I'll go ahead and warn you: my editorial for the night is very political. I know this turns most people off, and this won't be the norm by any stretch; most of my editorials will cover a broader range. But with the inauguration on everybody's mind, my own included, I had a few very political things to say.
Anyway, if you're not in the mood, you can go ahead and skip down to my normal Week in Literal Review feature.
EDITORIAL:
We stand at a crucial transition in our nation's history. One era of U.S. politics is coming to its rightful end- I say rightful because its failure has almost reached the point of objective historical truth. I'd like to say I knew it all along, but following party lines and spin in a highly polarized society doesn't constitute having a personal opinion; it was only in the past few years that I developed real opposition.
During this change in administration, looking past the obvious changes (there are many) and past the obvious things that will remain the same (there are many) leads us to question other, more fundamental differences between 2001 and 2009. One of these differences is, to me, striking: our nation has suddenly, miraculously, started seeing gray again.
Notice the rhetoric of our outgoing President during these final days, as reported by Democracy Now: "America must maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken to you about good and evil. And this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere." Scoff or cheer, pick your poison, but this pretty much captures the typical U.S. citizen's mindset during this administration. The world was all about black and white, clear moral superiority and clear moral inferiority.
At least, that was the world we wanted to see. But Abu Ghraib put a dent in our sense of ethical impregnability, as did allegations of waterboarding and other torture in various prison institutions run under the radar by our government. There was no need to worry, though; our President washed the fears away: "America does not torture."
I speak facetiously there, of course; most of us took that response to the scandal as a joke, an absurd reductivist approach. Then again, what happened to our attention span on the torture issue? It seems like our compassion waned significantly as torture fell from "headline" status. We don't have to worry about it, we can use that age-old excuse of the contemporary middle class: "there are just too many issues, we can't care about all of them at once."
Along, then, comes Obama's attorney-general designate, Holder, who doesn't shy away from the issue: Waterboarding, he says, is torture. There it is, laid plain in the arena of public discourse. The New York Times covered the aftermath; the constant frustration Holder faces is that his definition will force us to "look back," whereas Obama wants to look to the future.
So if we're not supposed to look back, what can we do to excise our communal demons, the ethical dilemmas that we'd like to get rid of before the new administration? Well, a nice proxy should do the trick. Enter Israel, who (tellingly) compare their recently-ceased invasion of Gaza proudly to U.S. tactics in Iraq. Steven Erlanger's article for the New York Times plays into this handy metaphor: aside from the obvious mistake (not quoting or referencing the Palestinian opinion of anything) he conveniently talks about the nature of guerilla warfare and its relationship to war crimes with barely a mention of Iraq.
This Israel situation is the best thing that could have happened to our national conscience. It's like asking for advice in a sitcom: "Hey, uh, I have this friend, Israel, and he, well, he invaded another nation and killed an inordinate number of civilians." It's a perfect way to talk about legal implications without, well, implicating ourselves.
I'll drop the smart-ass tone here. How dare we? How dare we talk about "not looking back?" What we're shielding from our eyes isn't some intangible error out of centuries past; we are ignoring people who are alive now, people we have hurt very, very recently. We are so excited about moving ahead that we're letting the casualties of our apathy fall helplessly by the wayside. I'll ask it again: how dare we?
Interesting footnote: in the aforementioned article, Israel's logic seemed strikingly familiar. A government official states plainly: "Not to target civilians, not to target U.N. people, not to target medical staff. All this is very clear in Israeli military doctrine.” It's part of the doctrine. Israel does not do that. I guess that's the end of the story- no gray area needed.
THE WEEK IN LITERAL REVIEW:
Most Interesting, Music:
Tough call this week, but one item gets the definite edge. New Decemberists MP3.
Most Interesting, Film:
Ten Sundance shorts for free (yes, free) via iTunes.
Weirdest:
AICN interviewed accidental superstar Soulja Boy.
Biggest World Event:
A ceasefire was forged in Gaza.
Reviews
Fever Ray, Fever Ray
Fever Ray's new album caught me by surprise in more ways than one. First, I was prepared for a March release, so to have the album mid-January definitely caught me off my guard. Second, though I was passingly familiar with a few tracks by The Knife, from which Karin Dreijer Andersson (who is Fever Ray) hails, I had never really looked far into that catalogue. Loading the album up, I was a little confused and hesitant, and in a way, I feel like that's how Andersson would have preferred it.
This is a daunting album. It is moody, arch, and grippingly sincere in a way that will remind some of Björk, but it's got a dark, primitive edge that wouldn't feel out of place on an old Einstürzende Neubauten record. Don't let these references fill in all of the blanks, though; Andersson has a perspective and style that is all her own.
Those who've listened to The Knife will find a lot of this to be familiar territory: thoroughly distorted vocals, sinister and stripped-down electronic beats, they're all here. But these tracks lack some of the poppy, energetic pacing, replacing it with more foreign and intricate beats that drive the songs in a distinct way.
Many of these songs are about monsters, not in the Hollywood sense, but the Steinbeck sense: a character with some fundamentally different perception that makes them totally alien to the world at large. People are capsules of energy, or live between walls, or exist forever. Andersson admits, whether in character or not, that she hates how others desire her love, explaining that she'd be far more content to work among plants. The album envelops you in waves of isolation, the feeling of being hopelessly separate from what is normal and familiar. On "Seven," Andersson darkly comments on the rituals of conformity: a box of light and sound which, if unopened, will make you very alone.
While the layers of instrumentation are perfect companions to the album's tone, the most potent instrument on Fever Ray is Andersson's voice. When thickened and deepened through means artificial, it can be remarkably bizarre and evocative, but her pure, unfiltered voice is the album's strongest weapon, an intimate and unsettling wail that bends and cracks and rises back up to inhuman tones. On "Triangle Walks" and "I'm Not Done" she laces her voice with a malicious determination; on "Now's The Only Time I Know" or "Seven" it takes on an air of desperate, wistful tragedy. Every unforgettable moment on this album is made so because of Andersson's vocal talent. On "Dry and Dusty's lone unfiltered stanza, the delivery of "Work as I've been told/In return, I get money" is crushing. Lyrics, too, bury themselves in your psyche: on "I'm Not Done", the imagery in a simple question ("do you laugh while screaming?") is hard to forget.
In fact, Andersson's voice is so crucial to the album that the one vocal cameo, by Cecilia Nordlund, is - when isolated - gorgeous, but feels here somewhat out of place and wrong. The arrangement on the album is lush and smart, but the haunting element that will keep drawing me in, time and time again, is Andersson's signature singing. It's what elevates this album from interesting audio distraction to a very unique sort of brilliance.
Personal:
Still cold as hell in my dorm. Nobody has come to fix the thermostat. I'm stressed about money, in addition to my irrational fear that I will somehow be unable to attend my classes this semester. I shouldn't complain too much; I got to hang out with some friends, I wrote what they consider to be a reasonably funny sketch, and I got to eat at the divine Mellow Mushroom. I guess there's something oddly comforting in worrying about the future, though; last semester's carefree carpe diem left me in the lurch, feeling sort of fatalistic.
Tomorrow, I attempt to wake up on my weekday schedule. Let's see if I can pull it off!
2009 FILMS SEEN: 1
2009 SONGS ON MY ITUNES: 61
Current Computer Situation: MacBook Pro, pissy about the temperature.
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