Food, cyborgs, elusive meteor showers.
Benjamin Britten, “Hymn to St Cecilia, Op. 27” (1942, set to a poem by W. H. Auden). November 22 is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music, musicians, composers, and poets. It’s also the late Britten’s birthday, and a choir I was in performed his gorgeous, spikily modernist piece in 2013 to commemorate both his centenary and St Cecilia’s Day. I wish we had a recording, but many great renditions exist, including Tenebrae’s, which is sublime and angelic and High Romantic in spots but then the basso soloist totally chews the scenery on “That what has been / May. Neh. Ver. Be. Uh. Gain.” The whole thing emphasizes the way Britten picks up on strands woven by Gershwin and Stravinsky and Ellington/Strayhorn to prefigure the giddy, proggy future of musical theatre.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Food (1972, camera and sound by Robert Frank). FOOD was a short-lived SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative founded by Clark and Caroline Goodden. The movie’s day-in-the-life footage of the restaurant is a fascinating glimpse into a fleeting but crucial moment: SoHo exactly at the juncture its cultural solidification as an affordable downtown art colony meant it was beginning to gentrify. The artist Donald Judd, feeling the squeeze of rising rents in the neighborhood, relocated to Marfa, Texas in 1971, the same year FOOD opened. But it’s cool to see how unfamous working artists, young and willing to get their hands dirty, approach cooking like they approach the messy tactility of studio craft, the intimate ongoing conversation with the materials themselves: gutting the fish, kneading the dough. It’s also cool to see this happening in New York City. We’ve come to associate the American ascent of the earthy bohemian farm-to-table restaurant with California (e.g., Berkeley, California’s Alice Waters and her legendary Chez Panisse, chronicled by Les Blank in 1980 in Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and to a lesser extent Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe). And we associate the NYC counterculture of the period, the white one anyway, with amphetamine-skinny, food-averse Warhol stars (see Mary Woronov rolling her eyes at “fat” hippies in Todd Haynes’s Velvets doc), so Matta-Clark’s document of the FOOD project offers a nice counter-argument that some of the city’s scrawny and black-clad hipsters were in fact excited about the same stuff as the epicures out west. I saw Food at MoMA paired with Robert Frank’s Life-raft Earth (1969), a commission by the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand to film a weeklong “starve-in” against world hunger, initiated at Menlo Park, California’s Portola Institute. It’s not a great movie and I enjoyed Matta-Clark’s far more, but together with Food it continues the turning-on-its-head of contemporary rhetoric about that era’s cultural politics of eating. I think Frank, who did not participate in the bulk of the strike, understood how bougie and privileged the white twentysomethings behind the “starve-in” were, that they were the children of the most affluent middle class in history and had access to everything their hearts could possibly desire, and how stupid it was to deny yourself sustenance for seven days on the premise of “solidarity” when you’re in a region of such incredible agricultural bounty and literally no one but you is restricting you from it. Like Jarvis Cocker sang in “Common People,” “If you called your dad he could stop it all.” Hell, if you called your PIZZA PLACE they could stop it all. Hunger strikes are meaningful when they come from, like, the incarcerated, because prisons by law have to keep inmates alive and it’s a PR nightmare and human rights violation if you allow them to die. Life-raft Earth just sputters out toward the end of the strike without a resolution, and yet we KNOW the resolution. World hunger still remains; we with the resources can still easily ensure everyone on earth is fed and we do not.
My post-election playlist No Yes November 2024: The Phoenicids (“jbl eleventh month mix. it’s complicated, and i know spotify is ‘the master’s tools‘, but i’m getting to the end with it”). This playlist is kind of a last shout for my Spotify usage before I transfer everything over to Apple Music, and a means of checking in with myself as I get out of my Big FeeFees re 47 and snap into action. It’s not 100 percent thematic, but enough of it is. I’ve had the Deerhoof/Jenn Wasner collab “I Will Spite Survive” on repeat for the past three and a half weeks, a testament to the leftist Bay Area band’s art-punk might and the Wye Oak/Flock of Dimes leader’s rich gorgeous alto. The Phoenicids are an elusive meteor shower, observed once in 1956 and not again until dust-trail modeling decades later, that scientists now link to a once-thought-vanished 1819 comet called Blanpain. Inspirational!
Roshanak Kheshti’s 2019 33 1/3 book on Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach — picked up to celebrate the week of Carlos’s 85th birthday and chock full of Donna Haraway cyborg theory and riffs on Carlos’s punny self-description “Original Synth” with visions of technologist and machine fusing and becoming inextricable. Kheshti’s notion of “synthgender” is layered onto the Moog pioneer’s transgender identity and how the trauma from the latter’s grotesque media reception caused her to retreat into reclusedom and a refusal of access to her humanity. Cyborg theory and “synthgender” (which “rejects any primacy given to originals; so called originals and analogs are equals”) have implications beyond gender discourse, seeping into the allegations of tricksyness and magick that accompany any electronic or studio-based musical discipline with a human at the controls, including the ghostly spring reverb and iterative qualities of dub reggae and the phildickian man-machine that haunts techno.
About 75 percent of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) (the final 25 percent being a series of visually compelling but pointless genre exercises in giallo and practical-effect creature gore and “edgy” A24-style alt-horror). People say the present-set The Substance is eighties vibes but to me it’s Y2K, Britney, infomercials, the fluorescent sensory overload of the pre-streaming monoculture in the 21st century’s Wild West. If feminism burrowed back underground in the eighties and had a brief riot grrrl nineties moment that quickly transitioned to neoliberal gaslight gatekeep girlboss symbolic emptiness, Y2K was a toxic cocktail of misogyny from the men at the top AND internalized and externalized disgust from the women who girlbossed into precarious power and crazed drill-sergeant energy, the Tyra Bankses and the Jillian Michaelses. I love that this is a woman-centered story that actually does understand women (cis, but perhaps trans too), and is sympathetic to the real-life struggles imposed on them within a hideous structure. It’s not punitive. Demi Moore’s character takes a physical and emotional turn for the worse but Fargeat didn’t write or direct it this way as comeuppance for what could be perceived as an aging woman’s desperate vanity. We have Sunset Blvd. for that. This is closer to All About Eve, except here there’s an ominous male voice on the phone insisting to Margo Channing that she and the fresh-faced and ambitious Eve Harrington ARE ONE. It’s Frankenstein when you remember that Frankenstein was written by a young woman whose mother succumbed to a labor-related infection eleven days after the author was born, and that Shelley’s own recently birthed daughter was a preemie who had died two weeks after delivery. Grief and loss and permeate The Substance, as well as the debilitating toll of giving of yourself and experiencing yourself being taken away. (Shelley’s Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” suggesting a vengeful god morphed into an eagle and taking and giving back the protagonist’s internal organs in an endlessly cycling hell.)
