The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
10 — Wednesday, March 17, 2021
There is a kind of clarity about oneself
that comes with empathy. Something about
examining yourself in the way you respond
to others, in the emotional exchange that
is shared when you feel keenly what those
around you are feeling, that provides clarity.
Alice Phoebe Lou, as she discussed in an
interview with The Daily, is an empath,
something apparent in her music. The
South African-born, Berlin-based free spirit
smiled while ruminating on this, giving a
nervous laugh that worked hard not to give
away the seriousness of her words. Her
catalogue of music reflects this balance;
it is tempting to categorize her music as
folk, save for its luminescent touches of
interstellar space. Her music creates space
in a way that is reminiscent of Jamie Drake,
and her voice shines similarly to another
blonde otherworldly being, Joni Mitchell.
And yet, her music escapes the genres that
would pin it down.
Glow, her new album, was a change
in sound, in part due to it being recorded
entirely on tape and because it’s full of love
songs. “Especially with this album, what I’m
trying to do or communicate with the songs
is being able … to try and help somebody get
more in touch with their own emotions and
their own feelings, which I feel is a gift,”
Lou told The Daily. She described music
as a catalyst for seeing within yourself, as
everyone is at different stages of connecting
with themselves. The new album is languid,
not rushing the listener into or out of love,
but allowing them to explore the feelings it
inspires at that moment in time.
Intriguingly, she had a specific goal
for her listeners with this new work — to
make them feel. However, there is a careful
balance between her musical needs and the
listeners’ expectations.
“I used to focus too much on the listener,”
she admitted. “As I was writing the songs,
I was adjusting things, or censoring things
or making things more palatable, based on
like, wanting the listener to be happier with
the final product, or … anticipating what
somebody wants from you, rather than just
giving what you want.”
That has changed. There is certainly a
sense of newfound self-confidence on this
record. In fact, this LP is a total change in
sound from her previous two. Although the
songs are mostly about another person —
as love songs often are — they are entirely
Alice. To be able to connect to your own
truest self through your love for another is
a special thing. And finding the right way to
express it? Well, that’s the challenge.
In the past, Lou explained, “I was always
looking to, like, one of the men in the room
to kind of … take over and, and steer (the
music).” Now, however, she has found an
important reason to trust her own musical
intuition. “It’s my story. It’s my thing,” she
asserts. How can she truly write about what
she feels, if she is not more vocal in how it is
executed?
This aforementioned dip in confidence
arose mainly from her lack of professional
training musically. Lou began as a street
performer,
busking
with
her
guitar
(although she casually mentioned that
she was first a fire dancer). Everything
in her musical journey happened quickly
without giving her the space to master
her instrument. Even though there are
times when she feels self-conscious about
this, it also works to her advantage. This is
especially so when hanging with her band,
who are all trained musicians.
“We learn from each other and bring
different things to the table, because the fact
that I don’t have a musical education also
helps me see a bit outside of the box of like,
this is how a song is supposed to sound,” she
told The Daily.
Her atypical way of looking at music is
part of what creates her singular sound. “It
becomes this kind of unique sound, and this
unique thing, my band is able to kind of, you
know, create the worlds in which we live,
because of … the things that they’ve learned
more technically from music,” she said. “So I
feel like we learn so much from each other.”
This reciprocal education was vital to an
element of her music that has always pulled
me in: its playfulness. Even when her music
covers serious topics, it always has a corner
of a smile beneath. At its most joyful, it feels
like a laugh that simply can’t be repressed —
something too good to be true, so much so
that it evokes a physical response.
“I started becoming very serious about
everything, and everything had to be like,
a serious thing,” she admitted, in the midst
of praising her band for saving her from
this mindset. They reminded her that the
goal is to enjoy, and that mistakes can be
laughed over. This sort of easy happiness
has underlined her music before, most
notably the play on orgasm noises in her
breakout song, “Something Holy.” Now on
her new album, love takes on a more quiet
seriousness, and a notable queerness. “Dusk,”
the lead single from Glow, croons to a loved
one, using female pronouns to refer to the
individual. Lou wishes to leave this song up to
interpretation, keeping the kind of love being
sung about ambiguous. She likes to keep her
songs and herself undefined.
“I don’t like to make the meanings too
obvious or didactic,” she ventured. “Because
then it kind of breaks the magic of like, your
own agency of interpretation.”
Lou makes her music for herself, to
express her experiences. But once it is out
in the world, there is a beauty in it that it
gives everyone something different. It is not
her song, she emphasized, but hers and all
listeners. This is the importance of art in our
everyday lives — the meaning we get from it.
“I feel like sometimes I just have this
desire for my music and my songs to be
like a friend that can relate to those parts of
yourself,” Lou mulled over in our discussion
of self confidence.
“If maybe you live in a family or a
community or an environment that doesn’t
serve you in that way and doesn’t actually
allow you to … take away the shame.”
Alice Phoebe Lou’s Glow is out March 19.
Basement Arts’s production of
“Jesus Corner,” written and directed
by Music, Theatre & Dance freshman
Samuel Aupperlee, is as splendid as it is
strange. The one-man show, starring
Music, Theatre & Dance senior Kieran
Westphal as narrator, draws from
real-life accounts of people reckoning
their sexual identities with their
Christian faith. The subject matter
is inherently tricky to grapple with,
yet the joint efforts of Westphal and
Aupperlee prove to be an artistic tour-
de-force.
The production uses documentary-
style theatre — much of the content is
drawn from real-life interviews with
people who identify as both Christian
and LGBTQ+. These perspectives
are shared through a “Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood” style children’s show,
in which the unnamed narrator
interviews
puppets
about
their
experiences.
The use of handmade puppets to
explain Christianity, homosexuality
and where they intersect, is one
fraught with potential for either
extraordinary failure or extraordinary
success. After all, we rarely associate
religiously-motivated
homophobia
with sock puppets. Nevertheless,
“Jesus Corner” pulls it off.
Westphal’s peppy delivery and
colorful puppets contrast sharply
with the heavy subject matter. The
protagonist named Narrator presents
us with three puppets periodically
throughout the show. One of them,
Pastor Meaning, is a snake puppet
in a pastor’s uniform (the biblical
irony isn’t lost on me). He appears
periodically to explain doctrinal
truths, especially those outlining
what it means to be “good.” The
show starts out with a relatively
friendly tone, the presentation seems
good-naturedly
cheesy.
Narrator
explains to the “boys and girls” that
God’s love is unconditional, but that
homosexuality is a sin.
The first half of “Jesus Corner”
is intentionally evasive in the way
it discusses the struggles of being a
gay Christian. The puppets do what
puppets do best: They sugarcoat.
The sermon repeats the mantras
that many a pastor has reiterated
in the past decade, those detailing
the inherent conditionality in God’s
love — “Hate the sin, love the sinner”
rhetoric. There is a palpable tonal shift
when Narrator’s puppets One and
Two detail their experiences coming
out to their parents. The dialogue
starts out lightly, but quickly takes
a grim turn when Two’s parents
decide to ignore their homosexuality
completely. “They say come as you
are, but they don’t really want that,”
Two says.
As the puppets tell their stories,
the manner in which the Narrator
portrays
the
puppets
becomes
increasingly erratic. It is heavily
implied that he too is struggling with
his sexual identity, which becomes
evident as the characters of the
puppets fade away.
The stage directions detail that the
puppets become “clearly inanimate,”
and it becomes evident that the
Narrator is completely alone. The
performative aspect of the puppets is
an interesting technique, as it helps
the audience differentiate between
the
performative
heterosexuality
the Narrator finds himself forced to
practice and the reality of his sexual
identity. The distinction between
meaningless
statements
about
tolerance and the harsh reality of
ostracization makes itself visible in a
way that’s hard to watch.
“God loves you, just not as you are”
is a mantra that is intensely hurtful,
but terribly familiar to many who
grew up Christian. It’s the mantra
that drove me away from religion
altogether. It’s the reason I wake up
in a cold sweat, terrified of a God I’ve
tried my best to renounce. “Jesus
Corner” hits particularly close to
home because it speaks to not just
my fears, but the fears of anyone
who has dared to exist outside of
the straightlaced (no pun intended)
Christian ideal.
Perhaps the most powerful motif
in this show is that of crucifixion.
Each time the Narrator deviates
from his performance of “good
Christian heterosexuality,” we hear
the scintillating clang of a hammer
on nails. This cacophony serves as
the soundtrack for the Narrator’s
final breakdown, in which he states,
“Sometimes all you can do is make
some noise and let God know how
you feel.” We are left with the final
image of the Narrator with his
wrists outstretched, stained with red
marker, offering himself up as a final
atonement.
Even in its COVID-19-altered
form,
“Jesus
Corner”
astounds.
The oscillation between anguish
and erraticism on Westphal’s part
is excellently portrayed, and the
design concept is simple yet effective.
Aupperlee’s script mixes the bizarre
with the biting. It hammers at the
gruesome reality of homophobia, and
the nails run deep.
I am a deeply impatient person. I
try to keep the worst of it subdued, to
at least play at maturity, but it comes
out in the way I love spoilers (more
often than not I seek them out myself)
and the way I watch the clock tick
up by seconds during the last minute
before my shift is over at work and the
way I average 87 miles per hour on
the expressway so that I can get to my
destinations sooner.
Because I’m impatient, I always
want to skip ahead. If a plot point in
a movie is taking too long to develop,
I’ll open the Wikipedia page and read
what happens before the movie can
tell me itself. I did it just last week,
watching the Bride struggle to get out
of a coffin in “Kill Bill Vol. 2.” I’m not
sure when it started, but I think it goes
back a ways. I tell people I just don’t
like surprises, but what I mean is that
I don’t like to wait.
I was a sophomore in high school
the first time I saw the film “Her.”
At the time, no one had written a
comprehensive Wikipedia synopsis
for it yet, so I was forced to let myself
be surprised. Over the course of the
film, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix,
“Joker”), a lonely writer going through
a divorce, and Samantha (Scarlett
Johansson, “Marriage Story”), his
ultra-intuitive, all-knowing operating
system who speaks to him through
an earpiece, form an emotional and
sexual relationship. He’s a human,
and she’s a computer program. The
premise works better in its execution
than it does on paper (I swear), and
upon first viewing, I found myself
wanting to reach for my phone and
look for a review, a blog post, anything
that might answer all of the questions
I had about this movie.
By now, I know all of the answers.
I love the movie so much that
Samantha’s lines about how “the
heart’s not like a box that gets filled up;
it expands in size the more you love”
have practically written themselves
in my DNA. Even before quarantine,
the film was a comfort I returned to
often. During quarantine, it resonates
because it’s about connection and
disconnection with technology as a
medium — the ways we can relate
to each other through it but also the
ways it limits our interactions. It’s
easy to identify with Theodore and
his desire for love and closeness in any
world, with or without a pandemic,
but his relationship with someone
he can’t touch — someone he can’t
even communicate with without the
technology — hits harder now than it
did before.
But the more I watch the movie,
the more I think that I identify most
with Isabella (Soko, “The Dancer”),
a woman who Samantha enlists to
act as a middleman, to be the body
Samantha can never have and give
Theodore what she thinks will be
more genuine experience during sex.
Samantha is quick to clarify
that Isabella is not a sex worker
because there’s no money involved;
she just wants to be a part of their
relationship. Isabella is a conduit, but
she also comes into their relationship
with the assumption that she’ll be
an equal partner. When she enters
Theodore’s apartment, her arms wrap
around him immediately, borrowing
Samantha’s
emotional
familiarity
with him and translating it into the
physical, even as Samantha guides
them. It’s Samantha’s voice in their
ears, but it’s Isabella who has the
bodily agency. She doesn’t really know
either of them, but she’s able to act as
she does, and she might even believe
she does. When things inevitably go
awry and Isabella leaves sadly, she
tells Theodore and Samantha that she
will always love them. Even though
he’s the one to call the whole thing
off and send Isabella home, insisting
that it just didn’t feel right, I think
Theodore is more like Isabella than he
realizes.
Theodore works for the fictional
beautifulhandwrittenletters.com,
a
company that writes personal letters
for other people. In one scene, he tells
Samantha about writing love letters
for a couple named Roger and Rachel
for eight years and how he included
a detail about Rachel’s crooked tooth
in a letter because he saw it in a photo
of them. Theodore, like Isabella, is an
intermediary in other people’s love
lives, a guest meant to manufacture
or facilitate intimacy when his hosts
can’t find or make it themselves. His
familiarity with them is artificial, but
he pretends to know them deeply in
order to replicate their love back to
them.
There’s something there that I
can understand. It’s not so much the
in-betweenness or the way other
people use Theodore and Isabella to
communicate love when they can’t
do it themselves; it’s the immediacy of
knowing another person.
When I meet people, sometimes
I want us to act as we’ve always
known each other. I’m impatient. I
want to skip over the pleasantries, the
hesitation, the shyness, so I can get
straight to the familiarity, the warmth,
the kinship. Forget the exposition,
give me everything that comes after.
Let me know everything about a
person and let them know everything
about me in the second I see them, so
I can love and be loved in an instant.
I’m impatient. Drop me somewhere
near the center of a relationship, past
the earliest stages but far from the
end. Let me walk into an apartment
and wrap my arms around someone I
didn’t know at all yesterday but know
deeply today. Make me like Isabella
and Theodore, but remove the artifice.
I know it’s a lot to ask, and I know
people just don’t work that way. The
practical parts of me rail against
my inability to let go of this kind of
idealism, the same idealism that
makes the idea of love at first sight
so appealing to kids and hopeless
romantics. It’s the practical parts that
keep me from leaning completely
into my fantasies of seeing and then
immediately knowing other people, of
cutting through the politeness to get
to the closeness. I play at maturity by
holding myself in one spot and trying
to root myself there.
I’m trying to get myself to enjoy
the exposition. I’m trying to rein in
my eagerness and remind myself that,
sometimes, good things take time.
I’ll probably keep spoiling movies for
myself, though. I’m still impatient.
‘Her,’ connection and impatience
Alice Phoebe Lou finds clarity in her latest, ‘Glow’
‘Jesus Corner’ hits the nail on the cross
KATRINA STEBBINS
For The Daily
DARBY WILLIAMS
Daily Arts Writer
SOFIA ROSA KAMINSKI
Daily Arts Writer
Andrea Rojas
Warner Bros. Pictures
Oh, what a joy — to sit down in a cafe
and embrace the ambience. Filled with an
assortment of chairs, knickknacks and eccentric
personas, sitting down in a cafe for a poetry
reading is probably in my top 50 things to do if
you like to read and have a coffee addiction. So
that’s why I was so excited to drop in on Café
Shapiro’s first night of student readings, tuning
in a little differently than how I imagined, with
my computer on my lap and a bag of Takis by my
side. Nevertheless, the night had some amazing
talent that made my hair stand on end and my
eyes tear up just a little bit, even if it was only
Takis dust in my eye.
Café Shapiro is a 20-plus year tradition
created and hosted by the University of
Michigan’s Library that originally was a student
coffee break as a part of the University’s “Year
of the Humanities and Arts.” For two weeks,
University undergraduate writers read aloud
selected works, ranging from poems to op-eds.
Although the first installments have come and
gone, there are still several more chances to see
student writers read their work.
One of the first highlights of the first night was
LSA sophomore Nicole Tooley. Tooley’s poetry
was the perfect balance of natural and processed
sugar. Her poem “Those Divine Cows” captured
childhood in all of its pinky swearing, Kool-Aid
drinking and cow dung-smoking glory. Maybe
cow dung isn’t the first thing that comes to mind
when you think about childhood nostalgia, but
this story resurfaced a really niche memory for
me of those field trips you take to that one lonely
farm or petting zoo off the highway (we all know
the one). Tooley’s use of childhood imagery and
sweet, soft cadence created an airy story of
youth. She captured the sappy love and distilled
it into a syrupy poem that stopped my heart in its
viscous nostalgia.
Next on my list of favorite pieces from
the
night:
LSA
senior
Dylan
Gilbert’s
“Appointment.” It was a chilling poem, focused
and clear. Gilbert’s poem consisted of a dialogue
between a patient with saltwater in their
lungs and a doctor who thinks anything but.
The juxtaposition of such an obvious ailment
makes the doctor’s unwillingness to hear the
patient that much more upsetting. Gilbert was
able to use this dialogue to address the blatant
disrespect that Black women face when seeking
help from America’s healthcare system. Gilbert’s
voice is clear, and while other readers often felt
disengaged in their readings, Gilbert brought
the scene to life with her stunning performance.
Another standout writer from the night was
LSA junior Malin Andersson with “The Night
Farmer.” Speaking as someone who definitely
had a curiosity for astronomy as a kid and still
does today, a poem about a farmer keeping a
field of stars sounds like the perfect Pisces,
sun-inspired Studio Ghibli film. However,
Andersson’s juxtaposition of the farmer’s
sparkling cosmic light and the artificial sterility
of hospital lights provided a somber note to the
poem’s otherwise whimsical style. Ultimately,
Andersson’s work felt like the kind of poetry you
read on a happy rainy day — joyous, with notes
of melancholy.
All the writers brought an amazing
assortment of original work to the cafe, and it
was an absolute pleasure to listen in on some
of the University’s best writers. Though the
reading was without the more cringy staples
of a coffee shop’s poetry night, I was better off
getting to see students in their homes and in
their element, with me sitting cozily in mine.
Divine cows, salt water and a little night
farmer: Café Shapiro’s opening night
DARBY WILLIAMS
Daily Arts Writer
Design courtesy of Caitlin Martens