The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, September 23, 2019 — 5A
As under-recognized as he is outside of his home
country, Luis Alberto Spinetta is considered one of
Argentina’s greatest ever musicians. Similar to Victor
Jara in neighboring Chile, his work played a stark
contrast against the authoritarian junta government
of Juan Carlos Onganía, heavily influenced musically
by jazz and pscychedelia and lyrically from poets and
philosophers from Nietzche to French playwright
Antonin Artaud, whose name is used as the title of one
of Spinetta’s best albums, Artaud.
Pescado Rabioso itself was a short-lived project
of Spinetta’s conception from 1971 to 1973, but for all
intents and purposes, Artaud is a solo Spinetta project.
Listening to Spinetta’s works, one can see the direct
influences from the musical movements burgeoning in
the Anglophone world at the time. Still, they feel much
more ahead of their time. Echoes of Radiohead can
be heard from decades before the English group even
started recording.
“Cementerio Club,” an early standout, is a slow
ballad with nothing especially musically interesting
happening except a few neat licks here and there.
Spinetta’s vocals, while slightly nasal and high-pitched,
are nonetheless soothing and are a conduit for the lyrics
which give Spinetta the reputation as a poet in addition
to just a singer-songwriter. He sings to a lover, “Qué
solo y triste voya estar en este cementerio / Qué calor
hará sin vos en verano,” (“How lonely and sad I’ll be in
this graveyard / How scorching the summer will be
without you”) using the idea of death introduced in the
first lines in which he sings, “Justo que pensaba en vos,
nina, caí muerto” (“Baby when you entered my mind,
I died”).
“Bajan” is another track where Spinetta flexes his
lyrical gifts. His vocals are never really measured,
tending to meander around with a flair for melodrama,
and this is put to great effect in the powerful choruses,
in which he sings, “Nena, nena, qué bien te ves / Cuando
en tus ojos no importa si las horas / Bajan, el día se sienta
a morir / Bajan, la noche se nubla sin fin / Y además vos
sos el Sol / Despacio, también podés ser la luna,” (“Girl
you look so beautiful / When your eyes don’t care if the
hours / go down and the day awaits its death / and the
night is endlessly cloudy / And either way, you’re the
sun / And you can slowly become the moon”).
Artaud himself was a figure lightly associated with
the surrealist movement in the early 20th century,
famous for conceptualizing the “theater of cruelty,”
where “cruelty” refers to the action of shocking the
audience through more than just the words of the
characters and the plot of the play, but also with gesture,
lighting and sound. It is interesting, however, that
Spinetta seems to reject the unfettered anarchism of his
album’s namesake in many ways, except for the album’s
masterpiece “A Starosta, el Idiota.” Over a powerful yet
fragmented piano, Spinetta croons, “Bocas del aire
del mar / Beban la sal de esta luz” (“Mouths of sea air
/ Drink this light’s salt”). In the middle, the concept
falls apart and features a cacaphony of sounds, from
a sped-up Beatles sample to a woman sobbing, before
returning with an exotic, distorted guitar and a hopeful
“No llores más ya no tengas frío / No creas que ya no hay
mas tinieblas / Tan solo debes comprenderla / Es como
la luz en primavera” (“Don’t cry anymore, don’t be cold
anymore / Don’t think there’s any more darkness / You
just have to understand it / It’s like light in spring”).
Artaud is an album that reveals more and more
after each listen. Even for non-Spanish speakers, the
musical richness and complexity is readily apparent,
and the way it is mixed, it is also rather intimate and
comforting. Even if none of that sounds interesting as
well, it might be worth just trying to collect one of the
coolest looking vinyls there is out there.
‘Artaud’ is ever-revealing
SAYAN GHOSH
Daily World Music Columnist
WORLD MUSIC COLUMN
Words in Max Porter’s “Lanny” refuse to stay
in their lane. I mean this in the most literal sense:
They stack on top of one another, expand and
contract at random and bend into and about the
margins, as if drunk on their very impression. And
they grow more belligerent with every page. By
the end of Part 1, they don’t even land sequentially,
opting instead to splatter the page in haphazard
handfuls.
The verb for interacting with words flattened
between the pages like bugmush feels more like
“look” than “read.” Similarly, “Lanny” feels more
like an experience than a text. To that point, it’s
the most exhausting thing I’ve read this year. Max
Porter’s sophomore novel, longlisted for the 2019
Booker Prize, floats around a jaded artist, her
yuppie husband and their peculiar-yet-brilliant
young son, the titular Lanny, as they move from
urban London to an ostentatiously creepy village.
The trope is painfully rich: There are batty old
neighbors (including “Mad Pete,” a once-artist
who may or may not have dabbled in porn), secret
bunkers dug into the earth and a local folk-spirit
known as Dead Papa Toothwort that stalks
villagers from the trees and whispers cynically
about their microwave dinners.
Between the “spooky village” camp and the
words sporadically sliding off the goddamn page,
it’s within reason to sow a few first-glance doubts
about “Lanny.” There are a lot of moving stylistic
pieces that thwart its access, and Porter goes
forth confidently in the direction of instability
by dividing the project into narrative thirds. Part
1 vacillates between the subjective perspectives
of four major characters before fragmenting into
disembodied snippets of direct, blunt thought
from anonymous villagers in Part 2. And then Part
3 is all up in the ether, slipping between first and
third person, theater and novel, dreamscape and
“reality” … I had to read the section three times to
feel done, forcing the book to end through brute
repetition, like some performed conclusion. It’s
intense.
There is a plot somewhere beneath all these
informal devices, though, and a surprisingly
simple one at that: Lanny goes missing. But when
you run that story through Porter’s neurotic
narrative machine, its components are yoked
apart and magnified into a pulsing array of issues.
The biggest yokefest takes place in that gulf of
perspective between parts 1 and 2, a deft move
on Porter’s behalf that contrasts what we tell
ourselves with what the rest of the community —
a single character, at this point — sees, warps and
spreads. For instance, the villagers in Part 2 are
the ones that imply Mad Pete’s lascivious tastes,
which complicates the wholesome art lessons he
gave Lanny in Part 1; conversely, Lanny’s mum
writes grisly thrillers to make a living, which is
easy to understand from her own perspective, but
now looks nothing but suspicious. With every new
piece of information, paranoia builds, backs turn
and credibility plummets. Despite the fact that
all are represented and speak directly, this voice
rings no more “true” than the subjectivity of Part
1.
In
an
earlier
anecdote,
Lanny’s
mum
unknowingly captures a tense sort of triangle
between data, fiction and truth. She once found
baby Lanny in a tree house nine feet off the ground
and, despite his repeated denial and airtight alibi,
subscribes to the story that her father had snuck
off and placed him there as a joke. “It was easier to
accept that Dad was lying,” she explains, “than it
was to have no rational explanation.”
Such transparent storymaking is the inventive,
exhausting work of “Lanny.” In its own peculiarity,
Porter’s bizarre little book deconstructs the myths
we create to survive those moments when there
is no rational explanation, everything from Dead
Papa Toothwort to media coverage to the critical
literary things I tell myself about the words falling
off the page — whatever makes you feel better.
Most impressively, though, “Lanny” refuses to
elevate one sort of myth over the other. Lanny’s
mum is a creative hippie type and his father a
(satirically hilarious) capitalist cog in the machine
and, although the book’s very existence gravitates
towards the purview of the former, both are
depicted as violent: Lanny’s dad displaces his labor
malaise and masculine anxiety onto the family
and his Mum stabs rodents in the sink for release.
It’s impossible to imagine these two together, but,
somehow, they still bone.
“Lanny” is a lot for its 210 generously margined
pages, and its ambition leaves loose ends that you
will have to do work with. If you’re into the sort
of reading experience that feels like wrestling,
“Lanny” will be a very satisfying project. But it is
the token experiment on the Booker menu that’s a
little too left-of-center to progress to the shortlist,
inheriting the 2018 seat of Nick Drnaso’s “Sabrina.”
Until the Foundation catches up, though, it’s up to
us to read the longlist, to keep the scene weird.
‘Lanny’ is a lot, positively
VERITY STURM
Managing Arts Editor
BOOK REVIEW
When Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews, the
hosts of “Dancing with the Stars,” take to the fabled
ballroom staircase to introduce the cast of “stars”
each season, it’s pretty safe to assume that viewers
are not expecting the best, brightest and up-and-
coming to appear on their screen. With alumni
including Master P, Kate Gosselin and Nancy Grace
over its 28-season run, “DWTS” has amassed a
reputation for being an anti-Met Gala of sorts: You
can pretty much expect everyone who isn’t anyone to
turn up eventually. And while the show has had its
share of bizarre seasons, this past Monday’s season
premiere felt particularly absurd. Almost too absurd.
Of course, there were the usual suspects: The
former athletes (murderer Ray Lewis and sentient
skyscraper Lamar Odom), the ringer (Ally Brooke of
girl group Fifth Harmony) and the shameless ABC
plug (former “Bachelorette” Hannah Brown). Then
came the questionable: Meredith from “The Office”
belting “She Works Hard for the Money” on live
television. And of course, the downright confusing:
Kel Mitchell attempting to prove to America why we
were wrong to choose Kenan over him. But, of all of
the casting decisions born out of a fever dream, none
seemed as surreal or as irresponsible as the decision
to cast former White House Press Secretary, Sean
Spicer, as a star.
No, not Melissa McCarthy reprising her “Saturday
Night Live” spoof — the real Sean Spicer, stuffed like
a Hillshire Farm sausage into an ill-fitting, electric
green flamenco blouse and skin-tight white pants.
Yum.
From the first minutes of the season premiere,
it became apparent to me that during the show’s
year-long hiatus it underwent more upgrades than
a Real Housewife — new graphics, sharper camera
quality, improved props and possibly most irritating
of all, new lengthy bits that precede every couple’s
performance. According to Deadline, changes to the
show’s classic format were implemented this year as
a means to maintain audience interest in the show
as it racks up more seasons. Desperate times call for
desperate measures.
Enter the Spice Rack.
Despite the outpouring of criticism from the
Internet when Spicer was first announced as a part
of Season 28, ABC remained steadfast in the decision
to televise the middle-aged white man’s powerful
journey towards redemption and attaining rhythm.
Although it would be irrational to believe for a
moment that ABC would opt for integrity over ratings
gold, it was not the mere decision to cast Spicer that
drove me to the edge. What irked me to the point of
near-insanity while watching live on Monday night
was the show’s blatant and, frankly, condescending
attempts at normalizing the former White House
staffer as a sort of screwball sitcom antagonist,
and not a political tool who has downplayed the
Holocaust, lied on several occassions to the American
public and continued to defend the fascist who tossed
him out of D.C. like yesterday’s trash. To save you the
ire, I’ll recount the most infuriating example of this.
“What one word describes you?” Spicer is
prompted, to which he smugly replies, “Beyoncé.”
For future reference, ABC, Beyoncé is infallible, not
people who simply co-opt her fame to dupe The
Youth™.
Spicer stumbles through both interactions with
others and his dance — a salsa to the Spice Girls’ “Spice
Up Your Life.” Yes, that really happened. Although
the entire viewing audience deserves an apology
(and maybe compensation) for bearing witness to the
ungodly pressure of Spicer’s slacks on his crotch, who
truly deserves an apology is the Latinx population
of America who had to watch a man partially
responsible for their ongoing disenfranchisement
essentially take a steaming dump on their culture.
Because that’s who we forget, right? The real
people affected by Spicer, his political cronies and
his supporters who chant “Build the Wall” one day
and celebrate Cinco de Mayo the next. In the rush by
some moderates to absolve Spicer of his “minor” sins
and see him as a man separate from — oh yeah — the
career decisions he’s made as an autonomous adult,
we don’t create a harmonious society or even “begin
a conversation.” We are just complicit.
Almost more importantly, we ruin the sanctity of
escapist reality television. No longer can “Dancing
with the Stars” merely be a place where America
retreats from the pain of the real world to watch
old has-beens break bones and dance the Foxtrot.
With Mike Huckabee mobilizing Ford F-150 Twitter,
panhandling online for prayers and votes to keep
Spicer on the show for another week, the sustained
blurring of lines between politics and entertainment
continues and “Dancing with the Stars” becomes
some sort of battleground for conservatives to “own
libs.”
I beg of you, before it gets too dystopian in here,
vote this man off. If not for me, then at least so we can
focus on the true underdog of this season, America’s
sweetheart, James Van der Beek. The electoral
college is not on their side this time.
Tonight, doing the cha-cha:
The worst spice on the rack
ALLY OWENS
Daily TV Editor
TV NOTEBOOK
ABC
No longer can “Dancing with the Stars” merely be
a place where America retreats from the pain of the
real world to watch old has-beens break bones and
dance the Foxtrot
In its own peculiarity,
Porter’s bizarre little
book deconstructs the
myths we create to
survive those moments
when there is no
rational explanation
“Lanny”
Max Porter
Graywolf Press
March 5, 2019
Listening to Spinetta’s works, once can see the
direct influences from the musical movements
burgeoning in the Anglophone world at the
time