The Somnambulist's Diary #5

In the dream, my sister and I are traveling through a dream version of Italy. It is a very specific place with stable, dream contours and familiar monuments: a cobblestone square next to a small canal. We quickly leave this familiar part of the world for a series of country roads, like the outskirts of Parma. While the streets are unpaved, there are modern-looking houses lining them and small fields full of wheat or grapes can be glimpsed between them. As it begins to get late, my sister and I stop at a hostel, though it looks like a large mansion.

Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.

The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.

I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.

The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.

My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.

Shadows in the Noonday Glare

Given its mythic importance in my mind (as the birthplace of my grandmother and the cultural center of the part of my heritage with which I most strongly identify) I never had a very clear image in my head of Mexico City. 

The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected. 

The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.

The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides.  Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees. 

And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees. 

This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there. 

As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on. 

I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself. 

Infinite Possibilities and Narrative Entropy

I just finished Bioshock: Infinite to mixed results. This whole thing is full of spoilers for those of you who haven't finished it so I suppose that you should stop reading if you intend to play it.

One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.

Bioshock's newest entry takes place in 1912 aboard the floating city of Colombia, a monument to late 19th century spiritualism and American Exceptionalism. Led by a mad prophet cast in the mold of Dwight Moody and Mary Baker Eddy, the society presented in the game takes on some of our core beliefs as Americans and does a decent, if ham-fisted job of making American players uncomfortable with the sins of the society they emerged from. That's fair and par for the course. The most revolutionary thing about Bioshock games from a story-telling standpoint is its willingness to make America the badguy. Both Rapture and Colombia are presented as splinter states, but they distinctly American dystopias, not just fueled by our history but by the rhetorical assumptions that we are somehow special.

The Objectivism of the first game is easy to sell as destructive and problematic. Though Ayn Rand maintains a devoted following in some circles, her theories are generally accepted to be a pitifully simplistic fantasy, attempting to justify greed as a moral imperative. It's harder to justify American exceptionalism as toxic  and the game settles on fin-de-siecle racism as the symptoms of its disease. There is no room for people of color or the Irish in Colombia and the game showcases a lot of uncomfortable, racist propaganda to prove just how awful a place the city is. Case in point, the images to the right:

Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.

Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.

Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.

In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.

From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.

As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.

Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.

The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.

And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.

Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the  politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.

The Somnambulist's Diary IV

My dreams have a false but recognizable geography to them. The street I grew up on figures heavily in many of them and the surrounding neighborhood, skewed by dream logic repeats from dream to dream. Some three blocks down the street from my own block, my dreams consistently feature a dark wood paneled restaurant with hotel rooms above them. No such place existed near my house nor ever did but it is consistently there. So too is a house near the end of the cul-de-sac, always abandoned, always dusty and furnitureless with naked wooden beams, worn and pocked by termites. I mention this because my dream last night featured this stable but non existent neighborhood--a shadow of the Walnut Acres in which I grew up. And the feeling of the unheimlische, not just within the dream, but outside it, is important.

I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.

A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.

I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."

I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.

The Somnambulist's Diary #3

I dreamt, last night, that I was on a snowy promontory, surrounded by men dressed in furs and patchwork armor. We are fending off something horrible that is lurking in the surrounding woods. There are horrid footprints with three toes all around the promontory and I see three of them dragging a sledge on which is the forward half of a bear, frozen intestines dragging behind it. We check its feet but the bear has four toes, not three.

I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.

When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.

So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.

We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches  mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.

It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.

My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.

As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration  or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.

My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.

So this is Christmas?

I should be clear upfront: I hate that John Lennon song. In fact, I hate the vast majority of Christmas Carols written after 1950, and most genre covers of the ones written before (read: an R&B version of Baby it's Cold Outside, cough cough, Vanessa Williams, cough cough). In fact it was my dismay at the idea that my hatred for most Christmas music that inspired this blog.

I should also be clear: I am not one of those people that hates (or even merely tolerates) Christmas music generally. I love it. During December, my radio station is tuned to KOST, Los Angeles' own easy listening drivel factory which goes all out with Christmas jungles from Thanksgiving to New Years. I will defend the importance of Christmas music to the death. But it is in increasingly narrow band of it that I bother to listen to and it got me thinking about Christmas and it's personal meaning and whether or not I had tapped into something larger or was just recapitulating every meaning of Christmas cliche blah blah blah.

All Christmases are pastoral: mis-remembered, idealized versions of some distant, indistinct childhood Christmas, now longed for but unrepeatable. My own unachievable Christmas is a conglomeration of the celebrations between four and seven: old enough for me to remember my parents together, young enough to believe in Santa Claus, consistent enough to seem like an immutable tradition. 

It is probably all related to my dad's attachment to Santa Claus. My family is not at all religious (my sister and I were raised as secular humanists by ex-Catholic parents) and Santa was one of the few nods to any kind of spiritual understanding of the world. My father and mother went all out with the tradition of his visits: thethank you note for cookies and milk written in flowery script, jingling sleigh bells on our roof, presents from Santa wrapped exquisitely in rich, velvety paper with pine nettles and holly sprigs. This was supplemented by an obsession with Alden Perkes' The Santa Claus Book, a kids primer on Santa that included daily routines, floor plans for his North Pole Compound and (my personal favorite) a slightly terrifying anthropological record of the various sub-species of elves (the ancient Egyptian Cyclops Elf was particularly frightening to me).

We did not have a specific family mythology of Santa Claus. The Alden Perkes book made for a good foundation, but it did not map directly on to anything I knew from other media sources. Santa Claus was not St. Nicholas, nor was he the Archbishop of Spain, or even the Clement Clark Moore Santa who rode in a red sleigh, finger on his nose etc. He was, if anything, closest the Santa Claus envisioned by L. Frank Baum in his 1902 novella, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I never read the novella but I was enraptured by Rankin and Bass' 1985 claymation version. In it, Santa is raised by fictional pagan gods and faeries and sent into the world with the desire to improve the lot of his fellow mortals. He is rewarded by the gods with the mantle of immortality that transforms him into a woodland spirit who can deliver toys to children through the ages of eternity.

I haven't really ever settled on what vision of this Santa is. He is vaguely Germanic or Scandanavian, not un-related to Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a feral spirit, living in the deep snowy woods, dressed in green, swaddled in furs, sometimes adorned with antlers or a wreath of candles and holly. He is not a fearful figure, but he is not entirely of this world. The toy-delivery thing often gets lost in the shuffle. He is a manifestation of my fantasy of woodland winters: of the space of light and homely hearths that is nestled in a cabin, snowed in by monstrous drifts. I suppose, in that way, it parallels the christian spirit of Christmas  out of dark times comes the brightest light etc etc. It's really an antler based thing for me, however.

Psychologically, I am sure that this somehow is a need for the safety  of my family, unbroken by divorce. I transplant the wholeness of the house to the image of a space of comfort holding out against the cold, snowy darkness without. But it exists, in a very real way, outside of that need. My parents, after all, spend Christmas together now. The need to create a fantasy space is gone. But the fantasy is too powerful not to endure.

Perhaps that is why I throw a yearly "Victorian Gothic Christmas." It's an attempt to aesthetically reconcile that childhood Christmas with an adult, non-saccharin celebration of the holiday. In bringing out the holiday's intrinsic darkness, perhaps we can summon an evening of light, even light phrased as drunken debauch.

My dad and I recently, independently heard a story on This American Life wherein a family takes this kind of care and concern for perpetuating the Santa myth to a somewhat distressing extreme. My dad apologized to me after listening, fearing he had done the same to me. I listened to it thinking "there is no way I won't turn into that father."  

Christmas isn't a religious conviction. It is not a space to reconnect with family. It is a set of aesthetic imperatives, to stand against the oncoming dark and live.

Oh What a Shame

It's been a while. I've been thinking a lot about Ke$ha lately. Actually for years.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely unabashed love of pop music. Over the years I have tried to make it into some grandiose statement about engagement with the cultural zeitgeist: oh Pop music is like Kundera's definition of kitsch, oh pop music is the end point of a vast alchemy that transmute incoherent emotion into something tangible--an anthem of consistent, relatable feeling. It's likely that all of it is bullshit and I mostly like listening to easy, un-challenging music. But with Ke$ha (whose spelling of choice is such an elegant solution to the Prince problem) I feel some kind of uber-connection. I should explain, first of all, that I am kind of a prude. Not in terms of my behavior which has occasionally detoured pretty heavily into vice-alley. But those behaviors are marked with a huge amount of self-loathing and a too-perceptible judgement of others. I am my own worst slut-shamer. I'm not proud of it. Consider this blog an apology.

But with Ke$ha... there is something in her complete indulgence in trash that transports me. She's not adjectivally trashy, she is trashiness: primally trashy. Ur-trash. And I admit, I get a guilty buzz out of it. But I also think it's more than that. So, without further ado, here is my analysis, for better or for worse of her newest single: "Die Young." Here is the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA

We are a culture of binaries and the club party / loser square binary usually associates the former with wild hedonism, abandon, freedom, and meaninglessness. It's a passionate defense of nihilism, usually. We're doing this because we can, because it's fun and because none of it matters. Monogamy is tyranny. Fidelity is a curse. Sobriety is a fiction. As a result, I am surprised to find that "Die Young" is, essentially, a desperate search for connection in a world of uncertain signifiers and painful brevity.

 Let's start with the opening lines (which happen to be the chorus):
 "I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums./
Oh what a shame that you came here with someone./
So while you're hear in my arms,/
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young."

 It's not, on the surface, such a strange message. She is hardly the first artist to make the point that dying young is preferable to growing old. Alphaville did quite a good job of that twenty-five or so years previously. What is worth paying attention to here is the recognition of the club being a liminal space. In previous songs, Ke$ha expresses her hedonism not as a patronage but as a lifestyle. Who can forget that she "brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack" in her first big hit. Here however there are some spatial and temporal limitations. She recognizes that her would-be lover "came here with someone" and, even more importantly, she characterizes it as "a shame." The narrative turns on the idea that their time is limited. Those limitations have everything to do with the world outside the club. The "someone" that the object of the narrator's affection came with is never defined. Perhaps it is a girlfriend, or a wife or just a date. She spells doom for the narrator's ambitions. Whatever moment of connection is being posited must, by necessity, end--maybe even at the end of the song. Rather than being a lament for the things that cannot last, Ke$ha proposes that they exist fully within the limited venue provided them by fate. "So while you're hear in my arms, let' make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," she says. The listener must be most struck by the desperation in the line (the crux of my argument here). Given that the exploration of their attraction must entirely exist within the confines of the dance, Ke$ha imagines that only death waits on the other side of that embrace. To imagine a life where her would-be lover returns to the person he arrived with is to imagine an abyss. Unlike most songs touting the virtues of youth and dying before one ages, this is a plea enjoying that which is limited and unsustainable. 

The cynics among us may want to characterize these lines as a reinforcement of the easy-hedonism that characterizes most of the Ke$ha canon. Reading the "while you're here in my arms" line as something more akin to "Let's grope before your girlfriend gets mad." There is certainly some evidence for this reading. The first verse states, quite clearly:

"Young hearts, out our minds,/
Runnin' like we outta time./
Wild childs lookin' good./
Livin' hard just like we should./
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up. (You Know)/
That magic that we got nobody can touch. (For sure!)"

 Essentially, this relationship, because it occurs in a public space, must be shameless and, in it's shamelessness meaningless. The cynic wants to read "don't care who's watching" as a lurid, voyeuristic invitation. They are wild children whose mid-club coupling is only the basest expression of a feral lust.

 As I said, validity in the above-reading and certainly in-line with Ke$ha's previous expressions of a world of endless hedonism. I would like to focus in on the second and final verse, however.

 "Young hunks taking shots,/
Stripping down to dirty socks./
Music up, gettin' hot,/
Kiss me, give me all you've got./
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush. (you know)/
That magic in your pants is making me blush. (for sure)"

 It's a rather stark denial of expectations. Ke$ha gives us a world of typical club sexuality: free-flowing alcohol, removal of clothing (note the double entendre in the use of the word "dirty"), a crescendo of libidinous music and actual physical contact. When we get to the final couplet, however, we see a hint of something unexpected. Though the couplet primarily treats on her lover's erection, she ends the line with the assertion that his physical arousal is "making [her] blush." Despite the claustrophobic sexuality all around them and her previous assertion of the public nature of their coupling, the most intimate moment of possibility--the recognition of his actual sexual capability, transforming desire into action--is rendered as innocent. The narrator blushes at his arousal. She is caught off guard by the revelation that their desire could be made manifest. Though the entire tableau is Dionysiac and debauched, at its core is a kernel of un-jaded, unexpressed erotic exploration that can still cause the "wild child" to "blush."

 This moment is quickly drowned out by another stanza in which she asserts:

 "Looking for some trouble tonight. (Yeah?)/
Take my hand i'll show you the wild side,/
Like it's the last night of our lives. (Uh huh)/
We'll keep dancing till we die."

 The narrator goes back to playing the role of half-feral seductress, perhaps as an overcompensation for the discomfort experienced in realizing she still had the capacity to experience sexuality in a way that wasn't constructed by the jaundiced eye of the club environs. She describes her lover as a source of "trouble" and her purview as being "the wild side." I see it as Ke$ha's attempt to defend against the critic that is made uncomfortable by her expressed discomfort. Again, death becomes the only viable way out of the situation. Though she employs a simile at first, "Like it's the last night of our lives," she quickly turns it into metaphoric call to action, "we'll keep dancing 'till we die." The line is repeated in ghostly echoes several times "die young, die young." By the end, it is not even a request, it is a command. Dying young is not, like Alphaville professes, the answer to the indignities of ageing, it is the only way make the impermanent eternal.

 We then return to the chorus which is repeated, sometimes even layering over itself in the lines' desire to be spoken. It is a shame. A shame that a world outside the club even exists. The music will stop and the narrator and her lover will have to part ways, he must go back to the "someone" he came with. She must accept that this return to blissful, erotic innocence must end. She will again become one of the jaded, shot-taking dancers, stripped "down to dirty socks" and unable to blush at the "magic" in the pants of her next partner. In a situation like this, clearly death begins to look attractive.

 The genre of trashy club songs relies upon the amorality (but not the immortality) of it's protagonists. They are lost in a world of drink and drug-addled hedonism that removes any culpability for the impulsive actions of a moment. Ke$ha has presented her heroines as mindlessly cruel pleasure seekers who cannot be blamed for their fickle affections because they are unable to be any different than their environs demand. But in this song, there is a profound vulnerability. It is not only the cuckold and his/her partner that suffers. The temptress/cad is shown to exist in a world of impermanent objects and desires that do not change because they are hollow. Rather, these desires change because they must--because they are acted on by outside forces. Ke$ha is the abandoned, even in the center of her own comfortably careless milieu. Those things that cannot last, despite their erotic intensity and exploratory innocence, take their toll. Better to die before the music stops than to continue in such an endlessly ephemeral vein.

 Brava, Ke$ha! You seemlessly blend the ribald with the poignant and yes: it is a shame that you came here with someone.