Don Draper: tune out, turn off, drop in. Photograph: AMC.

“When did music become so important?” — Don Draper

One of the pleasures of the fifth season of Mad Men is how, thus far, nothing much is happening on the show. Yet this nothing—a kind of beautiful stasis that you know cannot last—is happening within a larger swirl of social transformation that was the mid-1960s. psychedelic LSD trips, changing family norms, ethnic and racial barriers being crossed, Weight Watchers as a proto-feminist space, rock music as more than just entertainment. It’s all happening. And yet, Don Draper remains almost motionless, aimless, lost in his very stability at the center of it all. As if the center of success was suddenly on the margins and, for a moment, the margins were at the center.

It’s a marvelous evocation of a certain kind of experience of historical change. As the very ground beneath Donald Draper starts to shift—tectonically, invisibly—he does not fall. It’s just that suddenly, the world starts to look and feel differently all around him. What mattered matters no more and new ways of being suddenly seem possible.

We shall see how he responds since, after all, tomorrow never knows.

Links:

• Mad Men

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on pretending to sit at john peel’s desk.

The website of the John Peel Center (oops, we’re in England, so Centre) for Creative Arts makes me think about the strange intersection of private and public in efforts at creating spaces for culture.

First, it’s a marvelous and magnificent website, sure only to improve. And the actual efforts to develop the physical center (I mean centre) are impressive.

But what I am most struck by is that the whole project suggests how much individual figures come to serve as conduits for collaborative openness and cooperative creativity in the arts. Why and how do these singular icons of collective visions of culture come to exist?

Part of what is exciting about the Centre as presented online is that it really truly is an honorable project, worthy of gadzillions of dollars in funding and support. It celebrates a person who celebrated the creativity and artistry of others. So we are enjoying someone else’s profound expressions of enjoyment. There is a conviviality in this, a life force, a power.

But for me, the website also registers how this power works by tapping into the desire (at least for me) that one could sort of pretend to be John Peel. There’s a vicariousness involved in the effort of this website to deliver immediacy. I mean, don’t you kind of really want to sit down in that chair in the photograph? It’s as if somehow we have left the domain of cultural heritage and creativity and suddenly stepped into the pages of Dwell magazine! Mine, mine, mine, the picture says, even as it also insists, ours, ours, ours.

It’s a fascinating dynamic: cultural heritage and creativity coming excitedly to life somewhere between one’s desk, one’s stuff, and the world beyond one’s window.

But only if one pretends, for a moment, to be someone else.

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Joining in with a Brett Dennen recording at the end of “The Delicate Hour,” choreographer and dancer Molly Shanahan sang, “I ain’t gonna lose you.” Her insistent accompaniment could have been directed to the Dennen song itself as she trailed just behind the lead vocal. She chased the moment of its original creation, never quite reaching it, never quite losing it.

Or perhaps she was singing to the sunsets that Shanahan glimpsed while creating the piece at Silo, an artists’ retreat in rural Pennsylvania, as they vanished beyond the rural horizon. Or she was addressing her father, with whom she had witnessed a powerful aesthetic moment described in the program notes. She might have even been addressing her fellow dancers, who followed her every move, and made their own moves in tandem. She would not lose them, she insisted, they could trust her. Or perhaps Shanahan most of all addressed the audience before her, in the dark, singing to them at the edge of the end of the show. Of course, she might have been singing out to all of these people and instances—and still more beyond them.

Most of all, Shanahan seemed to sing to the very concept of the moment itself, to the idea of the moment in all its temporal presence and inevitable passage. She sang as if she had not a moment to lose, and yet knowing lose it she must.

Singing along to the lyric transformed a sad love song into a kind of reminder message: dance movement is about moments, is comprised of them, and yet it can never freeze them in place. Time moves, and movement with it. How then, Shanahan’s piece proposed, does an art about movement evoke, express, explore, even explain a moment in time?

In probing this question, “The Delicate Hour” went for the moment repeatedly, but each time a little differently. The dancers stood still, just barely swaying, gazing out at the audience. In one virtuosic passage in the performance, they sped up in frenetic repetition, heads down, sprinting into themselves, trying to dissolve into the moment.

They also air-smoked along with Kenny Rodgers’s version of “The Gambler,” seemed to borrow from the Thriller-era dance moves of Michael Jackson for an instance, then moved into more abstract and less referential gestural language in response to compositions by Stars of the Lid, Biagio Marini, and Guillaume Dufay. They raced across the stage. They held on to its centers and edges. They made this dance of moments count in countless ways. Shanahan and company claimed the moment in the swivel of a hip joint, the reach of an arm above a shoulder socket. Then they let go of it.

They had to, for they had to lose it—and us—eventually. The dance had to end. But they never lost us in the sense that we caught their meaning, we understood their evocations of feeling, we knew in the moment experienced and the moment remembered that there was nothing more lasting in the end than the delicate moment.

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At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=”a world that bears a question”) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica of one, where they do not want to be. The world we had is gone, and all we have now is a simulacrum, a fake, of the world we once had. “At some point in time,” a character muses, “the world we I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.”

This idea, which used to be the providence of science fiction and French critical theory, is now in the mainstream, and it has created a new mode of fiction—Jonathan Letham’s Chronic City is another recent example—that I would call “Unrealism.” Unrealism reflects an entire generation’s conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate.

— Charles Baxter, “Behind Murakami’s Mirror,” New York Review of Books, 8 December 2011

Throughout, Lerner tries hard to overcome our skepticism that poses special problems for the novelist today. As prose fiction is pushed further toward the margins of popular entertainment, as it becomes a more and more exotic form of storytelling, we notice its most basic conventions more. Like Adam, we are more apt to ask inappropriate, even extraliterary questions of a first-person narrator, such as: What sort of person goes on this way about his or her life? Why is a supposedly realistic character talking/writing in this artificially lyrical mode? What is the author trying to prove by writing a novel, of all things? These are questions that Augie March or Frank Bascombe or even the traditional narrator of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland are not equipped to answer, any more than Carmen could explain why she keeps bursting into song.

—Lorin Stein, “‘The White Machine of Life’,” New York Review of Books, 8 December 2011

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Sounds:

• Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger, The Long Harvest, Volume 1-10
• Various Artists, National Parks Project
• Various Artists, Opika Pende: Africa At 78 RPM
• Various Artists, The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro As Told By The Phonograph 1948 – 79

Words:

• Josh Kun, Audiotopias: Music, Race, and America
• Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic
• Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity

Screens:

• Paul Goodman Saved My Life
• The Borgias
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
• Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

Stages:

• Penelope, Steppenwolf Theater
• Aperiodic, Elastic Arts
• Pretty Monsters, The Whistler
• Race, Goodman Theater
• The Seldoms, This is Not a Dance Concert, Harris Theater
• The Ghost Is Here, Vitalist Theater
• Invisible Man, Court Theater
• Fjords, Poetry Foundation
• Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, The Delicate Hour, Columbia College Dance Center
• The Girl in the Yellow Dress, Next Theater
• Enron, Timeline Theater
• Love and Money, Steep Theater
• Punk Rock, Griffin Theater

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“This is not a dance concert.” As the show’s name suggests, The Seldoms’ tenth anniversary performance at the Harris Theater sought to demystify dance, to play down the seriousness of contemporary dance performance. What was wonderful about this concert that was not a concert was that it did so in the name of re-enchanting contemporary dance.

This Is Not a Dance Concert was, of course precisely and exactly about being a dance concert. Everything took place under the Dan Flavin-esque neon lights of cavernous Harris Theater, whose bunker-like, hillside structure quite literally turns the experience of going to a performance space upside down (if you come in from the sidewalk, you enter at the roof and balconies to go down rather than up to your seats). Only the theater was deconstructed, its very edifice not the setting for the not-concert, but rather part of the show.

The Seldoms broke the audience up into groups, taking them from station to station, emphasizing the spaces in which the dances were taking place. The audience moved to different locations around the Harris, in concert with the dancers at this not-dance concert. Note cards that were handed out at each station asked silly questions and made odd comments about the venue. For instance, did you know that the first balcony is 18 feet below the lake line, meaning that you could dip your ankles in the water from there.

The choreography continued this spirit of reversals, twists, inversions, and negations. What each performance at the various stations shared was that they went deep by skimming the surface. The not-dance became the dance. We watched a performance set to Yelp.com reviews of the bathrooms at the Harris. There was a dance among the seats in the empty theater itself that was about audience members coughing at performances. We watched four Seldoms turn the silver benches of the lobby into a kind of acrobatic obstacle course. “Women flying through the air, strong men,” one of the dancers exclaimed, “What’s not to like?!” Led backstage, we watched two of the male dancers battle over costumes, waging their struggle in a cherry  picker forklift bucket and in and around a coat rack on wheels. The performance ended in a  gigantic bingo game with the entire audience sitting on stage.

Part of the brilliance of the Seldoms is that they have fun—and want the audience to have fun—but they are also dead serious. They are amazingly athletic and expressive performers, virtuosos who place their skills in service of sensations and ideas. Look at me becomes a means of asking viewers to look all around themselves—and to look, if for a moment, within. It was all about heightening a sense of immediacy and discovering something at once fleeting and lasting, superficial and permanent, there.

Perhaps the best choice by Seldoms choreographer Carrie Hanson was to collaborate with drummer-composer Tim Daisy and many of the top improv-jazz musicians in Chicago. They were the perfect match for The Seldoms. Their approaches to music, while varied, often share in the goal of intensifying the everyday moment through a combination of ecstatic virtuosity and focused mindfulness. They too use demystification (of formal style, of instrumentation, of harmonic logic, of rhythmic norms) to enchant direct experience, to call attention to the very air in which the music exists in the now.

This was on display when trumpeter Jamie Branch deconstructed a trumpet solo into a series of rapid fire spits and breaths, with bassoonist Katherine Young offering quick, appreciative responses. Accompanying the dance located backstage, they played as the audience was encouraged to position themselves with our backs to the musicians, facing the dancers. Between sound and motion, we were performing for the performers as much as they for us. For a moment, behind the ropes and pulleys of the stage drapes, everyone was part of the show.

Which turned out not to be a show at all, but something at once more quotidian and more rare, something that was not possible to put into words but was exactly what we wished to say. As we listened and watched together, uncertain of our places, awkwardly crowded together beneath the scaffolding, the curtain was lifted on the relationship between negation and affirmation. “This is not” echoed around the rafters, singing its absence, until it folded around itself a million times and became a kind of yes, a sense of undeniable presence that leapt forth and fell away all at once. It was such a small thing, a little moment. We looked at the air where the bodies and notes had been, under the spotlights, and they were gone. But still there too. Where we were ourselves.

There was nothing left to do but nod at each other, bow to the dancers and musicians, and applaud. Bingo. We all knew we had witnessed something remarkable, achieved seldomly.

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Elliot Cole, “De Rerum,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

OperaCabal‘s OperaSHOP II takes as its mission the exploration of new forms of opera for the twenty-first century, but the two workshopped pieces it presented were not as concerned with claiming the mantle of opera as drawing upon operatic forms to create new works. They cared not whether they were called opera. But without opera’s traditions they could not exist. By not caring whether they were labelled opera or not, they wound up realizing OperaCabal’s mission.

The double bill featured two well-matched performances—a wordy, nerdy, hypercharged, archeological hip-hop-jazz performance piece about the dawn of human agricultural and urban society  and a quiet, meditative, introspective exploration of the passing of time driven by digitally-looped violin and voice.

Like a Wagnerian Ring Cycle excerpt with a good dose of playful humor, Elliot Cole’s “De Rerum” drew upon the mythic dimensions of opera. With a crack band and a dancing libretto whose letters tumbled and swirled around a digital screen, Cole delivered serious mythos with a grin, reinvigorating the spectacle and grand scope of opera through an intriguing mix of sly ridiculousness and dead-serious purpose.

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello” went in almost the opposite direction, returning to an aria form of the baroque and taking it to a place reminiscent of Andrew Bird’s music. As a piece of paper repeatedly folded and unfolded on screen through stop-motion animation now rendered digitally on an LCD projector and as Shaw used a loop pedal to record layers of harp-like, plucked violin arpeggios and sang into the pickup on her violin to add harmonies to harmonies to harmonies, one slowly got lost in the gentle repetitions. With fragments of text from Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, this was a piece about something forgotten, or perhaps even something that never took place in the first instance. It wasn’t so much a reverie or a return as a kind of emulation of lostness, a sonic and visual evocation of memory as a Mobius-strip. There was beauty in the restraint, a kind of calm, impenetrable sense of imperviousness to catastrophe and, perhaps at some lower level, deeper in the digital loop, a longing to measure how far endlessness could go, how deep stillness might quiver.

Could one get back to something that never was? This was the question Shaw asked. Could one make sense of how far we have come? This was the question Cole explored. In a way they were the very questions that OperaSHOP II itself posed. As Cole propelled the listener forward on the progress of civilization and Shaw drew us back to the stillness of self-investigation, the past and future of opera glimmered in the repurposing of its forms and traditions toward new and artful projects.

De Rerum (part 1: The Angle) from Elliot Cole.

ritornello { preview } from Caroline Shaw.

Links:

• OperaCabal
• OperaCabal Blog
• High Concept Laboratories
• Elliot Cole
• Caroline Shaw

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Recent articles (here and here) about the British ITV series Downton Abbey (now playing in the United States on PBS) have noticed its odd incongruencies (and its tantalizing intersections) with the Occupy movement in the United States and around the world. These articles point out that the middle classes are, at first glance, largely missing from Downton Abbey. The show seems to be a classic story of British upstairs-downstairs, of lords and their servants and the ceilings and floors between them. Why then, Irin Carmon asks on Salon, has the program struck a chord with American “liberals” in the upper middle class at precisely the moment when many are largely supportive of (or participating in) a movement against the contemporary aristocracy of monied elites?

It’s a valid observation to make until one thinks about how the figures of Matthew Crawley and his mother are central to the show. This middle-class lawyer and his social reformist mother place the middle-class front and center. However, the way they do so is telling, particularly for the American viewing audience.

What the articles largely miss is that Crawley is upwardly mobile in the most melodramatic of ways—he wakes up one day and discovers that he is next in line to become an Earl. What this sudden deux ex machina does in the American viewing context is to link his middle-class identity at once downwards and upwards. On the one hand, his story is the dream that links the middle class to those below them: anyone might win the lottery, might suddenly strike it rich, might wake up to find themselves a lord or a lady. On the other hand, the Crawleys are a symbolic link of the middle-class to elite power: they are, after all, distantly related to the Granthams.

This shadow life of class relations, stirred up and in flux, is shot through Downtown Abbey, from the plotline of Lady Sybil and Branson the chauffeur to the figure of Sir Richard Carlisle to the downstairs love story of Anna and Mr. Bates. In fact, it is the main concern of the show. The force driving this melodrama is not a nostalgia for feudalism but precisely that the old order of lords, servants, and vassals is under pressure from the forces of modernity.

The sense of the last days of an epoch and its crumbling system echoes contemporary times, when the hierarchies of rich and poor are increasingly coming under pressure. Downton Abbey displaces and resolves these modern tensions by reasserting the paternalistic commitments between the elite and their underlings. Lord Grantham and even his mother, the prim and proper Dowager Countess Grantham, always eventually adjust to the new realities of class in their historical moment. Sometimes they even lead the way.

The emphasis, even celebration, of paternalistic empathy, I would argue, is exactly what many in the American liberal middle classes feel is missing in the current system of American neoliberal capitalism. Many middle-class Americans do not begrudge the rich their riches, but they do long for a sense of reciprocity. They would live gladly with hierarchy within certain codes of the common good.

Others are beginning to doubt even this ideology. The specter haunting Downton Abbey‘s vision of reciprocity reestablished between the one percent and the ninety-nine is the question of whether the twenty-first century demands a new conceptualization of the very relationship between reciprocity and equality. Which is to say that gnawing at the edge of our mass-produced screens and mass-consumed pleasures that give us the melodrama of Downton Abbey is something more disconcerting: the outright drama of contemporary democratic social relations.

For the most part, the show resolves comically into a world of noble aristocrats and aspiring serfs in harmonious social progress. The program’s order is disturbed only to be reestablished anew. It provides a vision of society in which paternalistic reciprocity works. Perhaps this is, at some deep level, what many Americans long to bring to the United States.

But this comic resolution has a tragic undercurrent, for it marks the abandonment of the radical dream of American democracy, which was supposed to replace the English and European structures of hierarchical society with a world in which all were created equal, in which everyone acquired nobility by deed rather than birth. (Admittedly, this is a somewhat exceptionalist interpretation of the American dream; one thing Downton Abbey might be saying to American viewers is that this dream was always a facade, that they were never so far from the English and Europeans as they believed; but if this dream of democratic equality was but a superficial one, belied by a pile of catastrophes, ruins, and hypocrisies, it nonetheless still holds great allure for many Americans as a dream.)

The great question of the twenty-first century may well be one that Downton Abbey dramatizes by being unable to melodramatize it. How can egalitarian power and its tricky processes of effective representation and collective commitment be authentically enacted when the old system does not function anymore? That question is our property, not Downton‘s, and the answers will have to be found beyond where the estate ends.

Links:

• Downton Abbey
• Irwin Carmon, “Why Liberals Love ‘Downton Abbey’”
• Katie Roiphie, “Of Noblemen and Investment Bankers”
• Tanya Gold, “Downton Abbey: class and distinction”
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street”

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Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) has a typically incisive blog post about the recent “No More Plan B” brouhaha (upcoming panel this Friday at the AHA in Chicago). Calling Grafton a rock star, hers is a synthesis of his call to restructure the values of advanced historical training and Jesse Lemisch’s retort that what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs in education.

Of course, as TR points out, we need both:

Although I think that Lemisch would agree with me on the point I make above, the implications of his argument are that expanded employment (which would enact other kinds of social justice agendas, not the least of which would be expanded opportunities for education) would be enough. I disagree: it is not enough, and this is why Anthony Grafton is a rock star. Arguing that we stop pushing young scholars into a failed market where the most successful will be constrained in their opportunities and intellectual choices, Grafton wants to change the values that have been ineffective in creating jobs for historians. Public history has the potential to create a more free employment system that would support an expanded intellectual community and allow creativity collaborations to flourish.

Furthermore, in a topic that I will take up in part II of this series, Grafton is arguing that the most path-breaking and influential scholarship in the twenty-first century is likely to be collaborative and accessible to a broad public.  Breaking with the model of the exceptional individual, who works in private and competes successfully among professionally and narrowly similar peers, a paradigm that has governed access to the profession for over a century, is in its own way revolutionary.

There’s a lot to consider in TR’s synthesis, but I want to weigh in again with the point that we need to honor the desire of many hopeful history graduate students to become tenure-track professors. Yes, we can, should, and must imagine new modes of cooperative, public historical scholarship (digital humanities in the house). We just need to do so in ways that do not wind up reinforcing experiences of precarity, exploitation, and contingency among the intellectual laborers in the field of history.

In other words, there are important things to cling to in the older, increasingly impossible model of tenure-track professorships. In fact, the longing to be a tenure-track professor seems to me to be connected to the larger critique of intellectual labor within neoliberal capitalism implicit in Lemisch’s curmudgeonly response to Grafton and Grossman. People want to practice the independent craft of history securely, with a range of autonomy and freedom that empowers democratic historical activity rather than impoverishes it.

Ultimately, the question is not just what kind of history we pursue, but also what kind of public we pursue it in. We need to imagine and work toward a public life that supports the knitting together of university history departments, public institutions, and people’s lives in ways that are robustly intellectual and economically innovative. It needs to be a public that expands individual autonomy and collaborative historical research at the same time.

If we do not think carefully about the profession and public life in tandem and work toward changing both, we risk creating a field and a public that merely incorporate historians into existing, exploitative labor markets instead of transforming labor conditions to unleash improved historical investigation and a better public life.

This project, however, will require more collective modes of historical creativity, not just a rock star in the spotlight.

Links:

• Tenured Radical
• Claire Potter, “History and the Politics of Scholarly Collaboration, Part I: Or, Why Anthony Grafton Is a Rock Star”
• Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side
• Culture Rover, “#498 – Don’t Know Much About History crisis in the humanities, part one: a response to anthony t. grafton and jim grossman on graduate history programs”
• Culture Rover, “#505 – Reinventing the Wheel, on developing critical and methodological frameworks for the digital humanities, or the digital humanities is the humanities”
• Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life
• Culture Rover, “#511 – New Deal History time for plan wpa: history corps, a proposal for the job crisis in history ph.d. programs”

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Lucky Plush Productions, The Better Half (Photograph: Cheryl Mann).

Lucky Plush never quite got to their adaptation of the noir film Gaslight in The Better Half, but that was the point. This was a performance about breaking out of scripts, about the way that the real stories always start around the frame, drawing from it but never quite fully entering into it.

The very nature of the production—half dance, half theater—located the authentic tale at the interstice, the edge between forms. But Lucky Plush went further. The dancers kept interrupting the story to ask the director questions about their roles. They ran out of the auditorium and back in. Yet then they would move into quite beautiful repetitions of dance sequences, as if to suggest that we always must return to the gestures, hints, clues, roles, and rituals that existing scripts, films, norms, and forms provide for us—indeed demand of us.

The Better Half, as its name suggests, was most of all an exploration of the assumptions that steer courtship. How do two people move from being strangers to becoming intimate? How do they do so by entering into existing narrative structures yet also resisting those structures? When does the mystery of intimacy emerge in all its glory, and how?

The play portrayed individuals in a couple as dancers playing actors trying to grasp their roles in an old film script. But the actual plot of the film was not important. It was merely in the background, dimmed by the spotlights on the transformations happening through the adaptation. The two main dancers, a man and woman assigned the role of a married couple, were like metal filaments with shifting charges: sometimes they polarized, sometimes they magnetized, at first they were utterly strange to each other, but eventually they connected, at the back corner of the stage, gleaming and glowing even in the darkness that surrounded them.

They had kissed awkwardly at first, testing each other out, feigning intimacy, pretending to be an established domestic couple when they knew they were not. Then, continuing the dance, they moved dizzily through farce, burlesque, melodrama, comedy, theater of cruelty, Brechtian exposition, cheesy postmodern pastiche, athletic movement, startling weirdness, and everything in between until it mattered not what they were supposed to do, only that they had done it. They adapted—and in doing so were changed for the better halves.

The Better Half: work-in-progress excerpts from Lucky Plush Productions on Vimeo.

Links:

• Lucky Plush Productions
• Gaslight

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