The LARB Quarterly, no 26: Pop Issue

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no 26 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : POP 9 781940 660455 5 1 2 0 0 > ISBN 978-1-940660-45-5$12.00

Uc23643 LA Review Quarterly 2 pages (IFC + IBC) jal 2/20

Raft of Flame Desirée Alvarez

Scatterplot David Koehn “Named for the visual depiction of statistical data, the contemplative second book from Koehn explores domestic chaos through a sequence of long poems. . . . Humor and verbal play appear to offer a coping strategy for the vulnerability and difficulties of daily life, which Koehn sensitively renders in this observant work.”—Publishers Weekly Paper $17.95

Habitat Threshold Craig Santos Perez “Perez interweaves parental tenderness with knowledge of environmental crisis. With poetic verve and acuity, Perez invites us to the bedside of our ailing world. Formally inventive, these poems read like ritual. The invitation is to come closer, to be with a troubled world.”—Melissa Tuckey, editor of Ghost Fishing Paper $17.95

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

“The powerful second collection from Alvarez explores the remnants of Central American cultures after the 16th-century Spanish conquest, examining what endures and what doesn’t after plunder, colonization, and the destruction of a civilization . . . She brings the reader to an ancient world that is, in fact, still alive.”—Publishers Weekly Paper $17.95

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: TOM LUTZ EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: LAUREN KINNEY, ELIZABETH METZGER, MELISSA SELEY, CALLIE SISKEL, BRIAN SPIVEY, IRENE YOON ART DIRECTOR: PERWANA NAZIF DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING GRAPHIC DESIGNER: TOM COMITTA ART CONTRIBUTORS: LUTZ BACHER, JULIEN CECCALDI, AIKETERINI GEGISIAN, ARSHIA FATIMA HAQ, RABZ LANSIQUOT, MISLEIDYS CASTILLO PEDROSO, HELEN RAE, CARMEN WINANT, ALICE WONG PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC AD SALES: BILL HARPER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), JODY ARMOUR, REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, EILEEN CHENG-YIN CHOW, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, TAMERLIN GODLEY, SETH GREENLAND, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, MARY SWEENEY, LYNNE THOMPSON, BARBARA VORON, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF COVER ART: ALICE WONG, UNTITLED (AW 178), 2018, ACRYLIC ON PHOTOGRAPH, 5X7.5 INCHES. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND CREATIVE GROWTH INTERNS & VOLUNTEERS: TESSA BANGS, AKOSA IBEKWE, MIA GUSSEN

The Firebird and the Fox Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University “Brooks brings a lifetime of learning to bear in his new interpretation of Russian and Soviet culture in its most creative century. He is able to suggest how a variety of cultural elds over time grappled with the same set of recurring Russian dilemmas, distilling the powerful motifs that writers, artists, and intellectuals repeatedly embroidered into their works. No one who studies or loves Russian culture can afford to ignore this book.”

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no . 26 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : POP

Michael David-Fox, Georgetown University “Brooks introduces the reader to wondrous dimensions of Russian cultural creativity. By breaching the distinction between low and high culture, he reveals how popular themes and imagery permeated great works of literature and the arts, leavening their serious-minded discourse with doses of magical thinking and imagination.”

Richard Wortman, Columbia University December 2019 Hardback ISBN: 9781108484466 346 pages | 32 b/w illustrations, 16 43073.indd 1 43073.indd24/02/20201

West. If you are a retailer and would like to order the LARB Quarterly Journal, call 800-788-3123 or email orderentry@perseusbooks.com.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The LARB Quarterly Journal is published quarterly by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Submissions for the Journal can be emailed to editorial@lareviewofbooks.org. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www.lareviewofbooks.org.

essays 7 HOW TO MISS WHAT ISN'T GONE: THOUGHTS ON MODERN NOSTALGIAS WHILE WATCHING THE OFFICE by Lucas Mann 25 THE POLITICS OF POP: THE RISE AND REPRESSION OF UYGHUR MUSIC IN CHINA by Elise Anderson 57 WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TRAGIC: GREEK PLAYS FOR THE MODERN AGE by Johanna Skibsrud 72 THE PROMISES AND PLEASURES OF SCHITT'S CREEK by Eric Newman 79 SELENA GOMEZ AND THE PERILS OF CONFESSIONAL POP by Nate Sloan & Charlie Harding 99 LAGUNA REVISITED by Sara Davis 113 KIM GORDON, QUARANTINED by Alex Scordelis 130 TIME EXCERPTSMACHINEFROM TIME TELLS by Masha Tupitsyn fiction 48 WINO FOREVER by Louise Munson 84 RENEGADES, MAYBE by Francisco McCurry poetry 23 RIVER PHOENIX by Alex Dimitrov 43 TWO POEMS by Megan Fernandes 71 POP QUIZ by Srikanth Reddy 96 THE B-SIDES OF THE GOLDEN RECORDS by Sumita Chakraborty 108 "INFINITE JEST" by Grady Chambers 124 IT'S SPRING by Jenny Zhang shorts 65 CHASING POP by Emerson Whitney 110 KPALANGBMANISENISOMOEYO by Akosa Ibekwe 127 A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF AUTHENTICITY IN HIP HOP by Felicia Angeja Viator no . 26 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : POP CONTENTS V O I

Influx and Efflux Writing Up with Walt Whitman JANE BENNETT The Voice in DubDAVIDHeadphonestheGRUBBS Finding Ceremony ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS Everything Man The Form and Function of Paul Robeson SHANA L. REDMOND Refiguring American Music Cloud Ethics Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others LOUISE AMOORE Every Day I Write the Book Notes on Style AMITAVA KUMAR The Queer Avant-GardeGames How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games BONNIE RUBERG dukeupress.edu Jane Bennett influx & efflux writing up with Walt Whitman THE QUEER GAMES AVANTGARDE Bonnie Ruberg How LGBTQ Game Makers ReimaginingAretheMedium of Video Games T H E V O I C E I N T H E H E A D P H O N E S David Grubbs Amitava Kumar 3 2 1 1 2 Notes A Report on Style Every Day I Write the Book New Books from Duke University Press DISTRIBUTED BY THE MIT PRESS ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORG NEW IN PAPERBACK SPRING 2020 ANACHRONIC RENAISSANCE by Alexander Nagel and Christoper S. Wood “Seeks to reconceptualize nothing less than the idea of Renaissance art.” — CAA REVIEWS THE DEMON OF WRITING: POWERS AND FAILURES OF PAPERWORK by Ben Kafka “A witty and rich history of the faltering rise of bureaucracy since the French Revolution.” — TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, c. 2015, Gouache on paper, 54.72 x 43.7 in. Courtesy of christian berst art brut, Paris.

Dear “We’reReader,inthis together”: a phrase we've seen a lot recently. It has, through its ubiquity, lost some of its power and meaning. But perhaps it's still apt for the theme of this issue: Pop. Pop refers to popular culture, and this issue explores everything from TV to music to ancient Greek plays (once a very fashionable form). But what does it mean for something to be popular? Who does the collective "we" refer to? Who does it include and who does it leave out? The pieces here examine popularity, as well as how culture might connect or divide people.Lucas Mann discusses modern forms of nostalgia and rewatching The Office ; Elise Anderson writes about how pop music has shaped the political struggle of an ethnic minority; Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding examine Selena Gomez and the rise of vulnerability in pop; Louise Munson imagines an encounter between a distressed shop girl and Winona Ryder; Felicia Angeja Viator provides a short lesson on hip-hop history; and much We’remore. in this together; we’re into this together. Medaya

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stanfordpress.typepad.comsup.org STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Intimate Alien The Hidden Story of the UFO David J. Halperin “A thoroughly fascinating dive into a third author—Deandomain.”Radin,of Real Magic Motherhood A Confession Natalie Carnes “A gem of a book.”

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—Tish HarrisonauthorWarren,of Liturgy of the Ordinary Universal Enemy Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity Darryl “Thought-provokingLi and beautifully—Laurenwritten.” Benton, Vanderbilt University Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe Larry Wolff “A significant contribution to the historical scholarship on Woodrow—LloydWilson.”Ambrosius, author of Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism Reflections on Capitalism Wyatt Wells “Brisk, lively, and thoroughlyCarolina—Peteroriginal.”A.Coclanis,UniversityofNorthatChapelHill for Some Law and the Question of Palestine Noura “PreciselyErakatthebook we need at this —Angelatime.”Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle IN PAPERBACK ImaginationExperimental Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment Tita “Subtle,Chicolearned, and inventive at every turn.”—Jonathan Kramnick, Yale University NOW IN PAPERBACK Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara Elaine Sullivan Explore now at constructingthesacred.org PUBLISHING INITIATIVE

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Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist. A film about the intersections of personal and historical memory and knowledge systems, collecting and archives, and the death of a language.

WHAT ISN'T MODERNTHOUGHTSGONE:ONNOSTALGIASWHILEWATCHING THE OFFICE LUCAS MANN essay

When we decided to name our daughter Matilda, my wife bought a copy of Roald Dahl’s novel. We read it aloud to one another in bed. It held up, which was a relief, though I’m not sure it was the point. What mattered most was the little thrill we felt in recogni tion. We remembered everything — to reread wasn’t to discover anything new, it was to stoke the feeling of the first time around. The breathless description of evil Trunchbull swinging an offending child by her pigtails. The warmth of Miss Honey’s care. Increasingly, I think what we were looking for in the book, maybe even the name, was not gesturing forward at the expectation of having a child but MISS

HOW TO

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los angeles review of books 10 reminding ourselves that we had been children — it happened; we felt it. We still do. We didn’t consider this at the time, but the name wasn’t just a reference to one be loved book, but a whole franchise, an early example of the now ubiquitous tendency to make a profitable character unending across new forms and generations. When we brought Matilda to daycare and said her name, a young teacher cooed, Oh my God, that was my favorite movie! They don’t make movies like that anymore. Then a friend of a friend at a baby brunch: You have to take her to the musical — there’s nothing better. We looked at each other with that most pointless kind of snobbery, the assuredness that the connection oth ers felt was less pure than ours because we’d gotten there first. This isn’t an essay about rereading, it’s about rewatching, but I’m starting to think it’s all the same impulse. Being a person who reads now feels the same as being a person who watches and one who listens, especially since sometimes all of those things are happening at once, an overwhelm of words, sounds, images all experienced before, so long as there’s no space in between for boredom or silence. This is about my relationship to art be coming recursive, in ways that feel both active and helpless. In a recent (mostly ineffectual) takedown of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror in the London Review of Books, Lauren Oyler coined the term “hys terical criticism,” tying it to this particular culturalHystericalmoment:critics are self-centred — not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way around.

I don’t disagree with the observation, but the conclusion seems unhelpful. I’m more interested in criticism as a reflection of the culture it’s trying to define —  the constraints of what, and how, the world allows us to read. When I read Tolentino, or any of today’s best critics, it doesn’t occur to me to think of the way the self, or the solipsism of memory, always sits at the heart of an essay as a good thing or a bad thing, morally or aesthetically. Maybe this is obvious (glib false modesty is an other crime of the hysterical critic), but I’m stuck on how hard it feels to engage with what we love, or even try to get a sense of what we love. I think about the source metaphor of this modern cultural landscape: the stream. How to understand any piece of culture when they’re all in the same current, moving past and around us at all times, everything simultaneously here and gone. The act of viewership be comes reaching out for something sturdy, finding the purchase of self-recognition, grabbing on tight. The baby sleeps reasonably well now. The nights are ours again to mark with something of our choice. We’re rewatch ing The Office for the third time. We’ve already rewatched Friends, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Six Feet Under, but out of all these shows, all these memo ries of watching these shows, The Office is the most ubiquitous, its pages most dog-eared. This does not make us unique — according to a piece in Vanity Fair, by early 2019 there had been a total of 52 billion minutes spent streaming The Office on Netflix, a collective conscious ness spanning the length of human civ ilization. In the essay, Sonia Saraiya

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU UNIVERSITYCOLUMBIAPRESS Just Like Us e American Struggle to Understand Foreigners attitudesbigyou.booksBORSTELMANNTHOMAS“ThisisoneofthosethatstickswithBorstelmannasksaquestion—aboutU.S.towardforeigners—andhasanimportantargumenttomake.Whatismore, Just Like Us sparkles with telling details and connections.unexpectedItis,plainlyput,masterful.” Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Away from Chaos e Middle East and the Challenge to the West GILLES KEPEL Translated by Henry Randolph “Gilles Kepel has long been France’s most sophisticated scholar of radical Islam, and Away from Chaos is his personal and political summa—a remarkable synthesis of decades of passionate engagement with the Middle East.” —The New York Times Magazine Friend A Novel from North Korea PAEK NAM-NYONG Translated by Immanuel Kim “With still so little known about the North Korean people beyond mostly tortuous escapee narratives, Kim enables a rare, welcome glimpse into ‘a messy world of human emotions and relationships that is at once entirely alien and eerily familiar.’” —Booklist, Starred Review The Chile Pepper in China A Cultural Biography BRIAN R. DOTT “Extensive source materials in both Chinese and English form the bedrock for this impressive study into how a relatively unassuming American import so radically changed one country’s cuisines and especiallypharmacopoeia.traditionalThehistoryofthehumblechileinChinaisafascinatingone,asviewedthroughBrianR.Dott’saectionateyetscholarlylens.” —Carolyn Phillips, author of All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China

los angeles review of books 12 attempts to understand specifically why young people love the show so much, cre ating an obsessive backlog of their own experiences with a sitcom that cataloged the particular “detritus of late capitalism,” as she puts it, that began when they were in diapers. But rewatching flattens time. If the show is available, it can be both old and new over and over again, until what you never had and what you miss exist on the same plane. Sometimes before class, I talk to my creative writing students about The Office because it’s nice to share something non-required for six minutes. What we share is wistfulness, as though we lived through the same thing and now that thing is slipping away from all of us, even though we just watched it again and it was never really there. Do you remember that episode? I do remember! Do you remem ber the way it used to be to watch? I do! I do! They’re amused that someone as old as me gets their references; I’m amused that someone so young has already claimed my same sense of cultural loss. A pleasant, collaborative loop. I don’t want to use the word nostalgia It’s easy and it conflates ideas too neat ly, and like everything it’s tinged with Trumpian political relevance (though you could argue that, like with everything, Trump just made explicit the political act embedded within it). The word feels particularly loaded, but also unavoidable. When new content is endless, access constant, any act of laying claim to what to watch, or read or listen to, becomes a snatch at a moment of slowness — one complete, repeatable decision, a sense of consistency, which is another way of say ing relief. When Oyler writes about the “hysterical” in contemporary criticism, I think of it as a type of exhaustion; less narcissism or verbosity and more watching a brain spin out, then loop back on the fa miliar. I spend time now at baby-centered functions, where the only commonality among the adults at the edge of the scrum is the proximate ages of the small humans we’re responsible for. Frozen in small talk, the only guaranteed shared frame of refer ence is a discussion of what we’ve watched on various platforms. These conversations almost always become more stressful than connective — Have you seen this? This? No? This is like this. I can’t remember the name, but it wasn’t that one, it was the other one. Where can you see it? Here? Here? If you don’t have that platform, you’re missing this. It’s season three already? Not yet, but we’re planning to. We’ve been saying we should. Every conversation about viewership be comes a weird self-scold, another version of the spin classes left on a punch card, the leafy greens wilting in the fridge. Fall ing behind. At home in our personalized stream, the algorithm tailored to us, how can it not feel like the only option is to go back to what we remember, remember it again?Iguess what I really want to say is that, if the only option is nostalgia, nos talgia alone is too simple to say. Cultural consumption has splintered off into sub genres of what was once a fairly straight forward mode of engagement. These distinctions become yet another battle ground on which to cling to the comfort of allegiance. I, for instance, feel weird disdain for what I’ve dubbed evangel ical nostalgia — the endless franchises, the zealous loyalty to multigeneration al expanding universes that travel with you from childhood to (I assume people

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I get frustrated when friends over whelm the group text with passion and pathos for the “final” Avengers, or a new peephole into the same Star Wars room. Where is that generosity for anything new? Somehow works that attempt orig inality are easier to write off as derivative. I've felt a similar frustration when stu dents act like there’s just one way to tell a story, the one they’ve seen over and over and sworn allegiance to, and one set of characters adequate for populating a story — everyone a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, a Jedi or Sith — and that deviation is an in sult to the love they felt and feel, the first one and the only one. Watching someone else try to inhabit the same space in their imagination on repeat, it’s hard not to see them trapped. I get it — I’m a hypocrite. A lot of teaching is demanding a level of dedication to a similarly fixed, pure idea of the sanctity of the classroom. Teachers are people who, when they were students, did whatever a teacher asked; it’s a hard les son to learn that obedience is a different thing than taste. But how do you critique something new when its stated goal is ad herence to what has already been? Some times, it feels like even our conversations about craft become tinged with longing. The effort of engaging with something new is tempered with the memory of what you know you already loved, and then the memory of loving it, a memory of your self. Central to evangelical nostalgia is a yearning for control. My brand of nostalgia wants the world to stop. Call it old testament, if you like — let’s have our Talmudic ar guments, but no new volumes, please. I don’t want my favorites creeping forward, contorting toward control of all mediums. You can read this as humility, or you can read it as absolutism. You can also read it as hypocrisy, since The Office began as a British show; I was predictably pessi mistic about the American version until it proved so much it’s own thing, and ran so long, that it became it’s own artifact. Either way, there’s something crucial for me in the fact that The Office can not evolve. I don’t want to re-encounter Jim and Pam a decade later to see how they’ve changed. I dread the clunkiness of a contemporary writer’s room trying to massage Michael Scott’s balance of bigotry, narcissism, and ultimate decency into a world where the definition of each trait is ever-shifting. The result would be simultaneously offensive and cloying, a fluorescent light flicked on in a room that never should have been entered. In stead, rewatching what is unchangeable, the narrative is the opposite of evolution. The characters, the conceits, even the specifically time stamped mock-doc for mat — it’s all untenable but it’s still there, still lovable, more lovable. That’s the plea sure. From the very beginning, the show was built around a feeling of impending loss. The characters were dated when they premiered; the life they showed as sad and dumb and beautiful was endangered,

los angeles review of books 14 genuinely want this?) death. I liked Iron Man in college, but don’t have the de sire to watch him return with other he roes every year, their mythologies creak ing on side-by-side, each new iteration winking at the last, the meta-narrative of billion-dollar business. I haven’t seen any new Star Wars — the idea of this galaxy extending across generations brings me only fear. Or perhaps it’s distrust. It seems like a celebration of half-imagination, at best the achievement of something seminew. A way to simulate moving forward, with none of the risk; a way to stay stag nant with no shame.

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los angeles review of books 16 maybe already extinct, even then. One of the show’s best lines is the tagline of Michael’s self-directed commercial: “Limitless paper in a paperless world.”

The plot is generated by the characters’ ongoing navigation of their own obsoles cence. This only grows clearer with each rewatch, making it all somehow feel more valuable, a commodity in limited supply, even though it’s everywhere. The opposite of an expanding universe. In this version of nostalgia, what ex pands is our lives as we return to watch. I have this memory, very clear, of my now wife’s first apartment in New York: the basement of a friend’s sister’s twobedroom. We were a season behind but had DVDs to watch in bed into the ear ly morning. I was an intern at a magazine that touted its prestige, worked us hard for that prestige, then paid us with $150 cash in an unmarked envelope each Friday. My wife worked at a fancy purse store, where she couldn’t go to the bathroom for fear of theft. The economy had just collapsed, which created a sense of panic but also the absolving thought of not being per sonally responsible. Did we see ourselves as Jim and Pam? If we did, it was way too cringey to say out loud. But we did talk in ways that approached fantasy about the lives depicted on the show. Imagine wearing a suit. Imagine having your closest relationships with co-workers. Imagine a fixed, simmering kind of sadness, with beats baked into every episode to remind you that there are much worse things. Now, the baby sleeps, the screen shifts to that sneering question: Are you still watching? We nego tiate whether to watch another episode — it’s nearly 10:00 after all — and when we start watching again, we try to remember watching a decade ago. We feel the small satisfaction of being people whose lives resemble the semi-realization of ambi tions loftier than a mid-sized Northeast Pennsylvania paper company sitcom shtick, but then the little tug of what it felt like to watch the show as a fantasy all those years ago, which in turn begins to feel like a fantasy, too. And if I’m honest, we’ve had this conversation before, during previous rewatches, and so time compresses, a feel ing of both quickening and slowing, which I think was what we wanted when we de cided to do this instead of getting into that new Jason Bateman thing — not Ozark, the new new one. The brilliant anthropologist Kathleen Stewart once wrote a self-dubbed polemic aboutCulturenostalgia:ismore and more unspo ken and unnamed. Painted onto the surface of things, it passes us by as a blur of images and we “read” it as if it is a photograph ic image already “written” and framed. […] [The] fragmentation of our present is experienced as a breakdown in our sense of time. As a result, the present rises be fore us in the ultravivid mode of fascination — a fascination that is experienced as a loss, an unreality. She wrote these words in 1988. I know it’s nothing particularly revelatory to note that a sense of panic and loss that feels uniquely modern has felt unique ly modern throughout every new phase of technological modernity. Twenty-five years before Stewart, Marshall McLuhan famously bemoaned the TV, and the speed and fragmentation of what it meant to be alive in the world: “Only the dedi cated artist seems to have the power for encountering the present actuality.” I find

17 ELISE ANDERSON nupress.northwestern.edu Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry by Nikky Finney “Finney’s skillful, sweeping epic ambitiously connects personal and public history.” —Publishers Weekly Tapping Out by Nandi Comer “. . . a necessary and exquisite work which gets to the business of unmasking beasts so that we can discover us to be heroes who ought to be valued and, more importantly, heard. Get it, Nandi. Get it!” —avery r. young, author of neckbone: visual verses

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los angeles review of books it impossible to talk about what it feels like to be alive in this moment without eventually glomming onto a misplaced certainty that nobody else could have ever felt as overwhelmed as we do now, that all past cultures flatten into a time before us, too generalized to really picture, when it was easy to understand what it all meant.

Nostalgia for a time when nostalgia might have been clearer. But at the risk of continued hysteria, it has to feel different now. Yes, maybe the blur was precursor for the stream — so much, so fast — but I want to know what changes when you still feel culture zoom ing past you, but nothing is ever gone. The sense of desperation lingers, the sense of the inability to keep up, but that becomes recursive when you can return to the same story on demand, re-experience the same desperation. What happens to the feeling of nostalgia when we haven’t let ourselves miss anything? The culture I miss is more available and popular than it was when I first loved it. I still watch to feel yearn ing, even though I keep preempting the opportunity to miss anything. Again, it’s an impulse more comfortably identified in others. What better symbol for this half-feeling than Baby Yoda — not just a return to a character so beloved (forty years beloved, now) but a rebirth? This new-old character streaming its debut at the same time as the next new-old movie premieres, which ends with Rey, whose character arc is already three movies long, returning to the place where the first scene of the franchise was set, the embodied spirits of Luke and Leia literally haunting it, Leia now extra weighted with the real-life loss of Carrie Fisher, but look at her, living on in character, even though that character is also technically dead, as the universe ex pands and also stays exactly the same. The comfort of the thing being everywhere, all at once, fractured in the way all culture is, but unified in the relentless survival of a single fiction, no matter what else has changed, is changing. At the end of 2019, Annalee Newitz wrote in The New York Times that Star Wars fandom now mirrored American politics, with some imagining a progressive fu ture while others cling to and weaponize their nostalgia. The latter group is easy to skewer — rigid, afraid, cartoons of fauxaggrieved petulance: boomers. But I don’t know if their obviousness makes those who desire a politically progressive Star Wars any less entrenched. Compared to the completely intractable, semi-imagination can seem like revolution, but the self, the need to cling to a memory, is still at the center of the desire to bend the old thing toward a version that makes the memo ry feel less bad. In another anti-nostalgia Star Wars analysis, in Wired, Adam Rogers implores fellow fans to force the universe they worship to creak forward: The story only ends if we let it. There’s the self again, an imagined benevolent force, pushing at some idealized version of the un-killable formula that might, for now, feel decent enough. And look over there! Something unambiguously decent: that viral picture of George Lucas holding Baby Yoda, staring down at the puppet face like it’s something more. Freeze that image, hold that image, zoom. Imagine yourself as the baby, imagine yourself holding the baby; remember when you were, remember when you did — why would anybody ever let go of the familiar? In her essay on Roland Barthes, Kate Zambreno writes about staring at her baby’s sleeping face, recognizing herself, and then gaining the sensation of em bodying her mother, staring at the same

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The most interesting line in Oyler’s review of Tolentino’s book describes a cul ture that rewards those who “tend to find simple things complicated and complicat ed things simple.” I don’t know if that’s an accurate description of Tolentino, but it feels like an increasingly accurate descrip tion of me. Embedded in this critique is recursivity — the more you return to what was once a simple pleasure, the more de stabilized it feels, and that feels complex, and soon it’s like you’re not retreading well-worn territory at all. There’s a ten dency, I think, to justify writing about something, or caring about something at all, by framing it as an obsession — a much more active and interesting word than saying comfort or inertia, or trying to explain the feeling of just passing time. Every time I watch The Office, I think there’s more to say about it; each stupid gag contains new pathos or hidden politics, or the evolution of my politics is reflected in the way interpretation has changed. This time, all we talk about is Pam, and Jenna Fischer’s brilliant performance as Pam. Pam’s humility or little squashed moments of vanity; the way everything framed as a good thing carries an inev itable current of regret — I don’t know, just Pam: hero; us watching Pam and rec ognizing heroism. What does she mean? Something more than we previously thought, surely. Look at her eyes move when Jim reappears in that most famous scene, the way she bites at her lip as she cries, as though trying to pinch her way out of a dream that she doesn’t deserve him, one from which she never quite wakes. It feels momentous; it feels like

los angeles review of books 20 image a generation earlier — “unsettling, but in a calm way.” She takes pictures of her daughter every day: “Every morning now my baby’s face looks different. Every day her eyes look a bit closer together, or perhaps further apart. […] Will the photographs later reveal the nuances, the gradation?” In my experience: Yes, if you want them to. When the baby’s asleep, phones come out. Another stream: Matilda’s life; our lives, too, standing on the opposite side of the image. Some pho tographs get thrown up on the shared drive with family, those inviting a funny caption make it onto an Instagram story, and fi nally the most beautiful or milestone-y hit the Instagram feed. These separately curat ed narratives are padded by thousands of random shots and clips of our daughter, captured because we thought something important might happen and that possi bility made us terrified of being unable to revisit the thing even before it happened. Already, I’ve selected the images I want to revisit. In real life, I am ashamed of how angry I can get, in bursts somehow im potent and frightening at the same time, screaming into my pillow when it feels like nothing has progressed. This quality appears in no images, but I think about it a lot. I look to confirm the opposite. My wife took a video months ago from outside our living room window, when Matilda and I didn’t know we were being watched. She’s fussy at first, but I hold her on my lap until she cheers up, hiding my face with a towel and letting her pull it off. Her smile when my face reappears, her little body leaning exhausted into mine at the end, the way I absorb her gently, capably — every time I watch it, I think I see, then feel, some thing new. More contours of love, gentle ness, ease — a thousand other images and all their possibilities or terrors fade away. Often, we sit in the same spot, me holding her as she faces the window, and I try to make our bodies appear the same way, to recreate what it might feel like to watch us.

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los angeles review of books 22 it’s about us watching it, which I assume means that it’s about so much more, but maybe it’s just the right combination of happy and sad that a sitcom must reach for, which I’ve been conditioned to expect and make new each time. No, there has to be more than that.

When Nabokov gave his famous “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” lecture, even back then he was ask ing for things to slow down. A book, he said, was too overwhelming, just a stream of words, and only upon revisiting could there be meaning. I guess what I’m trying to understand is the line between deepen ing and inertia. And my own silly need to look at someone demanding a new Star Wars every year, as though there’s truly new ground to cover, and see something different than my need to rewatch the same episodes, the same characters, as though there’s truly something meaning ful that I might have missed. Wherever you find comfort, it’s also comforting to think there’s something more. But maybe that’s as pointless as it is greedy. Maybe whatever the object of revisiting or retell ing is, the thing we refuse to let flow past, the meaning lies in the act of imagined preservation. As Lauren Berlant writes in Cruel Optimism, all you can do is “admit your surprising attachments […] trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence.” This, she writes sim ply, “is sentience.” Pam Beesly, happy and sad, repeated — our own little Yoda, shift ing as we shift over time: proof of life.

, 2020, Found images, thread, silk. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, c. 2018, Gouache on paper, 14.75 x 12.5 in. Courtesy christian berst art brut, Paris

25

RIVER PHOENIX ALEX DIMITROV

And because there’s so much water in living, I help take his shirt off right here on the earth. Me and him. You and you. Reading this to see if I’m acting, if I’m really myself, if I’m good at pretending. Why would we be here then, in bed together, asking each other what the way back is in case we happen to change our minds.

In my own private Idaho I’m in bed with River Phoenix chain-smoking and talking about the afterlife. He’s about to give up being famous, I’m about to make him one more drink. When I die, he says, looking at the way I look at him, it’ll be a glorious day. It’ll probably be a waterfall.

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

27 essay

On the evening of September 7, 2014, I sneaked into an auditorium on the campus of the Xinjiang Arts Institute in Ürümchi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. Over the course of sev eral preceding days, I’d watched as crews from Xinjiang Television (XJTV) poured in and out of the auditorium, working to transform the space from its everyday function as a student performance venue into a much more exciting, if temporary, role as the set for the Voice of the Silk Road, a new reality singing competition. I want ed to see firsthand what had been going on.Inside the auditorium, young crew members scurried around, yelling at one another as they built out the red, rotating judges’ chairs now iconic to the Voice fran chise. A member of the production team stood center stage, clipboard in hand. Dozens of would-be pop stars were sitting in the stadium-style seats, waiting to learn about their upcoming blind auditions. The first round of the show would be filmed in front of a live audience at the Arts

THE POLITICS OF POP: THE RISE AND REPRESSION OF UYGHUR MUSIC IN CHINA ELISE ANDERSON

los angeles review of books 28 Institute over the course of several days in September and was slated to air on XJTV-2 later that fall. The producer began giving instruc tions to the hopeful singers sitting before him. He explained the practical things first: how to walk onto the stage, how to hold the microphone (much closer to the mouth than most people think!), and how to signal “ready” to the sound engineers. Next came his more substantive remind ers. First, be respectful by referring to the judges with kinship terms. Second, re member propriety and don’t hug or even touch members of the opposite sex on camera. Third, be succinct, but genuine and natural in interactions. And fourth, for anyone planning to speak Uyghur on-stage, do not, under any circumstanc es, mix Mandarin into your speech. “My team and I will have to spend 30 minutes scrubbing each Chinese word you use,” the producer said, imparting both gravitas and anticipated annoyance. At that time, I’d been living and con ducting doctoral dissertation research in Ürümchi for almost two years. I was there to study muqam, a form of “classi cal” Uyghur music with an older history in Sufi practice and a more recent histo ry as a project of state symbol-making. I was in my second semester as a student of muqam performance and research at the Arts Institute and had grown increasingly interested in understanding how muqam fit into the Uyghur performing arts world as a whole. Language — specifically the way that the Uyghur language was used to frame television and other perfor mance events — was a significant part of that.By the next evening, September 8, in spired in part by my classmates at the Arts Institute and in part by what I’d seen tran spire in the auditorium the night before, I signed up to audition for the show. ¤ Uyghurs are a culturally Turkic and pre dominantly, though not exclusively, Muslim people. The vast majority live inside the borders of what is formally known as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autono mous Region,” or simply “Xinjiang.” The region, autonomous in name only, is locat ed in China’s far northwest, where it oc cupies a full sixth of the PRC’s landmass. The region is strategically and economi cally significant, too: it sits atop precious reserves of oil, natural gas, and minerals, and serves as China’s western gateway to the Eurasian “Xinjiang,”supercontinent.aChinesename that means “new dominion” or “new territory,” is a co lonial term. The region has been known by this toponym only since the 1880s, when official documents of the Qing empire began to use it, though the name wasn’t fully adopted even after it began to appear in the official record. Indigenous Turkic inhabitants of the region contin ued to call different parts of this same land by different names: Altishahr, or the Six Cities, denoting the oases that dot the rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the south; Jungharia, denoting the alpine north; and East Turkistan, denoting sometimes a larger whole that still doesn’t exactly cor respond to the borders of Xinjiang today. Rule of the region passed between multiple powers in the first half of the 20th century as a dizzying array of gov erning powers — including Uyghur groups that established two short-lived independent republics — scrambled for control. Similar to its stance toward Tibet, the Chinese Communist Party

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The role that music plays in institu tional racism and stereotyping in China can also make it a tricky subject to talk and

los angeles review of books 30 claims that it “peacefully liberated” East Turkistan from this turmoil in 1949, when People’s Liberation Army troops occupied the region and formally declared it the Xinjiang Province. The area became “au tonomous” — on paper more than in real fact — in 1955 when it was given its current euphemistic name: the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The abundance and complexity of these names underscore the colonial con tours of the region’s relationship to the central Party leadership in Beijing, who have long been worried about the legiti macy of their governance of the XUAR. As an index of this anxiety, virtually every officially sanctioned history of the region begins with a variation on the statement that Xinjiang has been an inseparable part of the Chinese motherland since time imme morial. Chinese histories offer a similar narrative about all of the country’s con tested regions, including Taiwan, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. Today, the words “Uyghurs” and “Xinjiang” are most likely to conjure up images of internment camps. Since 2017, the XUAR government has pursued a comprehensive campaign of ethnic repres sion and cultural assimilation targeting Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Huis, and other Turkic and/or Muslim peoples. These pol icies include multiple forms of extrajudi cial, extralegal detention, internment, and incarceration; family separation; forced labor; religious repression; daily political indoctrination; and on and on and on. This campaign, while horrifying and absurd, is a logical extension of the re lationship patterns Beijing long forged between itself and the XUAR’s peo ples. Through the 1990s, when Han set tlers began pouring into the XUAR en masse as part of China’s plan to develop the region, Uyghurs and other local in habitants bristled at the realization that China’s policies were poised to bene fit ethnic Hans more than themselves. Han in-migration was making Uyghurs a minority in their own homeland. The authorities responded to protest and un rest by increasing pressure: “Strike Hard” campaigns and increased Han settlement; a move toward monolingual Chineselanguage education in the early 2000s; the labeling of Uyghurs as terrorists begin ning in 2001; the state’s violent response to the Ürümchi unrest of 2009; the dec laration of a “People’s War on Terror” in 2014. These were all displays of force, used to show Uyghurs that the state could and would make them second-class citizens, reducing every bit of space for civil action that they might try to occupy. ¤

The Chinese idiom 能歌善舞 (neng’ge shanwu), meaning “able singers and good at dance,” is one that many people throughout China associate automatically with the country’s ethnic-minority peo ples. While the Chinese state villainizes and represses peoples like the Uyghurs, it also celebrates their song and dance through common stereotypes, creating an image of Uyghurs as a happy-go-lucky, if backward and poor, people who might just break into song and dance at any moment.

The song-and-dance stereotype, a familiar tactic all over the world, is just one of the many ways in which Uyghur is a marked and special category, one of the many eth nic “others” against whom the majority population can measure itself.

—Benjamin Kunkel, Salon.com

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From its earliest days in the 1990s, Uyghur pop has drawn from a diverse set of influences. In the 1990s, as cassette and VCD recording technologies reached the region and brought with them dis tant musical influences, Uyghurs began performing folksongs in pop style on electronic instruments while also incorpo rating styles like reggae, rock, and flamen co into longer-established, indigenous forms of music-making. The 1990s also saw the rise of what some people ironically called “Ürümchi folksong” — a joke that hinged on the idea that a modern urban center like Ürümchi couldn’t possibly have proper folk mu sic. Ürümchi folksong, perfected by the likes of Rashida Dawut, set popular folk tunes in a lyrical, ballad-like style accom panied by keyboard and other electronic instruments.Atthesame time, musicians trained in more traditional idioms created anoth er popular form that some scholars writ ing in English have called “New Folk.” This music uses nationalist poetry set to folk-like melody and form, performed on traditional instruments like the dutar (a long-necked two-string lute). Unlike “Ürümchi folksong,” “New Folk” was (and remains) explicitly political in some of its themes. Abdurehim Heyit, King of the Dutar among Uyghurs, became a master of this style. In the face of state-led Han migration and the incentivization of land

The arrival of new technologies to the XUAR in the 1990s and beyond opened up entirely new realms of musical possi bility as music was copied and circulated and listened to on cassette, then on video CD (VCD), on mp3, and on cell phones.

los angeles review of books 32 write about. But it’s true — a truism, even — that music and dance play important roles in Uyghur society, as in societies elsewhere. In the Uyghur context, state stereotyping has further helped music and other forms of artistic expression to flour ish in ways that we might deem political. Since the 1990s, pop music has played a particularly significant role in Uyghur so ciety thanks to the ways in which a repres sive and illiberal Chinese state has helped to define the possible contours of cultural commentary, expression, and critique. My definition of pop — both in re gard to pop in general and Uyghur pop in particular — is broad. Some scholars, wont to complicate matters as they de construct them, define pop as commodi fied music produced for and consumed by the masses. For others, certain technolo gies — electronic instruments, auto-tone — are the definitive factors. In more com mon parlance, pop can be a denigrating and even derogatory term, referring to a bubble-gum aesthetic that many peo ple love to hate, at least publicly. I like to think of pop as a broad term encompass ing many possible definitions, but mostly as what is popular: what people actually listen to, what makes people talk. Uyghur pop draws on a constella tion of aesthetic concerns common to the whole of Uyghur music: puraq, or “scent,” which refers to ornamented, melismatic lines; an emphasis on melody over har mony that is tied to the practice of puraq; mung, or sorrowfulness, a sense of mel ancholy and longing expressed through timbre; instrumentation, utilizing the stringed lutes that form the organological core of Uyghur and other Central Asian tradition; and lyrics that often rhyme, driven by poetic and folk-literary conven tions. In these ways, Uyghur pop is not wholly separable from classical and folk tradition. In many instances, these genres bleed into one another.

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video still, 2005. Courtesy

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" of the artist.

In the 2000s and 2010s, as the state’s early patterns of repression against Uyghur discontent tightened and took firmer shape, the already-small space for civil society shrank further, and music turned less explicitly political. Popular musicians who had previously commented openly on politics turned their expression inward, relying on metaphor — sometimes thinly veiled — to convey, in the parlance of political scientist James C. Scott, a “hidden transcript” by which to register their discontent. Throughout the 2000s, pop albums often revolved around what appeared to me to be a trifecta of themes: romantic love and loss, filial piety, and pa triotic love for the homeland, a common combination throughout Central Asia. (In this way, some aspects of Uyghur pop struck me as similar to country music be loved in the rural US South, where I was born and raised.)

35 sale, Küresh Küsen, another popular New Folk singer, sang, The land is great, the land is themighty,land is the source of life. Brother farmer, I beg of you, do not sell your land. Küsen was exiled to Turkey and nabbed by the CCP when he was touring in Kyrgyzstan. He was brought back to pris on in China, and later exiled to Sweden, where he died of a heart attack in 2006. At the same time, younger Uyghur musicians in Beijing, privy to the more cosmopolitan influences coming into China’s capital, began drawing on inter national forms of popular music-making.

ELISE ANDERSON

Esqer Huilang (“Gray Wolf”), born and raised in Beijing and more fluent in Chinese than in Uyghur, made a name with songs that celebrated a Uyghur iden tity juxtaposed against mainstream Han culture. Erkin Abdulla, a guitarist and singer from a village in Qarghiliq county, Kashgar Prefecture, introduced flamen co stylings in Chinese and Uyghur. Both gained popularity throughout the PRC. In the 1990s, Ekber Qehriman sang love tunes and inspired a generation of young Uyghurs to pick up the guitar.

By the 2010s, as state oppression of Uyghurs was ramping up, the internet and globalization seemed to be erasing some borders and shrinking the world. Uyghur pop began to encompass an even wider, broader stylistic range than before. Ablajan Awut Ayup styled him self as the “Uyghur Justin Bieber.” “Six City,” a group whose name pays hom age to Altishahr, a historical name for the southern Uyghur oases, introduced Uyghur-language rap to young audienc es. Gulmire Turghun, trained as a dancer at the Arts Institute, experimented with a “bad-girl” aesthetic similar to — if still decidedly tamer than — early Britney Spears. Adile Sidiq, infamous for a “per

Mehmut Sulayman incorporated jazzy rhythms into love songs. Parida Mamut performed schmaltzy Ürümchi folk songs alongside the “playful” (and mildly scandalous) Kashgar folksong repertoire she sang and played on dutar. Abdulla Abdurehim, a master of puraq, began carving out what would become his space as the King of Uyghur Pop with repertoire that included love croonings, nationalist metaphors, and didactic commentaries on social ills. His 1998 hit “Sirliq Tuman” (“Mysterious Fog”) addressed the nega tive impacts of drug use at a time when heroin consumption had reached a high, causing an alarming level of HIV infec tion among Uyghurs.

When the Voice of the Silk Road came onto the scene in 2014, its producers en visioned it as a platform for what they considered truly modern, cosmopolitan musical forms. This was in contrast to an earlier attempt by XJTV to produce a re ality singing competition, “Yéngi Nawa” (“New Song”), which had turned into a platform for mostly folk-style and classi cal music.“Xelq naxshisi bop ketti,” one of the producers told me once as we talked about “New Nawa.” It got all folksong-y. He rolled his eyes. While he and others were proud of folk music and even performed it in their own repertoires, they also worried about its limitations: namely, how difficult it is for that kind of music to travel far be yond its own borders. This was not a prob lem particular to Uyghur folk music, they said, but an issue inherent in folk music around the world. What would it mean, instead, to produce something that could travel beyond the borders of the Uyghur Region?Inthis way, the Voice of the Silk Road was another iteration of the cosmopolitan desire I saw manifest in so many different parts of Uyghur musical life in my three and a half years in Ürümchi. Uyghurs have long faced a set of structural inequal ities similar to those faced by minority peoples in other parts of the world. For decades, the Chinese state routinely de nied Uyghurs access to passports and even the means to travel much farther than the XUAR’s borders. What did it mean to be a citizen of the world in a context like this? How could music help to bring other parts of the world to the Uyghur Region — andUyghurvice-versa?pop singers and musicians had a strong sense of their homeland, their music, and their lives as distinct from what they called “the interior,” i.e., the rest of China. Once, at a dinner with several of my castmates from the Voice of the Silk Road, one singer told us about his own attempt to make it big on the Voice of China. He was one of the strongest singers on our show, a master of puraq who drew inspiration from Turkish and Azerbaijani musical styles. He could sing pop in a way that sounded like the most skilled mu’ez zin reciting the call to prayer. On the Voice of China, though, he didn’t make it past

los angeles review of books 36 fect” rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” in her student days at Xinjiang University in the early 2000s, emerged as a talented singer-songwriter, crafting diva ballads that combined Western pop sensibilities with themes from Uyghur literature and history. Shir’eli El’tekin, one of the first graduates of the Arts Institute’s muqam program in 2001, incorporated classical techniques and styles into pop. Remark ably, King of Pop Abdulla Abdurehim, now visibly middle-aged, remained pro lific and beloved, his skill at puraq greater than it had ever been. Abdulla’s cousin, Möminjan Ablikim, followed in his foot steps, forging a lucrative career. Throughout, popular music — pro duced and consumed at concerts, in re cordings, at weddings, at nightclubs — gave Uyghur musicians and audiences a range of ways to express different senses of community and self, and to explore cosmopolitan ideas about belonging. It would be too simplistic to reduce every aspect of Uyghur musical life to politics, but the political realities of life in the XUAR made Uyghur music and the ideas it engendered always, on some level, laden with political implications.¤

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

los angeles review of books 38 the first round. The wife of another of our castmates was unsurprised. “Well, they do love stick-straight things, after all” (alar tüp-tüz bir nersi’ge amraq bolghankin) she said, matter-of-factly, referring to Hans and what she perceived to be straighter melodic lines in Chinese pop. The singers I knew also had an acute sense that there was little market for their music outside the Uyghur Region.

I was an anomaly: the other partici pants were largely Uyghur — and primar ily men. And yet, the musical styles were extremely diverse. My group alone — called “Buraderler,” or “brothers,” which was only slightly awkward for the six of us women who made it into the group — included a surprising array of pop styles. We had singers who performed Turkishand Azeri- and Uzbek-influenced songs, drawing on Central Asian styles. Some performed in a more traditionally “folk”

Uyghur rocker Perhat Khaliq made waves with his rock sensibilities on the 2013–’14 season of the Voice of China, where he was runner-up in the final round of the com petition. Several other Uyghur singers have managed to forge successful careers in China proper from the 1990s onward. But these were exceptions: most Uyghur pop musicians suspected that their work had a different audience, and they weren’t wrong. Hence, the Voice of the Silk Road Abdulla Abdurehim, Mehmut Sulayman, Nurnisa Abbas (the lone woman in the group), and Erkin Abdul la served as the coaches for the first sea son of the show. The format was modeled after the broader Voice franchise: singers walked onto a stage to do a blind audition while the four judges sat in chairs facing the audience, their backs to the stage. If they wanted to invite a singer to join their group, they hit a button that turned their chair around, at which point they could watch the remainder of the performance. In the first round, I sang an Englishlanguage jazz standard. I fretted over whether this was the right thing to do, but I’d signed up so last minute — only three days before my audition, long past the original deadline for participation — that I didn’t have time to work up a Uyghur song. All four of the judges turned their chairs around for me in the first round, surprised and delighted to find a for eign face as they faced me on stage. My audition hadn’t been very good, as I was shaking from nerves and over-sang a bit, meaning I was on the sharp side of intune. But I think something about the style, and likely their suspicion that I was one of only a few non-Uyghurs audition ing for the show, made them turn their chairs around for me. My fluency in the Uyghur language seemed to be the real accomplishment, delighting the judges and audience. I responded in kind: an swering the judges’ questions with pro verbial sayings and singing a brief excerpt from a muqam suite. I’d gone onstage with Erkin Abdulla in mind as my first-choice coach and so chose to join his group. My appearance on the show brought me overnight fame. The night my episode aired, in early December, my WeChat lit up with congratulations from friends and acquaintances, along with an invasively high number of new friend requests. The next day I went out to run errands and heard murmurs everywhere I went: “Wait — is that her? The girl from TV? The American? Oh my god, it’s her.” I made it all the way to the semifinals, almost cer tainly because of the ratings. The novelty of seeing an American perform in Uyghur was enough to draw an audience.

39 style. Others wanted to bring K-pop and R&B idioms to Uyghur music — not to mention all the guitarists, rockers, and aspiring jazz singers. To my own delight, after experimenting with songs in English and Uyghur, I found that I had a knack for singing the schmaltzy Ürümchi folksongs of theThe1990s.diversity and openness of the mu sic on stage belied the political realities outside of the auditorium. In 2014, thenXUAR Party Secretary Zhang Chunxian was sowing the seeds of the repression we know today. Following high-profile attacks blamed on Uyghur groups in and outside the XUAR in 2013 and 2014, Zhang de clared a People’s War on Terror and a new Strike Hard campaign. In summer 2014, the regional government put in place an internal passport system known as the bi anmin ka, or People’s Convenience Card, that institutionalized apartheid-style policies of ethnic difference and drove Uyghurs out of Ürümchi and other urban centers. Zhang also revived the Cultural Revolution–era practice of “sending down” intellectuals to the countryside, increased the state’s surveillance apparatus, and be gan experimenting with short-term reeducation camps. Uyghurs were increas ingly bound into place. Not a single episode of the Voice of the Silk Road was broadcast live, even in the final rounds. Audience members were never able to vote for their favorite performers, as is the customary format for the final rounds of the Voice in most other iterations. Such a format would have been too sensitive for this particu lar political context. But still, as the show progressed into its semifinal and final rounds, the producers policed partici pants’ onstage language in a way that was consistent with the ideology of purity that the producer had laid out prior to the first taping. Anyone who could not sing or speak in Uyghur was free to speak in his or her own language (the Kazakhs and Uzbeks participating in the show, whose languages are mutually intelligi ble with Uyghur, could speak Kazakh or Uzbek). But judges and contestants alike were scolded for accidental Mandarin use. Producers even stopped in the middle of filming if necessary. As we neared the end of the show, we were all given firm orders to sing in ana til, or the mother tongue. By the third round of the show, the producers began making all the coaches address their comments in Uyghur. Even a young Han woman, who had competed and commu nicated exclusively in Chinese, was ad dressed by the judges in Uyghur. No one provided real-time translation for her. ¤ This insistence on speaking Uyghur on stage arose within a broader cultural fer vor for the language and its alleged “puri ty.” Like most other languages, Uyghur — Uyghurche or Uyghur tili — isn’t “pure” at all. It’s a member of the Turkic language family, and therefore fully intelligible with certain other Turkic languages like Uzbek but less intelligible with others like mod ern Turkish, even though they share sim ilar grammatical, syntactical, and other features. Large parts of the lexicon come from Arabic and Persian. Like all Turkic languages, Uyghur is an agglutinating tongue in which suf fix upon suffix can attach to words to mark grammatical case, denote per son and time, and show other elements of aspect and nuance. What might be an eight-word statement in English, in Uyghur might be rendered as a two-word ELISE ANDERSON

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang have long lived in at least a partially bilingual environment, and many Uyghur speakers mix Mandarin loanwords into their everyday speech, even in locales like Kashgar and Khotan that are considered the most culturally “authentic,” the “most Uyghur.” This kind of linguistic mixing makes sense: to many people, Chinese words for “refrigerator,” “television,” and “ID card,” for just a few examples, were introduced along with the items themselves. In other cases, Uyghur speakers code-switch and mix languages in a way characteristic of people living in bilingual environments everywhere. Significantly, though, Chinese loans are generally not formally lexicalized into the Uyghur language. You will never find them in a dictionary, and you will rarely see them in formal print. Modern educational developments in the XUAR are partly responsible for this contemporary anxiety of linguistic puri ty. For the past two decades, authorities have experimented with diminishing the space for instruction in Uyghur at all lev els of education, from primary to tertiary. By 2016, there were two primary modes of education in the region: one was Man darin language instruction, which enrolls predominantly Han students alongside minority students who become known as minkaohan, a Chinese term that liter ally means “minorities testing in the Han language.” The second was “bilingual” in struction, which is about as bilingual as the autonomous region is autonomous: most classes are taught in Mandarin, but literature and music are taught in the nonMandarin mother tongue, often using materials translated into Uyghur from Chinese. The state allowed almost no space for Uyghurs to discuss these changes, or the pressure they felt toward assimilation. Performance events, many of which were centered on the arts in one form or another, thus represented one of the final spaces in which the Uyghur language was used extensively and in a “pure” form free of Chinese-language creep. If there was hope for continued production in the lan guage, the stage was a space where that hope could be fulfilled. Uyghur perform ing artists — and the producers of the Voice of the Silk Road — self-consciously staged events as “pure” in an attempt to push against Chinese cultural dominance. In demanding that everyone on the show speak Uyghur, the producers were work ing within the framework allowed by a broad and varied set of language and edu cationBackpolicies.inthe Arts Institute auditori um in September 2014, the producer had articulated an artistic and moral ideology of linguistic “purity” with precision and clarity. In what was already an era of cul tural loss for Uyghurs, stage performance was a “final frontier” for Uyghur language survival, for the viability of that tongue as one of production and consumption.

41 verbal phrase containing five or more suf fixes. “Ours is an economical language,” a tutor once told me with a wry grin. The agglutinating feature of Uyghur is just one of the many things that distinguish it so broadly from Chinese. Absurd, revi sionist nationalism aside — some schol ars in China have claimed that Uyghur is actually a dialect of Chinese, and that Uyghurs themselves have no relation to the Turkic peoples — Uyghur is indeed a completely different language from Chinese. The grammar, the syntax, the fun damental logics and principles: they share no common roots, nor do vocabularies overlap except for very recent loanwords.

ELISE ANDERSON

Looking back, it seems to me that Uyghur

los angeles review of books 42 performing arts events and the linguistic space that they made possible, including backstage negotiations and debates, were one of the closest things that Uyghurs in China had to a civil ¤society.

In hindsight, this open embrace of lin guistic purity seems remarkable, even unfathomable today. Since 2017 and the acceleration of Party Secretary Chen Quanguo’s campaign of repres sion, Chinese language — recast from 汉语 Hanyu, the Han language, into 国语 Guoyu, the national language — has crept gradually into programming on the Uyghur-language channels of XJTV. Tahir Hamut, a Uyghur film producer and poet now exiled in the United States, said in a November 2017 interview that he fears Uyghur-language programming will disappear completely within a few years. These days the Voice of the Silk Road itself seems unfathomable, as well. The show was canceled after its third season in 2016. Producers Muhtar Bughra and Memetjan Abduqadir were both detained, sent away perhaps to detention centers, perhaps to internment camps, perhaps to prisons. Zahirshah Ablimit, runner-up in the first season, was interned in a “reeducation” camp in Atush in 2018. While there’s some evidence that Muhtar has been released, there’s no reliable word about Memetjan or Zahirshah. I left Ürümchi for the United States in mid-2016, only a couple of months be fore the political situation in the XUAR took a clear turn for the worse. Since then, I have watched from afar as Uyghur pop music has taken some surprising turns. In the spring if 2017, Shir’eli El’tekin, fa mous for singing muqam in pop, released a song titled “Shi Jinping’gha béghish langhan küy” (“A song for Xi Jinping”), comparing the leader to a sun that has brightened the lives of the people. The color and sparkle of his voice seemed different; the puraq of his melodic line duller and plainer than ever before. That same spring, pop icon Möminjan Ablikim penned an essay praising the Party and it all it has done for him and his family. In early 2020, the XUAR Chinese New Year gala featured several Uyghur artists but not a single song in the Uyghur language, a stark departure from previous years. Musicians have been detained along with other members of the Uyghur cul tural and intellectual elite. Master du tarist Abdurehim Heyit disappeared into the region’s vast detention network in 2017 and did not surface again until 2019, when China released a proof-of-life vid eo of him in response to allegations that he had died in state custody. They appear to have later released him, likely due to intense international pressure. Dutarist, singer, and songwriter Sanubar Tursun disappeared in 2018 and resurfaced again only a year later. Parida Mamut, performer of “playful” folksongs, disappeared into a camp in 2018 and reemerged in 2019, vis ibly thinner and aged. The Uyghur Justin Bieber, Ablajan, disappeared in February 2018; there is still no word of his where abouts. After having already spent a year interned in a camp, the beloved singer of Ürümchi folksongs Rashida Dawut was sentenced to a rumored 15 years in pris on on unknown charges in a secret trial in December 2019. Some Uyghur performers are still making Uyghur pop music; music vid eos and other recordings continue to make their way out of the region. As best I can tell, the more “Western-style”

I think often of my friend and of this moment. I still marvel at the ability of pop music — so easy to dismiss — to open up minds and hearts, and open up entire regions to change, the way that Uyghur pop has for decades. Pop music has long allowed for a certain kind of spir itual resilience and political resistance in the Uyghur homeland. If there’s one thing to hope for, it’s that people keep listening.

ELISE ANDERSON

43 and modern a singer is, the safer they seem to be. Musicians and groups who play in bars and nightclubs appear safe. But the environment in which they make their music is undoubtedly, irrevocably changed.Several of my Buraderler group mates, as well as our coach, are living in the diaspora in places as far-flung as Switzerland, Australia, and Southern California. We message one another occa sionally, checking in on each other’s lives. None of us knows much about the rest of our “brothers.” How are their lives? Are they on the outside? Do they have enough to eat? Do they still sing? Are they safe amid the global pandemic raging around all of us? I can’t bear to think about how many of them might have disappeared, about what has become of their lives. ¤ In June 2018, on what might have been my last-ever visit to the Uyghur Region, I was surprised to learn that a beloved singer had released a new Chineselanguage song titled 美丽新疆 (Meili Xinjiang), or “Beautiful Xinjiang.” The singer had tried to break into the Chinese market once before, at the end of the 1990s, but focused on producing mu sic primarily for Uyghur audiences af ter that attempt fell flat. “Beautiful Xinjiang” seemed to mark a detour from the long arc of this career. That the singer refers to his homeland as “Xinjiang” in the 2018 song is no in significant matter, not least of all because it contrasts to the kind of language he used in reference to the Uyghur land just several years before. In early 2014, a close Uyghur friend and I were in the au dience at one of his live concerts in Ürümchi. That night he debuted a song titled “You Have a History,” the lyrics of which included the lines: Oh homeland, you are dearer than my soul, let come what may; I will sacrifice my life for you. When he sang of the “homeland” (weten) that night, everyone in the largely Uyghur audience understood exactly what he meant: not China or even Xinjiang but the Uyghur homeland, separate, special, and apart. Undoubtedly, these lyrics only pushed past the censors because of plau sible deniability. Surely the singer was prepared to tell anyone who asked that the homeland he sang of was the People’s Republic. But we all understood; we knew the meaning of the hidden transcript. My friend sat next to me and cried. On our walk home, tears contin ued to roll down her face. The song had stirred something inside her. “If only we were equal,” she said to me. “If only they treated us equally.” Today, of course, Uyghurs are less equal than they were then, less free than even the most pes simistic ever imagined they could be. In comparison to current political realities, 2014 seems like the good old days.

Rabz Lansiquot, Steve Biko Kids 1 (part of series where did we land), 2019. Courtesy of the artist. where did we land is an ongoing experiment interrogating the effect of images of anti-black violence produced and reproduced in film and media. The film takes the form of a moving image essay that speaks to the problems of the spectacular for Black subjects onscreen. Featuring 900 abstracted still images that span the African diaspora, both spatially and temporally, accompanied by a spoken text that features thoughts from Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Guy Debord, Frank B Wilderson III, Susan Sontag and more. It was initially presented as a sculptural installation at Many Studios as part of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable's exhibition (BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY? for Glasgow International 2018 and was turned into a film for a solo exhibition at LUX Moving Image in Summer of 2019.

45

IN DEATH, WE MET IN SCOTLAND

Black beach, tides wild upon us, the waters carried stunned crabs to the shores. I knew it could not be earth by their features and we, too, were distorted by afterlife. But I held your hand. Or what I think is a hand. And you smell like your mother and it returns, the velvet livingness — present tension, fights we have on streets, the red light of an Italian fair where I rob drinks off drunks and everything is carnivorous and lit. Our meals. Dancing, when you get low with boys and I laugh, room wet with joy at your nerve and swag. You are now synonymous with the city, synonymous with symphony and so it makes sense to meet here in solemn asphalt, in death. I touch what I think is your hand in the afterlife and recall the story of your mom, newly divorced, tucking you into bed on New Years Eve in Oregon. Your little brother, too. You choked imagining her lonely countdown and how you had slept so well through her despair.

MEGAN FERNANDES

Rabz Lansiquot, Justice for Sheku Bayou 3 Courtesy of the artist.

Do you know what aisle they sell dignity, I say to the store clerk on University Avenue It is a cold October, Frank Ocean’s “moon river” croons in my head and earlier that day I lay flat in the bathtub like a wild infant, shower pouring, thinking of that Dickinson poem where she says a bomb upon the ceiling is an improving thing steam gathering in celestial curls and I imagine bombs fizzing out gas and me, radioactive with love. At the grocery store, I ask where they sell dignity and when the clerk says “sorry, what did you say?” I thatexplainIam looking for havingdignity,lost so much in the last year and was wondering DO YOU SELL DIGNITY HERE? FERNANDES

47

MEGAN

los angeles review of books 48 if it was neatly placed by the baking powder or perhaps refrigerated with the perishables given its fragile shelf life and yes, I really did ask this partly because I was being funny and trying to make a friend but also, I would have taken a orhugany acknowledgment that I am a person who can laugh at myself despite walking with that odd angle of Childrendefeat. have no dignity and I really admire that about them. I love their ruthless response to injustices, their desire to feed birds in the park. To grieve the sea. Their right to be tired in public. Do you sell dignity here? I ask one last time, and then tell him how it went down, how I had lost mine in Bushwick of all places near a building covered in glass and white girl gentrifiers having their white girl epiphanies such bad coming-of-age trash, jesus, all my parents’ sacrifices for this? For what? Is this why I came here from Africa? they would say over my flat body, hopefully in the shape of a shrug. I am undignified. I prey on fluorescent light. I enter through the automatic door of grocery stores with royal glide, feetless into an even white.

49 I greet peaches and bawdy cauliflower, nod to the pink packets of sweeteners and wrapped meat thighs. I am drawn to the milks and oblong fruit, dent a red, Campbell can of soup. I want everything as cheap and damaged as this feeling. When they go low, we go high, a president’s wife said. I go low some days. I go so low, you cannot tell me from the animals we sell. From the hard grain my body has become. MEGAN FERNANDES

WINO FOREVER LOUISE MUNSON

fiction

50

There’s not a lot to do during this part of the day besides stare at the wall. A regular already came in this morning and spent decently. She always smells like a perfumed alcoholic. Her naked body in the dressing room is grotesque, pilatescut, and buzzing with anxiety and selfloathing. I actually really like her. I observe her body while helping her with all the various buttons, ties, and folds. Fancy clothes can be very complicated to put on. The store manager says this is because of the architecture of the piece. We are supposed to talk about the clothing here like it’s art. I don’t mind the corporate bullshit too much, I love luxury and I love good fabrics and cuts. Give me this over the thousand-dollar sweatpants those other assholes are wearing any day of the week, as my father would say. Any

51 day of the week, he would say, not about the sweatpants. He doesn’t care about sweatpants.Anyway, her body: all sinewy muscles, taut but aging skin, freckled from a youth spent in the sun, muscular and small. This is not a body men would want to touch, I think while slipping on her skirt, on my knees, a devotion between client and master I enjoy the steady, boring rhythm of. But women like her don’t care about men, they care about women. What certain other women think. Not me, though. I’m a woman — but barely. My father’s eyes are so often my own. I don’t want them, but he installed the programming very young. I know what most men like and what most men don’t. She talks to me about art and wanting to write her memoir about being a strong woman and a survivor, about being wronged by her abusive ex-husband, who pays for these clothes, these thousands of dollars spent on asymmetrical cardigans. My favorite part of her visits is when I encourage her to follow her bliss, I tell her to read The War of Art, and stuff like that, with passion in my voice. She bought a skirt today with a print that reminded her of a Degas. A Degas. What an idiot. I’m incredibly lonely here all day, out on the marble floor, hands crossed behind my back like I’m in church. Clothing hangs around my head in Möbius curves, not on mannequins, but simply hung, ghost-like, on lucite hangers. Waiting for a body. Not just any body, a body beaten into submission, a small body. This is the land where the word tiny to describe a grown woman is the highest compliment. Even when said in a scolding tone, don’t be fooled, it’s the highest of compliments for these insane people. I am also insane, which is how I know. And as I stand here, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows, my feet ache, in navy suede heels with a strap on the ankle. My uniform is the uniform of a Catholic school girl: black knee-high socks, an A-line black wool skirt, a plum button down. I like to be covered up. Around my neck is a necklace made of walnuts sourced from Zimbabwe and purple feathers. I love running the feathers through my fingers since I can’t smoke inside. My roommate recently got a new boy friend. He’s enormous, like a clown. It’s not just his size that’s enormous, it’s what my yoga teacher would call his aura. When he’s in a room — and now he’s always in the room — my breathing starts to get re ally shallow to account for his enormous presence. You have to get really small. On account of this, most people don’t like him, and he feels unloved. But together, he and my roommate plan to take over the world and suffocate us all with their crap. Welcome to Hollywood. My roommate is one of those people who tells you the truth and is really proud of it. It’s her reason for living. Of course, it’s her truth, but that would never occur to her. She thinks she’s God or something. She tells me things like, You haven’t done anything. And, You surround yourself with women who want you to fail. And, You don’t look as beautiful today as usual. Or, Is that what you’re wearing? You look like a soccer mom. But interspersed with these she’ll also remind me that the only reason she deigns to throw me these scraps of meat, of brutal honesty, is because, of course, she loves me. She loves me too much to let me fail. Not only loves me, but once she told me, I believe in you the most. That’s saying a lot from someone who spends all of her

LOUISE MUNSON

.

I didn’t notice the paparazzi gathered outside, their lenses like insects. They’re shameless, they just place them flush on the glass of the storefront and start clicking and heckling, like coyotes circling a neighborhood cat. It takes me a moment to register who it is, when I catch a glimpse of her face. Winona Ryder has walked in. Oh, I see. My first thought is that I’m so happy for her that

los angeles review of books 52 time believing in her future self, puffing it up, making sure she’ll get what she wants, meaning public adoration, some kind of fame or recognition of her singular talents. She will get this. It will not help. It will not relieve her suffering. I know this as I sprawl out on her bed, watching her get dressed.Still, I’m devoted to this axe murderer I live with. I created her, fresh from my childhood suffering. How boring, which is a word she loves. Mostly used as a statement in reaction to my rolling around in my victimhood, which I love to do. I say, I feel I’m suffocating. I miss home, I miss my brother, why would he leave me? Why didn’t he get help? And she smokes and stares out the ’20s-style old Hollywood windows and goes, I’m bored. I know I’m insufferable, but still. Still, I wonder, what kind of reality is it to believe a person, a human being, hasn’t done anything unless they’ve been in a movie? A TV show? Why in the world would someone’s beauty, talent, humanity rest unnoticed if not thrown up on screen, to be forgotten in the strike of a match. The world is upside down. What does it mean to be known? Known to God? To oneself? Logically, if you were known, felt known to yourself, to God, nothing could surpass that kind of peace. The space where you feel infinity, no time. No space. I feel that when I write sometimes. I felt that when I was with my brother sometimes. I feel that under water, in the ocean. But it’s oh so rare, like a very particular high. So, it makes sense that the other part of me, of you, would go hunting for a shitty replacement. And make a lot of suffering, a lot of drama around that thing that doesn’t even exist. There is a part in the Bible where Jesus puts his fingers in the ears of a deaf and dumb man and puts spit on his tongue and groans and prays to the sky, “Open Up!”— and just like that, the man is cured. I was thinking about how Jesus’s prayer was open up, at least in this translation, and not something like, Cure him, or, Let his ears hear, let his voice return Open up. Does that mean that all illness, coming from fear or lack, is caused by closing off to God? That insanity is not knowing yourself to be whole, perfect as God created you, and eventually that insanity will get you sick, or broke, or just fucking miserable? So there’s only one problem, then, and one solution. Open up.

.

Talking to my mom on the phone, it’s not unusual, when discussing a seemingly small thing, that she will say something like, “I’m walking on the blades of betrayal,” or, when talking about my brother, “At a certain point respect has to be earned, and the truth is he was given five talents — and instead of doubling them, he buried them all in the ground.” This is just idle chitchat where I come from. I didn’t know it was weird until I heard other moms discussing logistics and practicalities in a cooing cadence full of gooey affection, or at least the imitation of the sounds of love

Helen Rae, Untitled (November 17, 2019), 2019, Colored pencil/graphite on paper, 24x18 in. Courtesy of the artist.

I feel immediately close to her. Protective of her. The paps are now just hanging out near the valet, some sitting on the brick curb, smoking, eating, shooting the shit. She’s staring at a short-sleeved cotton poplin blouse with the same paintsmeared pattern that my client had earlier compared to a Degas. I do really like that

“Hi, good to see you! Let me know if you need anything or want to try something on.”

los angeles review of books 54 paparazzi still care enough to go through the trouble. Then I’m just relieved to have another body in the space. She looks small, with baggy clothes on and a deerin-the-headlights expression. A deer that has been told to look pleasant, or kind, or else. Her eyes are blank, scooped out of any thought, like something plugged into a socket. I smile and nod at her casually, then cross the room to fold an already perfectly folded cashmere sweater. It’s important to pretend to be busy yet relaxed — to be unobtrusive to clients you don’t know, especially if they’re famous. The molecules in the air palpably change when they come in, but it is your job to not notice.I’m never starstruck and am not in this case. It’s more an underwater feeling, a time-warp, Twilight Zone feeling because like many other girls my age, I have seen young Winona’s movies over and over. I felt understood by her suffering in these movies. Her pretty-enough-to-bepopular, but too-smart-to-buy-into-thebullshit predicament. The opportunity to be cruel and careless had been presented to her by society on a silver platter filled with colorful cakes, but she still seemed uncertain about it, disassociated from how she looked. And yet, she wasn’t strong enough to refuse the sweets entirely. Her intellect and empathy and self-loathing were at war with the expectations of the world.It was that or I was just projecting. A Course in Miracles, another spiritual text I’ve been reading, says that absolutely everything in this world is a projection. The book itself, Winona, this job I appear to have, money, nutrition, family, friendship. Death. None of it is real. And somewhere inside we all know this is true — that’s why we feel like aliens, that’s why we make art to speak to what can’t be explained in words but we can feel the truth of, that’s why we’re trying to reach the divine in some way at all times, even if we don’t know it. This world and everything in it are the effect of the cause of thinking we could separate from God. The ego has created a fearful projection of billions and billions of seemingly separate pieces. The big bang etc. The good news, according to this book, is that one day you will realize that there is nothing outside of you. Meaning you will wake up to the reality of the illusion and Know the Oneness that is all there is, which is love, which is God — that quiet part of yourself that seems to observe your insane thoughts. This is initially comforting, until it isn’t. Trapped in a dream you know you made and trying to shake yourself awake to no avail. I don’t mean to sound like a downer, I know life is a miracle. I sometimes know life is a miracle.

“Hello,” Winona says in a small, robotic voice to the blouse she’s gingerly touching across the room from where I am lyrically fussing with the cashmere display.

WELL, HELLO WINONA! I think, in a sing-song way, suddenly wanting to burst into laughter. Although her back is to me while addressing me, I pretend she is being normal. I immediately want to treat her with kindness.

55 pattern, actually. I shouldn’t have been so cruel. Winona holds it up, lop-sided, it’s slipping off the hanger, and she turns half to me and half to the emptiness at the back of the store. “Do you like this?” She sounds meek, unsure.“Yes, I love that one, actually,” I add the actually to signal to her that I would, if necessary, tell her the truth and let her know that the print sucks and would look horrible on her. It’s important to establish trust. It’s a good thing that I’m broke, and monstrously depressed. If I wasn’t, I’d actually have to sell something. This thought in itself cheers me up. Plus, I’m hanging out with Winona Ryder, man. We are having a connection. Her connection is now aimed more toward the back door, but that’s okay. I gingerly take the hanger from her, she’s acting like it weighs 500 pounds and her sparrow arm might break from under the weight of it. I manage to get her into the dressing room. She’s trying on 10 pieces: mostly blouses, knits and one pair of navy trousers I love. They’re made of a thick, futuristic fabric. Heavy but cut away from the body to feel like luxurious armor. The pants barely graze your skin when you walk. When I think about stealing, these are what I think about. They will make me into a different person, I swear. I’m standing outside the dressing room, my hands still folded behind my back, heels crossed. Occasionally glancing outside at the paparazzi. Some of them seem to be genuinely friendly toward each other, like construction workers gone morally bankrupt. Or, what the fuck do I know? Maybe they’re putting their kid through college without breaking their backs hauling cement. I know nothing. A sharp pain shoots through my heel, I shift my weight. Finally, she emerges. Back in her regular clothing. Her hair is even more fucked up than before and she has that same half-smile, dead-eyed optimistic robot expression on. She’s holding all of the clothing she tried on and hands me the rumpled pile. I take it and smile the same kind of smile back at her. This time, she looks straight at me, without altering one muscle in her face, her expression identical. She’s as friendly to a door as she is to me. Perhaps she’s enlightened, I think. “Okay … so you want these? Yes?” I ask, using my most soothing child-talk. “No. Thank you. Nothing today. Thank“Oh.you.”Okay. No problem.” I nod at her, mimicking her staccato cadence. Not to make fun of her, but to please her. She turns and slowly makes her way toward the door. This is when I notice that her right pant leg is bunched up all the way up to her knee. Outside, the paps yell at each other, and train their cameras on the glass, some in the street, ready to shoot. I think of the photos, with her messed up hair, and her pathetic pant leg. “Wait!” I call to her. She slowly turns and smiles at me blankly. “Your pant leg,” I say.“Hm?”“Maybe you want to put it down before you leave.” “Oh! Thanks!” Then she opens her purse, and starts rummaging through, as if looking for something specific I had just mentioned.“Fuckme gently with a chainsaw,” I say, in homage and exasperation. I realize I’m going to have to fix her pant leg myself whether she understands what the fuck is

LOUISE MUNSON

Helen Rae, Untitled (August 2019), 2019, Graphite and color pencil on paper, 18 x 24 in Courtesy of the artist.

6,

“I know. I think it’s one thing I have so I ruin it.” “I’m addicted to oxycodone because I can’t handle aging in the spotlight.” “Yeah, must be hard.” “I feel really close to you.” And then she goes to take off her purse.Before I realize what she’s doing, she says, “I want you to have this,” and holds it out to me. “No way, I can’t,” I say, shaking my head, taking two steps back. “It’s a Chanel 2.55,” she says. “I know,” I say, with respect. “Johnny gave it to me, it’s a talisman. Keep it, for good luck.” “Are you sure?” “It’s time to let it go.” “Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

I take the purse, the buttery leather lambskin already tainted by my sweaty hands. And then she hugs me, the purse crushed between us. It’s a good hug. Not the hug of a robot-woman. A real hug. And then just like that, she swiftly walks out the door, into a waiting car. The paps snap snap snap. And I stand there, looking out, having told the truth to someone, possibly for the first time in my life. A burning comes into my cheeks, then after a few minutes everyone’s left, the red and heat drained from my body, cool once again, silence once again, and alone.

LOUISE MUNSON

57 going on or not. I walk over to her, and gently but firmly take her by the shoulders and look deep into her eyes. “I’m going to fix your pants, okay?” I say, now with more of a dad-vibe in my voice. Like, we’re going to fix this, and it might be uncomfortable, but it’ll be okay and I’m here to catch you. Let’s tell the teacher what you did, but don’t worry, it’ll all be okay in the end.

“Okay,” she says after a few moments of blinking, her voice softer and seemingly filled with meaning. Like she’s acting a scene. Like she was waiting for this all along. Someone to take care of her. So I bend down, like a handmaid, and I adjust her pant leg, smoothing it in place with motherly care. And I don’t stop there, I stand back up and try to put her hair back into place. She closes her eyes, enjoying the sensation of my fingers in her hair. I tuck the last strand behind her ear. There. She opens her eyes and looks slightly, just barely, more alive, or human, or whatever, than“Whatbefore.happened?”

I ask. “You were like my “Oh,favorite.”Ijustgot old.” She sighs, looks down, and laughs a little. The robot moves! “You’re so tiny. I thought you were sort of normal-ish? Like skinny but normal.” We’re standing very close together, I am a little taller than her in heels. There is nothing outside of us. I feel I am talking to an oracle. I feel here is the answer to some things I don’t understand. “Oh, no. None of us are normal.” A hum of truth goes through my lower belly. A thrill of knowing, almost sexual. “I’m like a giant next to you.” I say and smile, so she knows it’s okay, I don’t mind being a giant next to her. She reaches up and touches my hair with such tenderness I feel tears spring into my nose. “You have such beautiful hair,” she says.“Thanks. I pull it out strand by strand because I hate myself and I want to die.” “But you’re so pretty.”

Aikaterini Gegisian, From the photobook Handbook of the Spontaneous Other. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

59

WE HAVE ALWAYS

TRAGIC: GREEK

JOHANNA SKIBSRUD

Tragedy, Simon Critchley tells us, is not when bad things happen to us. It is the way that we fail to see, fail to hear, fail to interpret the signs. It is our complicity, in other words, in our own undoing. The past, tragedy reminds us — though it may, for a time, go invisible or ignored — always returns in order to undo the tragic figure who imagines it might be finally left behind. Anne Carson writes, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Be cause you are full of grief. […] Grief and rage — you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die.”

essay

I’ve been thinking about tragedy as a way of understanding what it means to be a citizen. Like many Americans, I’ll be mailing-in my election ballot come November — but with less faith than ever BEEN PLAYS FOR THE MODERN AGE

Aeschylus’s great tragic cycle, the Oresteia, for example, which depicts the founding of Athenian democracy, can be traced to the “mysteries of Eleusis,” an ancient harvest rite. The play cycle is set off with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra. In the final play, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son, Orestes, is brought to trial for killing Clytemnestra in revenge. After Orestes is dragged in front of a group of Athenian citizens, Athena appears “from another world,” and almost instantaneously the crowd — torn by doubt, divergent his tories, loyalties, and grievances — be comes a populace, a collective body: “Who are you?” Athena asks. “I address you as one.” Perpetual disequilibrium is traded in for the possibility of equity and jus tice: “Now and forever more,” proclaims Athena, “for Aegeus’ people / this will be the court where judges reign […] Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people. Worship the Mean, I urge you.” And yet, in order to establish the equilibrium necessary to the modern city-state, Athena has to assuage and reaffirm the existing patriar chal structure. She establishes justice from an acknowledged compromise, condemn ing the crime of Clytemnestra, the moth er, and acquitting the crime of Orestes, the equally guilty son. Performance events, John Emigh has noted, “tend to cluster around ‘liminal’ occasions — times when continuity and change, past and future are held in an un easy balance, on a threshold, ‘betwixt and between’ the old and the new.” The opti mism embodied in Aeschylus’s version of the Oresteia emerged from a particularly prosperous moment in Athenian history directly following a troubled period of continuous war. It was an extraordinary period of creativity that also saw the con struction of the Parthenon of Ictinos and Callicrates and Pheidias. Fifty years lat er, however, the dream had dissolved and Athens — “over-extended abroad and over-confident at home” was defeated. ¤ I’ve been thinking about tragedy as a model for understanding what it is to be a mother. Before the COVID-19 pandem ic, I sent my daughter to a school locat ed next to a tactical supply store. Every school day I woke up, fed my children, dressed them, then dropped off my fiveyear-old within 50 yards of a place whose website fields questions like, “Where do I get an air gun that works for self-de fense?” and, “Do you sell swords at any of the locations?”Clytemnestra murdered her husband to avenge the death of their daughter, Iphigenia, whose death at the hands of Agamemnon was considered a neces sary sacrifice — a way of securing success in the Trojan War. The singularity and

los angeles review of books 60 in the electoral process and what it means to cast my vote, both in symbolic and in practical terms. A poet, and a professor of poetry, I’ve begun to dread the slipperiness of language; a fiction writer, I’ve begun in sisting on the facts; a defiantly optimis tic mother of two young children, I now sense scare quotes — raised like hackles — around words I used to use sincerely, with relative ease. Tragedy, I tell my students, takes place within the tension between will and ne cessity, freedom and fate. In the ancient Greek context, tragic theater — like all forms of popular theater — was inherent ly social. As Julie Taymor has put it, theater concerned itself with “ritual celebration, rather than ‘what’s-going-to-happennext.’”

61 specificity of the grief and rage expe rienced by a mother at the death of her daughter is crucial to the play and should in no way be ignored. When Clytemnes tra’s ghost appears in the final play, she offers us a vivid reminder of why this is important. Crimes against women and children must be taken literally, her ghost seems to warn. The voices of those who’ve been divested of, or who have not yet been granted a voice, must not be absorbed into a symbolic system that speaks for no one — that represents nothing, or no one, but itself.And yet, we would be missing something essential if we failed to read Clytemnestra’s loss, and her resulting ac tion, as a symbol for collective loss, col lective grief, collective rage. We would be missing something essential if we failed to recognize the link between the speci ficities of her role in the play and a larger, even more complex, and even more endur ing structure. In fact, Aeschylus’s trilogy only covers part of the story of the curse brought down upon the house of Atreus after Tantalus, the “founder” of that line, “offended the gods by feasting them on his son’s flesh.” The literal and figurative sacrifice, and cannibalism, of children is a recurring theme in Greek tragedy — both the impetus for and the impediment to every effort at “purging” the crimes of the past. It is only natural, then, that when Orestes kills his mother he expects noth ing less than madness. He flees, pursued by the furies and begging for mercy — though he cannot himself conceive of any way out of the cycle of fury and revenge. But then Athena appears. Looking “back and forth” between the maddened Orestes and the enraged bloodthirsty Furies, she assesses the situation, which she refers to as “a crisis either way.” “Embrace the one?” She considers. “Expel the other? It defeats me.” Yet she moves forward with the tri al and Orestes is acquitted. The Furies, whom Athena must realize can neither be legislated out of existence nor expelled, are “institutionalized” within the city of Athens, pronounced equal citizens: Leader of the Furies: “You would do that, grant me that much Athena:power?”

Leader: Your magic is working … I can feel the hate, the fury slip Criticsaway.” of Athena’s judgment have ar gued that she “yields to religious pressures and sexual politics”; that her acquittal of Orestes is “not only biased but predeter mined.” Athena herself is aware of the partial, and fundamentally flawed nature of the justice she endeavors to found. Even her final statement on the matter — “The man goes free … The lots are equal” — in cludes an implicit acknowledgment of Or estes’ guilt. Her aim is to correct, or at the very least improve upon, the seeming ar bitrariness with which the gods have hith erto provoked and intervened (or failed to intervene) in the affairs of human beings. But, “with all my heart,” she admits, “I am my father’s child.” The ambiguous and un ruly nature of both men and gods, Athena more than suggests here, will — tragically — continue to haunt the system.

In later versions, most notably Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes

JOHANNA SKIBSRUD

“Whoever reveres us — we will raise the fortunes of their Leader:lives.” “And you will pledge me that, for all time to come?”

Athena: “Yes — I must never promise things I cannot do.

I’ve been thinking about tragedy as a model for learning how not to under stand. In the ancient Greek context, trag edies employed masks — a performance element that explicitly connected Greek drama with the ritual practices from which it emerged. For both theater and ritual, masks created a liminal space in which the borders between self and oth er, the represented and the real, became blurred and uncertain. Perhaps because of this — as Emigh has observed — “the history of Western theatre can be seen as the progressive shedding of masks.”

Having moved, increasingly, toward an ethos that privileges empirical evidence over other forms of knowledge and that most values the performance of the “au thentic” individual, the use of theatrical masks has become increasingly rare, even in the presentation of the ancient Greek plays that required them. Far from being honored as an “instrument of revelation” — a vital link between the individual and “those communally defined forces that shape one’s sense of human possibilities” — masks have come, for most of us in the West, to represent a deceptive barrier. Associated, primarily, with neither possi bility nor community, they instead signal various forms of antisociality. Likewise, the concept of the chorus has become increasingly foreign. It is not uncommon, because of this, for contem porary productions of Greek tragedy to redact the choral odes — a structural ele ment that for the ancient Greeks created a space in the fabric of the plot for col lective commentary and reflection. If the odes are retained, they may be presented voice-over style in order to suggest, rather than a collective body, a singular psychol ogy at odds with the rest of the world. It is this individual psychology that (even if purportedly private, internal) seems somehow more accessible, more “real,” to us than the unconcealed if variegated soundings of a communal voice. Our social and physical life now includes a masked element that is all too real. And yet, at the same time, the mask confounds us — just as it has done throughout its long history both in ritu al and theater. By shielding the apparent limit of the finite body, it draws attention to that limit, as well as to our still incom plete understanding of how, and to what extent, the finite body intersects with and — therefore — affects and is affect ed by other bodies. Although opaque, the mask has long provided a sort of mirror in the context of theater and ritual, a way of drawing self-reflexive attention to the ways we represent ourselves to ourselves, and to the world. Despite the fact that they’re now largely out of use, the smiling and frowning masks still symbolize the theater because the mask remains at the heart of what it literally means to produce

los angeles review of books 62 Electra, the action of the play becomes far more intimate, psychological. As a con sequence of this shift in scope and scale, the morality becomes far more black and white. In Aeschylus’s version, everyone is guilty, vulnerable to a system that endless ly reproduces that guilt. Because of this, everyone is also open to change. Though trapped within the tragic dilemma (damned if you do, damned if you don't), they do not ultimately believe that their fate is sealed. They are willing to adopt Athena as a symbol of justice, willing to believe in and participate in the collective — even if their relationship to that collec tive is complex, even¤contradictory.

Courtesy of the artist.

A couple of months ago, I was thinking about tragedy as I was preparing for a trip to a wildlife refuge a stone’s throw from the US-Mexican border. I live in Tucson, Arizona, and whenever we drive south from here, toward Bisbee, or west, toward Kitt Peak, we pass through US Border Patrol interior checkpoints that have, at best, a tenuous relationship to US consti tutional law. Criticized for violating the Fourth Amendment, the Border Patrol has responded, inscrutably: Although motorists are not legal ly required to answer the ques tions “Are you a U.S. citizen, and where are you headed?” they will not be allowed to proceed until the inspecting agent is satisfied that the occupants of vehicles traveling through the checkpoint are legally present in the U.S. Tents have been set up over the road at the two sites we regularly drive through. Armed officials peer in at us through the car window, then wave us on. I feel un comfortable as we approach, guilty and apologetic, though I have nothing to hide. When we are on the other side and begin to pick up speed, a sort of helpless rage wells up in me — then quickly dissipates, blown about like a bit of dust in a spiral of sudden wind. I don’t like these check points, but that doesn’t stop me and my family from traveling where we please on the weekends. We are blind to their in scrutable relationship to the law, and to our own citizenship, precisely because we so easily pass through. But even in saying “we are blind” I am admitting that we are not blind. We are not tragically complicit; in other words, we are actually complicit.

los angeles review of books 64 theater. The word comes to us — like our modern word, theory — from the Greek theorein, and means “to look at.” Is it possible for us, in this moment, to look at ourselves, and at the distance we’re required to keep from one another right now, and see just that: The distances between us? The limits of our individual perspectives and of our current knowl edge? Is it possible for us, in this moment, to experience the rupture and overlay of self and other? Is it possible to recognize and make space for the way that we con tinuously confront, confound, disrupt, and become mutual witnesses of one another? ¤

Among the many crimes recounted in the Oresteia but left unlegislated at the end of the play, are those perpetrated by Apollo against Cassandra. Cassandra was the one who — though granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo — no one believed. In some versions of the story, Cassandra is cursed by Apollo because even after receiving her prophetic gift she refused to submit to him. In other versions, in cluding Aeschylus’s, Cassandra knowing ly deceives Apollo; she takes the gift of prophecy and promises the god her favors in return. But then she reneges on her promise; Apollo’s curse is repayment for this duplicity. It serves her right, in oth er words, if she should never be believed. But I’m thinking about this now and I’m wondering: Was it really up to Apollo? Whether or not Cassandra’s warnings are heeded, whether her prophecies are be lieved? Or does Cassandra’s story point us toward a liminal space in the history of truth-telling, where a linear, rational mod el, has already supplanted an already un popular poetic or prophetic mode? Where tragedy — which acknowledges the way

65 that the past is always at work within both the present and the future — has already begun to give way, replaced by an ideal of logic that, despite the contradiction, par adox, precarity, and multiplicity it stems from and represents, is nonetheless pre sented as singular and definitive? I am thinking about tragedy, and I wonder: Are we doomed, like members of the ancient house of Atreus, to feast on one another’s children and sacrifice our own? Fated, like Oedipus, not to recog nize the extent and complexity of our ge nealogies, or our own agency in relation to what is presented as fate? In 458 BC, upward of 15,000 people would have attended a single showing of Aeschylus’s the Oresteia. It was a moment of transition, a time of both continuity and change where past and future were held in an uneasy balance, a threshold between the “old” and the “new.” At the heart of Greek tragedy, Simon Critchley tells us, is a single question, “What can I do?” In the space between will and necessity, what we take for granted and what we do not yet know, is this question, this unsolvable riddle, which emphasizes, at once, our separateness and our inherent connection, not only to every other living human be ing, but also to everyone and everything that's come before. In our own moment of transition, perhaps the only thing that we can do is attend — both literally and fig uratively. We must read the plays, consult the oracles, listen to the dead. JOHANNA SKIBSRUD

Aikaterini Gegisian, A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas (The Sea of Actions, 8), Collage on paper, 28 x 44 cm Courtesy of the artist.

Once, Hank won us a trip to Orlando by putting a piece of paper in a cardboard box by the register at Tom Thumb. They paid for the flight and the hotel. It wasn’t for Disney, just for Orlando itself. He wanted to take us, we hadn’t ever been on a trip all four of us, my brothers and Hank. (He’d been my

short CHASING POP EMERSON WHITNEY

I’ve been thinking about locusts when they swarm. They do it because of turn ing cannibal. Each one realizes it like threading tape, like legs getting all plied apart. I’ve been seeing grasshopper lol lipops around again, like when everyone thought that show Fear Factor was so good. I’ve been seeing cricket dog food too, though I haven’t seen one cricket in so long. I dream about them often, little desperate streaks on my windshield. I wet my fingers with my tongue. Locusts are grasshoppers that are trying to eat each other and outrun the eating at the same time, that’s the theory.

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los angeles review of books 68 stepdad, but they’d gotten divorced. I moved in with him as dad in high school.) It was spring, so we rented a red Chevy Blazer and drove through Florida toward a circular hotel with rooms that opened onto a font of fake indoor plants. Just outside the airport, there was a cloud of locusts. The cloud was yellow when it smashed on the windshield. I lis tened to Nelly on my Discman and was thinking that I am from the South like Nelly (I counted St. Louis as South be cause I liked the album) and we’re still in the South if we’re in Florida, maybe even more because the state jabbed into the sea.

TEXAS GODDAMN IT. YOU MOTHER FUCKER, YOU’RE FROM TEXAS and he laughs the whole time, saying somehow, I’m the only one of his children born in the state. Alternatively, I only know my birth dad through photos of him holding ani mals. He has puppies on his chest in pho tos online, and I wonder what it feels like to be near him. I’m thinking about “Pop.” Like the meaning of it that’s “to appear.”I’ve got pictures like this. I’m staring at my mom, and dad’s face just comes over, hovers near her shoulder, it’s a surprise. “O father” says Etymology Online about the origins of “papa.”

Concerns of masculinity are some where in here, part of this. It’s a complete mystery.Ijust watched a YouTube video of a black widow crawling all over this guy to the tune of “Oh! Susanna.” The guy had made it to show that spiders are sweet too and fun sometimes. What am I doing here?The plains make a mess of me still and I come. Ihave come.  I wonder what I want in a very loud way, out loud, why did I come back here? I said at the gas station. I asked it but I said it, youThisknow? issuch a dude thing to do, ste reotypically and actually, chasing. In one of the white vans wetting the road, everyone looks like my brothers, like they’ve been on a computer for days — a slight heat smell, hot shirts. What I used to do was sit pants-less in a black Ford pulled onto the side of the road, Doppler going, ugly laptop on the dashboard. I was 14 and in a torna do chat room, “Vortex,” I may have been 15. I met Steve on there. We were both in high school but from different ones. He had a big neon fish tank with white fish, in Plano or Richardson or something like that, and thick tan carpet, his parents were never home. He had a wet, red face. I’d let him touch me with Twister on loop or the radar on. No one could hear us. Every window looked out onto a highway.

I’d wanted to go chasing and I wanted to know Warren Faidley, the photojour nalist who took pictures of storms and sold them. His pictures are famous, black vortex over a yellow sky. He made an art and a killing, and everyone realized this was kind of gold. Freaks of nature, slow shots that slide into blue.

Hank drove through the locusts laughing, saying, you know they’re trying to eat each other, right? They’re hungry for each other and they’re being eaten at the same time. They’re chasing and running. He was always laughing, saying things like it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye and then it’s just a game to try and find the eye. This is the guy who gets so angry when I say I don’t know where I’m from.

I wrote Warren all desper ate from my bedroom floor. He wrote me back something really simple and signed a postcard that I kept on the sill of my trailer-park-sized window in the duplex. I’d go on AOL. This guy with the Doppler was the first to suggest that I should stick my fin ger inside myself. I hadn’t thought of it. All ideal masculinity by its very na ture is just out of reach, writes Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure I was sour.  Right now in the van, there are wrap pers all over the floor and bags because everyone is having fun, this is camp for them.I didn't understand. This wasn't fun. I'd sentenced myself to proximity, just a benign being around others, that lack of privacy. Friendly relating is my extreme, much scarier than a storm. I don’t understand.  I don’t get it like I always have to remind myself that the most dangerous thing I ever did chasing was meeting those guys off the internet. I haven’t lied to myself that I’m safe in the van, but they’re all so happy and I’ve done it again I realize. I’d emailed all of the commercial storm chasing companies. There’s a listserv online of graphs that suggest success rates and financial liabilities and I went down the line and everybody said no to me writing, or riding along as a writer, except two, and Storm Travelers said something like a lot of these tours are red but ours is very blue. I realized they'd written it as a way of say ing queer and trans friendly. He texted me a photo of his tour company’s Facebook page: a rainbow flag behind a loose cropped image of a torna do like we won’t hurt you. Soon, I was putting hair goo in my hair and pacing outside the Oklahoma City Airport bus port with hardly any bags, I was fucking with my sunglasses because they were broken. The van found me there and Derek hopped out, a big guy in New Balance shoes, a yellow shirt that said Storm Travelers with a white font that slid into a tornado. Everyone inside the van shadowed when they turned to wardTheme.last time the air felt like this, I was with my dad and in second grade. We were in the panhandle near Oklahoma. At the time, he lived in Midland and I was visit ing him, the longest stint we’ve ever had. We spent a handful of weeks together.  The whole trip, I had nightmares that dad would leave me in his running Jeep, and I wouldn’t know how to drive, and he’d be gone, completely disappeared like at a red light. When he was driving, I’d watch his hands on the wheel and try to learn. He’d leave me inside there without the key and go into a gas station at night and I was terrorized. What if I needed the key? I was seven. We’d also regularly go to the sand dunes just outside town. You could get a pickle in a red-checkered hot dog carton and we’d stand around eating those before I played in the sand. I liked to watch the pickle juice run down his thumbs. I re member being surprised by dad’s body. I always was. It was a proximity thing, we’d

los angeles review of books 70 Somebody’s always watching, I thought when I first saw the photos. One book about storm chasing says, all hyped up, that tornadoes are nature’s attempt to restore and maintain balance, an intensification of imbalance almost beyond comprehension. An elusive pred ator, it says. The hunting metaphors are impossible.Thatyear,

71 hardly been near each other. I was wearing those ’80s sweatpants that were feminized with a stirrup. On my insistence, he’d helped me cut the stirrup and cuff them.

Dad has a short torso like mine, kept his cowboy hat on the dashboard. He’d walk me up to the top of one of the orangetinted dunes. You could pretend it was snow and use a saucer there. The heat hurt. They sold the saucers at the same place as the pickles. I don’t remember sliding down.On one of our trips, we rolled over hundreds of dead locusts in the parking lot. He’d just finished telling me about the time a bird exploded on his passenger side mirror and about when his windshield cracked exactly down the middle from lightning. We pulled in and crunched through them. Dad pointed out that they feel exactly like wax paper. I loved him. I wanted to be impressed. Dad was soft when he told me. Fear gets wrapped in love: I wanted to protect him from having ever hurt anything. This is important: On our way to school or on errands, Hank liked to blood-curdle scream for no reason. He drove a big black Naviga tor pickup that was given to him by his job and he was proud in it, tailgating and blowing kisses. He’s the one that taught me to drive, wanted me to toughen around that sound. What were we training for? We’d do circles behind a Target. He’d shriek randomly. The scream would start at my head and go through my hands.

EMERSON

Arendt in On Violence is saying some thing about how proximity to death in creases our vitality. I’m trying to get comfortable in the storm chasing van. All of us would like to find our selves subordinate, fucked, actually, by a storm — or maybe that’s just me and all they want is a cowboy thing, capture weather on camera and go viral — anoth er form of life. WHITNEY

Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, c. 2017, Gouache on paper, 76.4 x 47.25 in. Courtesy christian berst art brut, Paris.

Draw a line from each divinity to his or her or their least incorrect identification. There is no earthly penalty for guessing. Ten minutes. No talking.

Norse death goddess Composer of Invitations

Sumerian death goddess wears a cloak made of mist

Ohlone death god never lies POP QUIZ REDDY

Celtic death god Man With Something to Cut Hindu death god subsists on a diet of stars

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Aztec death god hangs sister from meat hook

Incan death god nationalizes mining industry

Inuit death god sleeps on a sickbed

SRIKANTH

Japanese death goddess Body of Stone Egyptian death god penis eaten by catfish

My mother has always been an er ratic sleeper. In teen movies, sneaking out of the house at night looks easy, but as a real-life teenager, I knew that I only had a shifting window between midnight and 3:00 a.m. in which I might slip out through the foyer and not be noticed by my mother reading quietly, illuminated by the side table lamps in the living room. Her usual schedule these days is to doze off on the couch shortly after dinner while streaming TV shows and movies

THE PROMISES AND PLEASURES OF SCHITT'S CREEK ERIC NEWMAN essay

“Iam so ashamed,” my mother texts me from the darkness of my broth er’s childhood bedroom in Lexington, Kentucky, where she is not sleeping in the barely light hours of a Wednesday morn ing in January. “I have been binge watch ing Schitt’s Creek and I’m now on season four. It’s been less than a week. Yikes!”

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75 on her iPad or tapping and swiping her way through Candy Crush. When my father wakes her up as he heads to bed, she follows along only to rise again a few hours later, when she makes her way to my brother’s room where she can watch or read to her heart’s content, lights on or off. It’s during these nightly interludes that we text back and forth, the gulf between EST and PST temporarily suspended. Swap ping work stress stories, commiserating over shared political dread, exchanging not-quite-gossipy news about other fam ily members — those are daytime con versations. These moments, when we are the only two members of our family still awake, are spent talking about our favorite shows and what we’re reading.

“When David did the Tina Turner dance for his boyfriend, I just couldn’t stop smiling,” she added, her text illumi nating my bedroom in Santa Monica. “I kept watching that scene over and over again.”Iwrite back from underneath a pil low, positioned to shield the light from my screen, trying not to wake Dan, my husband and the frequent victim of my own irregular sleeping schedule. “Right?! I mean, I think it went on for a bit too long and it’s kind of cheesy, but it’s so good. Dan was squealing on the couch with all the twitterpation,” using a term my husband and I adapted from Bambi to describe the rippling feeling of being in love, or, in this case, of witnessing others in love. “It’s not cheesy, you old grump,” she responds. “It’s sweet.” She includes a memoji that I would never recognize as my mother, bulging hearts where its eyes should be. ¤ Schitt’s Creek, which recently concluded its sixth and final season, chronicles the transformation of the Rose family after financial ruin throws them from their lofty perch as the uber-wealthy owners of a video rental empire. They settle in a small roadside town that gives the show its name. The Roses are, at first, disdain ful of their fellow townsfolk, whom they consider uncultured, laughable rubes. But the arc of seasons bears witness to a number of changes: they grow closer to their new neighbors, and in the process, become new people — kinder, more un derstanding, emotionally expressive, more honest, independent, happier, better. Af ter years of relationships with men who don’t care about them, siblings David and Alexis (played by series writer and cre ator Dan Levy and Annie Murphy) find Patrick (Noah Reid) and Ted (Dustin Milligan), partners with whom they can put down the performativity that saturat ed their social media- and status-inflected lives, and with whom they can be their honest, vulnerable selves, finding joy in and through their flaws. Parents Johnny and Moira Rose (played by Dan Levy’s father, Eugene, and Catherine O’Hara, both of whom draw into Schitt’s Creek the quirky humor that defined their perfor mances in Christopher Guest’s films) let go of careers in which financial success, market domination, and rubbing elbows with the glitterati were the keys to hap piness. Instead, they discover the sustain ing pleasures of being in a community, of finding a place among neighbors who love them regardless of whether their stars are ascending or descending. These transformations are not for the Roses only, of course. Their presence and the relationships they build with their neighbors change the town as well. Stevie

los angeles review of books 76 (Emily Hampshire), the surly manager of the motel where the Roses live throughout the show, starts off the series as a deeply insecure, lonely alcoholic who fears dying in a town that has always felt like a prison. As the series nears its end, Stevie under takes the first steps toward building a life of her own, one that is finally on her own terms and which reconciles the ambiva lent push and pull of wanting to stay in the comfort of the familiar while longing to see what lies beyond that border. As he navigates an on-and-off relationship with Alexis, Ted grows into a confidence that allows him to set limits and pursue his own goals without sacrificing his natural inclination to care for others and to put their needs ahead of his own. As his ro mance with David becomes more serious, Patrick accepts his sexuality, comes out to his parents, and begins exploring the world as a gay man who doesn’t fit the urban, upper-class model of gay identity which still has the lion’s share of represen tation in popular media (a type lovingly lampooned in Dan Levy’s performance).

While changes for the rest of the towns folk may be comparatively minor, they manage to navigate pregnancy, loneliness, alienation, heartbreak, and other strug gles, learning and changing alongside the Roses.Ihave watched and appreciated all of these changes, character arcs, and recon ciliations. So, why did I call David’s heart warming expression of love for Patrick — a performance of one of my favorite Tina Turner numbers — “cheesy” in that text to my mother? And why did my mother start her text announcing that she was “ashamed” for having binge-watched a show that she so clearly enjoys? Our shared reaction points to a cultural prej udice against pop; in this case, against the cheerful sitcom. That prejudice dictates that if the scene is touching, it must be false; that if it is uplifting, that must be because it refuses to capture the grittiness and sadness of real life. Real life, in oth er words, is pain; and pain, undiluted and constant, is what makes meaningful, real culture. When we embrace pop — say, in the form of a Carly Rae Jepsen bop, in a romantic comedy, in Mamma Mia!, in the sitcoms of my youth — it’s usually as a conscious escape from the darkness of re ality, a flight into lives that are uncompli cated and, for that reason, unreal. Over the decades, we’ve redefined the term “pop,” which of course means “popular,” to mean something more akin to an ersatz, empty happiness, a confection that we consume merely to pass the time, to avoid life. Even though a movie like Joker, along with the ethos it espouses, are very much “popular” reflections of our beleaguered zeitgeist, we don’t tend to consider that “pop.” It’s a dark, brooding movie that looks at the grim decay of our society; it’s a visual thought-piece that we can argue about precisely because it’s provocative gloom iness imbues it with the veneer of being “smart.” “Pop” might be best articulated in our cultural discourse as “hope” or “good feeling,” sentiments that in these darken ing times are easy to dismiss, especially in view of the vitriol and rancor, distrust and viciousness that have moved to the center of our political and psychosocial experi ence, to say nothing of the everyday anxi eties of our pandemic times. Feeling good, feeling hopeful is something to avoid in the present, an affective sin. How can we feel good when so much in the world is bad? ¤

A week later, I receive another text from my mother shortly after midnight in Los Angeles: “I finished the episode where Patrick came out to his parents after the info was slipped from David’s father.” “It reminded me of that time on Edisto Island,” she adds, recalling the moment when I came out to her, spelling “TWINK” on a Scrabble board to at once win the game and start one of the hard est conversations of my life. (It turned out fine.)My mother is eager to talk in these bleary morning hours. She’s touched by the emotional rollercoaster of Schitt’s Creek’s fifth season, and my phone keeps binging with new texts in which she offers an argument for why the show is, as Tina Turner would say, simply the best.

ERIC NEWMAN

“In each of the relationships on this show, the love between the characters is palpable. Personality quirks, though at times a source of ribbing, are never fodder for derision; they always seem points of endearment. And in the end, love triumphs over all.”

Over the course of the Roses’ mutuallysustaining romance with their neighbors in Schitt’s Creek, the characters navigate optimism, disappointment, despair, and the exuberant joys of new love in ways that expose them to vulnerability. David and Stevie learn to let others in, to low er defenses forged over decades in order to become happier, fuller people. Johnny and Moira must learn to depend on peo ple whom they either ignored or active ly disdained in their previous life. Alexis learns how to slow down, accepting and acknowledging what she wants out of life, out of a partner, out of herself. In the final season, the Roses have an opportunity to return to that old life and, while initially eager to do so, they are each challenged to reckon with how their values have shifted over their time out of the sun, to rethink the culturally-sanctioned rush back to wealth and fame in view of the new world they’ve built in the town of Schitt’s Creek.

To capture this reductively, the Roses have learned to value people rather than things. These shifts, among others in the series, require a vulnerability that doesn’t come naturally to the characters, just as it doesn’t come naturally to many of us, the viewers out here in the real world. The unique pacing of the show also rewards sustained viewing through the slow, incre mental changes that ultimately lead to a character’s growth, stretched out over sea sons rather than mere episodes. I watched the final episodes with tears in my eyes as Alexis, perhaps the sleeper character of the entire series, is at once recognizable as the young woman we met six seasons

77 BING!

“Okay, I am going to bed now. Love you.” Here, my mother comes close to what I think is the true genius of Schitt’s Creek, the source of its grip on nearly everyone in my various circles: work colleagues, friends, family, gays, straights, millennials, and boomers. It’s a show that allows, fos ters, and ultimately rewards vulnerability.

“These are the narratives that re mind us about the importance of love and family (however family is defined), and these are the tales that enrich our lives. And, in this era of Trump, this show is a neces sary respite and reminder that the more in our village, the better.”

There is, of course, a fantastical ele ment in the way that Schitt’s Creek rewards vulnerability, and one very much in the mode of pop. Within a 30-minute epi sode, the characters’ immediate struggles are typically overcome, and by the show’s end, we can all be sure that everyone will be, well, fine. We know that this is not the way life works in the real world, that sometimes vulnerability leaves you hang ing, exposed, more precarious and broken than you were before. This fantasy aspect of the show is the part that incites the guilt in guilty pleasure. Life in a small, almost entirely white town isn’t easy for queer people or people of color, particularly not when you’re the only one in the village.

los angeles review of books 78 ago yet also utterly transformed: selfconfident, enviably brave, and ready to make a life of her own after decades of fol lowing the whims and opinions of others.

However, the way that vulnerability, community, and love operate in the show challenges the easy Us-versus-Them bi naries that so thoroughly saturate our na tional discourse. While it’s true that there are, for example, more queer people in a major metropolis than in a roadside town like Schitt’s Creek, many queer people build meaningful and supportive com munities outside of urban centers. Across seasons, Schitt’s Creek draws its strength from bringing together entirely different experiences. That’s the source of its hu mor — its riff on the odd couple trope — but it’s also the source of an optimism that sticks with me episode after episode. As anyone from a small town recognizes, there are layers and allowances for differ ence that aren’t so visible from the outside. Schitt’s Creek takes those allowances and runs with them, positing that close con tact, living with and among one another, inspires a kind of reflexive communitar ianism we have been trained to distrust and disbelieve in our national politics.

“Now that I’m watching the new sea son, I really miss being able watch the next episode immediately,” my mom texts me while she’s running back from lunch to teach her afternoon classes. “The toilet David was having installed in the latest episode is the one your Dad and I have. Another reason I LOVE David.”

“I know,” I write back, sending a GIF of Moira pumping her fist while the word “COURAGE” flashes in the bottom third of the frame. “It’s so hard not to be able to move right into the next episode — or four. I’m dreading the end. I don’t want to stop living with these characters.”

The show is a reminder of why we need hope and where we can find it. It is a pop promise of a world in which difference is not a barrier but a bond, an opportunity to understand and love one another across difference. ¤ BING!

“Stevie has got to find someone,” she texts a few minutes later. “And it has to end with David and Patrick deciding to have a “Nobaby.”babies, please,” I write back, and I’m glad to know now that she hadn’t guessed this final arc correctly. The show has carefully attended to the nuances of gay relationships, especially around

(One apt criticism of Schitt’s Creek is cer tainly its lack of racial diversity; Ronnie, played with pitch-perfect deadpan by Karen Robinson, is one of the only people of color on the show; and she’s the only other queer person besides David, Patrick, and the bisexual stud who occasionally drops in for a laugh or a threesome.)

79 ERIC NEWMAN questions of monogamy, just as it attends to the unique valences of gay male/straight fe male bonds. Offered a chance for a return to his former life in New York, David decides to stay in Schitt’s Creek and buy a home with Patrick. Stevie blossoms into a confident busi ness woman, Moira and Jonny head out to an adventure in Los Angeles, and Alexis strikes out on her own and for herself. In some ways, this is Schitt’s Creek giving its audience what they want, but doing so in a way that feels fresh and, in its own pop way, honest. Maybe that’s the thing Schitt’s Creek shows us about pop — it gives you what you want, but it can also give you what you need.

AND THE PERILS OF CONFESSIONAL POP NATE SLOAN & CHARLIE HARDING

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At first listen, Selena Gomez’s “Lose You to Love Me” seems an unlike ly song to top the Billboard Top 40. Its sparse piano accompaniment and lack of percussive elements aren’t unheard of in contemporary pop but would usually be heard backing up a powerhouse vocalist like Adele or Beyoncé. Instead, Gomez’s vocals are hushed, conversational, defi antly unspectacular. So what drove the song to number one? What are listeners responding to? Gomez’s skill doesn’t lie in her vocal acrobatics, but in her abili ty to deliver a song with unnerving inti macy. It’s no wonder. The lyrical message of “Lose You to Love Me” is drawn from Gomez’s personal life, her voyage toward self-actualization after a rough breakup with one Justin Bieber, being diagnosed SELENA GOMEZ

In January, Selena Gomez released her third studio album, Rare — a work best heard on headphones. Its songs are at once diaristic and intensely mediated. Lyrically, they address Gomez’s relation ships (“Lose You to Love Me”), selfacceptance (“Look at Her Now”), and living in the public eye (“Vulnerable”).

los angeles review of books 82 with lupus, and coping with the pressures of theThespotlight.“topline” of “Lose You to Love Me” — its lyrics and melody — were writ ten by Gomez with the duo Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. The song’s music was composed by the Swedish team Mattman & Robin, with additional production by Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas. Together, these musicians translate Gomez’s private woe into public catharsis, and listeners get to tap into her emotional confes sion every time they turn on the radio.

Co-writer Justin Tranter reports that "Gomez would text before songwriting sessions to see “what she wants to talk about and what she’s going through,” then the rest of her team would take that raw emotion and process it into pop confectionary. This confessional mode of songcraft is reinforced by Gomez’s vocal style, itself a combination of authentici ty and artifice. Producer Ian Kirkpatrick, Gomez’s collaborator on “Look at Her Now,” says that “her voice is soft and kind of delicate, it just sounds like she’s talking to you, her voice is very personal.”

Gomez record ed the chorus’s “mmm”s without any mu sical accompaniment, just her murmuring on a studio couch. Afterward, Kirkpatrick chopped up her natural “mmm”s to fit the beat. The final product feels like it was made just for her — and all of us listening on ourBesidesheadphones.headphone listening, there is another technology shaping Gomez’s sound on Rare: social media. It lurks in the background but remains inescap able. In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the

In an unusual, wordless chorus, she sings, “Mmm, mmm, mmm.” Each time, it sounds like she’s humming right into your ear. To heighten the effect, Kirkpatrick had her sing “close on the mic … it adds to how personal the song is.”

Gomez is a singer who has been criticized for “not having the range,” and it may be true — she’ll never hit a Mariah Carey–esque vocal cadenza. But she possesses the uncanny ability to pick songwriters who can spin her personal life into universal balladry, and the gift to sing those songs with unerring honesty. As such, she might represent better than anyone what a new breed of pop stars will look and sound like as they respond to a musical and econom ic landscape shifting under their feet. The relationship between pop and the larger world is nothing new. As poly mathic musician David Byrne outlines in his book How Music Works, pop music al ways reacts to the technological and com mercial pressures of its day. In the 1980s, drum machines became inseparable from the musical genres they helped create: the TR-808 and hip-hop, the TR-909 and techno, or the Linn Drum and Prince (yes, Prince is his own genre). What technological innovation will become synonymous with the 2020s? Byrne’s prognostication was that headphone lis tening would usher in a new sonic era. A decade later, his prediction might be com ing true. According to Quartz, in 2010 headphone sales outpaced speaker sales for the first time — creating a structural shift toward private, away-from-public listening. Byrne says that listening this way creates a solitary soundtrack, a “sub stitute for our interior voices.”

Meier contends that “the hub of the mu sic industries’ various revenue streams is now the recording artist’s image and rep utation,” not the music they create.

Gomez’s confessional writing rep resents an aesthetic approach impelled by larger forces in the music industry. Today’s pop musicians are no longer just artists, they’re what Leslie Meier calls “artist-brands.” In the book Popular Music as Promotion, Meier writes how, in order to offset revenue loss from physical sales, record labels pursued sponsorships, TV placements, and new merchandise strat egies, turning their artists’ identities and intellectual property into commodities.

Even as this state of affairs might appear to be another deflating develop ment of late capitalism, there are benefits to the rise of confessional pop. Journalist Amanda Arnold argues in The Cut that the increase in artists’ “speaking out about their own struggles with anxiety and de pression is a shift worth celebrating.”

NATE SLOAN & CHARLIE HARDING

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Changes. Taylor Swift’s Netflix documen tary Miss Americana offers a voyeuristic look into the psychological effects of fame, with Swift revealing how she developed

Gomez’s Instagram informs us that Rare isn’t just an album, it’s also a beauty line, “coming Summer 2020, only at Sephora.”

Confessional songs succeed because audi ences relate to the intimate details of their favorite musician. The bigger the pop star, the more revolutionary the revelation. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Gomez shared that making her album was liber ating, because its confessions served her fans: “The agony, the confusion, the selfdoubt […] I went through that for some thing like this for other people.”  Gomez is far from alone here, with the Washington Post reporting that more artists are opening up about the mental health challenges associated with celebri ty. Her ex-boyfriend, Justin Bieber, shared his own inner demons on his new album

Attention Economy, artist Jenny Odell writes that “the invasive logic of commer cial social media” has contributed to a blur ring of the public and private spheres. We see the “cult of personality and personal branding” every day in our feeds: makeup tutorials, exercise tips, mukbangs. Thread ed with advertisements and clandestine “sponcon,” our daily routines become in separable from commercial activity. Now, for a post to appear non-commercial it must pass appear relatable. Relatability is essential for pop stars like Gomez, and difficult to achieve when you’re the fourthmost followed account on Instagram. Gomez told NPR that her album’s title came as a reaction to this moment, “where everything is based on your looks and social media and there are so many different channels telling people what they should look like.” Nonetheless, to promote her record she needed to find a way to rise above the noise and still come off as authentically herself. In the lead-up to her album release, Gomez (and pre sumably her social media team) posted a week’s worth of Polaroid-style candid bedroom shots to Instagram. Gomez wears an ’80s-style T-shirt with the al bum title “Rare” cheaply airbrushed over a heart-shaped sunset scene. The same pho tos appear in the lyric video for her song “Vulnerable.” There, she confides: “I would tell you all my secrets.” Her song “Crowded Room” seems to even wink at our desire to connect despite social me dia. The track’s music is filtered out into the background. Inaudible voices echo in the distance, but Gomez’s hushed lyric is bright and clear: “Baby it’s just me and you / Just us two / Even in a crowded room.”

Julien Ceccaldi, Pop-Punk Idol, 2019, Skeleton model, melted plastic, wood stain, clothing and accessories, Dimen sions variable. Photo by Paul Salveson Courtesy of the artist.

NATE SLOAN & CHARLIE HARDING

85 an eating disorder. SZA told Rolling Stone she suffers from depression, and sings about the soul-crushing work of her multiple day jobs on the song “Broken Clocks.” Demi Lovato opens up about her struggles with addiction, sobriety, and relapse in her song “Sober.” The success of these tracks is hinged upon the artists’ personal narratives, and each has mani fested positive social change by destigma tizing common afflictions. But this songwriting style can also have negative consequences. Gomez wrote about her personal struggles during a period of retreat from the public eye. On the song “Let Me Get Me,” Gomez sings about how therapy has helped “burn this camouflage I’ve been wearing for months.” Now she must maintain popular momentum by exposing her private life to the world. This cycle of retreat, personal exposure, and relentless promotion can’t be good for pop stars’ long-term health. In addition to the mental challenges of public life, there are very real concerns for stars’ physical safety, as obsessive fans have been known to cross the line. What’s more, there’s a gendered division to artists’ public self-immolation. As Kristin Lieb argues, female artists “must harness the power of personal narrative to construct, maintain, and extend their career life styles.” Male stars, by contrast, can remain comfortably anonymous. No one is asking to hear the details of Adam Levine’s per sonal life on his next record, for instance, but Katy Perry’s latest single is all about her recent Popularmarriage.songshave always been per sonal, but not necessarily autobiograph ical. Confessions were long the domain of rock, soul, country, and other genres. Pop represented the bastion of artifice, an impersonal hall of mirrors for listeners to get lost in. With pop’s swing toward the confessional, it’s worth asking if our soundtrack of personal liberation means putting the artists we adore at risk. There is a cognitive dissonance when an artist’s personal confessions impede his or her own pathway to mental health. What solutions could exist? Writing about the manufactured authenticity of so cial media in her book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino affirms that “the self is not a fixed, organic thing but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance.” Focus ing on the skilled performance of Gomez and her talented collaborators on Rare, rather than trying to find the figure at its center, might be the most responsible way to listen to the new sound of pop.

RENEGADES, MAYBE FRANCISCO MCCURRY fiction

When Manny was 19, he existed with no goals except to smoke weed, party, get laid, and drop acid. He had a dog paw tatted on his right bicep, and wore green contacts. His hair was short and full of gel, and the Smiths were his favorite band. On TV, he watched Puff Daddy, Mase and the Lox sell rap records in shiny suits, while DMX, grimy and shirtless, told the world to Get at Him. Clinton was also about to face impeachment, while the Zapatistas were four years into creating another possible world. Jeans were bag gy, Jordan was on the way to ring six, and Marilyn Manson was a star. But Manny didn’t give a shit about most of those things. He lived in an eightunit complex up the street from the Van

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Manny said coughing between his words. “Who was your hook up?” He passed the joint to “What?Nester.It’s not that bad,” David said. Manny noticed David looking around at the others to agree, his long lean frame suddenly unsure of itself. The others said nothing as Manny coughed into his closed fist.

Manny was the first to hit the joint as the words Biggie Biggie Biggie can’t you see played through three of the four speak ers in David’s car. The song’s undulating bassline buzzing along more than its in tended“Damnthump.bro, this weed is harsh.”

FRANCISCO MCCURRY

87 Nuys courthouse. The building was the color of dirty sheep’s wool. The apart ment was 600 square feet, with a wood floor, a concrete ceiling, and one bedroom. He and his four roommates would rockpaper-scissor every night for the couch. The building was so infested with roaches that at night the kitchen walls would go from bone white to looking like dalmatian print. Sometimes, a morning bowl of Frosted Flakes had a raisin-notraisin floating in the milk. Manny would just pluck out the invader, and enjoy his breakfast.Daily, Manny threw on white Ts and slim fit jeans. Whenever he stole — or bought — a new pair, he would make small cuts into the pant leg, at the ankle hem. This way his pants fit snug over his mahogany Harley boots. Manny’s boots had thick black soles and straps that went over the front arch with a small silver buckle. Some blood had stained the tip of Manny’s right boot, because he had kicked some Armenian pretty boy in the face during a brawl on Sunset. The kid’s mouth and teeth looked like a wet tunnel to hell as he lay unconscious on the street. Months had passed and the fight was still cherished and celebrated lore among Manny’s friends. The night Manny clicked into a soft political understanding of the world, he stood near the apartment building’s out side stairway. Manny had his right boot on the first step of the complex, and both his long sinewy limbs held his belt buckle, which was brass and shaped like a weed leaf. Manny looked at his boys David, Marco, Nester, and Hugo, who were a few feet away, gathered around David’s car: a beat-up burgundy ’88 Honda Sentra. Each held their shoulders and arms in a way that said fuck the world. Marco, Nester, and Hugo all wore white Ts like Manny, but David sport ed a brown flannel with gold trim. Their Levis had big folds at the bottom too. Only David’s jeans had the cuts in the hem like Manny’s. Ts, Levis, and boots, their collective uniform. Marco added a little flair with a pack of Marlboros in the fold of his short sleeve, while the broth ers Nester and Hugo had chains attached to their wallets looping from their back pockets to the belt holes over their hip bones. Chicanos reimagining the faux re bellion of CK ads. That night, the air was humid and still. Their corner lit like a pumpkin. The rest of the street baked under the shroud of valley smog that clung to old trees, and low-rise buildings, shaping a box-squaresquare Gothic landscape. This part of L.A. was hardly ever in the movies. I didn’t have the lore of neighborhoods that helped de fine the city; but its conditioning was all too familiar.Manny and his boys passed around a joint. It smelled like burning wood and ammonia. The smoke didn’t seem to move at all, sticking to the air around them.

los angeles review of books 88 “It’s all good dog,” Nester finally said.

The sound of “Hypnotize” faded out. “Manny what the fuck is wrong with you, homes? Do we need to start calling you baby lungs? You sound like you’re go ing to throw up and shit,” said Hugo, flex ing his chest and biceps as he grabbed the joint from Nester. “I’m good fucker. I think the weed got caught in a clump of your lady’s dried-up pussy juice. She let me go down for a bite earlier.”“What, fool?” Hugo said smiling, lift ing a fist over his head. Hugo wasn’t tall, but he was bulky and thick as bricks. He should’ve played fullback in high school, but liked girls and cars more than mean ingless packets asking questions about math, science, or English. Manny took a couple steps back gig gling. They all laughed. Marco then took a couple of puffs on the joint as Tupac’s voice crept into their ritual. The fournote piano loop began, and those stut tering drums and whiplash snare hit in a way that helped amplify the effects of the weed.“Ah, what?! This is my shit,” Nest er said as he plugged his upper body in the passenger door of the Sentra. Like his brother, Nester was short, but he also had a solid build that was becoming doughy from his love for emptying Mickey’s bot tles. He turned up the volume and the kick drum of “Ambitionz Az A Ridah” popped like a balloon through the feeble speaker in the door. “Damn, homes, you need to hook up your sounds. My little sister’s toy stereo bumps better than this,” Hugo said, shov ing David on his shoulder. “Fuck you, fool,” David said. He smiled and took the joint from Hugo. Nester and Manny swayed to the beat. “Aye, Manny you need to make me a dub of this. You put some good songs on here, dog,” Nester said. Manny just nodded, no longer cough ing and wiping tears from his eyes. He watched his friends. These not-boys, notmen, silent as Pac’s words cleared space. They stood around at their nothing and everything, searching for affirmation in each other, and beyond the buildings. Collectively, they played out their version of macho and cool inside a long stolen and colonized territory. Manny knew this was his “Aye,family.Manny, you working tonight?” David“Nosaid.I’m off,” Manny said. “Cool. We should try and hit up Lupe and Sally later. See if they want to kick it again.”“I’m down with that.” They were all on the brink of the next inevitable phase — their inner life force at the beginning of being coerced into disposable labor power. Manny worked part-time night shifts at Target to pay for rent and play. David was in a tech school for computers, while living with his par ents. Marco was thinking of joining the army. Nester was jobless and living with his brother; and Hugo the oldest, legally able to buy alcohol, worked at a tire and rim shop. None had children, and only one serious girlfriend among the five. They came together three or four nights out of the week to talk shit and plan their monthly parties, thinking this would be a forever routine. The slang, the boots, the slim fit Levis, and slicked back hair, an armor against the rapacious dusk of working-class poverty. A small rebellion against the mothers and fathers whose dreams never took shape beyond the paychecks that landed them in these

The joint dwindled down puff after puff up into the starless sky. Pac’s song ended and another song took over: a woman’s bombastic vocals saying deep deep deep inside, deep deep down inside. “Aye fool, what the fuck is this caca? Some happy house? Don’t put this on the tape when you dub it for me,” Nester said. Everyone except Manny laughed. “Fool, we dance to this shit every weekend,” Manny said. “No shit stupid ass. But I’m too drunk to care and got some tetas in my face.”

Manny said, “Alright, calm down, be fore one of you fools gets butt hurt and you both end up leaking. Chill out. I’ma roll another joint.” He walked toward the car. “Whatever, aye,” Nester said, eying his brother. “Aye fool while you’re in there, fast-forward this shit.”

Hugo stood chest out about three feet away from Nester, next to David. They all turned their heads as a figure moved in the distance. “Hey, who’s that creeping up,” said Marco.“Oh, that’s just Little Richie, Crazy Eddie’s baby brother. He’s the one who sold me the weed. I told him he could come smoke with us,” David said. “What! Never buy from Little Richie. He steals that shit from his brother. No wonder that shit had so many seeds and tasted like a donkey’s ass,” Manny said from the car. All of them watched Little Richie walk up, head cocked to the concealed stars. His tan and black collared shirt buttoned to the top, with khaki Dickies eight sizes bigger than his waistline, fold ed at the bottom over some black Nike Cortez. Creases ran down his pants like the lines were made with a ruler. He also had thumbtacks in the back of the shoe’s heel to keep the pants from dragging.

Little Richie’s walk was equal parts inse cure and “Heyfearless.LittleRichie, isn’t it past your bedtime, homes?” Nester called out. “What, fool! Hell nah.” Nester, Hugo, and Marco laughed. Little Richie stopped with his hands in his pockets and said, “So, you fools still smoking or what?” “I don’t remember you putting in on the sack, big guy,” Hugo said. “What? This fool bought it off of me.” Little Richie pointed to David. “I hooked it up for you fools and everything.” “And everything…” Nester mocked. Little Richie put his head down. “We’re just fucking with you little homey. We were about to toke up right now,” Hugo said, grabbing Little Richie on the shoulder. He picked his head up. After a few clicks and stops on the tape, Manny played the Smiths “How Soon Is Now?” The jittery warble of

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89 streets and away from the dictators and thieves of their homelands.

Nester shoved his brother for ef fect. They began to wrestle and slap box. Manny, Marco, and David egging them on: Fuck’em up, … gunna let em disrespect you like that, … uh oh watcha watcha. Manny stepped in when he saw Hugo catch his brother on the cheek with a swift open hand. Nestor’s face was tint ed red and contorted in anger. Manny knew even as brothers that one playful slap could turn into a real fight. Each was ready and skilled in finding an opponent’s weak spot: a relaxed knee, an exposed throat, and open chest. It had happened many times among them, and if Nester reacted, they’d spend the night trying to calm drunken slurs of “fuck that fool.”

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

91 the guitar came in over the slumbering drums. Morrissey’s ghostly vocal took precedence alongside the erotic groove. The song came together like a narcotic. Manny sat inside David’s burgundy Honda Sentra, and through the weed and sound, it felt like it morphed into a ’67 Jaguar Roadster.Manny watched David put some sway in his hips. David said, “Fuck yeah.” Manny bopped his head over the joint he was rolling and turned up the volume. Halfway into the first verse Little Richie chimed in, “What are you fools listening to? This shit is gay. Sounds like music my sister plays when she’s on her period.”“Aye, shut your little verga mouth Richie. You don’t know nothing about this. Don’t fuck up my high or I’m gunna have to spank you like your mommy when she finds out you’re not in bed,” Manny didn’t bother looking up at him. “What dog?” Little Richie said. “Chill man, or we won’t buy from you anymore,” David said, his hand firm on Richie’sMannychest.lit the second joint, hit it, and passed it to David. The song played on, like a soothing bubble around their bodies. A moment of safety. No shields needed to guard their manhoods. Marco danced to himself like he was holding a beautiful woman right there in their cir cle. His slick black hair shined in the faint streetlight. He was a spotlighted, chrome microphone.“Hey!Hey guys,” an uneven voice called out from the shadows. All six heads looked up. Marco almost tripped off the sidewalk to see the person speaking. “Hey, could you guys turn that down or go inside, you know, your apartment.”

“Come on guys, really? I have to get up for work tomorrow! It’s a Wednesday night for Christ sakes. I can smell the weed all the way up here, and your music won’t let me sleep.”

The obscured face called out from the second story of the complex behind a window“Tom,screen.shut your white ass up before I come up there and violate you,” Hugo said.Marco gave him five near the hip and said, “Right. Opie better stop trippin’.”

“Close your damn window then fool,” Manny shouted. He was a bit conflicted. He wanted to show his friends that he stood by them, but Manny did live there, and Tom was prone to complain to the landlord about the smallest disturbances, and Manny didn’t want to get kicked out. “Really, Manny! I mean, I know you live here, but do you really live here? I see how many people come in and out of that apartment every day.”

“Yes, mothafucka! What you tryin’ to say,” Manny said in a tone that recalled the days when he was the only Mexican in a crew of all Black kids in middle school. Nester eyed him suspiciously. The still, humid air was becoming tense.“Man, let me go regulate on this fool,” Nester said, taking a few steps toward the stairs. Little Richie laughed hitting the joint.“Nah, fool, chill,” Manny said, put ting his arm in front of Nester. He felt Nester’s belly clench with excitement. Nester smacked Manny’s arm away. “Well guys, you leave me no choice. I’m gunna have to call the police,” Tom said.“Tom, who told your ass to move into a neighborhood full of crazy Apaches anyway? You know Encino and Sherman

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los angeles review of books 92 Oaks are up the Boulevard, right?” Hugo said Tomcalmly.huffed, struggled for words. “I mean, guys, really, uhm, I don’t have to ex plain myself to you.” “You talk like you’re making big mon ey shoveling dog shit at the animal shelter, Tom,” David said. “You know, I’m not gunna argue any more. I’m calling the cops.” Tom’s head moved away from the window. He had actually been in the complex for a few years. He was the only white person on the block. He was single with no pets. Actually no one ever saw anyone but his mom and younger brother visit him. Tom even fed a few of the apartment pets. Still, he just didn’t know when to shut the fuck up and take the noise. This wouldn’t be his first time calling the police. They all turned to each other. “That fool ain’t gunna call the cops, is he?” asked Marco. Manny looked over at the window and shrugged his shoulders. His first im pulse was to tell them to go inside, but he didn’t want to back down to Tom, or seem like a punk to his friends, so he kept his gaze angry and firm. “Hey, put that shit out,” David told Little Richie. He stubbed the joint out on the curb.Hugo walked to the driver side of the car and turned the music off through the open“Wherewindow.should I put the rest of this joint,” asked Little Richie. “Here,” Manny grabbed it and put it under a loose brick that separated the sidewalk from a small patch of grass. They all turned their heads as Manny’s roommates Jessie and Olivia came out the front gate. “Hi, boys,” Jessie said smoking a ciga rette, a big smile on his face. “What’s up Jessie? Where you two, headed?” asked Manny. “Uhh, none of your business little boy,” Olivia “Alright,interjected.loveyatoo, mijita. Have a great night,” Manny said. He actually wanted to call Olivia a bitch, but instead he placed his slender veiny hands into his pockets and slouched his thin shoulders. Manny then made a sound like he was clearing his “Manny,throat.seriously, you better get your dumb ass friends inside,” Olivia ordered. “We heard Tom yelling.” She was all dolled up. Hair flat ironed, pre cision eyeliner, deep red lipstick, and her flat stomach out on display with a cheap chain wrapped over the hips. Her breasts and ass dominated space like Saturn and Jupiter. Her heels and car keys clicked like a seductive metronome with each step.“Okay, bye boys,” Jessie added as he followed behind his sister. “Dude, I don’t know how you do it. Olivia is fine as hell,” David said. “Yeah, well you can say I’m not her type,” Manny said. “What? Un gringo with un chingon de plata,” Hugo added. “Yup,” Manny replied. “Yeah, I seen her come through the spot asking for discounts on tires for her little Trevors and Bobbies in their Beemers and Benzes. Shit ain’t right if you ask me. But David’s right. She is finer than a motherfucker,” Hugo said. They all kept their eyes on Olivia until she disappeared into her car. “You know what I don’t get, Manny?” said “What’sNester. that?” “How you live with a faggot,” he said firmly.

“Tu sabes,” Little Richie added with his fist out. Nester left him hanging. “Damn, Nester, that’s a little harsh, no? Especially when you don’t mind all the tail Jessie brings to the parties,” Manny said. “Shit didn’t you and these two fools run a train on his little coworker a couple weekends ago?” “So, what, fool? I don’t sleep under the same roof as him. I guess you already got a thing going with Boy George, huh? Out here defending him and shit.” “Okay anti-gay Terminator. You know what they say about dudes like you, right?” Manny“Andsaid.what’s that?” “That it makes you so mad because you want to swing that way, Rambo.” Nester got wild in the eyes and stepped toward Manny, “You calling me gay, “Didhomey?”Isay that? But aye, if you wanna get froggy, ain’t nothing between us but space and opportunity.” Hugo grabbed his younger brother by the waist, “Chill baby bro. You lookin’ cra zy right now. You gunna make me think you are chueco with how crazy you’re actin’.”Nester easily wrestled himself from Hugo’s grip. “Man fuck you fools. I’m go ing to get a 40.” He began to walk to the liquor“Waitstore.up, I’ll come with you,” Marco said and the two walked off together. Manny was being playful, but he was ready if Nester kept acting up. Their differ ence in size and mass was of no concern to him. But he knew that it was these types of arguments that made them all friends, even through moments of distortion. Their memories and emotions churning within them like fission and fusion inside the sun. Nature or nurture, these types of bonds manifested in every corner from coast to coast. Each crew of men bond ed with its own spirit-crushing and soul defining hierarchy. Love, violence, and sex revolving around their bodies like comets and Evenasteroids.still, Manny hadn’t forgotten about Tom calling the cops. “He’s been drinking a lot lately, que no,” David asked Hugo. “Yeah. Mom getting sick and having no job is getting to him. He’ll be alright though.”Then as though Tezcatlipoca had come to lay claim on their souls, Adolfo pulled up in his ’57 Chevy Bel Air bumping The Sunglows’ “It’s Okay.”

“Whadup, big dog? The ride is look ing good. You got all them dents out of it,” Hugo said, followed by a slap of five and a fist“Yeahbump.my little cousin and his friends have been doing all the body work. Not bad if you ask me. They gunna paint it next weekend too.”

“That’s what’s up,” Manny chimed in. “What color?” His face was equal parts impressed and annoyed that Adolfo had left the music playing loud. Luckily, the song was coming to an end. “Straight Black. Black and chrome. She’s gunna be the prettiest thing roll ing through the valley homeboy. Lookin’ firme.”Little Richie, hands in his pockets, looked at the inside of the car. White and gray leather seats, long like a park bench.

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The laughing elements of Sunny Ozuna’s voice ringing out the windows like a mad drunk on a megaphone. Adolfo’s Bel Air squealed to a stop behind David’s Sentra. The whole car was sanded down ready for a new paint job. Adolfo stepped out with an open tall can in a brown bag.

Arshia Fatima Haq, "Recollection" video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

Adolfo was 10 years Hugo’s senior. He was the unofficial leader of their branch of a party crew that extended from the San Fernando Valley into the Inland Empire. He had stories of dropping acid with Dennis Hopper and selling coke to Debbie Harry. With no proof, the boys believed him because he partied like he was cut from the ’80s. Adolfo had a taste for cheap booze, quality coke, and young chocha, even though he was married with threeAdolfokids. said, “So … homeboy I was telling you fools about last week,” they nodded their heads, “he’s gunna let us use his crib for the party.” He pulled out a piece of folded-up notebook paper from his back pocket, an address, name, date, and time scribbled on it. He handed it to Hugo, who handed it to David. Manny inspected it with David silently. “So I’m’a need you guys to get some dope-ass fliers made up and start getting word out. We only got two…” Before Adolfo could finish his sen tence that same sad voice rang out from above“Listen,again. I warned you guys. I wanted to be nice about it. You could’ve just gone inside.”They all looked up and then to the south. Some blue red and white lights were flashing silently and approaching them slowly. A siren quickly bleep bleep blopped into their direction. Two cop cars. Before the cars came to a complete stop, Little Richie took off running. “What the fuck is that moro doing?” Adolfo said, confused. “Hey freeze!” A cop jumped out of the slowly moving car. He ran after Little Richie whose over-sized khakis, and plump weight had him struggling to get away. His cortez and the cop’s boots tip tapping an agitated tempo into the street.“The rest of you do not move,” a ge neric megaphone voice called out from the vehicle.Suddenly time stretched like rub ber, and sound became a slow hum. Manny looked up toward Tom’s window. His veiled face seemed just as nervous above, as theirs were below. Tom was run ning his hand through his ragged hair and his eyes were wide, hardly blinking, the bedroom light behind him obscuring the rest of his facial features. Manny, David, Hugo, and Adolfo all watched the cop reach for Richie’s shirt. As the cop tried to pull Richie back, Richie stopped, crouched, and twisted under the pull with a strength and agility beyond his age and size. The cop slipped on wet grass and Richie slipped out of his grasp. They all expected him to run left into the neighborhood. It was dark. He knew the layout. He could dip in and out of the small homes and apartment complexes. Instead Richie ran across the street toward the back end of the closed 99 Cent Store, a pawn shop, and a bank.

Richie fell to the ground like the awkward teenage boy he was, eyes toward the sky. His hollow expression shook Manny. It grabbed something in him, something so interior that it was beyond performance

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Their signs shone next to the main street lights that lit up the path of Richie’s at tempted escape route. Richie took eight rapid steps looking back toward the an gry cop getting back on his feet. Manny actually counted them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, then pop pop pop. A cop had pulled up in another car, and shot from the window. He still had his arms extended, smoke rising out the barrel, wedged inside the opened car door.

Manny sunk his head, and stared into his lap, hands behind his back, breathing

Manny with the pain still lingering in his stomach, moved his eyes back above Tom’s window, catching a quick glance of the nothing darkness above, before he was shoved in the back seat of the squad car. No one had bothered to turn off Adolfo’s stereo. The Shields’ “You Cheated, You Lied” covered the scene like a damp blan ket. Manny wanted to scream, but he went numb as he thought about Richie’s mom and brother and sister. What body would blame find? In that instance it seemed to Manny like the whole neighborhood was yelling at the cops, but people were in shock while most were scared. The cops began barking orders at people to “Move Back!” and “Calm Down!”

los angeles review of books 96 or the desire to be cool or the need to be tough.Hugo screamed, instinctively running out toward Richie as another cop car ar rived. Two other cops got out and tackled him, slamming his body into the concrete. They struggled to handcuff Hugo as he cursed and fought them. David stood still, seemingly numb, slowly walking off the curb and into the street, repeating “Why did you shoot him? Why did you shoot him?” His eyes were filling with tears. It seemed like he wanted to move toward Richie, but all David did was stop, look around, and raise his hands to hisMannyhead. looked up at Tom. He yelled at his window, “You fuckin’ peckerwood!” He grabbed the loose brick, that had been concealing the joint, hurled it at the win dow. He missed, but the thud against the wall getting a fifth cop’s attention. The cop grabbed Manny from behind and yelled, “Calm down, son.”

“Let me go you swine-fucking moth erfucker,” Manny said. As the cop’s arms reached toward and around his neck, it was here that Manny began to feel and understand that he and those he loved had been fighting for space. That they had to affirm why it was okay for them just to laugh, talk shit, and dance. That some voices were deemed more im portant than his and those that he loved. In the space under his heart, maybe above his stomach, an anxious fear blossomed. It scared him, but it also filled him with rage.Manny kicked at the building’s wall. He and the cop fell to the ground. A sixth cop came and slammed his baton into Manny’s stomach. The pain shot from his gut, swirling in a spiral and moving through his body. His mind became an empty black expanse where word and form were not taking shape. Manny heard Tom shouting from above, “Oh my god … I, I, I, didn’t, I’m sorry.”

Two more cop cars arrived, five new cops total. People in the neighborhood be gan to creep out of the houses and apart ments. Light was everywhere, and time suddenly snapped back to normal speed, sound amplified by a hundred. Cops be gan to yell at people to move back. Hugo was still cuffed, belly on the ground gazing at Richie, his eyes full of tears and anger. Little Richie was gasping for air, as the cop who slipped and fell, turned him on his stomach and placed him in handcuffs. David and Adolfo were being searched, not yet cuffed. As he was brought to his feet, Manny noticed Nester and Marco run ning up behind the crowd. Nester yelled for his brother. He threw the beer bottle he just bought at the cop cars. After the shatter, Nester and Marco were both face down and getting roughed up.

97 through his nose. The chaos outside the window pressed against his ears into a jumbled metalloid screech. He felt all that was important before Richie took those eight steps, lose some of its definition, its beauty, a bit of its meaning. Dissonance was his Whencompanion.Manny picked his head up again, the cop who shot Richie, was searching his body. He pulled five small bags of weed from Richie’s pockets, said, “Got it.” He held the baggies up like an other expected victory. FRANCISCO MCCURRY

The unnamed flowers in The Rolling Stones song “Dead Flowers.” They grew from the sadness and grief of the singers. They spilled out of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richards’s mailboxes every morning. They were born singed and curled. They died before the guitars were first plucked.

The daisies, or the Bellis perennis, that sheath Brigitte Bardot’s chest in Plucking the Daisy. They began to die when they were first cut, kept dying as the costume designer sewed them into a bralette, and starved while touching her nipples and the cleft between her breasts. In dying, they taught me about some of my hungers. B-SIDES OF THE GOLDEN RECORDS , TRACK THREE: "SOME FLOWERS THAT HAVE DIED" SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

The Cry violet, or the Viola cryana. Its purple blooms drew the fingers of lovers and of botanists. It grew in the kinds of rocks we have that are made of skeletons of marine organisms, like mollusks, which are small tender muscles housed in curved shells. We said we needed the rocks for our own homes. They died.

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The Maui hau kuahiwi, or Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, of the family of mallows. The murderers came to the island on ships launched from colder seas. Soon, little was left of the lava or the rocks that lava cools into, and nothing was left of the flowers. In the future, there will be a way to conjure the ghosts of these flowers’ smells. Aside from going to the lab where the scientists create the scents of some dead flowers, or going to the installations the artists made with the scientists so that many can stand together and feel time and space blossoming, there are other things we can do. For example, we can imagine. We look at photographs—like “Tree with daffodils” and “Flying insect with flowers,” which we’re sending to you—and watercolor within and outside of their lines to see them in another color, with another shape of petal or an extra stamen. We can dream ourselves into the most plentiful rocks and soils. The trouble is that the human imagination, we’ve learned, can kill more easily than it can resurrect. The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included on NASA’s 1977 Voyager spacecraft launches. They were intended as something of a message-in-a-bottle to any extra terrestrials they may have encountered. In the words of then-Pres ident Jimmy Carter: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

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Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, c. 2015, Gouache on paper, 23.2 x 17.7 in. Courtesy christian berst art brut, Paris.

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LAGUNA REVISITED SARA DAVIS essay

In 2003, a TV producer named Liz Gateley, three weeks into her new job at MTV, approached her bosses with an idea for a reality series. She pitched it us ing non-reality references: Dawson’s Creek meets 90210 meets Heathers. The show would be set in Orange County, a place that had captured the nation’s interest that year via Fox’s The O.C., which itself owed a lot of its genetic material to 90210. Gateley’s show was going to be about beautiful teens, young love, and popular girls — a perennial interest for film and television (cf. Carrie, Gossip Girl, Mean Girls, even 2019’s ultra-progressive Euphoria was not above a slo-mo sequence of cheerleaders moving through a cafeteria). Gateley’s proposed show was going to be reality TV, yes, but a new breed. Unlike its grainy,

los angeles review of books 102 poorly lit predecessors The Real World and Big Brother, this would view like a drama, eschewing “confessionals” (cast members in booths breaking the fourth wall) and made with the high production value of a scripted show, with complicated lighting setups and high definition camerawork. MTV was hesitant. Confessionals were a cornerstone of reality TV, an op portunity for producers to redirect cast members to particular plot lines, to stoke conflict or romance. Without them, high er-ups fretted, it would be difficult to sus tain a coherent plot. They also worried that they would not be able to find seven sufficiently beautiful teens. A concern to which Gateley, herself an attractive blonde from Orange County, rejoined: “Then you haven’t been to Southern California.”

For any drama about teens, the obvi ous milieu is high school, with its closedsystem stressors (adults don’t typically break up with romantic partners and then continue to see them every day, along with their new love interests). High school, by virtue of its annual structure, is punctuated with perfect narrative beats: homecoming, winter formal, spring break, prom (when characters are forced to double-down on vague romantic situations by choosing a date), and graduation. Gateley particular ly liked the idea of filming the cast talking at their lockers. With a green light from MTV, in early 2004 she and her team be gan scouting locations. They set up booths in high school quads and cafeterias, and kids who wanted to be considered could come up and fill out an application. It wasn’t completely clear what the show was going to be at that point. Cast mem bers have said they thought they were au ditioning for True Life, MTV’s erstwhile docudrama, perhaps “True Life: I Live in the O.C.” From the producers’ perspective, attractive teens who lived near a beach were necessary but not sufficient. They were looking for a compelling story of a particular kind: a love triangle. Dawson’s Creek had Joey choosing between Dawson and Pacey, 90210 had Brenda-DylanKelly. What Gateley had ordered specif ically was a “good girl, a bad girl, and a cuteOneboy.”afternoon, at Laguna Beach High School, the only public school for an idyl lic beach community some 50 miles south of Los Angeles, development producer Adam DiVello and his colleague, done for the day, decided to head home. On their way out they heard a car alarm going off in the parking lot. As they approached, the volume steadily increasing, they were confronted by the ur-image of the series to come: two beautiful high school-aged girls, both blue-eyed, with blonde hair flowing past their shoulders, like a clearcomplexioned two-headed hydra. Incredi bly, they were both named Lauren.

To distinguish between these two primary Laurens, the best friends be came “Lo” (Lauren Bosworth), the pithy sidekick, and “LC” (Lauren Conrad), the show’s main character, the “good girl.”

One of the Laurens had set off the car alarm, and the keys had fallen on the ground, and they were yelling to make themselves heard over the blaring horn. DiVello understood that what he saw be fore him was what they’d been looking for, and Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County was born.

In the school library, producers spotted Stephen Colletti, a pillowy-lipped surf er with liquid brown eyes. “That’s our Dylan,” someone said, referring to Luke Perry’s character on 90210 Luckily for MTV, Stephen and LC were childhood best friends with a

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This was the early 2000s, before social media democratized teen interests, and MTV was king. I watched TRL religious ly every day after high school, as if the dai ly ranking of the nation’s most requested videos was of urgent importance. Produc ers did not hesitate to call Cavallari and ask her to cut her trip short. She returned, auditioned, and was cast. Given how per fectly the love triangle met MTV’s ex pectations, I suspect that they would have cast Cavallari even if she had been much less charismatic than she was (after all, Lauren Conrad has the onscreen presence of a water bottle). But in fact MTV got very lucky with Kristin — without her I doubt Laguna Beach would have captured the cultural interest the way it did. In 2020, Kristin Cavallari is a muzzled lifestyle brand and mother of three, but in 2004 she was a funny, hot, fearless teen, ruthless in pursuit of her goals: having the most fun, meeting the cutest boys, and maintaining her position as alpha girl. Like a general in a halter-top bikini, she had an innate sense of who to crush and who to fleetingly ally herself with in or der to maintain her power. She was Gone Girl’s “cool girl” personified, holding all the Laguna Beach High boys in her thrall. In a season one scene, Stephen ruefully explains why he just can’t seem to walk away, giving voice to the show’s consensus on Kristin. “Kristin’s like a really good girl to hook up with and have fun with,” he says,Inmorosely.anycase, MTV had found their good girl, their bad girl, and their cute boy. They cast some additional surfers, Talan and Trey, and perhaps as a counterpoint, two brunettes, Morgan and Christina, whose wholesome story lines (both were Christian intentional virgins) would wash away as effortlessly as the surf and sand in the show’s opening credits. Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County was slated to start filming later that spring. Two days later, Janet Jackson’s nipple revealed itself at the Super Bowl Halftime show. The show had been produced by MTV, and sudden ly Laguna Beach High School no longer wanted to be associated with the network. Their contract was revoked. There would be no locker-adjacent talk, no slowmotion hallway processionals. They would have to film after school hours, and on the weekends.Thechange has an interesting, not entirely deleterious effect on the footage. Without the anchor of school, the cast cycles through an endless loop of leisure activities, they’re either: 1) at the beach 2) planning parties 3) eating sushi 4) getting ready to go out — the series loves its shots of two girls staring into a mirror, apply ing makeup 5) shopping 6) engaging in “drama,” while professing to be avoiding drama, too mature for drama, or relieved to be finally past the drama.

The general consensus of the cast (now almost all married with children and above-average Instagram followings) is that the Kristin-Stephen-LC love triangle DAVIS

103 long-simmering attraction. Stephen had spent most of high school dating an other girl, Kristin Cavallari, but during a break from that relationship had “hooked up” with LC. Now he was backtogether-ish with Kristin, but tensions between the three teens were high. It was as if Liz Gateley had manifested a love triangle out of thin air. The only caveat: Kristin was not on campus. As befits a wealthy teen in January, she was skiing. In her absence, her classmates had described her as “hot” and “bitchy.”

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105 did exist, but that the LC-Stephen arm of it was exaggerated for the purposes of the show. The mechanics of the tri angle were this: Stephen loves Kristin, who mostly loves him back but is occa sionally distracted by other, non-Stephen suitors (like the previously mentioned Talan, and Sam, a handsome blond surf er).

Kristin expertly diagnoses Stephen’s issue: “Any time I’m not like all over him, he gets upset.” When Stephen gets moody, he turns to LC, who, to the extent that she is able to convey emotion, does seem to love Stephen; certainly, she is sympathet ic to his cause. The LC-Stephen dynamic also owes considerable thanks to Lo (the second Lauren), who props up the ane mic story line by doggedly asking LC, “So what’s up with you and Stephen?” at regular intervals. Long, meaningful looks are the lingua franca of Laguna Beach, and pop music is carefully chosen to telegraph a character’s feelings. The use of music, artful editing and some early reality TV chicanery — Kristin has said that produc ers fed her “wild lines” to record as audio, telling her that if they didn’t “feel right” they wouldn’t use them — proved more than compensatory for the confessionals MTV was so worried about removing. It is abundantly clear, at all times, what ev eryone is Outsidefeeling.ofits central plot, Laguna Beach has relatively few interests. The cast is wealthy, and attention is paid to that, but there is no critical examination of class. The show does diligently docu ment how much things cost (S1Ep1’s titular “Black and White Affair” takes place in a $700/night hotel suite) and never passes up an opportunity to film a fancy beachside mansion (Lauren shows Stephen her clothes closet and her shoeand-purse closet). In one bizarre scene, a cast member is served a quesadilla in her bedroom by a housekeeper wearing a black-and-white maid’s uniform. Beyond this, Laguna Beach doesn’t ask difficult questions. It avoids creating too large a gulf between viewer and cast, because it wants us to like them, to worry along with them about whether they’ll get asked to prom or buy the same bikini as someone else. In an interview, Adam DiVello re ferred to shows like Laguna Beach as “as pirational.” Like in Gossip Girl, the show’s relationship to its cast’s wealth is one of admiration and envy, which is also a tone the Laguna Beachers sometimes have about themselves. As one minor character says in season two: “It sucks when like the girl you hate, you walk in and the house is like amazing.” If the show is not particular about its depiction of wealth, it does offer, perhaps inadvertently, a nuanced portrait of gender and social dynamics among the cast. And though it peddles teenage sex, it offers an otherwise socially conservative message. This plays out in how it presents its young female leads — the kind of girls they are, and the kind of women they would eventually become. Early in season one, Kristin and her friend Jessica make din ner for their boyfriends, Stephen and Dieter. They have modest goals: pasta with chicken in alfredo sauce and cake from a boxed mix. But it turns out that the blind are leading the blind (“Should I say ‘a half a pound of chicken’?” whispers an uncharacteristically unsure Kristin at the meat counter) and everything comes out really bad — the pasta, in Kristin’s own words, “tastes like feet” and the cake is liquid in the center. Stephen is sulking because Kristin’s flip phone is buzzing DAVIS

Kristin, visibly intoxicated and not one to disappoint, does a mildly sexy but entire ly PG-13 dance on top of the bar, makes out with Sam, and endures a histrionic Stephen, who, beside himself, repeatedly screams, “Slut!”

.

In comparison, Kristin is shown fail ing almost every test of proper womanly behavior. In season one, Kristin proved to be an ungracious host, in season two she is an ungracious guest. With Stephen off at college, Talan thinks he may be able to move from understudy to leading man, and he cooks Kristin an elaborate dinner at his house, including shrimp cocktail served in martini glasses with hearts of romaine, and a meat item he is seen ex pertly flipping on the grill (“I’m Italian,” he says, by way of explanation). Kristin ar rives wearing a sweatshirt and pronounces the meal Despite“intense.”Kristin’s obvious superior ity to LC in almost every way, Laguna Beach can’t disguise who it’s rooting for. The show works hard to keep the Ste phen-Lauren romance alive, and even tries to suggest that LC is the ultimate victor. In the last moments of season one’s finale, she arrives in San Francisco to start college, and who is waiting to pick her up? Stephen, in one of the more obvious bits of producer meddling. I can’t imagine who was fooled. You just have to watch Stephen’s interview for the DVD boxset extra features: “I realized that I liked being with Kristin so much more than I [liked being] with Lauren.”

Still the show insists that LC is the one. She provides voice-over narration for the first season, recapping the previous episode and setting up the next. Produc ers refer to her as the show’s “protagonist” and Liz Gateley talks about how she is the show’s most relatable character. They stuck with her, too, later producing The Hills For her part, Cavallari has been open in

los angeles review of books 106 with texts from other boys. Unconcerned, Kristin leaves dinner early after taking a call from Sam, saying she’s tired and Stephen’s being annoying. She is not pic tured doing any dishes. Later in the season, we are given a very different approach to Stephen’s needs. All of Laguna has decamped to Cabo San Lucas, a near-mythic land of no parents, no curfews, easy access to alcohol, and nightclubs outfitted with stripper poles (the O.C. version of Chekhov’s gun). In the episode, “What Happens in Cabo…”

The next day at breakfast LC weighs in on Kristin’s behavior with a matterof-fact, traditionalist view: “She’s wear ing a skirt and a little thong and she’s up there like on the pole. She knows that’s slutty.” Stephen, correctly identifying an uncritical harbor, sits next to LC at din ner, telling her he’ll stay in with her (she has a cold) and watch a movie. He steals bits of food from Lauren’s plate, prompt ing some playful wrist-slapping and fake protest until finally Lauren, clearly feeling like the odds are finally in her favor, tells Stephen in explicitly maternal terms, “I’m going to make you a little plate.” Across the weirdly L-shaped table, Kristin rolls her eyes.Thecompetition between Lauren and Kristin keeps this dynamic between slut and housewife in view. In season two, LC makes Stephen crepes, following a night that MTV tries to suggest they spent to gether. She is the perfect hostess, moving assuredly around her parents’ large Tuscan kitchen with its view of their infinity pool, infinity hot tub, and the ocean. When Stephen declines whipped cream, she gently insists: “It’s really good with it. You want me to put a little bit?”

SARA DAVIS

107 interviews about feeling manipulated and misrepresented by the show’s adult pro ducers, in ways that changed how she related to friends and romantic partners alike. “I didn’t know that they were going to make me the bitch,” she said. When the first episode aired, she said, she cried for hours. When filming began Cavallari had just turned 17, and she felt (probably rightly) that producers were effectively sabotaging the real, two-and-a-half-year relationship that she had with Stephen. She draws a clear distinction between Laguna Beach and her subsequent ap pearance on The Hills, which, she says, she treated like an acting job. When Laguna Beach first aired in September 2004, I had just started college in New York City. I’d chosen a dorm that only had single rooms, no roommates, which at the time seemed somehow cool er and more sophisticated but in reality was just more depressing. Waking up in my tiny room on the 11th floor, eating microwaveable foods, coming home to no one at the end of the day, I felt like no one would know if I was alive or dead. I was homesick for my sunny California home town, and spent a lot of time listening to mix-CDs my high school friends had made me, the discs Sharpie-d with inside jokes. Having always thought of myself as more of a cosmopolitan type, I was em barrassed to find that I missed driving in my car, and that I was uncontrolla bly drawn to the complex on Columbus Circle at 72nd Street, whose climatecontrolled interiors, big shiny J. Crew and mega-Whole Foods was the closest thing to a suburban mall that Manhattan had to offer. In December, I cried while telling my academic advisor that the plates in the cafeteria were always hot and wet and had leftover pieces of food stuck to them. By February, I had sunk into a major depres sion and taken a leave of absence, return ing home to sit on my parents’ couch and terrorize them with my “does life have any meaning”–type questions. During this time, I watched a lot of TV. It was then that I encountered, in reruns, the show billing itself as “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.” It was a comfort I did not anticipate, and watching it, I could retreat into a version of my former self.

Now I am 34, and in order to write this essay I watched 24 episodes of Laguna Beach sequestered in my bedroom wear ing headphones, so that the babysitter I hired to watch my toddler would not get the wrong impression about my “work.” Occasionally when I could not find my headphones, I watched it on silent with subtitles. Watching the show for the first time in over a decade inspired differ ent thoughts and feelings. Early aughts fashion, for example, seems particular ly problematic from this vantage point. The female cast is perpetually hiking up their low-rise jeans and adjusting their tube tops. They attempt to sit gracefully in their handkerchief-sized Abercrombie & Fitch denim skirts (something I can em pathize with as a former A&F employee circa 2002–2003, back when this was a Very Cool Job To Have. I was “scouted” while working my previous mall job at Godiva Chocolate). The guys look more comfortable than the girls, but also very schlubby. Also notable is the complete ab sence of social media (some cast members have said that they did have MySpace at the time), an inextricable piece of any cul tural conversation about teens today. The central love triangle feels lower stakes that I remembered, perhaps because

Inow.hope it’s not just because of my current stage of life, but the scene I found most moving during my rewatch was an odd moment in season one, when Kristin’s dad and LC’s dad get together for a chat. Kristin has since confirmed that their dads really were friends and “probably got dinner and stuff.” Both dads appear peri odically on the show, as do other parents. None of these are executive-producerKardashian type parents, nor implausi bly attractive Gossip Girl–type parents, or table-flipping Housewives — these are just normal parents, though unusually wealthy and reasonably attractive. But they serve their proper role as supporting cast to their teens: grounding them for bad grades, asking to meet their dates, taking an unreasonable number of photographs before prom. In the scene, Kristin’s dad, a real estate developer, and LC’s dad, an ar chitect, are chatting in an office (the natu ral habitat of dads!) while their daughters give each other mean looks in Cabo. Jim Conrad talks about how he asked Lauren to do him just one favor in Mexico: to “trade off being Mom” with the other kids. His philosophy is that when she’s 18, she’s an adult; she’ll make her own decisions.

Dennis Cavallari says ruefully that he’s “still trying to reel [his] daughter back in.”

los angeles review of books 108 it’s more apparent how humble a prize Stephen is. Today, Cavallari and Conrad are both successful businesswomen, with solid positions in the entertainment and retail worlds, whereas Stephen, despite a robust six-season run on The CW’s One Tree Hill, has largely faded from the pub lic eye. Rewatching these three feels just like a high school relationship — life or death at the time, in retrospect a little em barrassing, with a strong sense of not be ing sure what all the fuss was about. I was also surprised by how much screentime is devoted to the cast’s grad uation, and the big emotions surrounding it. Because the show wasn’t allowed to film on campus, the ceremony is stitched together from home videos shot by cast parents on camcorders, giving it a homey, un-produced feel. The teens, in the leadup and aftermath, struggle to make sense of this major life event; it’s clear that they know something big is happening but lack the life experience to understand just how big. Kristin and a sidekick have a conver sation post-ceremony about a speech in which someone called the moment “the end of the beginning.” In the scene it is clear that neither girl understands what that means, despite Kristin professing to “love that phrase,” but the phrase is apt — this is the end of their childhoods — and even if they can’t understand the ac tual words they can intuitively grasp the weight of the sentiment. Even Kristin be comes an emotional wreck saying good bye to her friend Jessica. “You can still call me,” says one girl to her weeping friend. “But it won’t be the same,” she replies. There are many similar goodbye scenes, and a certain sweetness to how the show chooses to linger on these moments. It’s hard to imagine current reality TV view ers, used to their steady diets of cat fights and infidelity, having the patience for it

It’s a friendly, strange moment between two real estate professionals and dads of girls who hate each other. To insert it here, immediately fol lowing Kristin’s pole dance and LC’s ungenerous post-mortem, highlights the well-known obliviousness of dads, and may create some dramatic irony, but it doesn’t really advance the plot of the show.

Are they trying to suggest that the world is larger than high school? To remind us that LC, Kristin, and Stephen, no matter how badly behaved, are someone’s chil dren? I think it’s possible that the appeal of Laguna Beach (if it has an appeal; I cer tainly could not in good faith recommend that anyone start watching it now for the first time) can be located in the disconnect between the dads’ understanding of the Cabo episode and their daughters’. It’s as though the producers can’t decide wheth er they want to manipulate these teens or parent them, to view them as resourc es or as children. The show is a document of a more innocent time in the history of reality TV, the genre’s own transition al moment, a graduation from the firstwave sloppiness of The Real World but not yet arriving at the deranged, maximum drama-per-minute Bravo universe of today. But the general viewing public is probably not interested in the evolution of reality TV, so it’s unlikely that this is what accounts for the show’s longevity. It seems that that is actually a result of the Lauren versus Kristin dynamic. Something about their conflict really stayed with people. As recently as 2018 (but also in 2016 and ’17), almost two decades after the show initially aired, the two were asked in in terviews about the current status of their feud. Cavallari, now a much savvier media player, was polite. “I haven’t seen or spo ken to [Lauren] in a while,” she said. “But if I saw her I would give her a big hug.”

SARA DAVIS

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A boy I’d known as “Gordo” had grown into a man. His pain became a shadow his exact size and shape: when he killed the one, he killed the other. Those storms were black, oblivious as tankers. I/ was done with college but still in love. We had kissed, visited Auschwitz, chucked our bedding in a dumpster, then college ended: Sara left for Florence on a Fulbright. I moved in with my parents. Flat on my back on the hot black roof I watched the high strands of lightning flash and shift like a pianist’s hands. CHAMBERS

"INFINITE JEST" GRADY

All June I swore I’d tattoo a passage from the book to my torso, then I didn’t. It was summer: huge storms rolled through.

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That/ passage I never tattooed had to do with death. When we were nineteen, as a plea for attention, Sara had swallowed so many pills they spilled from her stomach when the campus medic touched her tonsils. For Gordo, no such luck. Dead when they found him, his empty hangers clicked like cartoon bones.

But/ what I remember most that summer is skipping work: a six pack of beer, exhaustion, the stone wall I sat on overlooking the ocean. The light of that beach before the sun had set: golden, low, glowing. The grey seagulls circled like fans above the bodies on the sand.

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KPALANGBMANISENISOMOEYO AKOSA IBEKWE short

There’s this video on YouTube that I love. It’s a Genius interview with Rema, a Nigerian pop star, going over the lyrics to one of my favorite songs of 2019 — his hit, “Dumebi.” He’s young. His braids fall over his face and he tends to hide behind them a little, making him look even younger. It’s not shyness though, not at all. He has jewelry in his braids and he’s making sure we appreciate it. He begins by explaining the back ground of the song. He presents it like a miracle of a hit. Several stars had already rejected the beat, and Rema had very limited time in the studio. Thinking that he would be able to return and rerecord sections at some point, he strung together referential melodies over parts of the song that he didn’t have time to write lyrics

113 for. These were placeholders without real lyrical content. But when he showed his manager the work in progress, that was that. No going back, no rerecording. “It’s good like this,” his manager said. Nigeria moves very quickly. When one comes back after a long absence, the land scape feels different — physically, cul turally, even linguistically. I think it’s the weather. A tropical climate bustles. It’s dense with life and change. The heat and the moisture mean constant decay and re generation. Everything crumbling and be ing rebuilt upon itself like compost. Lush rot, as the writer Lincoln Michel calls it. It’s a forest at time-lapse speed; thou sands of years condensed. Massive old trees falling over and providing nutrients before rotting away and leaving outlines in the new trunks. The cities are like this too: The skylines are fluid, the companies seem young. The country can seem almost amnestic, but if you trace its new contours, you'll find the shape of the past. Everything in Nigeria competes with the speed of rot. By not returning to “Dumebi” as he originally planned, Rema was matching the pace of the country — tapping into something that more and more Afropop is touching today. The song’s haphazardness is part of its success. The other part seems to be confidence. There’s no time for perfection, so decisive ness makes up the difference. Confidence releases songs without dwelling on them. Confidence strings sounds together like words, and tosses their meanings aside like candy wrappers. How else would it be possible to make pop music for the most linguisti cally diverse place on the planet? Nigeria alone speaks more than 500 languages. But you don’t need to understand a single word when you’re listening to Afropop — you get enough of the meaning from the Iswagger.canonly approximate what Rema sings in the chorus of the song. My best tran scription is kpalangbmanisenisomoeyo. This sound or word or phrase is a mixture of Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin. “That part is a whole vibe,” Rema says, “I don’t know what it means.” He thinks about it again: “I don’t think it can be spelled, actually. Even in the lyric video, we just put vibes.”

AKOSA IBEKWE

The sounds are meant to be felt rather than understood — not thought about too hard, but enjoyed and danced to. It’s a language of its own. It’s just vibes.

Carmen Winant, Looking Forward To Being Attacked, 2018, Found images, concrete, foam, installation and detail views from In Practice: Another Echo, Sculpture Center. Photo by Luke O’Halloran Courtesy of the artist.

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I got some groceries, some peanut butter To last a couple of days.

This is not how I imagined my conversation with Kim Gordon. I first reached out in early January 2020, anticipating a slow response because Kim seemed busy: she had recently re leased a new record, started a tour, and was actively campaigning for Bernie Sanders. Then, the spread of COVID-19 rapidly accel erated and the possibility of doing an inter view dwindled even further. When South by Southwest was cancelled, I received a polite note that Gordon was unavailable.

— Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

Murphy’s law then swung into action and the situation only worsened. The virus shut everything down. Isolated in my home, I wrote to Gordon’s publicist, “I’m social dis ALEX SCORDELIS

KIM QUARANTINEDGORDON,

interview

ALEX SCORDELIS: How are you do ing right now?  KIM GORDON: I don’t know. [Pause.] I just did an online yoga class. Were there other people patched into the class, or was it just a one-on-one?

los angeles review of books 116 tancing and figure that, as a freelance writer, the best thing I can do is to have conversations with artists I admire and get them published. But I completely understand if Kim passes.” I received a quick response: Gordon would do the interview.Imeant this genuinely. At this mo ment of extreme anxiety — amid the latex gloves, N95 masks, and existential dread — Gordon, 67, seemed like an ideal artist to talk to. As a performer, she projects an unflappable air, a living embodiment of the punk ethos that nothing — not a stage diver, heck ler, or technical meltdown — will stop the show. Her 2019 album, No Home Record (Matador), feels like a voyeuristic look at modern life from afar. Even when I started listening to Sonic Youth, as a kid, she gave me the sense that nothing could faze her — an imperturbable cool, that also comes off as stalwartness.Thenight before we spoke, I pulled a few books from my shelves: Gordon’s 2015 mem oir Girl in a Band, Jimmy McDonough’s Neil Young biography Shakey (Sonic Youth is discussed), and a book called How to Write About Music, which I bought on an impulse, just because the title amused me. The joke was on me: when I flipped to the “How to Interview an Artist” chapter, the sample interview offered was with … gulp, Kim Gordon.Our conversation took place the follow ing day, by phone, over the course of an hour. Working from home, like most everyone, I went out to my garage and sat in a closet, balancing my laptop on my knees and my phone in my hands (I didn’t want to wake my sleeping 13-month-old). Gordon spoke to me from her home in Franklin Hills, the neighborhood sandwiched in between Silver Lake and Los Feliz. ¤

It was on Instagram. Actually, it was kind of annoying, because it’s already hard to see the screen, what the instructor is doing on your phone, and then people’s names kept popping up [as they logged in]. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of that. This is the new reality. Unfortunately. Yeah, this is the new reality. I want to talk about the past few weeks — you’ve ping-ponged from canvass ing for Bernie Sanders to performing at Zebulon here in Los Angeles, to per forming abroad in Europe, to now living in the era of social distancing. What has it been like for you? The Bernie campaign has been a thread through it all. Then it switched from the politics to the virus. It’s been strange. I actually got sick in Europe which, when I travel, I pretty much always get sick. I never had a fever or cough, but I still don’t feel totally right. I was just dizzy during the yoga class. I honestly don’t know why that was, maybe a stomach thing, or who knows. Maybe I have leukemia. I’m a hy pochondriac. But I’m feeling a lot better. But I don’t know. It’s just very strange. I can actually catch up on things. I guess, like a lot of people, I’m going to try and learn Spanish now. And I can always make art. I don’t know who’s going to buy it.

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KIM GORDON

What is it like creating art in this mo ment of crisis? Well, I haven’t even really started. I did something yesterday, some drawings that I had to do for some people. It’s hard to focus on anything right now. But in some ways, it’s like being on tour alone, or when you have to travel for work alone. Wheth er it’s to do an art exhibition or promo … you’re kind of alone. So in a weird way, my usual activity is not that different from so cial distancing. It’s just what it’s like when you’re on tour a lot. I watched an interview with you on You Tube, and the interviewer called your new album a “solo record,” and you said, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s a solo record, but I had a community of artists around me who came along.” In this moment, how is your community of artists cop ing? Just texting. FaceTime. Basically, every one has pretty much the same worries, and watching different films or TV shows or people suggesting, “Oh, let’s do like a … I don’t know, virtual film club or some thing.” I don’t know what that is. I guess just watching the same movie and then talking about it. I feel like people tend to consume art like comfort food in moments of tur moil. What’s been your experience con suming art during the past week? This friend of mine who is one of the two people who I’ve seen, one is my niece, who lives with me, and the other, he brings over records and art books. Like when I was sick. And it’s social distancing, but we still get to share culture together. He has a lot of great art books; we had an afternoon of just culture. ¤ Nimble and prolific, Gordon has punctuat ed her post–Sonic Youth career with surprise twists: art shows at Gagosian, acting turns on Girls and Portlandia, wild electric per formances and albums from her noise band Body/Head (with collaborator Bill Nace), a 2015 memoir called Girl in a Band, and in 2019 No Home Record, the first album re lease under her own name Despite this flurry of public activity, she remains somewhat mysterious and unknow able. In 2016, there was an internet account dedicated to posting images and stories about a run-in between Kim and a coyote in the park ing lot of the Silver Lake Whole Foods 365, an absurd “Paul is dead” myth for millennials. And yet, it seemed so unlikely that it might have actually been true. Gordon has managed to maintain an elusive air despite having her own active social media presence. In fact, just the day before, I had noticed an exchange she’d had with Pavement’s front man. ¤ I saw on Twitter that Stephen Malkmus ranked the songs on Led Zeppelin IV, and then you responded, “My fave!” I thought you were just being nice, but this morning I watched your Amoeba Records “What’s In My Bag?” video, and you bought Zeppelin IV and said, “It’s my favorite.” Yeah, it’s my favorite of their records. I like III, also. It dawned on me that you truly are a child of L.A. in the ’70s, and I was curious

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los angeles review of books 118 to hear your thoughts on how Zeppelin manifests itself in your work.

Gordon mentioned that she starts most days by watching The Hill’s Rising with Krystal and Saagar, a political news web show. On her social media platforms, Gordon has doc umented her support of Bernie Sanders, and has encouraged her followers to get out and vote for the senator in the Democratic pres idential primaries. She has phone banked, canvassed door-to-door, and even made a hu morous video, “Cooking with Kim,” in which she blends “ingredients” like Medicare For All, Green New Deal, and Women’s Rights. The outcome is a sheet cake with Bernie’s logo. Gordon also joined Artists4Bernie, an artistled campaign that supports Sanders. As of early April, nearly 4,000 artists have signed a letter of support for Artists4Bernie, includ ing Gordon’s tourmate from the ’90s Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and author Rachel Kushner, who has written about Gordon’s Bernie sup port for Artforum Gordon told me that she was first im pressed by Sanders when she lived in west ern Massachusetts and would listen to him speak every Friday on the now defunct Air America radio network. “These are not radical ideas that he has,” she said. “It’s kind of ridic ulous, in this day and age that people think they are.” ¤ You’ve been an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Sanders has

I did a show a long time ago, like in 2003 or 2002, about L.A. I had this weird interest in Jimmy Page’s interest in California. You know, like the song “Going to California.” It was a diaristic sort of show, and it had these texts I’d written about growing up in L.A. and being into Joni Mitchell. On one wall, I did this airbrush painting of Joni Mitchell from the Ladies of the Canyon album cov er. It was that iconic outline of her. And then on the other wall was Jimmy Page. I had this theory about how he’d been in fluenced by her, then I read an interview where he said that when he listened to “Song for a Seagull,” her guitar playing made him cry. At that show, I also had a video of driving around L.A., up into Laurel Canyon, that I put to the song “Tangerine.” Or was it maybe “When the Jetty Breaks”? I forget which one. [Note: she probably means “When the Levee Breaks.” But I didn’t correct her. Her use of “jetty” immediately made me think she’s someone who spends more time thinking about Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty than Page and Plant.] I wasn’t initially into Led Zeppelin. I thought they were too macho or some thing. So I came to them later. Actually, what got me was seeing a clip on YouTube, this early clip when they played on the BBC. They did “Dazed and Confused,” and seeing Page use his violin bow to play the guitar solo, that classic clip, I was like, “Oh my God, it’s amazing.” I always associate Zeppelin with the ’70s, but I think that clip is probably from 1969. Right, right. I feel like a lot of the ’70s was actually in the ’60s … Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett … just swathes of just exper imental noise music going on, with psy chedelic lights and people dancing. I’ve seen clips like that, too. It’s pretty amaz ing. Of course, everyone’s on drugs. ¤

KIM

GORDON

As someone who’s toured in countries where the arts are more valued than they are here, what about his platform ap peals to you? Pretty much everything. His idea that America needs extreme economic restruc turing, and then all these other things are interwoven. Medicare For All, Green New Deal. If you’re going to tell people, no more fracking or oil or whatever, then you have to have some other means of putting people to work, and training peo ple. The working class is already in crisis, and now there’s this [COVID-19] crisis. And it just really shows what’s wrong with the system, and wrong with really the Democratic Party, and the establishment. Basically, they don’t really care about workers, actually, in their policies. I saw a post of yours on Instagram where you mention that you’ve always support ed anti-establishment, radical politics. How does Sanders fit into the spectrum of what you’ve supported politically over the years? Aside from women’s rights and support ing that, I haven’t been overtly involved with radical politics. Only in my head — my ideas, or how I feel. I’ve always been anti-establishment. Growing up in the ’60s, that informed the way I see the world. I always saw homogenized culture as an evil form of capitalism. I’m not say ing that I think communism is great or anything else. Even in countries that are democratic-socialist democracies, their cultures can be just as homogenized. We all have H&Ms, Starbucks. I want to talk about the song “Hungry Baby,” off the new album. Listening to it, I thought back to when I was a young teenager and I read an article, proba bly in Rolling Stone, where you talked about touring with Neil Young, and you called out his road crew for sexist behav ior. As a kid, that was the first time I’d heard a woman call out sexism. Thirty years later, you’re still using your art and your platform, in songs like “Hungry Baby,” to call out sexual ha rassment, violence, and abuse. Where do you see the fight of women’s rights standing now, and where do you see it going from here? I guess maybe the way all the grassroots movements are, women’s rights move ments have always been having to carry the mantle themselves. And I think our best hope is … it’s imperative that we have to vote against Trump. Because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not going to last an other four years. I hate to say that, but you know … And Trump’s already loaded up the courts. I guess that really is what we have to do, is just help to support pro gressive people, get the Senate back, keep the House, and try to get Roe v. Wade and abortion rights into permanent law. I kind of grew up thinking in part that it was [al ready law]. To prepare for this interview, I pulled my copy of Girl in a Band off the shelf. When I flipped it open, the first word that I saw was Trump’s name. You men tion him in describing the “ugly sheet of Trump buildings” that line the West Side Highway, that they’re a monument to urban corruption. You wrote that be fore he was a presidential candidate.

119 positioned himself as an “arts president.”

Carmen Winant, Looking Forward To Being Attacked, 2018, Found images, concrete, foam, installation and detail views from In Practice: Another Echo, Sculpture Center. Photo by Luke O’Halloran Courtesy of the artist.

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In all your years in New York, did you ever cross paths with him or his family?

Actually, strangely, someone seated him next to me at a Marc Jacobs fashion show. I had just happened to have brought my good friend [the critic] Byron Coley, who couldn’t be more worlds apart from any one going to a fashion show. And he was sitting behind me, and I was talking to him. I saw this look on his face, squinting in kind of disbelief. And I turned around, and it was Donald Trump walking toward us. And he had full orange makeup on. Marc didn’t have a catwalk, so Trump said to me, “Aren’t they supposed to have one of those things?” And like, “They must be expensive to build.” He’s such a fucking idiot. I think his daughter must’ve been modeling or something. But there was a picture in Entertain ment Weekly of the front row [at the fash ion show]. There’re two people who have their jaws jutted out, and kind of leaning forward. One is Trump and one is Byron. Byron has just the most quizzical look on his face. ¤ I saw Sonic Youth play for the first time in the summer of 1995. I had just graduated from the eighth grade. Gordon and her bandmates headlined Lollapalooza that year. I caught the roving festival at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. The venue, with a capacity of 22,500, was sold out. Most of the bands and artists on the bill carried Sonic Youth’s stamp of approval: Hole, Pavement, the Jesus Lizard, Beck, the Dirty Three, and Mike Watt, to name a few. As a kid fresh out of a Catholic junior high school, it was an eye-opening day. An old guy offered me and a friend a joint (as good Catholic school kids, we politely declined). There were booths for Rock the Vote and Rock for Choice. I saw Mike Watt play bass with an egg whisk. To an unworldly kid, Lollapalooza in the ’90s felt like the epicenter of underground culture. But looking back, the annual festival was more like a roving head shop. The amphitheater stank like bad incense and cheap weed. A horde of kids dotted a sprawling lawn eating cheese fries, drinking jumbo Cokes, and watching Cypress Hill per form in the middle of the day. In my mind, the memory that stands out is Sonic Youth. They were shredding at an ear-splitting volume, with Gordon thrashing away at her bass. Unfortunately, I could only watch the first few songs of their set because by that point, my mom was already waiting to pick us up in the parking lot. She had ar rived at nine o’clock sharp. ¤ I was 14 when I first saw Sonic Youth play. At that time, it seemed like there was a goal within the band to bring un derground culture to suburban kids like me. Was that a conscious decision? Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a revolutionary act. When you’re talking to the converted all the time, it’s not … [pause] we just wanted more distribution. After a while, if you’re making something you like, you want as many people to hear it as possible. And it

KIM GORDON

Oh yeah, he’s always been gross. I remem ber, we did this photo shoot once, uptown by Trump Tower. There was this big giant key, golden key in the lobby. I remember posing next to it. It was funny.

¤ In the summer of 2011, I published a pro file of the band Wild Flag. After it ran, their publicist put me on the list for a show they were playing with Sonic Youth at the Williamsburg Waterfront. I went by myself because a plus-one wasn’t offered. When I ar rived at the gate, I discovered that I wasn’t actually on the list. I texted the publicist but didn’t hear back so I walked home. Thir ty minutes passed and I got an apology text and a guarantee that I was now on the list. I turned around and went back. I had missed Wild Flag’s set, but I would still get to see Sonic Youth. I’m sharing this story, so you get a sense of how moronic and banal life as a music journalist is. It’s like being a minor character in an extremely low-stakes Kafka story.And yet, that night, Sonic Youth un leashed a ferocious set. The band played with focus and fervor. Gordon stood center stage, plucking an electric-blue bass. There was little interaction between the band onstage. At one point, Thurston Moore took the mic and said, “Later tonight a giant rattlesnake is going to rise over Manhattan and intro duce us all to 2012. And it will spray LSD that will sprinkle down on us, and we’ll all turn into women.” I know he said this at 9:02 p.m. because I actually wrote it down. I also snapped a photo of the band that’s still on my phone. I took it because there was a full moon rising directly above the stage as they

What’s your attitude about looking back at your own body of work? I don’t know, it just really surprised me that people were so interested in X-Girl, because the clothes weren’t that great. Ac tually, I shouldn’t say that because Mike Mills did graphic design for us, and the T-shirts were great. It was hard to get the clothes to fit properly. But there wasn’t anything else going on at time in downtown streetwear for women. We didn’t really make money from it till we sold it. I probably made more money from that than I made in Sonic Youth, which is kind of sad. But when we started Son ic Youth, we weren’t thinking commercial success. We were just like, “Let’s make something cool.”

los angeles review of books 122 is more radical to try and do something different within the mainstream, rather than to operate in a ghetto. To that point, you were bringing peo ple from the underground to the main stream with you. Was that something that you thought about at the time? What do you mean, like having different bands open? Yeah. Lollapalooza 1995, as a 14-yearold, it felt like you were curating a show for a suburban kid like me. To be like, “You should know about this stuff.” Well, it’s just so much more fun to play with bands you like, that you feel like you have some community around, rather than that you’re just all lumped together because you’re played on alternative radio. That was when alternative radio, to us, was suddenly like, “Whoa, wait a minute. We’re not like this.” It was kind of a fake community, you know? I used to work at Paper Magazine, and in 2012, a couple of my coworkers interviewed you for an oral history about your ’90s clothing line, X-Girl. I remember them telling me, “Kim seemed baffled that we wanted to talk to her about this.”

The band played five more shows later that fall in South America, to fulfill an obligation, and then like Gordon and Moore’s marriage, Sonic Youth dissolved. I didn’t ask Gordon about her divorce. It’s a subject she covered in her memoir and in the interviews she gave at the time of that book’s publication. Her book has an all-time last line, right up there with “Isn’t it pret ty to think so?” In the memoir’s final scene, Gordon is returning home to L.A. after a trip to New York (where she was singing in place of Kurt Cobain with Nirvana at their 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction). She parks in a car in front of her Echo Park home and makes out with a guy. “I know, it sounds like I’m someone else entirely right now,” she writes, “and I guess I am.” ¤ How would you describe your childhood in L.A.? Boring. For elementary school, I went to the Lab School at UCLA. I learn by do ing, which is why, maybe, I like to work in different mediums. But it was just totally creative, and then I had to deal with pub lic school after that, which I really didn’t adjust to. I really hated suburban L.A., the banality of it. I felt like, when I read that book [Jean-Paul Sartre’s] Nausea, I was like, “Oh, yeah. This describes how I feel as a teenager.” High school was better than junior high. It was kind of real. I was starting to go to demonstrations, things like that. In the same way that Sonic Youth was a gateway for suburban kids to contempo rary art, were there certain works that were a gateway for you? Oh, yeah. My brother took me to see this Godard movie when I was like 14 or 15, Pierrot le Fou, which really, really blew my mind. I guess that was maybe the biggest thing. And just listening to records like the Velvet Underground and music from that time. Neil Young. And then just a lot of free jazz. I listened to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Archie Shepp. My dad had a big jazz collection, more mainstream, but that was more my early childhood, listen ing to stuff like that. Billie Holiday. Can you hold on a second? For sure. I have to text somebody that I’m supposed to meet for a walk. Can I call you back later? Of course. Should we set up another time to chat? Yeah. Like around one or something? That works for me. Thanks. Okay, great.  ¤ I stepped out of the closet in my garage and paced around. It was noon. Gordon would be calling back in an hour. My years in the trenches writing music journalism gave me

KIM GORDON played, and most of the songs they performed were off their 1985 sophomore album Bad Moon Rising. It was an unusual move for Sonic Youth, a band that otherwise spurned nostalgia.Thatended up being the last Sonic Youth show in North America. A couple months lat er, Gordon and Moore announced their sep aration. They had been married since 1984.

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los angeles review of books 124 a gut feeling: she’d give me 10 more minutes. No more than that. I looked over my ques tions. I wanted to ask her about a photo of her and Kurt Cobain that she’d posted on Instagram on Super Tuesday. But she might be annoyed by that. I wanted to ask her about the alleged (but definitely fictitious) coyote attack at Whole Foods. I also want ed to ask her a bunch of nonsense lightning round questions. The world is teetering on the edge of oblivion, why not ask something lighthearted about how she takes her coffee or what her favorite dance move is? I called a couple of friends and ran my questions by them. They said I had to ask the Kurt question and the lightning round questions. Gordon’s publicist texted me Kim’s number and said to call her back. ¤ Your new record came out in October of last year, and has a very modern production quality. It’s both experimental and would fit seamlessly on a playlist between Cardi B and Ariana Grande. I worked with Justin Raisen, who’s worked with Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira. I met him through his brother, who does a lot of hip-hop and stuff. I just figured what ever I brought to him, he would make into a song, like he would make it sound that way. We did the first song together, “Murdered Out.” That came about acci dentally. And was like, “Oh, okay, you get me.” It’s kind of trashy. And it had this playful element to it, which I liked. Ba sically that’s why I decided to work with him. I have one more Bernie-related ques tion. On Super Tuesday, you shared a photo of you and Kurt Cobain on Instagram in an attempt to get out the vote for Bernie Sanders. Cobain was a close friend of yours, but he’s also be come a symbol. And his image is pow erful. I was curious what inspired you to share his image in that context? [Pause] Honestly, I was just trying to get people’s attention. But I think he would have approved of Bernie. Finally, I have three or four lightning round questions for you. I saw a doctor from UCSF post that singing is very good for your immune system. Do you ever sing during the day, and if you do what do you sing? I don’t. But when I was trying to memo rize these lyrics for my tour, I would listen on my iPod to them and sing along. But that’s as close as I get to singing aloud. I have lyrics going through my head, but nothing comes out of my mouth.

In what museum in the world do you feel most at peace? Oh, I don’t know. At peace? It feels most like home. Or, I guess, that you enjoy going to the most.

The museums keep changing and ex panding their properties. I really like the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, but I haven’t been there in a while. I’ve seen amazing shows at the Beaubourg [Centre Pampidou].

What’s your morning coffee setup? Lately it’s been having a cup of rose Darjeeling tea with honey while I watch Rising.

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You’re a physical performer. What pop star do you enjoy watching dance the most? Tina Turner. She is one of the most amaz ing performers ever. And to go off that, do you have a favorite dance move of all time? No. Gotcha. Okay. I mean, waving my arms around, I guess. ¤ After we said goodbye, I hung up and walked out of the garage closet I’d been sitting in. It was a relief to talk for an hour about any thing that didn’t deal with death and disease. I felt somewhat foolish ending on those frivo lous questions, but this was all new to me. I’d never interviewed an artist at the start of a globalWithcrisis.Gordon, I never expected to get every answer I was seeking. She’s always let her art do the talking for her. There’s an ee rie Richard Prince painting on the cover of Sonic Youth’s 2004 album Sonic Nurse that features a nurse, whose face is partially ob scured by a surgical mask — the kind every one is now wearing at Trader Joe’s. Despite the mask, the nurse seems to be making direct eye contact with the viewer. There’s some thing of Kim Gordon in this image: even when she’s baring her soul — like she does on her new album, and in her memoir — Gordon remains obscure. Sometimes this ob scurity is literal — scanning old interviews on YouTube, Gordon occasionally answers questions from behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. Like the nurse on the album cover, Gordon never lets herself be fully seen, though she can be heard, entirely, loudly and without restraint.

everyone’s still so flippin ugly my romance will lead itself no one who wears flip flops as their primary footwear has ever given to the poor - anyway redistribution- of wealth has gone the way of democracy how many times have you carried on a relationship with a corpse we bow 3 times to the dead and this guy has the nerve to perform western psychology on my shanghai family well eff u cee kay kiss my broken finger blade I don’t feel like making excuses today did a soda company really collude with the state I’m on the five star of yesterday if it doesn’t fit inside a post what is it even you must have known you’d lose

IT'S SPRING JENNY ZHANG

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127 your privacy the day you wanted someone to compliment you what does it take for anyone to see anyone if history is true then you and I are either rare or doomed at your request I actually do try to remove myself from public life “would that make you happy?” but I know how this works you’ll want more of me to vanish more and more and more until all of us are gone leaving you and your family money and your buddies from harvard and yale and yr suddenlypolycubemyfavorite line grows sinister “we shall have everything we want and no more dying” the always-sorry tremble like the smallest creatures waiting for the boot waiting to die of natural causes so you can finally have your paradise

Rabz Lansiquot, London 2011 Riots Phone 1 Courtesy of the artist.

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A VERY

In February, fresh off her Grammys sweep, singer Billie Eilish appeared in a Vogue cover feature in which she called rappers liars. Vogue’s Rob Haskell described Eilish as a “grounded girl with a happy family,” a characterization she affirmed, only to ex plain that, in her music, she likes “devel oping characters,” including monsters and murderers. Her songwriting, Haskell not ed, is “never strictly autobiographical,” and Eilish defended her use of alter egos: “Just because the story isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t be important.” Lying, though, that’s something else. And rappers, she said, with all their “posturing,” tend to be guilty of it, she said. Indicting America’s black est and most popular music genre, Eilish BRIEF HISTORY OF AUTHENTICITY IN HIP HOP

FELICIA ANGEJA VIATOR short

los angeles review of books 130 noted, “There’s a difference between lying in a song and writing a story.” In the arts, it is generally acceptable — preferable, even — to play with the truth. Those who create rightly claim the license to employ fantasy, metaphor, mythology, abstraction, sentimentality, exaggeration, and fiction at will, even when represent ing a lived reality, whether one’s own or someone else’s. Artists use elements of the unreal to purposefully contradict, amplify, or otherwise complicate what we might clumsily define as “real.” Black artists are certainly no exception. One only needs to behold, say, Basquiat’s 1984 Self-Portrait, read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, gaze up at Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War bronze monument, or watch John Singleton’s film Boyz N the Hood to understand the complicated nature of “the truth” within art created to reflect real life. Rap music, however, has been subject to a different set of standards ever since hip-hop swept the pop music landscape in the late 1980s. For decades now, the music has been relentlessly and uniquely fact-checked. Rap critics and fans alike have made a habit of rubber-stamping only those artists whose lyrical tales and public personas are verifiable. Fakes get no love. Even rap artists themselves have passed judgment. Philly rapper Schoolly D, who wrote rhymes about his IRL exploits with the Park Side Killers gang, once griped about Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys: “None of them are for real. They’re just spoiled little rich kids that know how to act, basically.” A decade lat er, in another public battle for recognition, rapper Nas blasted rival Jay-Z on the track “Ether”, accusing him of masquerading as an ex-con and cocaine dealer: “No jail bars, Jigga, no pies, no case / Just Hawaiian shirts, hangin’ with little Chase.” In “Ether,” authenticity was currency and Jay-Z was deadOnebroke.could make the case that hip-hop artists, in branding themselves as “reality rappers”, “ghetto reporters,” or, simply, “real,” have delineated the very standards by which they have been assessed. In his interview with NWA, following the suc cess of their controversial debut album Straight Outta Compton, Rolling Stone’s Alan Light explained the group’s defense against criticism: “They’re just reporting what they see on the streets around them and setting it to Dre and Yella’s funky, bass-powered beats.” Blame might be leveled at these early L.A. rappers, who were particularly adamant that because they told it “like it is,” they could claim as much cultural authority as the most trusted CNN correspondents. To justify her critique, in other words, Billie Eilish could reasonably cite NWA, the godfa thers of reality rap. The thing is, the notion of authentic ity in hip-hop has always been, and still is, performative. It is a rhetorical device — one of many — baked directly into the artistic practice of rap. Since the late 1980s, it has been used as a creative tool, leveraging the public’s rubbernecking fas cination with gang life. As John Leland observed in The New York Times in 1989, “the gang member has become one of the prevailing images of the young black male on television and in the movies.” Rap art ists of that era not only tapped into that image but exploited it, using it for mu sic industry attention. The “strength of street knowledge,” as NWA called it, was an assertion of a point of view as much as it was a sophisticated marketing trick meant to captivate the public. This was a way to insist on the value of young black perspectives on issues like gang violence,

131 drug culture, and police abuse, and a way of making the world pay attention. Taking cues from filmmakers, tabloid television, and cable news, rap artists figured out how to spin “reality” to make themselves commercially viable. Rappers have also long understood the cultural value of eliciting disapprov al from white listeners and other outsid ers. Inversely, this has meant ensuring precious validation from the people for whom the music was intended, especially black peers who understood the referenc es, the humor, the slang, and the conceits in theEilish’smusic.complaint about rappers lying betrayed, among other things, the young white singer’s patent ignorance about hip-hop songwriting and about complex representations of blackness. She didn’t get it. But her response — the uneasiness, the miscalculation, the brush-off — only reinforces what is so unique about rap as a form of black art: although rappers have indeed staked a claim to “truth,” that “truth” has always been a slippery and subversive thing. Billie Eilish isn’t supposed to get it. And that’s the point. FELICIA ANGEJA VIATOR

“Pretend it’s 1995.” Isn’t it Romantic, 2019 The people telling the truth are also the ones telling the jokes. When I finally meet L in person, a gender studies scholar and online friend, at a noisy East Village bar in August 2018 during her last week in New York, she resumes our ongoing conversa tion about streaming television. The one we’ve been having via email and DM for over a year. “What have you been watch ing the past few months?” L asks. “Felicity, the late ’90s WB drama.” I tell her. “And stand-up comedy.” L laughs and nods her head. “That’s perfect,” she says. “Of course you are. Comedy has the answers.” By an swers, I think she means the future. L tells me Lauren Berlant is now writing about comedy, too. This is supposed to be a good sign, like I’m on to something. When I get excerpts from time tells MASHA TUPITSYN

TIME MACHINE

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Space is the time you need to get to someone else.” for a moment the imminent future Noel represents collapses. “Though technical ly still in the twentieth century, the year 2000 was a good enough marker,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in Present Shock, “to stand in for millennial transformation.”

133 home, I Google “Berlant” to see if I can find the essay. It comes up immediately and is called “Comedy Has Issues,” a fun ny title. Personified, comedy is analysand — a neurotic transgressor with problems. Neurotics, Freud said, are the reason we know anything about the world. Come dians are, Beforetoo.television went online, days of the week mattered. Felicity premiered on the WB channel on September 29, 1998, and ran for four seasons. First on Tuesdays, then on Sundays. The hourlong college drama, which followed Felicity, and her two love interests Ben and Noel, spent two years in the 20th cen tury and two years in the 21st. It marks an end and a beginning. The past and the future. Noel, a self-proclaimed “comput er geek” and graphic designer, is the only character on the show who regularly uses the internet and has a personal website — www.noelcrane.com. In 1998, Noel is in the present, a present beholden to the imminent future, the one that will can cel the past: the new millennium. All the other characters in the series lag behind technologically, forfeiting the digital: cell phones — even landlines — preferring to show up unannounced at each other’s dimly lit, analog houses. Noel talks about Apple computers as early as the first sea son. But his love is expert. Everyone else uses their laptops strictly as word proces sors to write term papers. By the fourth season, the characters begin to mention being “online,” but only for research. At the end of season three, during the last episode, post-graduate Noel announces to Felicity that “the internet is dead.” Jobless, the dot.com industry has just crashed, and

MASHA TUPITSYN

The future quickly becomes an anachro nism that might not ever come to end the present.Atthe bar, L told me that my now deserted Tumblr has always had an “an tique” quality. I press her about what be ing antique means even though I have my suspicions.Iknow it has to do with time. With being out of order, out of date. With me watching Felicity, a 20-year-old show that was cancelled 16 years ago, on my com puter at night. Ten months ago, I went off social media, leaving my five-year-old blog frozen in time. This isn’t the first time I — or my romantic views — have been called antique. In 2018, Felicity, a deeply romantic ’90s show, also looks and feels antique. I can see this now, in retrospect. But I also felt it in 1998, when the show aired every Sunday. Felicity makes us forget about the future. Now and then. What it values is emotional, and stands still. The look on people’s faces, the sound of people’s voices. What it depicts takes time: the slowness of touch, the duration of pain, the long stretch of a look, “the time it takes to get someone else,” as Godard put it to Dick Cavett1. The importance of introspection as a way to come back to something, not as a way to forget someone. What Ben re fers to as a “time machine” when he tries to think of a way to get back to the time before he sabotaged his relationship with

1 The Dick Cavett Show, 1980. In the interview, Godard discusses his 1980 film Slow Motion using the metaphor of the train and the train station in relation to cinema, waiting, and love. Godard: “I use an image to go from one station to another one. You need a train. I think movies are the train, not the station. I feel myself as being more of a train than a station, and that’s an explanation for why I am less anguished. Because I’m not waiting for the train anymore.

In an interview, Felicity editor Stan Salfas discusses the series’s focus on slow ness: “[The scenes] play very long because our sense is that is how you connect with someone. And have a sense of a real and deeper layer of emotion.” Time is affective. L doesn’t completely answer my ques tion. I flashback to a letter she wrote in 2018, in which she noted: “This kind of resonance is also what I meant when I said your Tumblr posts feel synchronous.”

2 “In speed there is a forgotten tenderness.” John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet, Pantheon Books, 2005. I can barely hear her over the loud music at the bar, a votive candle is glowing on our table. The young finance crowd that now inhabits the East Village is cele brating for no reason mid-week. It’s only eight o’clock but people are acting like it’s midnight. Wednesday becomes Saturday. Everyone has their phone in their hand while they dance and talk. All the inter esting and varied human gestures have been reduced to one single affect: looking at a smartphone. L’s words fuse with song lyrics. I move closer so I can hear better. No place is meant for talking. By antique, L says she means some thing about slowness and proximity. “Your writing voice on your blog always sounds like it’s from another time. A voice that isn’t here but somewhere else. And yet, it always feels close, present.” I squirm, crack a joke. I don’t know if she thinks this is a good thing. I will ask her later over text to double check. An antique is something old, discontinued. From another time. But also something that lasts, survives. One etymological derivative, “to see,” is pro phetic. A vantage point most don’t have. I think of the scene in Dead Poets Society when John Keating, a high school English teacher, asks his male students to take turns standing on his desk in order to see the world differently. I think of Felicity, my time machine. Watching it then, watching it now. Up late summer nights in 2018 searching for random fragments of the series on YouTube. Not sleeping be cause the internet makes it impossible to know when to sleep, when to stop search ing. Not sleeping because of the heat. Not sleeping because I can’t let go of the past or because mourning it is the only way I can face the future, which is always now, and which therefore never comes. August. Burning up in bed. The hum of the fan on

los angeles review of books 134 Felicity. “The one moment, the turning point, where I blew it.” The time machine Godard invents to get to someone else is a train. The time machine Ben invents is cinema: a film canister that contains Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 Gold Rush, which he finds a celluloid copy of and hands to Felicity in person. A material object but also a symbolic one. Ben has roamed the city all night and tracked down a print of the film they were meant to watch to gether the summer before at Bryant Park. They will go back in time, he tells Felicity, by watching the movie they never got to watch. To have the love they never got to have. To feel the things he refused to feel. “That’s the moment I’d take over, if I could,” says Ben, creating an alternate reel. Through camera work and editing, Felicity, steeped in the heartache of time travel, continually reverses time, retriev ing and revisiting what has been lost.2 “At this point many turned back discouraged, whilst others went bravely on,” Gold Rush tells us, charting an emotional journey that purports to be monetary. Through out the series, Ben and Felicity take turns bending time in order to come back for one another, hovering in the analog ’90s, in the teleportation of silent cinema, in the speed of ethics, while time outside the time machine anticipates the future.

135 top of the rattle of the AC. Grainy foot age, ecru walls inside my laptop screen. Ben’s dark apartment. Felicity’s dark dorm room. The fake NYU campus, a California studio lot posing as New York. Stock footage of an exterior shot of SoHo’s iconic Dean & DeLuca (closed down in 2019) used over and over. In the show, Ben and Felicity go back and forth to each other’s apartments at all hours just to tell each other something. She is in Manhattan, he is somewhere in Brooklyn. But distance is never an issue. Emotionally or physically. The city in the show isn’t real, but the feelings are. The se ries understands that anything real must be done face to face. Which is time con suming. And risky. Ben and Felicity are the same color: two headlights beaming at one another — what Felicity refers to in one episode as “this force between us.”

Almost spiritual. Like the famous kissing scene in Pretty in Pink that the cinema tographer Tak Fujimoto lit entirely with car headlights. Is this an accident or what people look like when they are designed for each other? Lit for each other. I’m ex hausted but want to take the time to look at these faces again, so close together in these slow-motion scenes. The high-stake looks, the choked-up voices. Words that take thought and labor. That take years to feel.When

Ben and Felicity kiss, they al ways touch each other’s faces, making the kisses longer and slower. Holding each other in place, holding each other still. YouTube uploads, bootleg copies, low res olution, distorted, often inaudible sound. Headphones, no headphones. One day a clip is there, the next day it’s not. Next clip. Autoplay. I reroute. Rephrase the search. Until, like an anagram, I find what I am looking for, what I have suspected 3 Rushkoff cites both McDonald and Gray in his chapter “Digiphrenia.”allalong, using the right combination of words. Mashups, fan videos, user com ments — hate and love — aggregating like wildfire, then halting at some point in time for no discernable reason. Why does it stop? Time stamps. Things expir ing. The past coded, continuously renewed and uploaded into the constant-present. If this were weather, something we could feel, or see outside, it would be a tempest. Do I have the language for this? Is there a language for this? “I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memo ry that come to me now, let you pick the takes,” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, yearning for the com puter to delete the emotional hard drive of grief.Everyone tells me that time doesn’t change what the world is like — only everything else? — to think so is nostal gic, inaccurate. So, what is changing it? What has changed it? What changes the world? While visiting Lisbon on holiday in Here Is Where We Meet, John Berger realizes that the Portuguese saudade does not mean nostalgia, but rather “the feel ing of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly.” It is an ger at a too-casual dismissal of the past. For Berger, loss is not the same thing as change and change not the same thing as progress. In Present Shock, Rushkoff3 notes that “change is changing, too.” “No longer flowing top down, but flowing in every direction at all times,” Mark McDonald of IT research and advisory company Gartner, explains. “Change is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be near ly continuous,” states Dave Gray of the

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Courtesy The Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.

1989, 7 Xerographic prints,

Lutz Bacher, "Jackie & Me", each 58 x 46 cm, Part

2 of 7.

5 Some of the best examples of science fiction as mourning are: Vertigo, La Jetée, Solaris, Starman, The Terminator, and Star Wars. The final season of Felicity was originally scheduled for 17 episodes, with Felicity graduating from college. But when another WB show got canceled,  Felicity was “gifted” a five-episode back order. Matt Reeves and Abrams, who was by then making Alias, decided to use the extra five hours to send Felicity back in time, giving her a do-over. The episodes “Time Will Tell,” “The Power of the Ex,” “Spin the Bottle,” “Felicity Interrupted,” and “Back to the Future” are all construct ed around magic spells, time travel, and the alternate outcome of Felicity choos ing Noel over Ben. “Love can be scary and can make you want to turn back the clock,” writes Emma Fraser. “No matter the timeline, Felicity always ends up with Ben — even when she picks Noel.”4 Science fiction is both a genre of failed mourning and magical think ing. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud writes that time plays a key role in differentiating between the two states. Mourning, like science fiction, requires a “lapse of time.” The “future” is always really the past. In melancholia, the ego is wounded. In science fiction, time is wounded. In Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, the momentum and force of grief produces an alternate reality in which the impossible is thought to be possible. Didion calls this magical thinking, which began when her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly from cardiac arrest in their New York home. In the memoir, it is this thought, this wish, that turns time. That turns mourning into magic. Grief is a time machine. As a genre of grief, science fiction re volves around the desired return of a lost object.5 “Bringing [John] back had been through those months my hidden focus, a

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137 social media consultancy Dachis Group. In the no-time of the computer, what does the saying “timing is everything” mean? There is no longer a clock at the center of the universe, no clock at the center of our lives.“The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific,” Rushkoff writes. I am not just watching Felicity again. I am remembering time — a specific time — because it is over. The world of the dig ital mutating, bleeding into everything. The hours, days of the week, out of order. The Wednesday at the bar with L turned into a Saturday. Why does it matter? It matters. No more diegesis. No more mys tery. No more behind the scenes. No more that’s fiction and this is real. No more that is in front of the camera and this is behind the camera. No more that was then this is now. No more hands on a clock. No more face to face. No more things you can’t see but know are there. No more beginning, middle, and end. No more remembering. No more counting the days. The years. The place. Time no longer being some thing you ever have to wait for or miss. Save. Get back. Show up and make a plea for. The way Ben shows up time and time again for Felicity. Time and time again for himself. The Year of Magical Thinking In season two of Felicity, creator J. J. Abrams filmed a stand-alone Twilight Zone episode. After Felicity, Abrams went on to explore the science fiction genre explicitly in television shows like Lost, a more extended permutation on time trav el and fate, and serial movies like Star Trek 4 Emma Fraser, “When Dawson’s Creek and Felicity Turned Genre,” SYFY WIRE, May 16, 2018.

Peggy Sue Got Married, Flatliners, Waking the Dead, A.I., Donnie Darko, Minority Report, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2046, Inception, Moon, Looper, the end of Before Midnight, which even features a speech about a time machine in the final scene, Gravity, and Annihilation. As Claire Denis put it in a Film Comment talk about her own sci-fi venture, High Life, “In space, time is so important.” 6 Fittingly, Vertigo is based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead). past, which is Vertigo, a movie in which a female double — a time portal — opens up an alternate world for Scottie, a detective. Some of the locations in Vertigo are plac es Didion frequented with Dunne when they were first married. When Dunne was still alive. The Mission San Juan Bautista, featured in Vertigo, is where Didion and Dunne got married. “We were married at San Juan Bautista. On a January after noon when the blossoms were showing in the orchards off 101. When there were still orchards off 101.” Ernie’s, a restaurant that Didion says no longer exists, is where “James Stewart first sees Kim Novak,” who plays Madeleine and Judy. Ernie’s is “our place,” Judy tells Scottie. Ernie’s is also her and Dunne’s place, Didion tells us. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Dunne takes the “Midnight Flyer” from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1968 to have dinner with Didion, who is working on assignment. Space and time collapse. Vertigo also becomes a way for Didion to return to the early days of her present-day marriage. The film is a doorway in time. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes that “[a] book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of de tective novel, in part a kind of science fic tion.” Vertigo is both. But why does Didion lay her sto ry (the story of her marriage to Dunne; a love story) beside the story of Vertigo (the story of death, madness, and grief)? Is it because death splits the past in two? Science fiction, a form of magical think ing, permits us to travel to different times as though time were a place. Mourning, Freud writes, involves the long and pain

los angeles review of books 138 magic trick,” writes Didion. In the docu mentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, Tony Dunne, John Dunne’s neph ew, recalls that when Didion told him she planned to keep Dunne’s clothes in case he came back from the dead, “it did not seem far-fetched. It seemed plausible.” By way of sorrow, science fiction makes the technological improbability of time travel plausible. Grief is a vehicle that takes us elsewhere.In2005, Didion will write two mem oirs about death. In them, she will turn back the clock in an effort to bring back the dead.6 “‘In another world,’ writes Didion, was the phrase that would not leave my mind […] The way you got sideswiped was by going back.” In Mag ical Thinking, Didion retroactively forms a link between her marriage to Dunne and the figments and trickeries in the lovesick plot of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film Chris Marker called science fiction. In her memoir, Didion remembers travers ing time zones in 1968. She remembers flying with PSA — the Pacific Southwest intrastate commuter airline in operation between 1949 and 1988 — which Dunne and Didion took frequently in order to see each other. In the future, when Dunne dies, Didion asks herself: “I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have made a different ending on Pacific time).”

Is Vertigo an example of magical thinking?InThe Year of Magical Thinking, Vertigo doubles as Didion’s lost marriage. Didion goes looking for Dunne in the

139 ful work of detaching from the loved one we have lost. “[I]ts function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead.” Science fiction shows us where we go — where we travel to — when we can’t let go. We call this place the future. Both Vertigo and Magical Thinking involve time travel and grief. And while Didion doesn’t note this, both narratives span a Fromyear.the Latin word vertere, vertigo means “to turn, bend.” But what is being turned? Time? And what is turning it? Grief?An anagram of vertere is verrete, the second-person plural of future tense of venire. What “you make or cause to come.”

Comedy Has Issues In Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Dave Chappelle tells Jerry Seinfeld: “Everybody thinks the guy on the stage is the fake. But really, it’s the guy off the stage that’s fake. The guy on the stage, that’s the real guy. The guy off the stage is the one who lies to people, who doesn’t say what he actu ally thinks.” After Chappelle famously refused $50 million to do a third season of his sketch comedy show, Chappelle’s Show, in 2005, Chappelle became one of my favorite funny truth tellers. After he refused the money, he appeared forlorn on talk shows like Oprah; chain smoking on Inside the Actors Studio. Racism, the politi cal conditions of fame, the heartbreak and unsustainability of success returned com edy to its tragic roots. It made comedy something mournful. In Chappelle’s case, it made being funny synonymous with being exploited. To go on being funny about certain things — about blackness — Chappelle realized, was dangerous. To laugh, said Chappelle, to go on laughing

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You cause it to turn, to bend. You are beingMadeleineturned. is the idealized past, Judy the melancholic future. By moving be tween the two, both Joan and Scottie get “sideswiped” into “another world.” By looking for her marriage in the movie Vertigo, a detective story, Didion is telling us — perhaps unknowingly — something about its enduring mystery.7 About its melancholic past. About its unforeseeable future. About what time looks like when you reconstruct it through the lens of grief. Through the lens of a movie. Through a restaurant that no longer exists. The two deaths that come in 2003 and 2005 (her husband, then her daughter) will throw Didion into a parallel universe of grief, one in which it is possible for the dead to come back for their clothes. In Vertigo, Scottie, real name John, is also obsessed with clothes. With dressing Judy as the dead Madeleine. “And then I’ll buy you those clothes” Scottie tells Judy. He means the clothes that Madeleine wore. 7 In the 2018 Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, one character describes a ghost as a wish. “And then you started in on the clothes,” Judy tells Scottie. She means the clothes that Madeleine wore. Is Vertigo a story of failed mourning? “It is clearly not sane to go on, beyond a certain point, testing the rules to see if they are made of anything (magic, con sent, words, divinity, and so on),” writes Adam Phillips in Going Sane. Freud ini tially gave us two years to successfully mourn. Movies give us two hours. To do what? To go where? Science fiction allows us “to go on, beyond a certain point” while “sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known. Living within our means.”

Finally Breaks His Silence About Abruptly Leaving Chappelle’s Show,” Vanity Fair, Joanna Robin son, June 11, 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/06/dave-chappelle-why-he-left-chappelle-show.

los angeles review of books 140 the way he had been laughing and making others laugh, was too costly. Chappelle re treated. First to South Africa, then to his farm in PromotingOhio. his comedy special at Madison Square Garden in 2014, Chappelle appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. On the 15-minute segment, an eternity on TV, Letterman repeatedly probed Chappelle about where he had been, about why he had disap peared. “We haven’t seen you in 10 years. You took a hike.” The question was a joke; the joke was the question. The joke was that both Letterman and the audience al ready knew the answer. Letterman, being “funny,” asked Chappelle to answer the question anyway. But also to discourage a too-serious answer. Whatever answer Chappelle was going to give would have to be humorous. That was his job as a co median. That was his reason for being on the show. That was the price he had to pay for being given a second chance to be fun ny onstage. Chappelle had already failed to make light of tragedy when he left his show on Comedy Central, when he de clined $50 million. Chappelle blamed time for his absence. “I’m just seven years late to work,” he joked. Everyone in the audience exploded into laughter.8 “Boy, are you going to be in trouble when you go back,” Letterman warned, referring to a place that is really the present time. In Vanity Fair, Joanna Robinson describes the interaction: “David Letterman tried 8 In his novel Women in a River Landscape, Heinrich Böll refers to a laughter that sounded like “the swish of the 9guillotine.”“DaveChappelle

The comedian is allowed to have is sues onstage — in their act.10 To have is sues offstage, in one’s life — to have them

10 According to the creators and cast of Seinfeld, Larry David inverted the onstage paradigm of comedy. A failed stand-up in the 1980s, the famous curmudgeon reportedly often lost his temper onstage, turning against his un receptive audience when they didn’t find him funny. The attacks were apparently not part of the act. Jerry Seinfeld claims that David lost his temper onstage but never with friends. Given the comedy rules that Chappelle outlines for Seinfeld on Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, it is unclear why David’s stand-up routine was not successful. Although he was telling the “truth,” and doing so through the filter of comedy, David’s beefs proved to be too much for his audience, who didn’t want to hear his “truth” even onstage. In David’s case, additional filtration was required. In order for his comedy to work, he needed the mild comedic persona of Seinfeld to mitigate and mediate the comedy to get Chappelle to open up about it, and though Chappelle deflected at first — ‘I’m just seven years late to work’ — he went on to address the question in a slightly more serious way. Slightly.”9

After I told L I was deactivating all my social media accounts in November 2017, she wrote: “It’s almost like to preserve what is good in oneself one must possess a reti cence toward visibility that in practice looks like oscillation between exposure and L’swithdrawal.”emailreminded me of Chappelle and Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Comedy Has Issues.” The one L had told me to read when we met in August. It made me think about my own retreats. My own re sistance to exposure, my own use of hu mor to transgress and deflect, the way I had deactivated my social media accounts in an effort to withdraw. On Letterman, Chappelle’s famous seven-year oscillation between exposure and withdrawal be comes the butt of the joke precisely be cause it wasn’t a joke. It was serious. Yet the time to make light of it — to turn it into comedy — had come. “You could see this joke as an escape from the feelings that normally accompany bereavement, a sort of truancy,” John Carey writes in his introduction to Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.

x

Courtesy The Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.

7 Xerographic prints,

cm, Part 7 of 7.

Lutz Bacher, "Jackie & Me", 1989, each 58 46

For seven years, he couldn’t convert sor row into a joke. This return from truan cy — a comeback — is supposed to be a good thing. But is it a good thing?

11 George Carlin even called his 2001 stand-up special “Grievances and Complaints,” employing the title as both form and material.

los angeles review of books 142 with comedy — as Chappelle did, is a problem. To have issues onstage, where one tells the truth, Chappelle says, as op posed to offstage, where one is supposed to lie, is part of the criteria of being funny. Comedy is a window of time allotted for airing out grievances. It is also the struc ture for airing out grievances.11

[LaughsEveryone.]” hates a complainer. To com plain in a song is different from complain ing in real life. The song makes complaint acceptable. Funny. True. Through song, complaining ceases to be complaining. Is this what Chappelle means when he blames time for his retreat from comedy? Time turning turmoil into song. Into joke. Time itself becoming a joke. It took him seven years to “escape from the feelings that normally accompany bereavement.” of his comedy. Along with a third filter, the character of George Costanza, who played David’s alter ego on Seinfeld, and the final personification of television. David says that people often ask him why he didn’t play George himself. “Didn’t you want to play George?” “They never would have approved of me as an actor,” explains David.

While 19th-century scholarship notes the double-phenomenon12 as a technique in comedy, Shandling’s anecdote reveals an additional layer to Chappelle’s theory of the onstage/offstage scheme. Here we see that the demarcation lies not sim ply with where a person tells the truth and where a person lies. It is where one is allowed to tell the truth. Where one is compelled to tell it. How the lie is socially instated; how the truth is theatrically ori ented. “Tellingly, stage presence,” writes Jon Foley Sherman in A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention, is something the actor has, not the character. Actors may be born with it, they may study to acquire more of it, but actors are the ones who have it and “it” is “of” the actors. Which is also to say that in some way it relates to them as persons; ‘their’ stage presence is a function of their specific being placed in front of other beings. For Foley, this placement is phe nomenological, not simply situational or locational. However, placement onstage trumps presence, as we are always in front of other beings but not always onstage, and not always telling the truth.

12 “It is noteworthy that some typical motifs of the double-phenomenon,” writes Otto Rank in The Double: A Psycho analytic Study, “seem here to be raised from their unconscious tragedy into the cognitive sphere of humor.” Mistaken identity is the “immortal subject of comedy.”

Comedy legitimizes complaint. The

On Letterman, Chappelle admits to not being able to find a way to be funny onstage for seven years. Is this part of what he means when he tells Seinfeld that the guy offstage is the liar? Was he lying to Letterman by sidestepping his sorrow, re ducing it to a half-hearted joke? In an act, would this bereavement take a more re bellious form? Shortly before he died, the comedian Garry Shandling also appeared on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. At an L.A. diner, Shandling tells Seinfeld, “When I say [comedy] is a fucking mine field, they go, ‘Shandling’s complaining.’ When I listen to the blues, it’s the exact same words I say. [Both laugh.] But people go, ‘This is fantastic.’ But when I say, ‘My baby left me,’ they go, ‘Stop complaining.’

143 song legitimizes heartbreak. The stage legitimizes presence. It magnifies “a unique truth about the performer,” writes Sherman. It is the stage which the actor and comedian use, and which allows us to see — to tolerate seeing — what being truthful might sound like. But the mean ing of stage presence can be inverted: no longer about what one — the actor — (uniquely) has, it is where one is allowed to have what one has. To be what one is. To say what one thinks. Stage presence is dangerous precisely because it is about the actor, not the character, as Foley writes. When “the stage is yours” it becomes both the space of ethics and the failure of ethics.Truth and complaint can exist in song, in comedy, in acting. The rest of the time we are expected to lie. The rest of the time we pretend we don’t know what the truth is. On Letterman in 2014, Chappelle, like Shandling, is trapped in a gray zone: he cannot lie but he also can not tell the entire truth. He cannot be en tirely funny and he cannot be entirely sad. He turns a serious, unprecedented refusal into a joke. He is onstage, but he is also offstage. He is playing a comedian but he is also playing himself. He is funny, but he is not doing a standup act. He is black. The man joshing him for being “late” is white. He blames time. “The way you got sideswiped was by going back,” Joan Didion writes more than once in The Year of Magical Thinking. When Chappelle states that he is seven years late to work (for whom?); that it took him seven years to get back, making him “late,” he is tell ing us something about what it means to lose time. To receive a blow; to not know how to use the joke to escape or transport

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Stranger Things actor David Harbour calls actors the “elected officials.”bereavement. To disappear, to come back, to time travel. But is the return worth it? Has it been worth it in Chappelle’s case? “If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them?” Didion asks. Is the place Chappelle has come back to better than the place he has come from? To be onstage, where, as Chappelle tells us, one tells the truth, is a question of eth ics, not strictly a province of fiction. It is, as Adam Phillips puts it, where “some thing false is true.” The point, Chappelle tells Seinfeld, is about the time and place of fiction. The point is where we go for truth. And to whom. The actor is the per son we celebrate for having “it” (“it,” in this case, is also all the things an actor has that we don’t) in the same way that the onstage comedian is the person we are willing to go to for the truth. Actors use acting to pay attention the way comedi ans use comedy to tell the truth. Is this why there is more comedy than ever? Is this why there are more and more award shows for the actor?13

13 In an interview, the writer Gary Indiana states: “What always catches my attention is who gets to be somebody and who doesn’t. [Awards] are so punitive to everybody else. You can be excellent without getting an award for it.”

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Sara Davis is from Palo Alto, California. Her debut novel, The Scapegoat, is forthcoming from FSG in 2021. Alex Dimitrov is the author of Love and Other Poems, which will be published in February of 2021, Together and by Ourselves, and Begging for It. With Dorothea Lasky he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. He lives in New York. Megan Fernandes is the author of  Good Boys, published by Tin House Books in February 2020. Her work has been published in  The New Yorker,  Ploughshares, the  Chicago Review, among others. She lives in New York City.  Charlie Harding & Nate Sloan are the co-hosts of the Vox.com podcast Switched on Pop and longtime musical collaborators. Nate is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Southern California. Charlie is Executive Producer of the show and a multi-instrumentalist and song writer. Their book,  Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works And Why It Matters, was published by Oxford in December 2019. Akosa Ibekwe is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry is  Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020). His poetry and criticism have appeared in  Harper’s, The Guardian (UK),  The New York Times,  Poetry, and CONTRIBUTORS

Elise Anderson is a rights advocate, scholar, trans lator, and performer currently based in Washington, DC, where she works in human rights documen tation and capacity-building as Senior Program Officer for Research and Advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. She earned dual PhD de grees in Ethnomusicology and Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University in 2019. Sumita Chakaborty is a poet, essayist, and schol ar whose debut collection of poetry,  Arrow, will be released this September from Alice James Books in the US and Carcanet Press in the UK. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2017 and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2018; her poems have recently ap peared or are forthcoming in  POETRY, American Poetry Review,  The Best American Poetry 2019,  Memorious, Blackbird, and elsewhere.  Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018) selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and fiction can be found in The Paris Review, American Poetry Re view, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Joyland, and elsewhere. Grady was a 2015–2017 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and he lives in Philadelphia. More of his writing can be found on line at gradychambers.com.

Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television,  Lord Fear: A Memoir, and  Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere His essays have appeared in  Guernica,  BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among others, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Francisco McCurry is a decolonizing native, trav eling the spaceways of planet air. He is working on a novel called Lucha Libre in America and holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. He pays bills working in education, and knows WuTang is Forever. Louise Munson is a playwright, whose work has been profiled in Salon, HuffPost, New York Theater Review, Brooklyn Rail, among others. Plays produced: Penelope, Goodbye to All That, Do Like the Kids Do, Montana. Louise is a founding member of IAMA Theatre Company, now in their 10th year. She is currently in development on her first feature script, Dragon. Eric Newman is the Gender & Sexuality editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Johanna Skibsrud is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Arizona. Her latest book, a novel — Island — will be released in Fall 2020. Masha Tupistyn is a writer, critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of the books  Love Dog,  LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film,  Like Someone in Love: An Addendum to Love Dog, and  Beauty Talk & Monsters, as well as the films  Love Sounds and the ongoing film series,  DECADES. Her new book,  Picture Cycle, was published in 2019 by Semiotexte/MIT. She teaches film and gender studies at The New School. Her book Time Tells: On the Ethics of Presence and Attention, is forthcoming.

Aikaterini Gegisian is a visual artist of GreekArmenian heritage, who lives and works between the UK and Greece. Building on her contribution to the Armenian Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale (2015 Golden Lion for best national participa tion), she has over the past four years developed a series of new commissions exploring the role of images in the construction of national and gen der identities, for among others: the Whitworth, Manchester; Jewish Museum, Moscow; National Arts Museum of China, Beijing; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; BALTIC, Newcastle; Calvert 22 Foundation, London; Kunsthalle Osnabruck; DEPO, Istanbul; Yermilov Centre, Ukraine. In March 2020, her latest photo book, en titled  Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, was pub lished by MACK. Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India, based in Los Angeles, CA) works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and the intersections of fact and fiction, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment and mysticism, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. Her work emerges from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas — woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen — and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. Narrative threads

145 numerous other venues; in fall 2015 he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. Alex Scordelis has written for  Billy on the Street, Difficult People, and received an Emmy nomination for his work on  Triumph’s Election Special.  A long time contributing editor at  Paper, his writing has also appeared in  New York,  Rolling Stone,  Playboy, Esquire, and The Believer.

Felicia Angeja Viator is the author of To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard University Press, 2020). Emerson Whitney is the author of Heaven (McSweeny’s, 2020) and Ghost Box (Timeless Infinite Light, 2014). Emerson teaches in the BFA creative writing program at Goddard College and is a postdoctoral fellow in gender studies at the University of Southern California. Jenny Zhang is the author of the story collection  Sour Heart and the forthcoming poetry collection My Baby First Birthday Lutz Bacher was an artist who lived in Berkeley California, then later in New York City where she died in 2019. Early in her career, she adopted the fictional, masculine-sounding name — Lutz Bacher — and thereafter revealed few personal de tails about her life.

Julien Ceccaldi was born in 1987 in Montreal, Canada and lives in New York City. Solo exhibi tions include Sex is Work, House of Gaga, Mexico City (2019); Rock N’ Roll Princess, Jenny’s, Los Angeles (2019); and  Solito, Kölnischer Kun stverein, Cologne (2018). He recently participated in group exhibitions such as This Corrosion, Mod ern Art, London (2020);  Ritratto d’un capello in quietante, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2019) and Painting Now and Forever 3, Greene Naftali, New York (2018). He is also the author of several selfpublished comic books.

FEATURED ARTISTS

146 include migration, celebration, warfare, nostalgia, homeland, and borders, often within realms of Islamic influence, through both traditional forms and kaleidoscopic reinventions via pop culture. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region.

Carmen Winant is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at The Ohio State University and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photogra phy. Winant collects and alloys found photographs as a method of looking closely feminist modes of survival, revolt, and innermost feeling. She lives in Columbus, OH, with her partner Luke Stettner and her two and three-year-old sons, Rafa and Carlo. Alice Wong was born in 1980, Hong Kong. Her interpretation of the natural world is an enlivened — often neon — version of animals, plants and landscapes, where the color dial is always turned to its peak saturation. Both in her drawings and ceramics, Alice often takes liberties with color, in tensifying the true shade of the animal so that it translates on the psychedelic rainbow spectrum. An introduction to vintage postcards and found photos has since led to a new course of work that recalls a Baldessari-like approach of color-blocking over appropriated imagery. Alice reconfigures family album kitsch or cliché macro shots of plants and landscapes, consuming the original with a contem porary, slick sheen of artificial color. Using her vi brant palette as a vehicle to enhance and abstract, Alice obscures what might be considered the cen tral focal point of the image, recalibrating the view er’s vision.

Helen had her first solo exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery in 2015 and in 2017 received her first New York solo exhibition at White Columns. Helen’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and she has received features in Art Forum, Vogue, and The Los Angeles Times among many other publications.

Rabz Lansiquot is a filmmaker, programmer, curator, and DJ. They were a leading member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) collective from its inception in 2014. Now, they are a member of artistic and curatorial collective Languid Hands alongside Imani Robinson. Languid Hands are the Cubitt Curatorial Fellows for 2020-21. Rabz was Curator In Residence at LUX Moving Image in 2019, developing a public and educational programme around Black liberatory cinema. Their first solo exhibition where did we land was on view at LUX in Summer 2019. They have put together film programmes at the ICA, SQIFF, Berwick Film & Media Festival, were a programme advisor for London Film Festival’s Experimenta strand in 2019, and are on the selection committee for Sheffield Doc Fest 2020. Rabz is also training to deliver workshops in working with Super 8 and eco-processing at not.nowhere, and is a board member at City Projects. Misleidys Castillo Pedroso was born in 1985, in Havana, with a severe hearing impairment; she later showed signs of developmental difficulties, and was placed in a specialized facility. When the signs of autism became clearer, she returned home to live in total isolation from society. One day, she began to paint and cut out silhouettes of bodybuilders — sometimes larger than life-size — soon adding wildlife, demons, and organs. This assemblage ended up decorating all the rooms in the house. Those close to her claim that Misleidys displays an exceptional capacity for clairvoyance and that it isn’t rare to come upon her in the middle of “conversing” with her works through gestures — a sign that these figures are the bearers of some power beyond the fascination they may exert on the beholder

Helen Rae was born in 1938. She has been creating art since 1990 when she first joined the progres sive art studios of the Tierra del Sol Foundation in Upland, California. Her drawings, in colored pen cil and graphite, are immediately striking for their vivid imagery, resonant use of color and innovative reworking of source material. Using fashion maga zines as a point of departure for otherworldly jour neys into the subconscious, Helen transforms the original images into something uniquely expressive, which possess a strange beauty and power.

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Borderland Apocrypha Anthony Cody “Intense feeling, empathy, rage, compassion swerves language, torques the page. History and data inflict. Intelligence composes, sequence wrestles with violence. It must be witnessed, expressed. The love is expression. Witness is form.”—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, author of Hello, the Roses Paper $17.95

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