6 — Thursday, September 12, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Danny Brown’s last album,
Atrocity Exhibition, was widely
acclaimed and viewed by many to
be one of the best projects of 2016.
To follow up such a successful
project can be a challenge, but,
luckily for us, Danny Brown
seems more than ready for the
daunting task at hand. “Dirty
Laundry,” the first single off of
his recently-announced project,
uknowhatimsayin¿, is a brazen,
colorful statement of intent,
letting everyone know that he’s
got more to say.
Much like Danny Brown’s
signature vocal style, the beat
(courtesy of Q-Tip) is vivid,
hallucinatory and cartoonish.
These are not the shadowy,
vintage cartoon images that are
suffused throughout much of
hip-hop
(e.g.
Madvillainy,
“Cartoons and Cereal”), but more
like the vibrant, acid-drenched
animation found on Adult Swim.
Much like the experimental
cartoon
programming
block,
Danny Brown is not afraid of
vulgarity, and his record of
humorous sexual explicity is
continued on “Dirty Laundry”:
Lines like “Once got a ho, ain’t
had money for the room / So we
did the humpty hump in a Burger
King bathroom / Lowkey kept it
undercover / The way she slurp
slurp, she’s the quicker picker-
upper” make the double entendre
of the title all too clear (even if
the “quicker picker-upper” line
is actually the tagline for Bounty
paper towels).
Most
importantly,
Danny
Brown
sounds
fearless
and
confident in his new direction.
“Dirty Laundry” preserves the
bizarreness
and
acerbic
wit
that makes him special without
stagnating, is brimming with
creativity and is an auspicious
sign of things to come.
Danny Brown has more to say
on new single ‘Dirty Laundry’
SINGLE REVIEW
I don’t think I found out about
online shopping until I was 11 or 12. I
surfed the Internet before then, sure.
I may have found the model bios on
Abercrombie & Fitch and read up
on how Nathan likes to spend his
summers sailing off the coast of his
family’s vacation home in Nantucket.
I studied how he wore his jeans low,
and how he didn’t seem to be worried
about their grave potential of falling
off at any moment in the pictures he
posed for. I owned several pairs and
approximated his look to the best of
my ability —which, for me, somehow
meant layered t-shirts in a variety
of colors, ripping apart my carefully
distressed denim to display a tasteful
peep of thigh, and a propensity to
suck in my cheeks and push out my
lips that plagues me to this very day.
I may have spent some long nights
having long, separate conversations
—on my phone and through my newly
minted email (Runningaddict97@
comcast.net because I wanted to
seem sporty), at the same time and
with the same person. Hunter was
funny, bubbly and just cruel enough
to me that I felt comfortable coming
back to him every night to bond over
our mutual love of … corn dogs? I
don’t remember exactly what we
talked about, but I remember that he
ate corn dogs and twinkies every day,
and that I fantasized about shacking
up with him as we prepared for the
nuclear winter. He looked like a
literal fox with fine, almost platinum
blonde hair. I knew he secretly hated
me, and I was enamored to the point
where I could only bear to try and
connect with him from the safety
afforded to me behind my desktop
computer screen.
We would play soccer and football
together, but I only really knew how
to run fast. I thought that if I ran laps
around the scrum of players in the
middle of the field — and I harnessed
the cool masculinity that Nathan
wielded so easily with my ripped
jeans — then I would finally be
picked to be on his team. I thought if
I saved up enough of my allowance, I
could buy myself into this boys’ club
that was always just out of reach.
Hunter could play sports, and I just
wanted to look the part.
Themes
were
very
important
to me growing up, whether that
was the — shall we say ill-fated —
PBTeen,
tiki-inspired
confection
that became of my bedroom or the
worlds that I could build for myself
with its contents. A model car or
a cutout from a magazine were
one way tickets to a fully realized
fantasy — complete with houses
by the beach, jobs, 401ks, spouses
across
a
spectrum
of
genders,
precarious social networks that had
to be traversed in Machiavellian
fashion and clothes. The clothes
I got to wear! My self expression
was completely uninhibited in this
fantastical, if not slightly vacuous
space of mine, and the only kernel
that could be salvaged from my
reverie was what I wore to school
each day.
It turns out that I was the last
person to get in on the ground floor
of my sexual deviance. Rumors
about my friendship with Dorothy
began
to
circulate
around
the
same time I started exhibiting
that subtle flash of leg. The stress
they brought, combined with the
absurd popularity contest that was
my elementary school experience,
seemed to color what I viewed as an
escape from daily life. My fantasies
weren’t absent of the creatures that
created the need for them, I was just
powerful enough to cast them off
into vague opportunities for conflict
in which I could be successful and
clothes were my sword.
It
makes
perfect
sense
that
everything changed for me when I
found out that Saks had a website.
It took very little time for dancing
around in a towel dress and my
mom’s open-toe pumps to turn into
canary Zac Posen taffeta and a pair of
cork-soled red bottoms. Pressures to
conjure up a wife and focus on what
she would wear more than myself
were vanquished, and all of a sudden
I got to be Isabella. Or Cheryl. Or
whoever. I got to be Sam, too — I
didn’t have to choose. Every ideal
that I would happily bridge chasms
to satisfy in my mental landscape,
be it my relationship to gender and
sexuality or all of the attributes
entailing that easy masculinity I
so valued, almost instantaneously
collapsed
upon
entry
into
the
consumer marketplace.
My first forays into an empowered
sense of femininity, one that skulked
in and out of the Park Avenue
penthouse she found on Christie’s
and wasn’t afraid to indulge in long,
long stares at the all-nude Dolce &
Gabbana Menswear ads of the time
— into queerness, really, happened
at the same time I started to realize
what class was. And that the things I
feel drawn to have a nasty tendency
to cost lots and lots of money.
Dressing myself not only reached
new
dimensions
of
aspiration,
but became a way for me to shield
myself from a community that was
hostile towards difference. As a
very nervous young boy preparing
to go down a road that spoke of
vulnerabilities having yet to reveal
themselves, a facade that read as
impenetrable to others seemed like a
sensible way to go.
This of course, is not a love letter
to consumerism, or a failure to
acknowledge that part of what I
aspired to had very much to do with
surviving (even selfishly thriving)
in a system that afforded me some
privileges and not others. Rather,
I’m saying that there are great
truths that lie in fantasy, in what we
envision ourselves to be, and how we
communicate that to others. Clothes,
in choosing them and throwing
them on our back, can give us the
keys to explore parts of ourselves
that we’re not yet fully conscious
of. They let us create characters,
fabricate whole worlds, and try to
sell them as best we can. They can
be armor. They have the power to
unite and divide, and as with all
modes of expression that lie at the
intersection of history, culture and
status, finding the self starts with
what we can only dream of. Fashion,
style and art are too often discussed
as musings of the mind — born of,
but ultimately detached from, the
matrices of power from which we all
operate. So if you’ll humor me, from
my velveteen dreams to yours, I’d
like to start a conversation.
Sam Kremke: Velveteen Dreams
STYLE COLUMN
SAM KREMKE
Daily Style Columnist
Who gets to tell the shameful stories of a
nation’s past? Imagine a negotiating table,
but for collective memory. Whom should
we see seated, and where? Historically,
the victors have taken a disproportionate
number of seats, controlling the historical
record apparently among the spoils of war.
In more recent decades, marginalized and
oppressed people have fought their way into
the negotiations, staking their claim in the
story of nations that are equal parts theirs.
Regardless, the questions of who gets a seat
at the negotiating table, and who sits where,
are always in flux.
Co-directors Nanfu Wang (“Hooligan
Sparrow”) and Jialing Zhang’s (“Complicit”)
handling of these questions will surprise,
especially given their subject matter: In their
documentary feature “One Child Nation,”
the two native Chinese women filmmakers
take on the history and present-day
repercussions of China’s one-child policy. As
the name implies, this legal measure limited
families in China to having one child; what
isn’t as readily discernible are the great,
human-rights-out-the-window lengths the
country went to in order to enforce it.
I expect many of you will go into the
film awaiting victims’ accounts of what the
policy stripped from them, much like I did.
But Wang and Zhang chose to tell the story a
different way, incorporating the perspectives
of people with varying levels of complicity in
the policy’s brutal enforcement. The result
is a film that renegotiates not only China’s
memory of this policy gone horribly wrong,
but the entire notion of historical memory
along with it.
One of the first subjects, Wang, the
conductor of on-screen interviews and
director whose presence is most apparent
throughout, talks to is a village official from
the rural community she grew up in. While
we saw Wang’s own mother and will see
many others speak in the same anticipatory,
defensive way, when asked about how they
responded to the policy, this man’s responses
were punctuated by long pauses between
confessions of his role in the cruelty. When
he describes the forced sterilizations he
witnessed, he calls them “fucked up,”
though he does not claim that he tried to
disrupt them. At the end of this sequence,
while the camera stays fixed on the official
and his neighbors, we hear Wang think
out loud about whether to use the village
official’s connections to find women who
lost their children in the enforcement of the
policy. Another off-screen voice challenges
the thought of putting them on camera and
asking them to re-experience their trauma.
In the film that ensues, Wang and Zhang
seem to heed this warning. We see Wang
speak to a midwife who aborted children
without the mother’s consent. She speaks
with a family planning official, who justifies
the policy as an act of putting national
interest before personal discomfort. She
speaks with researchers who try to track and
reunite abandoned children with their birth
families, with journalists who resisted the
policy and its aftermath in their respective
forms. What we do not hear are any pained
accounts from forcibly sterilized women,
from children sold to orphanages in the
strictest days of the policy.
Wang and Zhang do not tap into this
ethos, which seems so natural to a narrative
that has numerous victims, but I think that
was deliberate and wise. That might have
been too much of what we expected to hear,
might have matched this story’s frequency to
that of most of the stories we hear, drowning
in a cacophony of shameful histories and
unimpressive resolutions. Instead, we have
to wrestle with the complexity, if not futility,
of allocating individual blame, as well as
the perhaps more worthwhile question of
reparation and collective healing.
That said, ambivalence surrounding
enablement of the policy does not register
throughout.
For
instance,
whenever
the directors had a child on camera, the
emotional weight of the burden they
inherit from their elders was not subdued
but patiently allowed to sit, uneasily,
unresolved on our minds and hearts. To
that end, the most heartrending scene is
easily the interview with a twin, living in
China, whose sister was taken away. When
the pre-teen girl lists off what she wants for
her sister — a loving set of adoptive parents
in America, where her twin was found to
have ended up — she gets sidetracked with
what she would want, were they to reunite
someday. They would have snowball fights
in the winter, wear matching clothes and her
tearful, thorough list goes on. In this young
girl’s desperate fantasy, we watch it unfold:
the outstanding loss, the open wound that is
neither shrinking nor scabbing, as time goes
by and steps toward healing are neglected.
By speaking to unexpected figures in
the history of this policy and soliciting
otherwise unheard of accounts, Wang and
Zhang blurred the supposed line between
victim and perpetrator, between innocent
and guilty. Isn’t that how it should be? Isn’t
history too complex to arrange into simple
categories of good and evil? If anything,
I hope “One Child Nation” might inspire
others to tackle shameful histories in an
equally nuanced light. There is such a thing
as accountability, as taking responsibility for
the wrong you did. Guilt is sitting with that,
allowing it to fester, when the only way to
truly take responsibility is to work together
for reparation and positive change.
Confronting the past
in ‘One Child Nation’
JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer
JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer
Dirty Laundry
Danny Brown
Fool’s Gold Records
My first
forays into an
empowered
sense of
femininity ... into
queerness, really,
happened at
the same time I
started to realize
what class was.
FILM REVIEW
WARP RECORDS
It makes perfect
sense that
everything changed
for me when I
realized that Saks
had a website.
One Child
Nation
Amazon Studios
Michigan Theater
By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/12/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
09/12/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Thursday, September 12, 2019
ACROSS
1 “Are you getting
100%?” cereal
6 Lover
11 Excludes
15 Place to play
16 Gulf of Oman
vessel
17 Neutral tone
18 Charcuterie fare
19 Quaint sleeping
coach
21 Target, as a
receiver
23 “Moonlight
Sonata” opening
movement, e.g.
24 Stand buy
25 Dromedary
feature
28 Hybrid fruits
31 Cheerleader’s cry
33 Top __
34 “Garfield: __ of
Two Kitties”
37 Deceptive
appearance
39 __ Plaines
40 Classic American
board game
symbolized by
this puzzle’s
circles
44 Fish often fried
45 Famille member
46 Out of practice
47 Deceptive
50 Took to heart
52 Sleep soundly?
53 Classic movie
theaters
54 Maple yield
57 Martial arts
teacher
61 Knesset country
63 Brit’s afternoon
drink
67 Raised landform
68 Stable baby
69 Befuddled
70 It was originally a
sitting meditation
pose
71 Capital on the
Tiber
72 With 22-Down,
intimidate
73 Reach
DOWN
1 __ Bay Rays
2 Nymph
associated with
Artemis
3 Needle
4 Tiny tunnelers
5 Eighteenth,
usually
6 Clotheshorse
7 Sch. with a
Brooklyn campus
8 Penne __ vodka
9 Fuse
10 Writer Bombeck
11 Inoffensive
12 Praise
13 New Deal agcy.
14 __ La Table:
cookware shop
20 Bonn : Wasser ::
Barcelona : __
22 See 72-Across
26 Soccer star
Rapinoe
27 Beer belly
29 Unlikely to react
30 Likely to react?
31 “Scram,
varmints!”
32 2017 “Hello,
Dolly!” Tony
winner
33 TV’s Arthur
34 Billing nos.
35 “This __ / Doth to
our rose of youth
rightly belong”
(Shakespeare)
36 Intrusive MP3
files
38 Aerodynamic
41 __ sauce
42 Bridal gown
storage option
43 It’ll never work
48 Big Easy cuisine
49 Co-worker of
Lane and Olsen
51 “Where __ sign?”
54 Pulled a chair
up to
55 Insurance giant
56 Skirt fold
58 Dove, e.g.
59 Young
salamanders
60 Wee
62 Sleight of hand
63 Egypt’s cont.
64 Jack of “Barney
Miller”
65 Common Market
letters
66 Hot tub sigh