Michael White, writing in the NYTimes on March 13, had one entirely accurate thing to say about the new Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production, in English, of Kurt Weill's masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), which I saw yesterday afternoon at Symphony Space as part of the National Theatre (not exactly, but that's perfectly okay) Live broadcast series: "This is a piece whose chronicling of modern life is so exact, it functions more like reportage than reimagining."
I count this as my sixth Mahagonny (eighth, if you include audio recordings). It's an enormously difficult piece to pull off, and reviewers of it, and much of Weill's work (or Brecht's, for that matter), tend toward expressing disappointment that what they're seeing is not the perfect production they seek, it seems. White does the same, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, instead of appreciating how far and how well a production actually gets it right, and thus turns away potential audiences from this hugely important work.
Every performance is different, of course, so I did not see the particular one reviewed here. Former ingenue, von Otter was wonderful, cold, laser-sharp focused, and frightening as the Widow Begbick, foundress of the pleasure town, Mahagonny, and the rest of the cast was quite strong. The production starts small and grows progressively lavish--if "lavish" includes scores of shipping containers stacked to a horizon-obliterating height--with clever, cutting edge projection effects. The first act showed the most exciting--I mean, riveting--account I've ever seen of this opera. But what blew me away the most was how clearly America (and the world) has turned into Mahagonny. "Prescient" doesn't come close to describing the alignment between what late Capitalism has accomplished--and continues to do so--and the savage world-critique, the weltanschauung-critique, Weill and Brecht fashioned, which still seemed bizarre and off-putting to me a handful of years ago, and now reads like an aesthetically-heightened newspaper, with some of the most gorgeous, thrilling music ever composed for an opera stage.
From the classic, 1970s, DG recording by David Atherton and the London Sinfonietta, these are two of my favorite pieces ever and come from Kurt Weill's Das Berliner Requiem (1929), a cantata setting of poems by Bertolt Brecht, which itself, more than anything else, is about the German experience of the aftermath of World War I. As you will see....
As it is ever inappropriate to divorce the salt and pepper at the dinner table, I refuse to divorce the first Bericht, or Report, from the second, in this truly incredible one-two punch (a dreadful pun, here) of Weill-Brecht, in this strange and beguiling, this deeply upsetting and unsettling, this compelling piece. Its ferocity may surprise you. And so, first, The First Report on the Unknown Soldier under the Triumphal Arch. All translations, which follow Brecht's original German, are mine, flaws and all.
IV. Erster Bericht über den Unbekannten Soldaten unter dem Triumphbogen Wir kamen von den Gebirgen und vom Weltmeer, Um ihn zu erschlagen. Wir fingen ihn mit Stricken, langend Von Moskau bis zur Stadt Marseille Und stellten auf Kanonen, ihn erreichend An jedem Punkt, wo er hinfliehen konnte, Wenn er uns sah. Wir versammelten uns vier Jahre lang, Legten nieder unsere Arbeit und standen In den zerfallenen Städten, uns zurufend in vielen Sprachen Von den Gebirgen bis zum Weltmeer, Wo er sei. So erschlugen wir ihn im vierten Jahr. Dabei waren, Die er war geboren zu sehn Um sich stehend zur Zeit seines Todes: Wir alle. Und dabei war eine Frau, die ihn geboren hatte Und die geschwiegen hatte, als wir ihn holten. Der Schoß sei ihr ausgerissen, Amen! Als sie ihn aber erschlagen hatten, Richteten wir ihn zu, dass er sein Gesicht verlor Durch die Spuren unsrer Fäuste. So machten wir ihn unkenntlich, Dass er keines Menschen Sohn mehr sei. Und gruben ihn aus unter dem Erz, Trugen ihn heim in unsere Stadt und Begruben ihn unter dem Stein, und zwar unter einem Bogen, genannt Bogen des Triumphs, Welcher wog tausend Zentner, dass Der Unbekannte Soldat Keinesfalls aufstünde am Tag des Gerichts Und unkenntlich Wandelte vor Gott, Dennoch wieder im Licht Und bezeichnete uns Kenntliche Zur Gerechtigkeit.
IV. First Report on the Unknown Soldier under the Triumphal Arch
We came
from the mountains
and the oceans,
To strike him dead.
We caught him with ropes, strung
From Moscow to the city of Marseille
And aimed cannon, so as to reach him
At any point
to where he should flee,
When he saw us.
We gathered for four years,
Laid down our work
and were
In the ruined cities,
calling to each other in many languages,
From the mountains to the oceans,
Where he was.
So we killed him in the fourth year.
It was to be
That he was born to see
Standing before him at the time of his death:
All of us.
And there was the woman who bore him
And who was silent when we got him.
Let her cunt be ripped out.
Amen!
And when we had slain him,
We turned on him so that he lost his face
Through the traces
of our fists.
So we made him unrecognizable,
That he was no man's son, anymore.
And dug him out
from under the steel,
Carried him home
to our city and
Buried him under the stone,
and indeed under an arch,
called the
Arch of Triumph,
Which weighed a thousand talents, so that
The unknown soldier
Under no circumstances
should rise on Judgment Day
and, unrecognizable,
Walk before God,
Yet again in the light
And call us the knowable
To justice.
Great poem: Bertolt Brecht, 1919 Serviceable translation: Attributed to L. Steve Schmersal, November 2014
The reason I am thinking about this now--and writing about it at all, here--is because this second (or fifth) movement, this Bericht, this Report, this recitative, this solo, sung, here, by the wonderful Benjamin Luxon, is sung almost entirely over a Hammond organ, and my friend, the composer, Gordon Beeferman, has just acquired a Hammond, which required me to regale him about this piece for not a little while. Gordon, I write this for you.
In Settling the Score, Ned Rorem writes about how some composers are constitutionally fast or slow (off-topic, but I feel the need to share, Rorem also says that one can hear Weill in Bach but not the other way round--a fascinating and paradoxical assertion) and that Weill is of the fast variety, that even in his slow music you hear the stillness of atoms spinning, spinning, spinning.
This observation is nowhere more legible than in his setting of Brecht's great poem to--or "report on" but always very much report to--the Unknown Soldier, in which Weill makes the Hammond sound like a squeezebox, devolving, dissolving in its own solution, into a single note repeated figure before the woodwinds take over. The suspense of the stillness of atoms spinning. The master at work.
Rorem also suggests Britten's War Requiem owes a certain allegiance to this uncategorizable, ineffable, nearly inscrutable work. Don't think. Just ride the sounds and the meanings dissolving into sounds, vocabularies, and histories to which we have almost no real access, except through imagination. Just try to be quiet. Amen!
V. Zweiter Bericht über den Unbekannten Soldaten unter dem Triumphbogen Alles, was ich euch sagte Über Ermordung und Tod des Unbekannten Soldaten Und die Verwüstung seines Gesichts, Auch was ich euch sagte über die Bemühung seiner Mörder, Ihn zu hindern am Wiederkommen, Ist wahr. Aber er kommt nicht wieder Sein Gesicht war lebendig wie das eure, Bis es zerschmettert wurde und nicht mehr war. Und er ward Nicht mehr gesehen auf dieser Welt, Weder ganz noch zerschmettert, Weder heute noch am Ende der Tage Und sein Mund Wird nicht reden am Jüngsten Gericht. Es wird kein Gericht sein, Sondern euer Bruder Ist tot und tot ist der Stein über ihm, Und ich bedaure Jeglichen Hohn, und ziehe zurück meine Klage. Aber ich bitte euch, da ihr ihn Nun einmal erschlagen habt, Still! Fangt nicht von neuen an Zu streiten, da er doch tot ist. Aber doch bitte ich, da ihr ihn also Erschlagen habt: Entfernt wenigstens Den Stein über ihm, Denn dieses Triumphgeheul Ist doch nicht nötig und macht Mir Kummer, denn mich, Der ich den Erschlagenen Schon vergessen hatte, erinnert er Täglich an euch, die ihr noch Lebt, und die ihr Immer noch nicht erschlagen seid. Warum denn nicht?
V. Second Report on the Unknown Soldier under the Triumphal Arch
Everything
I told you
About the murder and death
of the Unknown Soldier
And the devastation
of his face,
Also what I told you about the effort of his murderers,
To prevent him from coming back,
Is true.
But
he will not come back
His face was alive like yours,
Until it was broken, and was no more.
And he was
Not seen in this world,
Neither whole nor crushed,
Neither today nor at the End of Days,
And his mouth
Will not speak
on the Day of Judgment.
There will be no judgment,
But
your
brother
Is dead
and dead
is the stone
above him,
And I regret
Any scorn,
and withdraw
my complaint.
But I ask you,
because now that
You have slain him:
Quiet!
Do not start anew
To argue, because he is dead.
But I ask, because you
Have so slain him:
Remove, at least,
The stone above him,
For this howl of triumph
Is unnecessary and makes
Great sorrow
for me,
The one
who had the slain man
Forgotten, it reminds
Me daily
of you
who still
Live, and who
Have still
not been
killed.
Why
not?
Great poem: Bertolt Brecht, 1919 Serviceable translation: Attributed to L. Steve Schmersal, November 2014
Paul Celan is probably the most important poet of the post-war generation working in German. He takes on Rilke and Brecht on a regular basis, and Goethe, and turns them inside out. Paul Antschel was born a Jew in Romania in 1920, his parents were murdered in the Shoah (aka The Holocaust), and he spent the rest of his life, mostly in Paris, writing some of the most significant poems ever produced in German. His Mother-Tongue was the language of the murderer, yet he continued to explore the rich history and possibilities of this wonderful language, pushing the boundaries of language and meaning as far as he could, to a place that many cannot follow. His desire to write in German is both a contradiction, as such, and a resistance to that force of death that the Nazis brought so powerfully to what we call Germany and the German language. This is the place of poetry. He drowned himself in the Seine in 1970. I do not blame him.
I have waited at least twenty years to even attempt any translation of his work. It is a very difficult work and among the most worthwhile in the world of poetry--that least understood and disappearing genre of letters. There never was and there never will be again an artist of the kind, calibre, depth of feeling, and depth of thoughtfulness that we find in Paul Celan nee Antschel.
I humbly present these well-intentioned attempts to bring Celan out in any kind of English. Please forgive me. Please, forgive me.
CORONA
by Paul Celan (b. 23 November 1920)
Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
the time goes back into its shell.
In the mirror is Sunday,
in dream will be sleeping,
the mouth speaks true.
My eye descends to the sex of the beloved:
we look at each other,
we speak darkness,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in seashells,
like the sea in the bloodshine of the moon.
We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time that the stone tried to bloom,
that unrest had a heartbeat.
It is time that it is time.
It is time.
Translation attributed to L. Steve Schmersal, May 2014
CORONA
Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.
Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:
die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.
Im Spiegel ist Sonntag,
im Traum wird geschlafen,
der Mund redet wahr.
Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten:
wir sehen uns an,
wir sagen uns Dunkles,
wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis,
wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln,
wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.
Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße:
es ist Zeit, daß man weiß!
Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt,
daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.
Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird.
Es ist Zeit.
*** *** *** *** ***
PSALM
by Paul Celan (b. 23 November 1920)
Nobody kneads us again from earth and loam,
nobody summons our dust.
Nobody.
Blessed are you, Nobody.
For your sake would
we bloom.
Against your
will.
A nothing
we were, we are, shall
we ever remain, blooming:
the nothing--, the
nobody's rose.
With
pistil bright as soul,
stamen waste of heaven,
corona red
from the purple word, which we sang
over, oh, over
the thorn.
Translation attributed to L. Steve Schmersal, May 2014.
PSALM
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
niemand bespricht unsern Staub.
Niemand.
Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir blühn.
Dir
entgegen.
Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, blühend:
die Nichts-, die
Niemandsrose.
Mit
dem Griffel seelenhell,
dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,
der Krone rot
vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen
über, o über
dem Dorn.
Happy (Late) Bertolt Brecht's Birthday, everyone. (It was February 10th.)
It is entirely arguable that, although Bertolt Brecht was considered one of the most important German poets, playwrights, and theater directors of the first half of the Twentieth Century, in the second half he became the most influential dramatist and theater practitioner in the world.
Meine Damen und Herren, Madames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen, he died. All people die. Mortality is part of what defines our precarious humanity. It keeps us from being gods. Except, not always. He became a god after he died, but because gods are ideas, he had no way of ever enjoying it. And the idea that he became was a diluted idea of his work and thought, a less nuanced, demanding, and radical Brecht that was the result of a dialectical encounter with the mainstream via incomplete and compromised translations into English. This was the god that became so popular.
Yes, for all of his posthumous success, exposure, influence, and adoption--everything from Oh, What a Lovely War! and Cabaret to Peter Brook's famous 1970 RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to Hair, Marat/Sade, Godspell, Company, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Chicago, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, and Sweeney Todd, to Angels in America, All That Jazz, many of the films of Sirk, Godard, Fassbinder, Pasolini, and Todd Haynes to the plays of Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter to Dogville, and the Atlantic Theater Company's enormously successful musical adaptation of Wedekind's Spring Awakening (the list is, for all practical purposes, endless)--Brecht remains deeply misunderstood in the international theatrical landscape, despite the monumental wake cast by his work, misrepresented by longstanding, received accounts--oversimplified, incomplete, humorless, and doctrinaire accounts--of, and prejudices against, his dramaturgy.
He is the troubling, insoluble, and almost completely forgotten conundrum of Twentieth Century theater. An unruly, mischievously critical, complicated, subversive, and often contradictory-seeming figure from the start; a rebellious enfant terrible/Wunderkind/eminence grise, simultaneously considered a rejuvenating pioneer of contemporary theater as well as its most reviled, bloodless, and overly-intellectual sidetrack; a Marxian revolutionary and a survivor who is often cast by his detractors, and many of his champions, as an apolitical opportunist, sellout, and plagiarist; an admirer of such varied cultural forces as Marx, the Marx Brothers, Japanese Noh theater, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marlowe, Kaiser, Kipling, Gay, Büchner, and Chaplin; a constantly evolving and unsentimental thinker and theorist on the place and function of theater in society; a practitioner who deplored the denigration of entertainment, humor, and slapstick in any art form as superficial and useless instead of essential and central; a cultural giant whom it should not be difficult for the critically open-minded and persistent investigator to admit that Brecht--and perhaps he alone--offers the most sustained, supple, sophisticated, useful, and nuanced engagement with the question of the political in art and the question of art in the political and social spheres.
Brecht's example, far from being a barbaric, anarchic, naïve, slapdash attack on popular or bourgeois culture, employs juxtaposition, tension, resonance, reversal, contradiction, comedy, irony, expectation, surprise, and sympathy to articulate the barbaric, anarchic, naïve, slapdash attack of culture on the individual, the gendered body, the couple, the family, the community, and the very idea of the just and the possible. But. And this is the most important, and challenging, ingredient missing from almost any production you've ever seen of any piece by Brecht or from any piece you've ever seen presented in what is referred to as a "Brechtian" mode or style: you must find a way to make the piece an entertainment--theater must be entertaining--or you've wasted the audience's time and everyone else's.
And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Britney after all she's been through! She lost her aunt. She went through a divorce-uh. She has two fucking kids. Her husband turned out to be a user, a cheater, and now she's going through a custody battle. All you people care about is readers and making money off of her.
She's a HUMAN!!! What you don't realize is that Britney's making you all this money, and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her. She hasn't performed onstage in years. Her song is called "Gimme More" for a reason—because all you people want is more, more, more, more, MORE!
Leave her alone! You're lucky she even performed for you bastards! Leave Britney alone. Please.
[Sobs.]
[Pause. Composing himself.]
Perez Hilton talked about professionalism. And said if Britney was a professional she would have pulled it off no matter what. Speaking of professionalism, when is it “professional” to publicly bash someone who's going through a HARD TIME? Leave Britney alone! Pleeease. [beat]
[Sobs.]
Leave. Britney. Spears. Alone. Right. Now. I mean it. Anyone who has a problem with her, you deal with me, because she's not well, right now.
[Quiet sobs, then loud sobs, some choking.]
[Pleadingly] Leave her alone.
[END]
I almost always listen to music when I write. Tonight’s selection, for a variety of reasons, is Sufjan Stevens, and my least-listened to disc of his, The Avalanche. Remixes, failed attempts, favorite non-releases, and would-be B-sides. Check it out.
Chris Crocker. How is one to speak of him without resorting to phobia or condescension? Or perhaps affection? What I would like to do with this post is attempt a critique of something I believe he represents that does not have recourse to those other things. This offers a fairly fine line, between fire and tears, let us say; it is a finite walk, a balancing act. It is a highwire act, and it is up to whomever is reading to determine when and if I fall.
In all honesty, my initial reaction to the Leave Britney Alone video was a certain kind of boredom. It was my first exposure to Chris Crocker, and I fully recognize why it fascinates and could imagine how this boy has become such a phenomenon on the internet, even before his exposure reached me, the least exposed to this world except through friend and boyfriend. The intensity, the personality, the personal nature of it, which is to say the intimacy of it, is captivating. This video has the sort of thing that makes good porn captivating—the idea that you are getting a peek into something sincere and unguarded. Good porn feels like a true voyeurism, which is to say a perspective that is supposedly hidden from the object on view. As in this situation, porn is never the case of unknowing spectacle. As much as a performer "forgets" the camera, the camera's presence and its recording function is reliable precisely because this recording is intentional. Someone wants you—yes, you—to see this footage, so it is always shaped to some to degree, and this is another way of saying that there is an aesthetic involved, and that there is a desire, and this is a self-conscious desire. And there is therefore an audience—an audience of which the subject is aware. The implication of an audience means the awareness of an other watching in this case—isn’t that funny that the awareness of the self is contingent on an other watching? Yet, not so much. It is not so surprising that the circle that encloses the observing other encloses the self. Self awareness is a mirror and the mirror is the other, or, as we say, the audience. And within this doubly enclosed circle we have performance.
BOREDOM/LAUGHTER/PHOBIA
As in the tradition of a Shirley Bassey concert, Chris Crocker begins his Britney monologue at the level of 11, and he sustains that level throughout with occasional spikes to 12 and sometimes even 13. Just when you think he can’t take it up a notch, he does so, and then goes up another notch. But without the artistry of someone like Dame Bassey—and how should he have this power at such a young age when she has had a long lifetime to learn how to overwhelm us so completely?—Mr. Crocker can only hover like a hummingbird or an insect around the same high pitch. Though his attack is sustained and intense, it is this deadly consistency that is the hobgoblin of his speech, and the thing that makes it boring. But that which makes the monologue boring is, of course, the thing the makes it funny. On the level of a temper tantrum, which can only be the first way anyone apprehends this clip, it is hilarious. And I think this aspect is what accounts for a good portion of its popularity.
For me, close on the heels of the amusement, is the urge to reach into the screen and smack some sense into this kid. It is difficult to tease out the differences among the utterly vapid subject matter, the grandiose self-involvement, the chip on his shoulder, and in-your-face femininity. I’d like to say that this final factor lacks power for me, but I can’t, and that shames me. The moment that comes to mind, strangely, is from the movie Carrie—not the adaptation of the Dreiser novel starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, but the movie version of the Stephen King book—in which the gym teacher played by Betty Buckley saves Sissy Spacek’s Carrie from the humiliating, locker room maxi-pad attack by Carrie’s schoolmates and in the next scene confesses that she wanted to smack Carrie too. It is this annihilating, knee-jerk demand for normalcy of which I am so ashamed. But one doesn’t have to honor that demand any more than to recognize that it is there and to therefore resist it. This is instructive. Your fears and repulsions needn’t be something from which to—or with which you—recoil, but they can teach you; they can remind you that what we learn to react to with irritation or revulsion can tell you who you are by reminding you who you would like not to be, and therefore remind you of how brave those people are who reflect these parts of yourself back at you.
They are not brave because they show you who you are, but because they are unafraid or unashamed to do precisely what society would prefer they not do. We constantly torture the feminine out of little, queer boys, and the kid who resists this is to be admired. Anyone who resists this is to be admired regardless of his or her age. This accounts for precisely why—and I don’t know if this applies to Chris Crocker, nor do I think it matters one bit if it does or doesn’t—this phobic encounter accounts, however, precisely for why the rights of the transgendered matter so deeply to the politics surrounding same-sex desire. This is not my point with this piece, but it is worth mentioning that there are gay and lesbian folks who find insult in being grouped with those who wish to become the other sex. But if you find femmey guys and butch girls offensive, is it because you were one at one point that person, and don’t you wish someone stood up for you instead of making fun of you, ostracizing you, or kicking your ass? And even if you never had this experience, how could it be any clearer that wanting to become the other sex isn’t that different, to the straightest of the world, from having a hint of the other sex in you? Since there is only one relationship that is recognized—between a man and a woman—do you really think, as a man, that you’re earning points by playing rugby and following the Yankees? You only invoke a playground pecking order by rejecting the transgendered in this way—even if you never had any interest in liquid eyeliner (or for you lipstick ladies out there, even if you did). Seeming straight will never protect you from the people who want to hurt you because you’re not straight. Just ask Senator Craig.
ON THE QUESTION OF COMPOSURE
Part of what, I think, makes Chris Crocker so fascinating to so many is his lack of composure. Whether his tearful or defiant face is a purposeful performance or not—and I cannot tell if it is or not and is therefore a composure of its own or not—Crocker’s temper tantrum is the very representative of a lack of composure. On its face, Leave Britney Alone is an uncensored display. Within a culture that is obsessed with composure, with being what you seem, with a self-identical clarity, with a hygienic fear of infection by terrorism or an untoward desire, where our politicians are supposed to be appear to say the correct things and toe a certain line, there is an exhilaration in the exhibition of someone ranting with a complete lack of composure. It matters not at all that it is about Britney Spears, in fact the serious investment in something so trivial makes it that much more delicious, that much more personal, and that much more pornographic.
The political creature in our Land is the paradigm case of this composure of which we are so tired that we turn to a screaming child on YouTube to find something—anything—that feels different from the calculated sincerity that assaults us every day on our national media. Senator Craig shows us all what it’s like to inhabit that suffocating demand to embody the joyless place of expectation that only finds its relief in an airport men’s room stall. No one can withstand that demand to please. American politics has become so willing to please on the surface—and only on its face—to maintain its place, that it has lost sight entirely of what it means to care for, to husband, to uphold, the public interest. The public interest is not what the public finds interesting, which is the domain of the celebrity, but that which is actually for the public good, what is sustaining for society, both now and in the future. I speak of civic duty, which is a grave duty, and one that has been traded for the triviality of a popularity contest, for likeability, for respectability, for a composition. We live in a nation where a politician would willingly promote laws that would punish him for his own desire only to maintain his power. This is not just a betrayal of the self, but it is the betrayal of the public trust on the most egregious level. Yet, we forgive, because we understand pressure, pressure to conform, to compose, to seem and not be, and not to lead. We forgive because this is a collective arrangement, and we understand how the collective can force the hand, force it into a handshake, a handshake deal, how it can force the face into a shape: a ghastly blissful smile.
That last line is a reference that will pass over the heads of many readers, which is a pity because it comes from a Brecht poem, which only survives in English, which Bertolt Brecht wrote about the actor, Peter Lorre, and his experience in Hollywood. I quote it now, only because our politicians are indistinguishable from our celebrities, to our great national detriment:
The Swamp
I saw many friends
And the friend I loved most
Among them helplessly sunk
Into the swamp.
I pass by daily.
And a drowning was not over
in a single morning.
This made it more terrible.
And the memory of our long talks about the swamp,
Which already held so many powerless.
Now I watched him leaning back
Covered with leeches in the shimmering,
Softly moving slime,
Upon his sinking face
A ghastly blissful smile.
Smile for the camera, Senator—Senator Craig, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator Spears, Senator Crocker. Do you vote for the world your grandchildren will live in or do you vote for the person with whom you’d most rather enjoy a beer? Smile. Smiles everyone. Smile. Smile for the camera.
RAGE
We might now, after such a long excursis, return to what should by now be the obvious topic of this post, which is clearly Chris Crocker’s deathless outpost, Leave Britney Alone.
We are, or I should say, I am, presented with a number of problems, or shall I call them, opportunities, to end this post. But instead I will invoke anger. Rage, O Goddess, sing of the rage of Chris Crocker.
When I happened upon Leave Britney Alone, I had never heard of Chris Crocker, or rather I had never heard of the videos and the phenomenon that travels under that signature. Though his name is a pseudonym, Chris Crocker is not, or does not appear to be, a fiction in the order of a J.T. LeRoy or Anthony Godby Johnson, though he bears the markers of a similar fascination. It is really in the order of an insult to invoke the names of these great fakes of the internet and the publishing world in the same paragraph mentioning Chris Crocker because 1) “Crocker” does not lay claim to any of the spectacular hardships of those ersatz Lost Boys and 2) it is the video transparency of Chris Crocker, and his meetability, that exempt him from such a distasteful hoax, or, at any rate, lends him some much-needed credence. Yet there is a striking similarity in the collective taste for such a creature. This similarity is not his fault, yet the desire for the sexually-transgressive/sexually ambiguous, uncensored child remains. The appetite for this strange configuration remains so powerful that no one has mentioned it thus far to my knowledge. Except me.
But let us speak of rage. According to an article on thestranger, Chris Crocker is a boy, somewhere in the South of our Nation, and he is supposed to be who he says he is. I am circumspect in the way I present these facts because I have been taught to not trust the media. I don’t know why I feel this way but it probably has to do with the utter inability—or perhaps lack of interest—that the media has shown of late in reporting what happens in the world. I don’t blame my circumspection. Yet, here we are, and we have this piece, and we have “Chris Crocker”’s video posts, which are no more or less real than these words you are reading now on your screen.
I did some research on the C.C. phenomenon—only a little, I promise you, because, Gentle Reader, I wanted to honor, a little, the context, or truly the contextlessness of the Leave Britney Alone experience as I first found it. You see, this single video has far surpassed any of C.C.’s previous video-posts. In fact, the last time I checked on YouTube, Leave Britney Alone has had more viewings—well over seven million—than the original cause: Spears’ appearance on the MTV music awards (which had a reported viewing audience of seven million—this number, as with all other reports, is subject to question, yet this is what I read). Try to imagine seven million. That is only a million less than what is supposed to be the population of New York City (according to the US Census Bureau). Okay, try to imagine a million people. Have you met a million people? Do a million people know who you are? (Is this circle getting smaller?) Now, are you nineteen-years-old? And are you being home-schooled by your grandmother because it is feared you’re too femmey to literally survive public high school? Is your first boyfriend someone you’ve never met in person but is—like almost all the other intimate relationships you have ever had—relegated to the internet and the telephone? Now, assuming all these factors are “true,” let’s go back to seven million people knowing who you are. Who are you now?
“Chris Crocker” is a resistance to some boy’s situation, which is to say his environment. In thestranger article he says he has always been femmey, he looks up to women, not men, not gay men, but women, specifically. He puts on eyeliner (beautifully) and posts videos titled Bitch, Please, wherein he enumerates the various useful ways of saying “Bitch, please…” (though I felt he missed a few good iterations as his performance escalated) or This and That wherein he responds to people, real and internet, who have attacked him. This appears, on the face, to be the reaction of an embattled person, a person who must resort to the internet to be credible, or at least heard. This is a person who describes the people who “friend” him on MySpace as “fans.” Fans. This is a person who believes himself—whether its true or not, according to this thestranger piece—to have fans. Do you have fans? Does he have fans? Or does he have people who watch him to see what he’ll do next? And what is the difference between having fans and being a freak show and being Edie Sedgwick?
But our topic is rage. Where is this rage? The Muse of Epics—who is even less truthful, who is much more enamored of effect, than the Muse of History—knows because in Bitch, Please, This and That, and Leave Britney Alone that rage is on view for all to see, in Epic display. What disarms these pieces—what takes them away from self-conscious, calculated performance, or in fact, what arms them entirely—is, for example, is the imperious gaze that Mr. Crocker gives the camera—his camera, his eye to the world—at the end of Bitch, Please, or his, as he states on YouTube, entirely seriously tearful defense of Britney Spears in Leave Britney Alone? The world he speaks to is so much larger and therefore so much entirely smaller and specific than his viewers might believe. The pain he imputes to Britney Spears is his pain, it seems. How else to understand the emotional level to which he rises in this defense of a celebrity he can only know through the news or what he reads and believes? He tells us that if we have a problem with Britney that we should come to him. He tells us that we should leave Britney Spears alone, and that he means it. He speaks to us as though he knew her personally; he speaks to us as though he knew us personally. Chris Crocker defends Britney Spears as though she were himself, and I have little doubt that—if this is a sincere display, as I think it probably is as much as it can be—that this is the case. Replace “Britney Spears” with “Chris Crocker” and you have the real message to the world. Seth Green hit the nail in the head far more accurately than he might have intended in a celebrity-parody of an internet-celebrity defending a pop-music-celebrity. To this imaginary personality, even to himself, called “Chris Crocker,” an attack on a celebrity like Spears is an attack on himself. In his mind, he is her equal; he is capable of accepting the blows thrown at her, in her stead. Though he is a kid in the South who refuses to reveal his real name or location—for obvious reasons—he feels capable to speak to us so easily, as though his internet fame is on the same level of the manufactured fame of a Britney Spears who has had corporations and smart managers-since-fired behind her. Mr. Crocker not only takes on the machine that produced Britney Spears, that has turned on her, but the audience that consumed her, and that now consumes him as an object of derision. His rage is a delicious internet treat that we chew on as a zero-calorie moment, which we discuss for a week or two until the flavor is gone. Then we spit it out and forget it. The joke we call History will remember Monica Lewinsky, Anna Nicole Smith, and Britney Spears longer than Chris Crocker and his undisguised tantrum about himself. It is being forgotten even as I type this. Even as he signs the contract to his reality series.
But now that we have put his rage for recognition to the side, finally, I can get to the purpose of this post, and by that I mean the title of this post, which is the nature of celebrity.
About three decades ago, Andy Warhol declared, presciently that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. When I think of statements like this, I usually think of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin and wonder what they would think of the world today, because the stuff they wrote about--what Adorno called the Culture Industry--and the way media affects the populace haunts me to this day, every day. I think they would commit suicide rather than live in a world of reality television and the blogosphere. Similarly, I imagine that the men who wrote the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, if they came in a time machine to the Twenty-First Century, would be appalled by the state of the Nation, despite, or, really, probably because of, their patrician sensibilities.
We live in a time when everyone believes in the necessity of their own celebrity. The person we call “Chris Crocker” is young enough to believe that this is the way the world is supposed to be. Celebrity is now available to everyone, for a time, as Warhol said. The larger question is: do we want it? And within that question is why do we want it? It seems that in this version of reality we are stuck with is the question of if we are only real if we are on television--and that being on television has become coterminous with being on a screen, any screen, even a computer monitor. Somehow, now, being famous—which is being known—is the same thing as being real. For politicians this may be one thing—which is awful enough—but for you and me, this is something else entirely. We have entered into a time when Warhol’s whimsical prediction has taken on the quality of a curse.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
We close, appropriately, with the delicate Sufjan Stevens song playing as I write these words. In my mind, in my mind, this song is titled, "I made a lot of mistakes."
I fell in love again
all things go, all things go drove to Chicago all things know, all things know we sold our clothes to the state I don't mind, I don't mind I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind
I drove to New York in a van, with my friend we slept in parking lots I don't mind, I don't mind I was in love with the place in my mind, in my mind I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind
you came to take us all things go, all things go to recreate us all things grow, all things grow we had our mindset all things know, all things know you had to find it all things go, all things go
if I was crying in the van, with my friend it was for freedom from myself and from the land I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes
you came to take us all things go, all things go to recreate us all things grow, all things grow we had our mindset I made a lot of mistakes all things know, all things know I made a lot of mistakes you had to find it I made a lot of mistakes all things go, all things go I made a lot of mistakes
"Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version)," music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens on The Avalanche, 2006.
People like to say that Brecht is cold, but I believe he has a deeper game. When I read a piece like Nannas Lied, I can't help thinking that despite his political and sexual opportunism, he actually had a great deal of sympathy for women. I think this comes out in the poetry and the plays.
This is a song about a streetwalker making sense out of her world using a famous Villon refrain as her own. So what if Brecht plagiarized this line or meant it as an intertext, it's the overall effect that seems like it is most important, and in this case we find the delicate and the brutal coming together in an explication of what happens when a girl sells her body and feelings in the market of "love." And apparently, it's not so easy.
Nanna’s Song
Dear sirs, with seventeen years
I came to the market of love.
And I had been through a lot,
Bad stuff happens a lot,
Indeed, that’s the game.
But nevertheless, I have some of the blame.
(After all, I am a person too.)
Thank God, everything goes by so quickly,
Both the love and the even sorrow, as well.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Of course, as you go through the years,
The love market becomes easier,
And you embrace them by the score.
But your feelings
Grow oddly cool,
If they’re rationed far too little.
(After all, any supply has to come to an end.)
Thank God, everything goes by so quickly,
Both the love and the even sorrow, as well.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
And also, if you have learned the trade well,
In the measuring of love:
To transform desire into small change,
Still is never easy.
Now, you’ll make it.
Meanwhile you become older.
(After all, you can’t stay seventeen forever.)
Thank God everything goes by so quickly,
Both the love and even the sorrow, as well.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Nannas Lied, Bertolt Brecht, English translation attributed to L. Steve Schmersal. Music by Kurt Weill, 1929.
And now, auf Deutsch:
Nannas Lied
Meine Herren, mit siebzehn Jahren
Kam Ich auf den Liebesmarkt
Und Ich habe viel erfahren
Böses gab es viel
Doch das war das Spiel
Aber manches hab ich doch verargt.
(Schlieβlich bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.)
Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Freilich geht man mit den Jahren
Leichter auf den Liebesmarkt
Und umarmt sie dort in Scharen.
Aber das Gefühl
Bleibt erstaundlich kühl
Wenn man damit allzuwenig kargt.
(Schlieβlich geht ja jede Vorrat zu Ende.)
Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Und auch wenn man gut das Handeln
Lernte auf der Liebesmess’:
Lust in Kleingeld zu verwandeln
Ist doch niemals leicht.
Nun, es wird erreicht.
Doch man wird auch alter unterdes.
(Schlieβlich bleibt man ja nicht immer siebzehn.)
Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Nannas Lied, Bertolt Brecht. Music by Kurt Weill, 1929.
And now for the song.
The incomparable Teresa Stratas singing Kurt Weill's setting of the poem that he wrote as a birthday gift for Lotte Lenya, after they'd moved to America, and married for the second time:
