The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 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 Read more online at michigandaily.com