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Monday

25Jan2010

BOOKS

In Which Joshua Ferris Diagnoses Us All In The Unnamed

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 10:28AM

The Many Compulsions of Joshua Ferris

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

She puffed out her cheeks like someone about to burst, eyes popping wide. Then she settled into a grin shaded with resignation. “It’s my one go-around,” she said. “What do you do—hate yourself till the bitter end?”
“I’ve always thought you were the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“You’ve always been biased.”
“I’m glad you don’t hate yourself.”
“Acceptance,” she said. She shrugged. “It’s a bitch.”

Standing behind a wooden podium at the West 82nd Street Barnes and Noble, Joshua Ferris reads from his second novel, The Unnamed. He pauses after this last bit as if acknowledging the audience’s all but united, nearly inaudible sigh. Rife with pressing and existential questions, and at times overwhelmed with corporeal images of a tortured body and landscape, Ferris reads this quieter, more yielding part — a bittersweet reunion between father and daughter — with a slower, more deliberate pace.

ferris' officeDuring the Q&A, hands shoot up. The popular focus: Tim Farnsworth, the protagonist of the novel, and his harrowing, unidentified disease best described as a sudden, irrepressible urge to walk. This compulsion damages his family, his friendships, his career — partner at a successful New York firm — and provokes philosophical and sometimes spiritual enquiries, while physically inflicting the most grotesque, frost bitten, skin peeling, swelling, burning, assault from the elements on his once healthy and handsome body. Gone were the days…

In response to some of the more metaphorical readings, Ferris is quick to express his expectations for a literal appraisal of Tim’s illness, rather than an allegory for the way we live our lives: “Treat this like a real disease…like a cancer,” he recommends. Apologizing for perhaps appearing too vehement in his expectation, and understanding the inevitability of multiple interpretations, Ferris remains bound to, as if championing above all, a precise grasp and accurate reading of this particular disease.

Conceivably, this might be why he chose to read an excerpt less fixed on the disease and its physical and mental effects but on a moment between family; largely what I found most compelling in the novel. In a society consumed by the legitimizing reassurance of diagnosis, the Farnsworths are never offered any guarantee or explanation about Tim’s strange walking bouts.

One of many doctors attempts to empathize: “I know how you’ve struggled to validate your condition...I know you’ve fallen into depression because no empirical evidence has emerged to exonerate you.” The hope offered in a name, in a baptism of this disease, would absolve the family’s pain. Their life, their norms, their vows, and their respective roles—father to daughter, wife to husband, husband to wife, mother to daughter—undergo an unorthodox but necessary shift. The immediacy of survival reinvents responsibilities within their home; but at what cost?

But the novel finds its character, finds those kernels that readjust the reader in his or her seat as if to fully consume a sentence or idea, when it sheds the persistent, more clinical voice. Once the family reorganizes itself around Tim’s disease, a candid telling takes off.

Jane, Tim’s wife, wonders about the “matrimonial haul.” Is she prepared, and in more hilarious bits, ‘equipped,’ for another round of retrieving her husband from bizarre and far away locations in the middle of the night? And yet, her commitment and love is unflinching: “Sickness and death, caretaking, the martyrdom of matrimony—that was fluff stuff. When the vows kick in, you don’t even blink. You just do. She had to be up for it.”

Later in the novel, Jane reckons with a darker period in her life, one that Ferris describes tenderly but stops short of letting breathe a little longer. There are the occasional moments of temptation when Jane’s pitter patter is excited by another man, a better life — “Her heart leapt. It was a girl’s heart.” — but those instances are rarely revisited. Jane’s superhuman, unrelenting devotion is hard to appreciate because the history of their love is never shared.

Ferris really pinches at something real when describing the daughter, Becka. She is an overweight, solitary teenager who sometimes evokes the most pressing kind of sadness — unspoken desperation — and other times coolly assumes a level of responsibility within her family that shines a light on her inborn mellowness and maturity.

In one of my favorite parts, diverging from the novel’s prevailing sense of commotion, Becka and Tim watch disc after disc of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Together, they are a pair of unapologetic, idle adolescents. And though their Buffy imparted inertia is a symptom of some greater crossroads within their family, this shared surrender is sweet and reminds us of the irreplaceable nature of family. In passages like this last one, Ferris’ confident style returns and the novel’s otherwise perverse preoccupation with despair pales.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here.

"Sing" - Four Tet (mp3)

"Pablo's Heart" - Four Tet (mp3)

"Love Cry" - Four Tet (mp3)

In Which Lena Dunham Recalls Specific Moments of Hesitation

Monday, December 21, 2009 at 10:19AM

'What I Do'

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

“Mark my words,” twenty-three year old filmmaker Lena Dunham points to the recorder and vows heartily. “Early 2010, I’m going to move out from my parents' place.” Immediately following her pledge, a group of New School students sitting beside us at Benny’s Burritos on Greenwich raise their frozen margaritas to the entire restaurant and cheer in a sing-song slur, “Haaappy Thaaanksssgiving!” Admittedly, the moment is rich with the sort of quips someone older might use to parody young twenty-somethings living in New York. But for Dunham, who speaks unashamedly about almost anything ("I clearly project oversharing, it's what I do!") and whose wit lends itself to immediate yet original repartee, moments of youthful admittance from the school of 'write what you know' are both satirized and expressed discerningly, and often hysterically, in her work.

With her web series Delusional Downtown Divas in its second season, and having recently hosted The Art Awards at the Guggenheim alongside co-stars Joana D'Avillez and Isabel Halley, and in production on her second feature Tiny Furniture Dunham shows no signs of slowing down. She's found her passion and is not pressed to stray from it. "They [Dunham’s parents] gave me this delusional idea that it’s okay to make a living doing something like this...You just pick a job that’s totally impractical and then you make a living!" she says facetiously, attributing some of her filmmaking flare to being the daughter of artist parents. For now, Dunham confesses, "There's nothing else. There’s not another job for me."

Performing the trinity of writer, director, and producer on most of her projects, as well as starring in both of her features, one might presume a lot of about the downtown New York native. But those sorts of conjectures are palpable inspiration for Dunham's work. She might not entirely deviate from certain clichés, but those of the affected young New Yorker artist with dreams of lo-fi grandeur are used as writing material, rather than assumed in her person: "The show is a parody of a lot of people where you're like 'I know you're doing a lot...I'm just not sure what it is...'" With Dunham, the ‘what it is,’ registers as completed and future collaborations: two co-written scripts, one with Mom, and one with Ry Russo-Young.

In her web series we follow three young women and their hilarious escapades in navigating the city's art scene, all the while misstepping and sometimes overstepping. In a mock Proust questionnaire on the show's website, Dunham's character, Oona, ‘the budding novelist,’ is asked how she would like to die. Oona’s answers in Diva-speak—both laconic and fantastically unflinching—“Young. Of old age.” In good parody form, Diva aphorisms like this pick up on a specific downtown scene, without necessarily picking on it. Dunham’s writing focuses on the DDD’s abstract theories and schemes for making it without doing it. Their exploits are further inflated with two or three, and sometimes six ridiculous and conceptual costumes changes per episode, and occasional appearances from New York’s real life art scene; Nate Lowman, Clarissa Dalrymple, and Cory Kennedy to name a few.

Running its course of This is What We Talk About When We Talk About Film, our conversation veered to Mumblecore. Despite knowing many of the genre/movement's key players, Dunham remained earnest and tentative in wondering about its future direction. Admitting there was a shift towards more adult concerns in Andrew Bujalski’s latest, Beeswax, she illustrated the roles of adults thus far in Mumblecore as “...the Muppet Babies and the adults going 'meh-meh-meh-meeeeehhhhh-meeehhh-meh...” By no means was this an attack on the genre. Rather, Dunham’s interest in its sustainability and its innovation speaks to her fidelity to film and enthusiasm for learning about as well as being a part of what comes next. In her newest feature, a young woman returns home to live with her mother and younger sister after graduating from college. Dunham admits there is nothing revolutionary about the story’s main themes, but notes the parent role in a script whose tone has otherwise Mumblecore tendencies: unsuccessful romantic exploits and awkward, hesitant conversations among old friends.

A third of Tiny Furniture is filmed in Dunham’s actual home. Joking about the inevitability of life imitating art and vice versa, she recounts the less than great state she left their home in after one week of shooting. “I’m always doing shit like this,” referring to another time where she poured sand all over her father’s studio. “My movie’s about being a bad daughter, and about living in your parents’ house and not respecting it properly. And then my mom comes home [who stars as the mother in the film] and was like I can’t believe you wrote a movie about this and look what you’re doing!” The floors were entirely scuffed and scratched. Dunham shakes her head and laughs, “It’s too meta...too meta.”

Grateful for the opportunities she’s had, Dunham acknowledges the improbabilities that arise with filmmaking. “It’s so terrifying…Things don’t work the way they used to,” she says, alluding to today’s obstacles of making a film and then selling it. Doubts come in waves but are never lasting. “Every time there’s a room full of people wondering what I should do right now, or when I’m in a situation when someone asks, ‘How do you think we should block this scene?’ and I don’t have an idea…I wonder why am I doing this?” Dunham mentions specific moments of hesitation, of wondering when the crew might crack, of questioning the self-involved nature of the job; the all encompassing energy and commitment it requires. However, she bears in mind the nearness she feels to her work. “But then I remember...oh, it’s what I love to do.”

Despite the familial attitude on set — “I’ve never had a crew that I’ve liked so much. It’s been so smooth" — Dunham expects some resistance from the team during a twelve-hour night shoot in a Greenpoint parking lot. “Everyone’s going to want to kill me,” she says. “It’s a sex scene that takes place in a sewage pipe.” She elaborates on the equation quickly as if expecting scrutiny. “We are having the pipe built and fork lifted into the parking lot. It’s an expense. It’s money being taken away from more important parts of the budget." Acknowledging perhaps, a small propensity for diva impulses, she jokes, “I had to have this pipe. I just had to!” But it’s Dunham’s occasional caprice, like the sewer pipe, that offsets the self-referential, “too meta” material. Seemingly, her filmmaking ethos, though always in flux, pairs the stories she is compelled to tell with impulses and ideas she cannot deny.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here.

"Cataracts (live)" - Andrew Bird (mp3)

"Some of These Days (live)" - Andrew Bird (mp3)

"Opposite Day (live)" - Andrew Bird (mp3)

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Tuesday

24Nov2009

MUSIC

In Which We Think of Love As Something New

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 11:09AM

Of All These Friends and Lovers

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Mine was not a Beatles family. This is not to say that I didn't know about the Mania and that growing up I hadn't seen the footage of frenzied girls, screaming and losing their minds, or that I too couldn't shake my ponytail, chanting, "Yellow Submarine" like other grade-schoolers at birthday parties. In high school, I was alluding to non-existent nostalgia while listening to the White Album on my Discman, and scribbling the words "Happiness is a Warm Gun" on the dirtied rubber of my friend's Chuck's. But formatively speaking, in terms of music, The Beatles were not the band that my parents had pulled from their LP collection and had sat me down, closed their eyes, bowed their heads, and said, 'Listen...learn.' And so, my relationship with the band gained most of its momentum and devotion later on; Rubber Soul being the most anecdotal album, and a personal favorite.

Heralded as their big jump, their transition from teen pop to more reflective, more deliberate songs, Rubber Soul is a critical album. Its cover, slightly warped and psychedelic, with a pumpkin-colored design spin, was nameless, a first for the group. Their four faces, their four moppy-haircuts were name enough. And though I can appreciate all that made it new—those subversive innovations in recording and production, and the band's movement towards more political lyrics, more drug-influenced persuasions—those aren't the reasons I turn to it, and return to it.

Rubber Soul is an album that I listen to in its entirety. Each song is marked by something to look out for, that enjoyable waaait for it quality. The cleanness of the remaster, the space between sounds and intent, reminded me of those little details.

Take for instance the pleading, listless sway of Lennon's "Girl.” The long, deep breath that repeats throughout is a special, very intimate sound. It's an emotion almost too desperate for words. Or maybe it's just the long, post-toke, exhale? Who knows. Either way, it isn't said verbally; the satisfaction is immediate! I have an image of them performing “Girl” in a neighbourhood jungle gym or children’s park. It’s got the lazy, punch-drunk persuasion of adults who’ve happened upon a swing set or a slide too small. Ridiculous?

Fondness for a song whose theme is the past, whose tone is entirely nostalgic, is an obvious reaction, but "In My Life" is a sentimental homecoming that I’ve always smiled along to. Call it simple, There are places I'll remember, All my life though some have changed, but like those afternoons where I choose to abandon everything and revisit old e-mails, or phone an old friend—the number, despite time, easily dialled as if imparted some unforgettable rhythm—this song too, its cadence, is wistful. The sound is the warmth of a classic television show; the kind they don’t make anymore.

The jingle-jangling "I’m Looking Through You" has a dreamy freewheeling quality to it, like running-away music, like throwing everything into a bag and disappearing with a friend, sitting shot gun and figuring it out later. Despite its excited sound, the tambourine and strumming guitar, the lyrics recall images of salvation and of recognition. The ‘You,’ allows and empowers: a song to sing at the mirror. But sometimes we aren’t listening to the lyrics, and sometimes the song is simply what it was that one year; on a summer mix to play loud with friends while carrying barbecue supplies up the stairs and to the roof. The mix was on repeat and the song played again, maybe twice more, as the sun was setting and the grill was re-lit.

"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" is another song on the album relating an embittered story with a woman: I once had a girl, or should I say, she had me...But as an acoustic song, accented with Harrison’s sitar, one might miss the punch line at the end, where he, the narrator, though based on Lennon’s infidelities, sets fire to the woman’s apartment, because when he awoke, he’d been left alone, this bird had flown. But again, story aside, the curling twang of the sitar was and still is the heart of "Norwegian Wood", marking the group’s shift towards the psychedelic.

Finally: for me, "Nowhere Man" will always be inextricably linked to Holden Caulfield. We had an assignment in school to pair a song with Catcher. This one boy in my class presented "Nowhere Man." As if there were a right answer to the assignment, a golden ticket, he seemed to find it. It was as if in that moment he raised the bar, not just of the assignment, or for that particular English class, but for that time in our lives. Hindsight can sour things, especially our memories of growing up. It can make it all sound overwrought and exaggerated, but if I remember carefully, that was the boy that caused a shift, in all the clichéd but necessary ways.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here.