Consultancy Rock
The solace of sociological distance in the music of Rush
by Rob Horning
Certain rock groups persist as their own subgenre. The venerable Canadian band Rush is one of them, maintaining a legion of loyalists willing to stick with them as they release album after blandly titled album — Power Windows, Presto, Test for Echo — that defiantly sell in the millions despite little mainstream notice or media excitement. Like the devotees of other cult bands (Phish, Dave Matthews Band, etc.), Rush fans seem to believe that ostentatious musicianship excuses indistinguishable songs — that tracks from, say, Rush’s 1993 grunge disc Counterparts are somehow over the heads of ordinary music fans rather than simply being inaccessibly boring.
But maybe the Rush cult is right. Though the band’s music often belatedly reflects rock trends, Rush seems to deliberately exist outside the hype cycle and the desperation it fosters in listeners who try to keep up with it or, worse, direct it. Bands and songs can easily become phonemes in a musical-taste language meant to express cultural capital. Unreflexive music consumers — if such people can even exist in a Spotify universe — may not be invested in the status games that often enshroud pop music, but their listening habits are still shaped by the zeitgeist, which constrains what is possible and what gets circulated. The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone.
How did Rush get there, beyond irony, beyond cool and uncool?
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Il Salvataggio Selvaggio
A letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises
By Evan Calder Williams
Dear Micky Arison,
I was sorry to hear about the Costa Concordia. What a big fuck-up, a große Verhau, as Kluge would put it. A sad one to boot.
I saw that you tweeted that “our thoughts and prayers are with the passengers and crew” so I can tell that you’ve been thinking about it a lot.
The concern in the media has been, above all, with those passengers and crew living, dead, and unconfirmed, as it well should be. It seems a fair coverage, although I wish the Brits would stop gendering the wrecked boat: as a BBC correspondent put it, “because although she sits behind me looking fairly solid there, she’s not quite as stable as she looks. She’s sitting on a ledge and if she was to move not too far, there’s a danger that she could slide into very much deeper water. The authorities just couldn’t take the risk of having divers and other rescue workers on board if she was just that unstable.” The sad fact of a scuttled behemoth capsized just offshore, guts bursting with marine-life-killing fuel, may have certain elements that are funny. But it is not hysterical, at least in the sense of a late Victorian misogynist pathology.
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Dance With the Devil
The systematic genius of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango
by Dan Bevacqua
Twenty-seven years after it was first published in his native Hungary, László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, Satantango, has materialized in America. Published by New Directions, it is the third of Krasznahorkai’s works to be translated into English by George Szirtes, Hungarian-born poet and winner of, among other honors, the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry for his book Reel. (Szirtes’ work deserves more than a nod; it is a terribly skilled and patient man who can translate, as he did with Krasznahorkai’s novel War and War, a seven-page-long sentence motored by madness without missing a single rhythm, beat, or complex plot point.)
Set in an unnamed Hungarian village, Satantango is the story of an almost forgotten group of people, forgotten to themselves, to one another, and to the world, who wait — fighting, and dancing, and drinking, and dreaming, and trying to get it on all the while — for a pair of saviors to rescue them from the misery of their lives. Imagine if, instead of waiting on Godot, Vladimir and Estragon were themselves a reckless, absent, and know-it-all God? How hard up and bad off would the poor bastards waiting for them have to be?
Pretty hard up and bad off, as it turns out. The citizens that populate Satantango are some of the most miserable characters in literature. They make Thomas Bernhard’s monologists (to whom Satantango’s narrative point of view eventually owes a great debt) seem as sentimental as they truly are. By this reviewer’s count, there are only two moments of actual kindness in the book. In one, a bar owner cleans the mud off a drunk cripple. In the other, a boy teaches his mentally retarded sister the best way to commit suicide. (She thinks of it as a type of favor.)
In Satantango, sex is a meaningless act, except as a way to make money or cure boredom. Teenage girls turn tricks in an abandoned factory. A certain Mrs. Schmidt (her beauty, in a wonderful way, matched only by her girth) sleeps with every man in town but, so it would seem, her husband. Furthermore, everyone despises everyone — and with good reason. Every single character in Satantango, in their own way, is trying to cheat, betray, wound, destroy, or escape the other. All this drama is set inside a rain-pelted, fog-swallowed, dark and crumbling village, where, as the image of the once impregnable, now decayed estate at its edge suggests, the words comrade and serf are all but interchangeable, and as equally dehumanizing and ridiculous.
While the ghosts of feudalism and a dying communism linger and affect the characters in Satantango, Krasznahorkai is not merely interested in how the Hungarian psyche suffered under failed sociopolitical systems. He is more interested in the illness of the human individual inside all systems, and the visions we experience and delusions we create in order to “attempt to forget despair.” Krasznahorkai’s mastery of structure, character, and language is matched by his ability to simultaneously weave all three together; readers can feel themselves physiologically immersed in the world of the book, itself a finely orchestrated system.
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The Future Is Female
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, women are nowhere and everywhere
by Samantha Hinds
A tea-soaked palette floods recession London. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we see the khaki styles and filing boxes of an empire packing itself away. Director Tomas Alfredson, known best for his gentle adolescent vampire tale (Let the Right One In, 2008), stays orthodox to neither John le Carré’s text nor the sonorous lurch of the film’s TV predecessor. Alfredson instead stacks rapid visual clues, beginning with a title sequence of offbeat jazz to underpin chain-smoking functionaries. With its singsong suspense among the classified stacks, Tinker has a bureaucratic bebop. Alfredson, a Swede, in an admitted second-language evasion, storyboards with the comic-book cuts of a kid who ran straight past the Oxford Classics to Tin Tin.
In Tinker, the Cold War strikes soothing, senile hues: mint, rose, brown. Le Carré’s MI6, dubbed “the Circus,” stands in brick and imperial ivory, its ponds marred by dead leaves. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, born 1971, resurrects 1973 through a dusky haze of cigarette smoke and locker-room steam. Despite a lively pace, weary tones pervade. Wiretappers huddle under red-veined ecru maps. Even bleak Soviet torture is conducted in a pastel room where a bun-haired monitor crisply folds her newspaper. As Václav Havel said when asked to recall the 1970s on the other side of the Curtain, “The first half of the decade is a single, shapeless fog.”
Tinker’s plot turns on the search for a KGB mole, but le Carré’s story really invokes dying glory — specifically, the duty and defeat of a Blitz-battered old guard under amoral new management. Gary Oldman’s George Smiley, the cast-off spy brought back to investigate a possible sleeper agent, is accordingly reduced and ruminative. We see him don oversize frames that highlight under-eye bags and jowls. He is a disheveled pensioner on an empty bed whose emotional range peaks at silent gagging.
Compare this to television’s Smiley: an arch Alec Guinness, playing the entire scale of upper-crust talk with a percussive lilt. Directed by John Irvin, the 1979 BBC serialization of Tinker suited only the ascetic. Viewers had to commit to six claustrophobic hours of calculated old-man maneuvers in thickly wallpapered rooms. The matryoshka doll of the series’ title sequence, nesting and revealing, indicated its nature: cramped but analytically gratifying in the extreme. The late Ian Richardson did “dandy in aspic” Bill Haydon best here: haughty, sniveling, and slim. (Colin Firth’s version in the new film swaggers out of turn.) BBC screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft ensured the old Smiley had a tense and inquisitive agency. Oldman — working with the redacted language of writers Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan — seems stunned silent by comparison, if touchingly so. He matches Guinness’ musicality only when describing an encounter with Soviet arch-nemesis Karla. Both actors convey Smiley’s dignity, but only Guinness gave him carriage.
The genius of the Smiley character is in his sublimation. Though under acute suspicion, Smiley is no Condor on the run. Nor, thankfully, is he an avenging “codger with cudgel,” avoiding spy actor Michael Caine’s reactionary turn to raging Harry Brown (2009). Smiley is too discreet for blood — at least among his own. Forgiven his vocation, Smiley would be the witness archetype at its moral best. A custodian of unspoken codes forged in wartime, spent Smiley watches former British knights-errant be bought off by the highest bidder. Tinker thus marks the point when the rational neoliberal approach to intelligence collection ousted the honor-bound gentlemanly spy culture of the Second World War.
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The New Inquiry is proud to announce that Reanimation Library, the project of our contributor and friend Andrew Beccone, will be temporarily relocated to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the Print/Out exhibition, part of Print Studio from January 23 until March 9.
Join us for the Library’s opening reception on Thursday, February 2, 6:00-9:00p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Reserve tickets here.
Accounting for Beauty
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Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
Before I actually read Erotic Capital, sociologist Catherine Hakim’s treatise on how women should flex their powers of sexual allure in the workplace, I wanted to like it. As Hakim presents it, erotic capital is a combination of physical assets (beauty, style) and know-how (liveliness, charisma, social skills) that can make those around you want to help you succeed.
Who can argue with that? I cheer a vivacious, charming acquaintance who thrives in her career because she strives to make her workplace convivial; I recall repeatedly going out of my way to help out a strikingly handsome colleague who always smiled at me in the hallways, even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to him. Even as a “radical feminist” — the sort of person Hakim blames for limiting women’s sexual power in the workplace — I’ve used erotic capital. When I was teaching English as a second language, I suspected that being a well-groomed, friendly, lively American woman helped me keep students’ attention.
In fact, it was because of my feminism that I wanted to like Erotic Capital: Whether from nature or nurture, women have traditionally excelled at “soft skills” like taking the emotional temperature of others, listening, adjusting one’s behavior to any given situation, and cooperating. These all happen to be skills that, until fairly recently, have been undercompensated in the workplace. In Hakim’s book I anticipated a deftly written argument that would reclaim the value of women’s work so that maybe we’d eventually start paying people in the professions that make use of those skills — say, teaching and nursing — their true value.
That’s the book I wanted to read. The book I actually read was more like this: Men supposedly have higher sex drives than women, creating a “male sex deficit,” which means men are always in a state of wanting more of what women supply. (Hakim has some convoluted theories about gay men and lesbians, but the book assumes people with actual power are heterosexual.) So women who are willing to address that deficit, by either having actual sex with men suffering from it or presenting themselves in an enchanting manner to exploit it, have erotic capital that can be traded for other forms of capital.
Erotic capital has many guises: from “trophy wives” whose skilled self-presentation becomes a part of a man’s public persona, to men or women who style themselves in such a way as to garner attention at their workplace, to women with otherwise limited means who sell their erotic capacity (whether forthrightly, as with sex workers and performers, or more covertly, as with sales jobs) to establish themselves. It’s “sell yourself” meets “sex sells.” What’s most surprising about all this is that Hakim seems to think she’s saying something new.
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Un(der)known Writers: Martin Luther King Jr.
“I’m sure that you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington, he was completely lost; he knew not who he was. This reveals to us that the most striking fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up on the mountain, a great revolution was taking place in the world - indeed, a revolution which would, at points, change the course of history. And Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it; he was asleep.
There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, ‘We want to be free.’ And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.”
Oberlin College Commencement Address, 1965
Scoreboard Jesus
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Can Tim Tebow, the latest American exemplar of “muscular Christianity,” get a witness?
by Elissa Lerner
Unless you’ve avoided all sports news since Thanksgiving, you’ve probably heard the name Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback and evangelical Christian who likes to thank his lord and savior Jesus Christ for winning football games. Despite his awkward throwing motion and his dismal stats, Tebow still led his team to six “miraculous” comebacks, including completing an unlikely 80-yard pass in the first seconds of overtime to beat the favored Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game last week. Already controversial from his college days — his painting John 3:16 in his eyeblack prompted the NCAA to ban the practice — and from a Focus on the Family-sponsored anti-abortion ad that ran during the 2010 Super Bowl, Tebow’s eagerness to talk about his faith as much as win games has made him a touchstone for a debate about the role of religion in sports. “Tebowing” has even become a verb, describing the act of dropping to one knee and touching one’s forehead in apparent praise of God as Tebow frequently does.
Though the scale of hype may make Tebow seem at best a flash in the pan and at worst a prop in a cynical NFL marketing scheme (Charles Barkley has called him “the national nightmare”), the Tebow phenomenon is nonetheless a uniquely American one, tapping into the long intertwining of sports and religion in the U.S. It dates back to the Puritans, who considered sports sinful idleness that detracted from godly work. But as historian Robert Higgs points out in God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America, a competing Christian ideal rose up in America to counter the Puritans: the Christian knight, the progenitor of muscular Christianity, whose icons include Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie (who popularized the Gospel of Wealth), Amos Alonzo Stagg (pioneer of American football and Yale divinity student), and James Naismith (Presbyterian minister and founder of basketball, a sport explicitly designed for missionary work).
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Not Great Men
Georges Simenon’s The President shows how history swallows its agents
by Rob Horning
With its focus on a destabilized European government, currency manipulation, and the frailty of technocracy, Georges Simenon’s novella The President seems a surprisingly timely book, especially considering it was originally published more than 50 years ago. The scene in which Simenon describes various ministers meeting at a country retreat to decide the fate of the franc in the midst of a financial crisis could easily be taken for a fictionalized rendering of any number of the E.U.’s serial efforts to save to the euro. “After the disastrous experiments made by previous governments, which had lived from day to day, robbing Peter to pay Paul, the only solution was a large-scale devaluation…”
But the novella also explores the timeless theme of the pettiness engendered by power and the cumulative personal sacrifices it necessarily compels. Simenon, whose attitude toward writing was something like ordinary people’s attitude toward breathing, seems to have known something about pettiness and certainly about compulsion. In a 2007 Bookforum profile, Luc Sante summarizes some of the highlights of Simenon’s prolific career: his anti-Semitic journalism, his boasting about sleeping with thousands of prostitutes, his becoming a collaborator during the Vichy regime, his ego-driven feuds with publishing houses, and so on. Sante suggests Simenon was one of those writers “whose finer qualities have been siphoned off into their books,” which means, considering the hundreds of novels he wrote, he might have been an extraordinarily fine man.
Simenon is mainly remembered for his series of detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret, but he also wrote scores of other books, his so-called roman dors (hard novels), uncompromising examinations of human moral weakness. Reissued in November by Melville House as part of its Neversink Library series of overlooked works, The President is one of these. It ushers readers into the mind of a retired politician, referred to only as the Premier, who believes he has accumulated enough blackmail material on his colleagues during his time in government to assure that he will be a power player until his death. Hobbled by a stroke and sidelined in a provincial town, the Premier — a character Simenon based on Georges Clemenceau, France’s Prime Minster during World War I who survived an assassination attempt in 1919 — spends his days surly and half-sedated, fretting impotently about his legacy. The action, such as it is in this glacially paced novella, takes place entirely in the Premier’s desiccated interior world, as he waits to be consulted about the formation of a new Cabinet and mulls over the various shifts he employs to uphold his dignity among his retinue of servants.
Of course, those helpers, who have been hired by the state to provide him material and emotional support, are also spying on him, rooting through his books and collected papers and photographing the incriminating documents he cherishes. We learn that the Premier’s sense of embattled privacy, so intrinsic to his own conception of his identity, is entirely an illusion, stage-managed by his servants and the protection agency responsible for guarding him. His apparent status of national figurehead emeritus merely masks his true condition, that of a political prisoner under house arrest.
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Cruise Control
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.
by Max Fox
Last Thanksgiving, more men logged on to Grindr, the largest “all-male, location-based social network in the world,” than on any other day of the year. Somehow, Grindr managed to tout this fact without mentioning stuffing. On its official blog, the makers of the app suggested a few possible holiday uses for Grindr: You could “find out where your crew is and dance off that gravy,” or, more strangely, you could “ask your neighbors on Grindr” to pick up a forgotten ingredient from the grocery store. No reminders were given to use protection, nor was there even an acknowledgment that Grindr is overwhelmingly used for hooking up for sex.
Grindr is an app you can put on your smartphone to find guys to fuck. It uses GPS-enabled smartphones to triangulate a potential mate’s location in real time, without requiring any eye contact. Since launching in 2009, it has claimed the title of largest gay social network from other contenders, mostly thanks to word of mouth, though it has enjoyed more than a few breathless trend articles. Joel Simkhai, Grindr’s youthfully handsome CEO, is as virginal as his company’s PR. In interviews, he demurs when pressed and insists that all his app wants is to help men find out who nearby is gay. This self-neutering is partly explained by Grindr’s need to conform to the decency guidelines of Apple’s walled garden. The user agreement for Grindr stipulates that no “offensive or pornographic” materials be included in a profile; violation leads to profiles being disabled.
But Grindr’s media celibacy, however, doesn’t stop the app from publicly identifying as a gay concern or from participating in gay politics as popularly understood. In a move that must have caught Chris Hughes’s eye, New York users were greeted with the telephone number of the state legislator for their GPS coordinates when they logged on early last June and were urged to place calls in support of marriage equality. (Other platforms for user-generated content, such as Tumblr, have made similar efforts to push political action, encouraging the idea that brand identification can also be a sort of de facto political subjectivity.) After a few decades of gay politics’ rightward-glancing sanitization — from closing the bathhouses to the current focus on children’s bullying — this development should not surprise anyone. With Grindr we see the conjunction of a gay political identity with a discursive rejection of the very aspect of gayness that is both most definitive and which the app mobilizes for profit: sex.
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Do Nothing, Be Nothing
Violence, idleness, and nihilism in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
by Stephane Allard
Clocking in at just short of a thousand pages, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is the author’s ostensible pitch for the Nobel Prize and what many expect will stand as his magnum opus. Published in Japan in three installments beginning in 2009, the novel was released in North America in a single volume this past October.
True to form, Murakami sprinkles artificial flavoring from the likes of Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler throughout, and begins the novel with a tribute to another of his great influences, Lewis Carroll. In 1Q84, Murakami’s Alice is an assassin named Aomame; a stairway off a congested Tokyo expressway takes the place of the rabbit hole; and Wonderland is not a strange and amazing place but an eminently similar-but-different universe called 1Q84. The novel is set in 1984, and after her decent down the staircase, Aomame’s world mysteriously and — at first imperceptibly — shifts.
Violence appears in much of Murakami’s prior work. It is impossible to forget, for instance, a haunting passage in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle describing the meticulous skinning of a man’s entire body. While perhaps excessively explicit, it stands alongside Dostoyevsky’s most poignant illustrations of human cruelty and vileness. However much the theme of violence may have been explored in his earlier work, in 1Q84 — and unlike in any of Murakami’s other work — violence is the constitutive element at the novel’s core. Violence manifests itself, or else lies in wait, at every turn of the page.
In 1Q84’s dystopia, the exterior world is not a complex multifaceted otherness but instead simply a bad and nasty place, the habitat of violence. Consequently, Murakami’s characters are faced with a limited set of responses. The first and most obvious is to fight back, battle with that exterior world with violence of their own to overcome it. In 1Q84, this strategy is epitomized by Aomame, who assassinates domestic abusers with the help of “the dowager,” her ethereal partner in crime. But this approach has obvious moral hazards. Doesn’t violence breed violence, even when deployed for laudable ends and in homeopathic doses?
Murakami himself seems ill at ease with this solution and proposes a second option for dealing with an inherently violent world: idleness. Like Bird, who spends days at the bottom of a dried-up well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or Kafka, who spends weeks alone in a secluded cabin in Kafka on the Shore, many of 1Q84’s characters spend a lot of time not doing much. Aomame may well be forced into hiding, but it remains that she spends nearly the entire third book following a daily regimen of exercise, looking down from her balcony, looking up into the sky, and reading (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, no less). The novel’s other primary character, Tengo, for his part, does little more than read, write, wait for the phone to ring, go to work, and visit his comatose father — no surprise here — at a sanatorium.
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Un(der)known Writers: Anna Kavan
Self-portrait by Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods in Cannes, France. She perceived herself as deeply unloved. Kavan was the main character in her novel Let Me Alone, and she adopted the name for herself after a stint in an asylum. She kept herself immaculately maintained, was severely addicted to heroin, and enjoyed the success of her own interior decorating business while she saw 16 of her works published before she perished — not by her own hand — in 1968.
From “the Birthmark,” as featured in Asylum Piece (1940)
“At first I could see nothing, it might have been a black cellar into which I was gazing. But soon my eyes penetrated the darkness and I could make out some sort of a pallet under the grating with a shrouded form lying upon it. I could not be sure whether it was a man or a woman who lay there, shrouded as if on a bier, but I thought I discerned a tarnished gleam of fair hair, and presently an arm, no thicker than bone, was raised, feebly, as if groping towards the light. Was it imagination, or did I really see on that almost transparent flesh a faint stain, circular, toothed, and enclosing a shape like a rose?
I cannot hope that the horror of that moment will ever leave me. I opened my mouth, but for several seconds I was not able to utter a sound. Just as I felt myself about to call out to the prisoner, soldiers appeared and hustled me away. They spoke roughly and threateningly, jostling me and twisting my arms as they dragged me into the presence of their superior officer. I was commanded to produce my passport. Falteringly, in the foreign language, I started to frame an inquiry about what I had seen. But then I looked at the revolvers, the rubber truncheons, the callous, stupid faces of the young soldiers, the inaccessible officer in his belted tunic; I thought of the massive walls, the bars, and my courage failed me. After all, what could I hope to do, an insignificant foreigner, and a woman at that, against such a terrifying and strongly established force? And how would I help the prisoner by myself becoming imprisoned?
At last, after much questioning, I was allowed to go. Two guards escorted me to the station and stood on the platform until the train carried me away. What else could I have done? It was so dark in the underground cell: I can only pray that my eyes were deceiving me.”
Submitted by Kari Larsen
