Let's Talk Bodies

Amidst all the Gaga fervor (which I obviously—and wholeheartedly—am helping spur on), other tremendous pop acts have been looked over. One of the greatest things happening in music this year is the release of three mini-albums by Swedish sensation Robyn. The albums, titled Body Talk pts. 1, 2, and 3, are being released every few months, at the rate that Robyn and her producers finish polishing new tracks. Parts 1 and 2 have already been released to much-deserved critical acclaim.

One of the aspects of this project I find particularly interesting is the theme reflected in the title: Body Talk. Despite this phrase, the lyrics of the songs on both albums make relatively few direct references to the body. Robyn’s songs, like so many other songs in the pop genre, are instead mostly about the trials of love/unrequited love and dancing.

Perhaps, though, that’s the key to the title: dancing. Robyn is obsessed with the club and, more importantly, obsessed with what happens in clubs. Namely, socializing. Socializing centered on the dancefloor (song titles include the likes of “Dancing On My Own,” “Dancehall Queen,” and “We Dance to the Beat”). And dancing is nothing else if not communication via the body. The socialization isn’t even really centered on dancing; the dancing is socialization. Dancing is a discourse. Dancing is literally body talk.

Perhaps, then, it makes sense that dance pop is a genre with such a strong female presence. Perhaps it makes sense that dance clubs are a staple of queer culture. Dancing is performative—it is a way to reclaim the body, and not be made a slave of it. French feminist Helene Cixous in her seminal essay (pun intended), “The Laugh of the Medusa” outlines some of the qualities of what would come to be called the “écriture féminine” (women’s writing). Cixous places a great deal of emphasis on the body and observes that a woman speaking publically, “doesn’t ‘speak’, she throws her trembling body forward. . . it's with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. . .she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body.” Perhaps, then, dancing is a permutation of the écriture féminine. It’s certainly freeing for many of these great pop artists: “Now what? 'ya jaw has dropped / Until the music stop / you know I still run this thing like a dancehall queen / I really don't want no hassle” Robyn boasts on “Dancehall Queen,” while on “None of Dem” she feels she wants to escape a town where “none of these beats ever break the law”—finding music worth dancing to is literally a matter of liberation.

The world of pop, in general, seems a place where feminist and queer expression can be very at home, as its equal emphasis on theatricality, music, fashion, dance, and performance make it a complex discourse that might be capable of thwarting certain aspects of patriarchal communication. Of course, major labels can corrupt all this, sometimes turning singers into public sex-slaves. But the savviest of the pop-icons brand themselves, literally turn themselves into cultural movements (think Gwen Stefani and her world of LAMB, or Gaga and her tight-knit community of Monsters), thereby wresting control from the system and speaking to us in new ways. They’re making the beats and dancing to them, they’re making the clothes and wearing them, and they’re staging the performances and putting them on.

“When the beat comes on, the girls all line up / And the boys all look, but no, they can't touch” Gwen Stefani sings in her now several-year-old hit single, “Wind It Up.” It’s a clear pronouncement of body ownership and a clever summation of certain third-wave feminist views. “I know he thinks you're fine and stuff / But does he know how to wind you up?” If he doesn’t, Gwen and the girls probably do, because they’re speaking an entirely different language.

The Old Soul of Lovely, Still: Nik Fackler

Age, time and memory are very much the looming concerns of Nik Fackler and his first film Lovely, Still. This independent gem was distributed in only fifty theaters in the U.S. and tells the story of Robert Malone (Martin Landau), a lonely old man who meets a woman named Mary (Ellen Burstyn). He soon finds himself caught up in a grand love story at an unlikely point in his life. Within the first few minutes of the film, the charming winter wonderland of Nebraska Christmas hugs and slowly pulls you into a warm holiday romance. By standard analysis, Lovely, Still arguably suffers from having no antagonist. This is easy to ignore thirty minutes into the film when the audience is completely immersed in the romance and the gripping performances of Burstyn and Landau. However, the film does fall into some of the same directorial debut problems as (500) Days of Summer, namely moments of overly flashy style as well as a kind of kitchen-sink psychological and generic approach. Nevertheless, it’s always heartening to see a young filmmaker with such passion and belief in the ways the craft can make people feel and think.

Nicole Elliot, Nik Fackler at Laemmle Music Box

Nik Fackler is as humble and charming as his first film, but more importantly, he maintains a child like sense of wonderment reminiscent of a small boy wearing his father's oversized tweed jacket. The biggest question for this incredibly young director is how he was able to get recognition at all. “It was sort of conditional, I mean for a long time no one would even read the script. I was really young. From seventeen to twenty, no one would even read it: agents, actors, anyone, so I finally stopped posting my age, and started hiding my age and then it was just getting the script to Martin’s agent and I think something we had on our side was that Martin didn’t get a lot of scripts where he was the leading man in this grand love story. So it kind of had the advantage to maybe have him pay attention to it. So he read it and then I get a call on the phone when I was like 22 or so, and they’re like we’re flying you to Los Angeles to meet Martin Landau, so get ready.  So I flew out there and was like, ok, I can’t mess this up. So I met him and we began to chat and we became friends and collaborated and he sent it to Ellen and then we started making the movie.”

If Lovely, Still is any indication of future projects, we can expect something akin to an already fine wine growing even more satisfying with a little more age. Perhaps the cork on Lovely, Still was popped too soon.

After the credits rolled at Laemmle Theatre on September 18th, a young Fackler, decked out in geek-chic threads with fashionably clashing patterns, strolled out to a modest audience, happy as a kid on a snow day. He generously offered himself to a gathering of senior citizen piranhas who perhaps wouldn't have bitten so quickly had he looked older.

There are two things working for Fackler besides the obvious talent and oozing creativity. One is luck. The other is memory, not to be mistaken for grand wisdom because of the aged characters. Fackler and his film exude nostalgia and longing for youthful warmth, tucked away deep in our minds and surrounded by the cold truths that layer and harden us over the years. “I don’t know, I was just kind of writing from the heart, I was just trying to be really honest about what I was going through and not try to be age specific about it.  I found through existence that we all have a lot in common in our feelings and emotions. I was waiting tables at my parent’s diner in Omaha and I met this old man who had been alone all his life; he had never been married or even had a girlfriend and I’m like, wow, this guy just hasn’t had these feelings that I’m feeling and I was captivated by this man and that was sort of the genesis of the story.”

Fackler proved that young Hollywood could artistically succeed without following trending topics. We need independent voices that make us feel something human. Fackler has added another work that helps restore how viscerally, passionately and nervously whole the celluloid strip can make us feel. May Lovely, Still be his northern star.

You Are What You Wear: Paglia, Gaga, Sex, and Identity

Recently, esteemed cultural critic Camille Paglia declared that pop icon Lady Gaga heralded the death of sex. And you know, Paglia may be right, though not in the way she thinks.

Paglia is a talented writer and critic, and honestly, much of her reading of Gaga was spot on. The conclusions she draws from her reading of Gaga’s performance, though, are baffling to say the least. Paglia wants us to believe Gaga is a sexual regression when compared to the likes of early Madonna, but it is Paglia’s own pronouncements about sexuality that ultimately come off as regressive.

At one point she complains that “Gaga isn’t sexy at all—she’s like a gangly marionette or a plasticized android.” The problem with this complaint is that what follows the m-dash doesn’t in any way clarify or provide evidence for the assertion that precedes it. Is there something inherently un-erotic about marionettes or androids? Large swaths of otaku culture beg to differ. Later, Paglia has the audacity to declare that Gaga’s trip to a gym in fishnets and a bustier “isn’t sexy—it’s sexually dysfunctional.” A comment meant to provoke, it instead induces an eye roll. Really? That’s what you want to call sexual dysfunction? “Sexually dysfunctional” is such a slippery and loaded term, and Paglia’s blithe use of it is surely an emptier provocation than any of Gaga’s.

Paglia makes other sharp observations—namely, that Gaga is a liar, that everything about Gaga’s life is scripted and “over-conceptualized,” and that she is a “ruthless recycler.” All true. All obvious statements. All part of the point. And so why are these things bad? It’s never made particularly clear; we’re simply meant to take for granted that artistic recycling is bad.

Lady Gaga is a postmodern icon. She is a living, breathing bricolage. Lady Gaga is a calculated persona, though she would deny this. She is collected bits of music and fashion. She is a series of precisely planned catwalk poses. She is, as Paglia puts it, a “manufactured” persona. But what is important is that she is self-manufactured.

Yes, yes; it’s true: Gaga has the help of a major label and the media. But it’s clear that, as much as any celebrity can be, as any individual can be, Gaga is just that—an individual. She is independent. It’s certainly not her label’s idea to have her parade around in full drag queen regalia, fanning the flames of rumors that she’s actually a man. It’s not her label’s idea to have her posing as a man for Vogue Hommes in Japan. It’s not her label’s idea to have her photographed wearing a Philip Treacy bejeweled crustacean. These are things so far removed from the traditional sexual signifiers pop music deals in (perhaps the signifiers Paglia still wished it was trafficking in), that it’s clear these are Gaga’s decisions.

As for the media, well, Gaga plays it far more than it plays her. Details about her private life end up splashed in the tabloids far less than other much less famous celebs. And this is precisely because Gaga has successfully dissolved the private/public dichotomy. Lady Gaga is a persona, but, then again, so is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

Paglia also notes that, having been on near continuous tour, Gaga has made herself “a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny.” Here, Paglia’s reading actually falls a bit short. Her observation is correct, but she stops too soon: Gaga’s aesthetic has also evolved so rapidly that she has been impossible to pin down. It’s all wrapped up in her self-given name—Gaga. An homage to Queen, but, at the same time, childish gibberish, a phrase and name devoid of specific denotation, bestowed with only the meaning she gives it.

All this is to say, where perhaps early Madonna was a crucial feminist icon, Gaga proves to be perhaps the quintessential queer icon. Her identity is a gleeful performance and she is not one Gaga, but many. Just as we are not one self, but selves. Our corporeal form is misleading. It gives the appearance of unity (though even this breaks down on a cellular and atomic level), but we all know that we struggle daily to know ourselves. We struggle to process all the different facets there are that make us up.

What Gaga teaches us is that we’re all performers in our own ways. To look for our “authentic” self, to look for some essence that makes us, us, may prove futile. Instead, to live authentically, perhaps what we must do is authentically wear our facades. To fashion our facades as we see fit. To self-manufacture. To self-actualize. This is the queer goal—labels are reductive, they are society’s and tradition’s attempt to manufacture us. To place us in neat boxes.

Paglia once wrote that “feminism says ‘no more masks.’ Madonna says we are nothing but masks.” Certainly, it seems clear this is a message even closer to Gaga’s heart, but I’ll give Paglia this one. Still, Gaga takes it further, because who has ever worn the masks with more glee and more fervor than Gaga? Maybe Madonna did teach us that we’re all but masks; Gaga reassures us, once and for all, that that needn’t be an empty or terrifying revelation. You are what you wear. You are that mask, and that’s a joyous thing.

So does Gaga herald the death of sex? Perhaps what she really heralds is the death of sexuality as most currently conceive of it. She is not un-erotic, but rather, she asks us to redefine that term, to find multiple eroticisms. She asks us to be the million indefinable things that we are. We are all indefinable. We are all untranslatable. We are all gaga. We just don’t all know it yet.

-Article from contributing writer Michael Ward.

Whole Arts

More and more, art is cannibalizing itself in order to create something new. More specifically, the creators of mainstream arts are combining elements of pre-existing media with current trends in an attempt to come up with a hybrid so bastardized from its original forms that no one will notice. Even worse still, that no one will care.

Take for example the recent Internet sensation, the Bed Intruder Song. For those who don’t know the origins of the song, I will explain. Briefly. A news story about a man who broke into a woman’s house at night and tried to rape her, but was scared off by her brother, who rushed in to help, aired on WAFF in Huntsville, Alabama. Antoine Dodson, the brother, is shown warning fellow citizens to hide their kids and hide their wives while threatening that the perpetrator will be found. Of course, auto-tuned sound bites from this news story made perfect fodder for a hit pop song.

This sort of post-modern pop phenomenon is the equivalent of multi-processed food. Think about it: what are the whole sources of the Bed Intruder Song? First we have the news story from WAFF. The news story itself is a conglomeration of two whole parts, those being the original source video and audio. The Bed Intruder Song lifts the audio from the news story, divorcing it from its original context, adds auto-tune and finally cuts and pastes the sound bites in anachronistic order. As if that wasn’t enough, synthesized instruments are added to create a heavily processed and manipulated art, one several layers removed from its elements’ singular, whole sources.

Like processed food, processed arts are full of empty calories: they have no inherent meaning or value. Will anyone remember the Bed Intruder Song in a year? I don’t think so. The art that is remembered has value and meaning, and that is because it is made from whole sources. The Mona Lisa is made of a canvas and paint, neither of which held a context before they were put together. That is the key difference: whole arts divided into their elements lose all contexts. They are pure and powerful. I posit a return to whole arts.

Contemporary Realism and the Movies

Hitchcock's "Marnie" is a beautiful film to watch in the first few rows of a packed house: heads turn from left to right as Tippi Hedron rides her horse, Forio, from one side of the gargantuan screen to the next. I watched a clip of Marnie on an iPhone once, excited at the prospect of seeing Marnie anytime, anywhere, however the miniscule screen only partially achieved the traditional moviegoing experience. Well written scripts, by their nature, long for transformation to expansive screens attended by a packed audience but in the golden age of living from small screen to tiny screen, the well-written script may have to settle for netbook residency. 

The way we "go" to the movies has changed but the language remains in tact. From the advent of home box offices, higher resolution computer screens, and high performance smart phones coupled with higher admission costs, moviegoers have forged new spaces for watching movies. This mobile telepresence challenges what it means to go to the movies. 

The movie theater's crisis is, interestingly enough, parralled in this summer's Christopher Nolan film "Inception," which explores one man's journey through dream states to retrieve information and overcome his past. Along the way, he, Mr. Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio), must maintain the discrepancy between reality and dream states. A danger to Cobb's profession is pulling yourself from a dream state where you are the sole architect of your space, free to design buildings, bridges or cafes. Inception posits life is easier in a dream state because every construction and application is a direct product of the mind and the only reality of this new world is that it's not reality. Just as it is imperative for the characters to focus exclusively on the careful design of these alternate states of being, we the audience are are focused exclusively on this world too, and it goes without saying that we must be in order to keep up.  As a result, the film sacrifices personal touches of character for the sake of style and design.

Like Inception, we are beginning to live outside of a reality we have always known for the sake of design, exclusively, but not limited to, the movies.  This is evidenced through the way we communicate; we exchanged face to face conversation for the telephone and the telephone for texting, instant messaging, Facebook, My Space and Twitter. Before the internet became a place for public diary entries, living on a screen used to signify privacy: a place to keep private information, well, private. The screen is a place to come to life, socialize, make friends, have fun, learn and exist. It has become a place in reality for both socializing and entertainment. Francois Truffaut famously spoke, "Quand on aime la vie, on va au cinema," but today when one loves life, one pushes a button. Going to the movies means gathering around a Macbook Pro with a 17 inch screen, 3-D televison sets, iPhones and tablets, home entertainment systems and even watching a movie via Skype with friends in Chicago while you're in New York. This is a semiological check point in moveigoing history and, like Inception, this idea of "existing" in a cyber world is fascinating but comes at the cost of more personal and stimulating real world interactions. 

Size does matter when it pertains to a movie screen. Whether you're watching the Ozark mountain world of Winter's Bone or the penis hungry predatory fish of Pirahna 3-D (spoiler alert), the visceral reactions that theatre screens promises are not matched in any gratifying or interesting way by an iPhone. Audiences never laugh louder, cry harder or jolt further from their seats than in the presence of other people at a movie theatre. Cinema is a shared art unlike a painting or poem that can be purchased by a single collector and admired. Film needs audiences and nothing compares to laughing out loud with a packed house and sharing in poignant onscreen moments. When Wes Craven's Scream franchise ripped through theatres, houses were packed with teens in the long white ghoulish masks and everytime someone was stabbed, audiences screamed together in a way they never would have at home alone. At the end of this summer's third installment of Toy Story, both kids and adults wept as Andy gave up his toys. This is all part of the "movie going" experience, one that doesn't require a data plan.

If one visits some of the great theatres in the United States, from the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles to the Cinematheque on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn, even The Neon in Dayton, Ohio, they will find that these theatres feel like a shrine to the event moviegoing used to be: before megaplexes became the equivilent of state fairs and audiences carved a niche elsewhere. I attended Rob Reiner's latest, "Flipped", at the Laemmle Music Hall theatre on opening weekend with no more than ten other people. The red carpets and old seats of the marquee were bittersweet; the once public realm of moviegoing felt like more of a pilgrammage to something lost.

Were he here, Hitchcock could see how his works exist on screens he couldn't have imagined. As he often said, "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." Well Alfred, they are. 

Welcome

First and foremost, welcome to The PostMod. We believe in embracing a new generation of artists and academics, as well as the idea of sharing in the future in a responsible and resourceful manner. We are a space dedicated to observing and commenting on the ways we view art, politics, history and consumerism from the point of view of a new academic wave in American youth culture, in hopes of spurring further discourse in all areas. We hope to create popular, accessible and insightful dialogue about where we are and where we are going.  We look forward to capturing the budding voices of young theoreticians, artists, critics and writers in their chosen fields through reviews, interviews and internet video. 

In addition, as we are a collaborative site, we readily welcome new contributors. Feel free to submit a piece that is 800 words or less on anything in the world of the arts, politics or culture, while making sure to tell us a little about yourself. You can contact us at thepostmod@gmail.com.

The PostMod is a site run out of Beverly Hills, California, by three writers. We will have many new voices and intriguing topics in the upcoming weeks so we hope you check in often. 

-The Staff