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Arts
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 — 5
Guided By Voices has always
basically been known as Bob Pollard
and a bunch of guys with day jobs.
He was the driving force behind
the band in any of its iterations.
Whether it was back in the ’80s
when they were still recording out
of a garage or in the ’90s when they
sounded like they were recording
out of a garage, Pollard’s presence
has stayed the same.
Aside from Pollard’s constancy,
the structure of the band has never
been consistent: The number of
members present and prior is
21. The morphology of the band
became so convoluted that there’s
an
official
timeline
depicting
the change in formation on their
Wikipedia. In all honesty, the only
asset that really propelled Guided
By Voices into becoming a well-
recognized member of the indie
rock scene was Pollard. His esoteric
lyricism and musical quirks were
by far the band’s greatest strength.
This was his band. That’s why it’s
so surprising that he seems to be
the one dragging the band down on
their latest release, Surrender Your
Poppy Field.
This
is
not
to
say
the
instrumentation
is
anything
particularly
mind
blowing
or radical. If anything, the
sound is a bit dated, drawing
comparisons to Olivia Tremor
Control or Semisonic. But even
their critically acclaimed releases
from the ’90s sounded dated. They
were purposely going for a lofi
approach, which, in all honesty,
sounded better on Ween’s The Pod
or anything by Beat Happening.
The music on Surrender Your Poppy
Field simply gets the job done with
the occasional standout track. A
few notable tracks include “Arthur
Has Business Elsewhere” and
“Steely Dodger,” the latter of which
sounds like The Books tried to make
standard rock music. This is an
improvement from their previous
post-reformation
records
that
inexplicably tried to hold on to their
lofi endeavors from decades earlier.
The biggest problem with this
album is that Bob doesn’t have
anything to say. This was never the
case beforehand, as his sharp wit
was the biggest attraction to any
Guided By Voices record. At best,
he’s able to string together a few
clever bars on the record. At worst
... oh God. At worst, there’s “Cul-
de-Sac Kids.” Nothing about this
song suggests a right to exist. How
does a 62-year-old man sing “Cul-
de-sac kids have the best parties”
and “Boy, those sac kids throw
good parties” with any sincerity?
The answer: he doesn’t. It has all
of the vocal absurdity of Frank
Zappa’s “Catholic Girls” with just
about none of the irony. Mix this
with the worst instrumentation on
the album and you get a real mess
of a milkshake. This is one of those
songs that completely halts any
momentum for at least the next few
songs. Unfortunately, the album
doesn’t provide anything to bring it
back from such a low.
It’s a shame that one song
functions as a grenade, wrecking
the enjoyment of an album.
Surrender
Your
Poppy
Field
had the potential to be a fairly
decent record, at least relative to
their more recent work. Instead,
we’re given a confirmation that
Guided By Voices should stop
putting out records. At the very
least they need to take more time
crafting better sets of songs.
When you’re putting out three
records in one year, it suggests
that you don’t understand the
concept of b-sides. One can hope
they’re only putting out two
albums in 2020.
Guided by Voices needs to
stop: On their new album
GUIDED BY VOICES INC.
DREW GADBOIS
Daily Arts Writer
Surrender Your
Poppy Field
Guided By Voices
Guided By Voices, Inc.
ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW
Adapted from the hit podcast
of the same name, Epix’s new
docu-series “Slow Burn” — which
details the people involved in the
events of the Watergate Scandal
— has joined the trend of podcast-
turned-television shows, and it
certainly will not be the last. In
our current media climate, the
endless profit possibilities that
different intellectual properties
offer has nearly every network or
platform scrambling to attain the
rights to reproduce stories we’ve
already heard before, but just on
their platform. There’s absolutely
nothing wrong with adapting
a series from one medium to
another, but the qualities that
make a podcast great are separate
from what makes a television
series great.
Great
podcasts
make
you
feel close to the text. The voice
speaking to you invites you to
imagine and create your own
understanding of the story as
it’s being told. Podcasts-turned-
television series, on the other
hand, command you to sit down
and take in a single version of the
story unfolding before your eyes.
“Slow Burn” wants us to imagine
what it felt like to live through
Watergate in real time. It gives
listeners a different perspective
on the events we think we know so
well, stripping away the collective
knowledge of the event in order
to tell the story from the very
beginning.
The visual element that “Slow
Burn” returns to the most is the
image of an empty living room
that screams 1970s — a wooden
coffee table, a walnut bookshelf,
an FM radio controlled with a
dial. With each return, it becomes
easier to imagine yourself being
there, living through the events,
catching a snippet of the daily
Watergate news coverage as you
go about your day.
The brilliance of the title
“Slow Burn” is how host Leon
Neyfakh perfectly evokes the
feeling of a literal slow burn
with his suspensful storytelling.
Recounting
history
through
our
collective
memory
often
results in only remembering the
popular assumptions and forced
narratives. In other words, we
remember the outcomes, but not
the specifics, such as the people
involved.
“Slow Burn” is all about
the people involved. Neyfakh
repeatedly invites us to forget
about what we already know
about Watergate and imagine
ourselves as observers who have
no idea what the “third-rate
burglary” that barely made it
into The Washington Post might
eventually
lead
to.
Neyfakh
loves bringing our attention to
figures who “played roles in the
story that are larger than history
remembers.” The series opener is
centered around Martha Mitchell
— the wife of Nixon’s Attorney
General — and outlines her
role as the initial whistleblower
in the Watergate scandal. The
episode also recounts the Nixon
administration’s successful smear
campaign to dismiss Mitchell as a
crazy alcoholic in order to control
the narrative.
Without Mitchell, it’s very
possible
that
the
truth
of
Watergate would have never
come out. Mitchell’s courage to
speak out, the steps taken by the
government to keep her quiet
and to turn her into some sort of
delusional person are not talked
about as often as it should be. The
relevance of Mitchell’s treatment
by the press and the Nixon
administration
is
particularly
relevant considering the way our
current president disregards and
discredits anyone who speaks out
against him. This episode details
Mitchell’s role in Watergate, and
the rest of the series should bring
back important figures that have
been forgotten by history and the
slow burn of the truth. The next
time someone tells you a story
that’s so outrageous that you
can’t believe it, remember that
sometimes the craziest thing to
come out of someone’s mouth may
very well be the truth.
Slow Burn
Series Premiere
Epix
Sundays @ 10 p.m.
JUSTIN POLLACK
Daily Arts Writer
Watergate’s ‘Slow Burn’
EPIX
Sometimes it’s actually worth
reading the jacket copy — a lot
hides there. Lidia Yuknavitch’s
debut story collection, “Verge,”
is, apparently, “a group portrait
of
the
marginalized
and
outcast in moments of crisis.”
Yuknavitch apparently “offers
a shard-sharp mosaic portrait
of human resilience on the
margins.” The blurbs on the back
of the book have more to say
about this theme: the novelist
Dorothy Allison writes that
“I know these people, I know
their dilemmas, and where I
don’t recognize them, I believe
them.” The essayist Melissa
Febos offers that the stories
“showed me how resilience is
forged through survival, beauty
through
brokenness,
joy
by
fire.” In the acknowledgements
to the book, Yuknavitch writes,
“to everyone anywhere living
in the in-between of things: I
get it.” As it turns out, this use
of the term “marginalization” is
used in a slippery, broad way; it
encompasses anyone who is in a
position somewhat illegible from
the point of view of normative
society.
Yuknavitch
writes
about both war refugees and
women frustrated with their
relationships,
incarcerated
people
and
people
who,
dissatisfied with bourgeois life,
begin to identify with elsewhere.
The key is a sense of incongruity
with the dominant narrative of
what a person should be doing.
I
am
focusing
on
this
peripheral material — jacket
copy, acknowledgements, blurbs
— because it necessarily primes
readers for the text, and because
Yuknavitch
herself
doesn’t
frame these stories, yet they
clearly go together. “Knowing
people” and “believing them”
are functions of compassion —
the statements in the packaging
of the book indicate an ethical
bent to Yuknavitch’s fiction,
one where bearing witness to
the lives of marginalized people
is a way to find out about “the
world we live in now.” Empathy
seems to be the function of this
book, its rationale. In this book,
we as readers will bear witness
to the stories of the resilient
outcast, broadly defined; we will
have compassion for them. This
framing material is basically
an insistence on Yuknavitch’s
ability as an author to shape
these particular experiences into
a form that readers will be able to
understand.
I’m
interested
in
the
assumptions
inherent
in
empathy,
especially
as
an
ethic of literature, especially
when “literature” means $26
books published by an imprint
of MacMillan. I feel like an
audience is implied when a
book claims to be a vehicle for
empathy. This is to say, two
groups of people are created by
books like this — the readers,
the ones who empathize; and the
subject, who is empathized with.
This, of course, is common
in fiction. The way Yuknavitch
writes about her subjects is often
troubling, though. The opening
of one of the shortest stories in
the collection, “A Woman Going
Out,” is a minutely detailed
description of a woman shaving
her legs in the second person:
“Take the razor up smooth
against the slight resistance of
stubble, flick the wrist at the top,
dip the head into the water, swish
it around, then back down to the
ankle for the next run. Flesh
smooth-appearing in a track
through white foam. Do it again.”
Like the flesh appearing from
under the leg hairs, Yuknavitch
likes to slowly reveal her subjects
at the beginning of the stories,
starting
disorientingly
close
and then slowly zooming out.
This story, which is less than a
page long, reveals the woman’s
genitalia in a moment that feels
like it was meant to trip up the
reader. “Over the knee to the
thigh, pause; same with the
other leg, pause; scrunch it inch
by inch up the thighs to the balls
pushed back up into the cave, to
the penis tucked tight between
the legs and secured with a
thong … ”
We do not, in fact, see the
trans
woman
going
out.
It
stops here, in her bathroom,
letting the body signify in
place of the woman’s mind,
personality or actions beyond
the cosmetic; it effectively erases
her
personhood
as
separate
from her body. The story relies
on
the
reader
experiencing
the trans woman’s genitals as
surprising and alien; the story
gets its narrative shove from the
othering of the titular character.
I’m not mentioning this story
because I take special issue with
Yuknavitch’s fictional treatment
of trans people. I’m mentioning
it because outside of the context
of
the
collection’s
thematic
umbrella, this story would be
fully visible as a mechanism for
othering a person. I found myself
wondering after this story about
how much of the depiction of
people on the “verges” of things
requires establishing their state
as abject.
This same kind of othering
appears
in
different
stories
in other guises. In “Second
Language,” a Lithuanian woman
is engaged in prostitution in
Portland. She doesn’t understand
English very well, and navigates
her new country in a dissociative
haze. The prose style Yuknavitch
uses is intensely bodily and feels
slightly unmoored from reality.
“The front man lived near a
freeway — what freedom was
it meant to have? — in a snot-
colored two-story house with
black plastic in the windows
where curtains in the windows
where curtains should be. When
she knocked on the door, her
throat cords braided and her
vertebrae rattled.” There is an
intense fixation on this woman’s
body, even outside of the sex
scenes, the story is full of pale
wrists, neck veins, intestines.
The story’s fixation is on how
the experience of prostitution
robs the woman of her ability to
understand herself or her world,
her lack of fluency in English just
another way she feels displaced.
Her body becomes the only thing
that signifies, and all it signifies is
a use value — the meaning of this
woman’s life is stripped away by
the new country, her experiences
there. It’s more than a little
painful to read. The ending is
unsatisfyingly redemptive — the
woman tells a Slavic folktale as
a way of furtively hanging onto
some aspect of her self-definition
(“There was one thing besides
her body that she possessed —
a story, in a foreign tongue but
still a story”) and in the end
Yuknavitch’s
story
takes
on
the character of a folktale. The
woman guts herself with window
glass and spills her entrails onto
the pavement, and in doing so
calls down greywolves from
the
mountains
surrounding
Portland, who avenge her against
her clients and her pimps. The
ending of the story is something
like the statement of a moral: “I
tell you, do not go near that place.
Do not go near it. Greywolves
guard the ground there. Girls are
growing from guts, enough for a
body and a language all the way
out of this world.”
Empathy ill-defined in
Lidia Yuknavitch’s ‘Verge’
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
PBS
Verge: Stories
Lidia Yuknavitch
Riverhead Books
Feb. 4, 2020
TV REVIEW
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