Home - This Recording

Top

This Recording Recommends

Video of the Day

Recent Recordings

A Poem for You

UPTICK

We were sitting there, and
I made a joke about how
it doesn’t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

- John Ashbery

Live and Active Affiliates

This Recording

Masthead

Alex Carnevale
Editor-in-Chief

Molly Lambert
Managing Editor

Will Hubbard
Executive Editor

Contributors
Yvonne Georgina Puig
Meredith Hight
Durga Chew-Bose
Molly Young
Tyler Coates
Almie Rose
Karina Wolf
Danish Aziz
Eleanor Morrow
Owen Roberts

Comments? Requests?

Search TR

100 Greatest Writers

Classic Recordings

Robert Altman Week

Woody Allen Week

The Print Edition

Tuesday

09Feb2010

AMERICA

In Which You Want To Be A Man, Don't You? Wait, Do You?

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:57AM

The Big Game

by GREGORY SIDMAN

Boy, oh boy...to be a man. Seems to hold a lot of resonance today. And Sunday’s Superbowl commercials have an affinity for transmitting the typical nostalgic, saudade kind of resonance about coming to terms with the fact that most men aren’t the archetype of how men “should” or could be — self-reliant, self-confident, dominant, charismatic and, essentially free Americans.

I mean all of this in a vague, non-analytical, unsystematic, improperly researched, balls-in-your-face, hastily put together kind of way. I’m dipping into this with a thick brush, and I’m taking broad strokes. I’m writing this like a man. In fact, I’ve half forgotten which ads lead to these thoughts. And I only watched the game till halftime. And I was half-watching, anyway.

But, luckily, the most poignant commercials were limited in number, were almost broadcast consecutively and at the exact moment when I was paying extra special close attention: the Dodge Charger “Man’s Last Stand” ad and the Dove “You’re a Man” ad. The depictions of masculinity, and even the products hocked, are almost at odds — or they at least point to a duality of rough play and cleanliness.

At odds, except for one deep down little bit of emotion that strings them both together, tight like Siamese twins: the utter dissatisfaction with the inane details of being a grown up; those details which seem to get in the way of ‘being a man’; which are so common and pervasive that they seem to consume the existence of men, which forces men to not be men.

As a way to cope with this sad narrative, this mirror of their banality, men, of course, have a few options: drive away from your wife, kids and sense of responsibility as fast as you can in a Dodge; wash yourself obsessively with a bar of Dove, attempting to clean your filthy life from your body and your memory.

And as a third option, as shown in the 10,000 Bud Light commercials broadcast within a four hour period: drink yourself numb, and casually conceal your alcoholism and prosaic self-hatred with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. An ironic sense of humor which acknowledges the fact that you don’t feel as if you stack up against classic examples of American masculinity — and that it’s easier not to try.

Commercials play with male assumptions about grown up, manly masculinity the way boys play with toys. And obviously, they only let guys in the playhouse if they know the magic password. By the way...do you know the magic password? You think it’s Charger? Nope. Dove? Nah-uh. Flo.tv? Wrong.

It’s less obscure, and you probably say it every day when you wake up: “I hate myself.” You can hate your life, your wife, your job, your car, friends and parents too, but first things first: hate yourself.

Hate yourself with the same uninspired self-pity as Robin Williams’ Peter Banning hates himself in Hook. Hate yourself, buy a car, and never grow up. Boy, oh boy — now that growing up without growing old has been replaced with growing old without growing up, we’re all lost boys.

Gregory Sidman is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Los Angeles. This is his first appearance in these pages.

photo by Lilja and Inga Birgisdóttir"Boy Lilikoi" - Jónsi (mp3)

"Ammaelolnidur" - Jónsi (mp3)

"Happiness" - Jónsi & Alex (mp3)

In Which We Also Prefer Ballet Flats To High Heels

Monday, February 8, 2010 at 8:00AM

The Object of Their Affections

by ADA KAPLAN

I've spent a lot of time this week thinking about the fact that I love two men, and that two men love me. I’ve actually been thinking too much about this fact for the last two years. There are good weeks and bad weeks, and this was an eventful one. For one thing, they’re both in L.A. now, and my intention for the new year was to free myself at last of this complicated and heartbreaking binary, but everything I do seems to make things worse. One of these men was my boyfriend for many years, and then neither of them were, and then the other man was, and now neither of them are again. This is because my latest solution is to “be on my own.” So I suppose I am single, though I wonder whether it’s possible to feel less so.

Elisa Sighicelli, Santiago: Curtain Tryptich, 2000I have illusions, that I’m concentrating on my work, that I don’t need a man, that I am independent. I must uphold these illusions in order to believe in myself, as something other than the center of this enduring amorous sideshow. I call it a sideshow because it seems from the outside that’s how it must look, but to me, it’s my life. And I need my life to be about more than being the object of these affections, even if, truly, it isn’t.

I’m ashamed. Whatever women may think, it doesn’t feel good to listen to a man you love and respect beg or cry, or tell you to pick him because he brought a superior toy to your cats. What it does is make you despise yourself. It’s the fault of a weak and indecisive mind, possessed of delusions of intellect and ambition, but moored in that loathsome covenant of female want. How important, really, is it to feel beautiful? To be loved? Important enough to ravage the pride of two strong, kind men? They’ve chosen to remain in the situation, and I have never lied to either of them, but I implicate myself.

So far being alone has meant trying to explain why. It’s something about feeling responsible for the whole thing, and shouldering so much love, that I’ve forgotten how love should feel, when it isn’t jealous or concerned with others, or sad. There was a day around Christmastime, when I made my alone decision, that I felt my life regain a sense of levity. I actually jumped up and down in my childhood room. This only lasted a day.

Untitled (The Party Is Over)Being alone has meant buying an old lady roller cart so that I can wheel groceries into my apartment and a rubber gadget that allows me to open jars on my own. Being alone has meant failing at being alone, and convincing myself that I’m not at all interested in sex. This is mostly true, but there’s still a real part of me that cares. And if I cave and spend the night at the most recent boyfriend’s house, then I will pass the morning, which I intended to spend writing and working, because I am a serious independent woman whose priority is working and writing, as I did today, googling the 22-year-old girl who told him she wants to “bone down,” whom I've met briefly, only to be reminded by a fancy magazine that she is the daughter of a big producer, and prefers ballet flats to heels. He asks me what he should do about other women. I want to scream, but I say I can’t tell him what to do. Why? he says. They always ask me why. He only wants to be with me, he says, why can’t I just be with him. It’s a question I’ve heard from each side many times. The answer is because I love them both. And because I don’t have the heart, because I lack the strength, to choose, I have to say no.

After I spent the morning browsing hipster photo blogs, I cried. I looked at the manuscript of my book and wanted to burn the thing for being so futile and uninteresting. I imagined my life, and their lives, unfolding. They were married to beautiful women in ballet flats. They were carrying toddlers on their shoulders. I was glad for them, glad they were free of me, but also reminded of the scene in Legends of the Fall when Susannah sees Tristan with his happy family at the state fair, and goes home, sits down at her lovely vanity, chops her hair off, and shoots herself in the head.

I imagine myself married to one of these men, and seeing the other at the state fair with his happy family. It’s bad. Then I switch them, and it’s just as bad, Even if they can’t have me, I know they want me to live.

Ada Kaplan is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Los Angeles.

"Not Made For Love (Leo Zero remix)" - Metronomy (mp3)

"Not Made For Love (Astronomer remix)" - Metronomy (mp3)

"Not Made For Love (Alalai remix)" - Metronomy (mp3)

6 Comments |

Email Article |

Print Article |

tagged

Sunday

07Feb2010

ART

In Which We Like Taking A Picture Every Day

Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 12:06PM

garry winogrand The Tastes of Jennifer Beals

The art critic and novelist Robert J. Hughes interviewed Jennifer Beals about her love of photography:

Actress Jennifer Beals first rose to stardom while she was a student at Yale and appeared in the 1983 hit movie Flashdance, playing a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. In real life, Ms. Beals also has a keen interest in art, particularly photography.

She says, however, that due to the demands of raising her daughter she doesn't practice that craft as much as she did in the past, when she "photographed every day." Here, she lists five books of photography she admires.

The Family of Man by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg

The book was tied to a 1955 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

"I first saw this book when I was a little girl," Ms. Beals says.

"It creates the cycle of humanity starting with birth, chronicles the good and the great and the not-so-great, the difficult and universal elements of what it is to be human."

[Looking at Photographs]

Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski

"I encountered it in college," Ms. Beals says.

Pictures in this book "made me more aware of how we exist within our environment."

kertesz

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Early Work by Peter Galassi

Ms. Beals admires Mr. Cartier-Bresson's "ability to hold two opposites with the same photograph, of struggle and joy and alienation and belonging," she says.