A Modest Request from a Potentially Homeless Writer

Will You Pay my Rent?


by James Albert Barr


Will you pay my rent? Seriously, it's nearing the end of the month (shit, it's actually tomorrow!) and I really need someone to cover it for me because I'm plumb broke. I really am. I can't remember being so utterly, so abjectly bereft of renewable funds. I'm totally broke, and practically penniless. And as Canadians well know, pennies are now absolutely useless; they've been discontinued and formally retired by the federal government. Stores reject them and piggy banks are less credible with them collected in its ceramic belly. Actually, I've got an old Classic Coke can filled with pennies. It still makes for a good paper weight, even though I rarely use paper now; especially single sheets strewn everywhere like during my "Henry Miller phase".

Yes, you guessed it: I'm unemployed at the moment, and not entirely without a degree of deliberateness on my part, I fully confess. But you see, here's the thing: I can't be wasting my precious, and quite frankly, crucial time making money, traditionally, for a living, because I'm preoccupied at the moment with representing you in the courtroom of life. What is the "courtroom of life" you might ask? with perhaps an inkling itching you in a hard-to-reach-area, or a visceral or cerebral discomfort all taut and knotted, but not so paralyzing as to prevent you from performing your daily tasks resulting in a likely bi-weekly stipend and a Pavlovian endorphin-rush from realizing that Friday has come around once again? No, I, and those considerably few like me (but most importantly me at this particular juncture), are the writers, the artists, the "lazy sumbitches who gotta git off their asses and earn a goddamn paycheck!", who are on the figurative front-lines, in the wrestling ring, hovering over an operating table and , yes, the proverbial courtroom trying to defend your collective freedom, your connection with verifiable life and existence, your connection with yourself. Because that connection is getting slowly shut-down, day by day, and even minute by minute, isn't it? 

Don't lie. I can feel the veritable disconnect from here in front of my laptop at 3:00 a.m. Mountain Time with The Knife's "Shaking the Habitual" semi-blasting from my Sony boombox (I believe it's track-four, "Without You My Life Would Be Boring", that's playing right now). And even more disturbing and unsettling, our very children are being born directly into it! It's the very air they first draw into their unsuspecting, their utterly unwitting, lungs and brains. They're inured to this disconnect before they've even said their first words. And we wonder "what's wrong with kids today?" And not the way we wondered what was wrong with kids from the pre-internet/cellphone era either. This is something completely different, isn't it?

Life, society and culture have become increasingly more complex and dumbfounding hasn't it? Culture itself seems to be drained of nearly all substance and meaning and value. You see and feel this too - oh, yes, I know you do, consciously or just below the surface of sentience. You don't believe me? You think I'm full of shit and artsy-fartsy pretension, or worse, I'm just plain crazy? Ask yourselves this pertinent question: What do you believe in? Do you truly feel fulfilled in, and by, that belief, and that belief alone within the abstract purity of its conviction and integrity? Or is it supplemented with anti-depressants? Or some other pharmaceutical prescription for reasons that are completely lost on you, despite the "happiness" you've incurred from your belief(s)? Alcohol? Recreational drugs? Sex/porn addiction? Gaming addiction? On-line social media addiction? Can you stand being alone with yourself and your thoughts without the ambient aid of music or television or some other aural distraction keeping the internal "unpleasantness" at bay?  Is your respective identity fortified with an unwavering sense of personal truth without it being totally governed by ego, narcissism and self-interest; which is to say, not completely deluded out of sheer and necessary rationalization and self-denial? Is empathy a foreign concept to you? Do you feel desensitized by life, your life? My life? Their life? Have you ever wondered what a day is like in the life of a Ugandan child? Or perhaps a single Detroit mother? How about an American Midwestern farmer? A struggling actress waiting tables off of Sunset Boulevard? An abused girlfriend from a broken family? A New York stock-broker? A globally curious youth in Beijing dealing with internet regulations? What does any of this have to do with your own life? It's "tough all over" I once read a retired "adventurer" say in an influential graphic novel.

I get it. I really do. It's really fucking hard to just muster up the requisite energy and sheer will to get out of bed and motivate yourself to accomplish yet another day of likely professional drudgery and adult responsibility, especially if you have a family to support. Where's the time to give a good goddamn to anything outside the immediacy of your own life drama? Therein lies the true tragedy of our contemporary world; one that is now wholly imprisoned by inhuman corporatism, worker-bee exploitation, technology-obsession/distraction and vapid, consumer-addled culture and media. And it's here that I come in, dear readers and fellow human beings, however damaged and deprived we all are and feel; and rightly so, because this is not the world we should be maintaining with the sweat of our brows and the very essence of our souls, our sense of meaning and value towards ourselves, our children, family, friends and others, humanity's very existence and nondescript, potentially post-human, future.

For reasons too drawn-out and protracted to get into here, suffice it to say that, after many years of observing and absorbing humanity's past, and now perpetuating present, I've taken on the Atlas-like task of attempting to explain this mess we undoubtedly find ourselves in, here at the early stages of the 21st century, and at the very least provide some kind of alleviation, if not outright solution, whatever the seeming ridiculousness of such a statement; my efforts are well-meaning and genuine, I promise you. And in order to exact said colossal task, I cannot be bogged down with worry and anxiety pertaining to the whereabouts - from daily physical and mental exertion - of the required funds expected to sustain, on a monthly basis, the residency I now, at present still, occupy here in the western regions of Canada.

So, once again, and from the humbling heart I assure you, can some kindly patron, with enough spirited sympathy and appreciation for the arts, foot the rigid bill of my "adult responsibility" and generously pay my frickin' rent, so I can get some real work done here in our collective name?...although I'll be taking all authorial credit of course, but for a damn good cause, you understand. Numerical figures can be discussed with the required discretion expected from such a sad and abject request asserted from this writer, a writer so utterly devoid of ego or sense of pride, apparently, that he'd resort to cyber-panhandling for legally tendered alms.

Oh, I almost forgot: you think you can throw in a few bucks for some groceries? I live on a strict, and very cheap, diet of: Kraft Dinner, Mr. Noodles, Chef Boyardee can goods, cheap wine, water, day-old bread and no-name cheddar cheese. It'd be greatly appreciated for sure. Eating is important of course, and I'd like to keep it up for the sake of the writing. Come on, help a "talented", socially-conscious mo-fo out, huh?  ;-)

Goldfrapp's Brilliant Debut Album from 2000: "Felt Mountain"

Beauty, Retro-Futurism, Woman as Symptom and the Post-Human Horizon

by James Albert Barr

"Who do we think we are?" - Goldfrapp: "Pilots"

"It's the stuff that dreams are made of." - Sam Spade in John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon"

"There's no escape. The city's ours. We made it....We fashioned this city on stolen memories. Different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one." - Mr. Hand from the 1998 film "Dark City"




The English electronic pop duo, Goldfrapp, released their eerily gorgeous debut album, Felt Mountain, in September of 2000. I only belatedly purchased my precious copy of it in 2008 after a fortuitous visit to my favorite record store in Toronto, Sonic Boom, on a late summer evening. I casually walked into the store, made my way down an arbitrary aisle and then heard the instantly captivating, otherworldly sounds that opened the album's first, stunning track, "Lovely Head". This was followed by the ambiguous, forlorn whistle from the duo's lead-singer and band's namesake, Alison Goldfrapp. This plaintive, solitary whistle recalls 60s European soundtracks, art-house pictures, and especially Sergio Leone films, which featured the stupendous music of Ennio Morricone. And then Alison's "character" - an apparent artificial twin/clone/replicant - dispassionately sings the first verse: "It starts in my belly/ Then up to my heart/ Into my mouth I can't keep it shut/ Do you recognize the smell/ Is that how you tell us apart". This discernible clone or android or reanimated corpse stays true to her/its claim of being unable to "shut her mouth" when she suddenly wails in such a terrifying, unearthly way, announcing its unnatural and implicitly forbidden presence: science creating artificial being; a being with sentience and consciousness it would seem...and a sense of the horror as well.

The eerie, spooky and spacey sound created to make such an unsettling, yet strangely beautiful, noise could be understandably mistaken for a theremin (popularly used during the 50s in sci-fi movies), but it was, in actual fact, Alison's own voice dramatically processed through a semi-modular monophonic synthesizer which modulated and distorted her voice rendering it virtually unrecognizable and inhuman. For me, it irrepressibly conjures up images of  Maria's gynoid robot-double (variously referred to as "Maria-robot","Maschinenmensch","Futura", "Ultima", "Robotrix"), if we actually heard her voice, from Fritz Lang's classic 1927 futuristic silent film, Metropolis. This associative notion is reinforced by the striking image of a sepia-toned Alison Goldfrapp split in two by a mirror or Rorschach-effect on the album cover of Felt Mountain. Alison's image resembles that of a 1920s era film starlet, if not the German actress Brigitte Helm herself, who played the Maria character and robot-double in Metropolis. It also implies the recent discovery of "genome-splitting/DNA tampering" and human-cloning.   

And, moreover, this sublimely atmospheric, cinematic, pop-culturally allusive and endlessly listenable album, with its postmodern cache, also alludes to a plethora of other eclectic, and profoundly related, sources spanning two centuries: Art Deco, hard-boiled film noir, the 1939 New York World's Fair, the modernist architectural delineations (i.e., sketches) of Hugh Ferris, German expressionism, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories pulp magazine, spy films and James Bond theme songs, Blade Runner, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Darwin's evolution theory, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 proto-sci-fi novel The Future Eve, Frank Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, Dean Motter's comic book series, retro-futurist Mister X and Terminal City, William Gibson's concept of the "semiotic ghost", Frederic Jameson's 1982 essay "Can We Imagine the Future?", and even H.P. Lovecraft's patented theme of our Faustian/Promethean thirst for "forbidden knowledge", whatever the horrific consequences that may result.   

Despite Felt Mountain's conspicuously modern, electronic sound and aural aesthetic, as well as its seeming emotionally cold distance and bloodless detachedness, I find the album quite affecting, moving and deeply melancholy (there are, indeed, some lush strings and operatic vocal flourishes here and there to counterpoint the underlying darkness and inhumanness). It incites an emotional reaction because of the ironic remoteness and sense of tragedy in its narrative. There's a dark intimation of a post-human presence pervading the album, and more and more throughout our present culture and society; an empty, frightening feeling of abandonment, betrayal and destitution, both physically and emotionally, even when sharing the same space; an increasingly artificial alteration to our collective ontology, our organic being and sense of human communion with one another. Crucially, this also includes the utter draining of the symbolic economy, its meaning and value, within cultural, social and gender relations.    

To further counter the futuristic, mechanical tone of the album, Goldfrapp recorded Felt Mountain in a remote, rural bungalow in Wiltshire county, South West England, hence the very suggestion of remoteness and seclusion in the album's title. Much of the time Alison was alone, and having been affected by this extensive solitude it influenced the lyrics she was writing for the album. Her love of film and memories of her childhood also contributed to the abstract, obsessional quality of the lyrics. Musically, Felt Mountain featured an array of different sounds and influences ranging from 60s pop to German cabaret, Shirley Bassey, John Barry/Morricone/Badalamenti soundtracks, folk, chamber-music, and of course electronica. It achieved only moderate commercial success, which is not surprising in my opinion, as it hardly catered to popular, mainstream tastes, but it did get short-listed for the prestigious Mercury Prize for Best Album in 2001.

Many of the lyrics on Felt Mountain express a sense of being abandoned, betrayed, rejected, jilted and discarded, while obsessively, stubbornly, and out of sheer emotional necessity, clinging to the notion of being loved and desired regardless. There are relatable instances where Alison sings about feeling discarded like a "brown paper bag", being "wired to the world" and "that's how you made me"; "I'm not supposed to feel/ I forget who I am"; "It's just the sound of you and me/Time twitching/Murmurs of our friendly machine"; "Say my name, whisper it/I'm deliciously wired"; "I fool myself to sleep and dream/Nobody's here, no one but me/So cool, you're hardly there/Why can't this be killing you/Frankenstein would want your mind, your lovely head"; "I think I loved you more than me/Are you human or a dud/Are you human or d'you make it up".

The album is dominated with this pervasive lyrical theme and trope of self-effacement, negative space and relational distance; supplemented and reinforced by the moody, electronically-baroque and aloof music (composed by both Alison and her partner Will Gregory), despite its icy, jagged-diamond and prismatic beauty. Like the Frankenstein monster (gender reversed) rejected by its maker, and Maria the robot used for manipulative and diabolical purposes as her human counterpart is unjustly imprisoned, and the femme fatale dying or disappearing at the resolution of a hard-boiled detective novel or film noir, Alison's apparently artificial persona is suffering from rejection and abandonment, bereft of her power of being desirable and wanted. Do modern women share the same sentiment asserted in 1985 by postmodern feminist scholar Donna Haraway, that she would "rather be a cyborg than a goddess", if it would only abolish patriarchy in the end?

Is woman simply just a "symptom of man" as controversially suggested by post-Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), even in artificial guise? Utilizing Lacan's seemingly sexist theory, contemporary critical theorist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek addresses the equally controversial theory of gender roles of social value in Otto Weininger's 1903 book Sex and Character where he (Weininger) insists that women are inferior to men, and have no predisposition towards "becoming a genius and bettering their spiritual being"; in point of fact they act as a distractive and destructive agent against men's "true desire". Symbolically, "she only exists as a result of the unethical division in man himself and therefore has no existence in her own right" (Tony Myers: "Slavoj Zizek" - 2003). Zizek uses what he terms a "Wagnerian performative" to show the similar functioning of woman's role as espoused by Weininger's claims in Sex and Character.

For example, in Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman, the titular hero eventually fulfills his "symbolic role" by means of woman - assigned to the opera's main female character Senta - acting as a "performative", a necessary vanishing mediator (in Frederic Jameson's' terminology) and symbolic prop, between Man and his ultimate destiny. Senta indeed dies at the end of the opera. However, Zizek brilliantly uncovers an ironic twist that supplants Weininger's and Wagner's male chauvinism by stating that if the so-called "woman as symptom of man" maintains the consistency, the integrity of the subject male, then by virtue of its dissolution will in fact betray that consistency/integrity and the subject will dissolve, be effaced and rendered indistinct. What that means is that man only exists by woman conferring meaning upon him to give him consistency; his existence is "out there" in woman and therefore he depends for his existence on her, hence woman's equal and proportional existence, according to Zizek's insights here.

During the late 19th century the issue of men and women's respective place in society, and the idea of eugenics in general, were being studied and fiercely debated. Charles Darwin focused much of his 1871 book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex on this very issue and claimed that evolutionary biology determined men's apparent superiority over women. Clearly, this is not the prevailing attitude in contemporary times, at least on the surface; and even the so-called "physical differences" are being considerably challenged by the female sex on the world stage daily. Conversely, however, and despite the major progressions made through the "women's lib" movement of the 60s and 70s, women are still ubiquitously displayed, in their "ideal form", as sexual objects in our advertisement-saturated culture. So there appears to be a deep-seated contradiction of sorts, both contested and endorsed by males and females alike. The woman as predominant, non-subjective sexual object, actually, artificially and virtually, and the woman as emancipated individual with her own mind and worldview are implicated in an ontological and epistemological struggle within the underlying themes of Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain album.

Of course, the other major theme of  Felt Mountain is the postmodern/retro-futurist one. In arguably the album's most beautifully crafted song, "Pilots", Alison sings in the beginning: "Armored cars sail the sky/They're pink at dawn/If I lived forever you/Just wouldn't be so beautiful as the sun/When it shines all over the world", followed by the song's chorus, which asks a very pertinent, but unnervingly simple, existential question: "We're pilots watching stars/The world preoccupied/We're pilots watching stars/Who do we think we are?"; a reflection on "the tomorrow that never was" depicted in early 1930s/40s pulp magazines and other pop-culture media of the day, and displayed in the 1939 New York World's Fair, haunts these lyrics to be sure. In Frederic Jameson's key 1982 essay, "Can We Imagine the Future?", he says: "We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly 'science-fictional' futures of technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated - streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals - while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past".

The pervasive ambiguity and love-hate position of living in our hyper-technological, organically-alienating and increasingly digitally-virtualized, world is suffusing through all, certainly first-world, denizens' constitutions at present, either consciously or not. Are we indeed collectively moving closer to a "post-human age", such as predicted by science-fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1993, leading to what later developed into "the Transhumanist Movement" in the 90s/2000s; and will we be ultimately subsumed by the alleged coming Singularity as inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil hopes will eventually be the case, thus establishing an apparent "cure for death and aging" for its own narcissistic sake?...

"Are you human or a dud/ Are you human or d'you make it up?"

Agnes Moorehead's Performance in Orson Welles' 1942 "The Magnificent Ambersons"

The Woman Who Broke Ground in Film-Acting Nearly a Decade Before Brando Did


by James Albert Barr

"Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Orson Welles ever put on film was this character - a spinster aunt who wasn't a comic relief biddy but a full-blooded, Jamesian tragic figure, brilliantly and scarily realized by Agnes Moorehead." - (on Moorehead's character, Aunt Fanny, from "The Magnificent Ambersons") Michael Gebert: The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards (1996)


 



In 1942, a mere year after the release of his masterpiece debut film, "Citizen Kane", Orson Welles wrote and directed his follow-up (and provided the film's narration as well); a period piece adapted from the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel of the same title, "The Magnificent Ambersons". Both tell the story of a proud, wealthy, American Midwestern family who find themselves collectively falling on hard times as major changes take-over society shortly after the turn of the 20th century. These "changes" ultimately result in what became the Modernist Age, an age the Amberson family were ill-prepared to meet, or accept, to their financial detriment and broken familial solidarity. Though not as fervently celebrated, and endlessly praised, or analyzed, as its monumental predecessor, "The Magnificent Ambersons" is generally considered an American classic and one of the finest films ever made. It was added to the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress in 1991 as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The film starred Joseph Cotton (who co-starred with Welles in "Citizen Kane"), a young Anne Baxter, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt, Ray Collins, and the unforgettable Agnes Moorehead, as the feisty and emotionally-wrecked spinster, Aunt Fanny. Her performance easily towers over all of her co-stars in the film. And I would submit that Moorehead, in general, broke new ground in film-acting that year in 1942. She brought a completely new and modern on-screen presence, sensibility and tone to her incredible performance.

In an era where cinema was still relatively young and rife with possibilities in all areas of its craft, Agnes Moorehead was already a veteran actress of little acclaim, already in her late 30s, when she met Orson Welles in 1937 and joined his theatre company, the Mercury players. She also did myriad radio performances with The Mercury Theatre on the Air (until Welles moved the company to Hollywood in 1939 to work for RKO Pictures, which distributed "Citizen Kane" in 1941) and later with CBS, particularly on their radio program "Suspense". Later, as a result of her increasing popularity and demand, she would be referred to as the "first lady of Suspense". Her significant cinematic debut was in "Citizen Kane" where she played the small, but memorable, role of the mother of future newspaper mogul, Charles Foster Kane, whom she reluctantly, but out of tragic, financial necessity, gives up to a wealthy banker in order to give her son a better life. Its implied that the child has been abused by his father as well, thus reinforcing the mother's intentions for the child's future welfare, not knowing what actually laid ahead for the boy and his now compromised childhood and adolescence; his beloved sled, 'Rosebud", left behind with his innocence forever,...seemingly. The classic shot of her looking out the window as her child is about to be taken away from her is both disturbing and heartbreaking in its seeming emotional distance: "I've got his trunk all packed. I've had it packed for a week now."

In her next film role in "The Magnificent Ambersons" Agnes Moorehead got a much bigger part, and she fearlessly threw herself headlong into the role of tight-buttoned, yet emotionally unhinged, Aunt Fanny. I feel it was with great irony that Moorehead's performance would be initially met with similar disdain and dismissiveness, as the Amberson family did while observing the great societal changes outside their collective 19th century bubble, when the film was first screened for test audiences. During many of Moorehead's scenes as Aunt Fanny, the audience would laugh out loud! Why did they laugh at her performance? Because it was a kind of performance not seen before in film at that time. It was so new and modern that its initial audience had no idea what to make of it, and so laughter (as is so often the case when people encounter the new and unfamiliar, even to this day, of course) was evidently their first reactionary impulse towards this "strange" on-screen behavior before them.

Moorehead's performance was filled with a precariously tethered, and episodically unleashed, disposition uncharacteristic of a properly bred Victorian era "lady". But its important to take into consideration Aunt Fanny's "spinster status". She's likely in her thirties, unmarried with zero prospects, and probably still a virgin, yet she evinces all the signs of a passionate and energetic, grown woman. In other words, her untapped sexuality has rendered her prone to outright hysterics, especially by the time the film reaches its ironic and unfulfilled, but necessary, "climax", where during the memorable "boiler room scene", Aunt Fanny, while confronted yet again by her pompous and ignorant nephew George, reveals that she is completely broke and the family fortune reduced to nothing. George is, not surprisingly, dumbfounded by this confession from his visibly distraught aunt, and so he unwittingly pushes her for an explanation that should have been obvious had he not been so selfish and oblivious. This "push" finally drives poor Aunt Fanny over-the-edge, and so she has a complete emotional breakdown in which George futilely attempts to restrain her to little avail when she wishes that the furnace she's leaning against, while pitifully sitting on the floor, was actually working so she could be burned by it. But, again to George's ignorance, for which Fanny must again inform him, they can't afford the gas to operate the furnace.

Moorehead infused her innovative performance of Aunt Fanny with many fascinating ticks and idiosyncrasies, unusual verbal inflections and startling moments of unbridled outbursts that set her far apart from not only her co-stars in "The Magnificent Ambersons", but also her colleagues in the film industry in general at that monumental time; a time that preceded Marlon Brando's legendary, and hitherto industry-changing performance nearly ten years later in 1951's now classic, "A Streetcar Named Desire", where he remarkably introduced the style known as "method acting"; a novel approach that brought a new form of on-screen naturalness that challenged and ultimately supplanted the old "mannered style" of acting that was the norm for pre-50s cinema.

After the release of "The Magnificent Ambersons", where it did only moderate business at the box-office, it was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Agnes Moorehead in the Best Supporting Actress category (her first of ultimately four nominations in that category within a 22 year span). She eventually lost to Teresa Wright for her performance in the year's highest grossing film and biggest winner at the Oscars, "Mrs. Miniver" - a crowd-pleasing wartime melodrama that went on to win Best Picture and five other awards besides. Only the New York Critics circle awarded Moorehead for her astounding performance in Orson Welles' underappreciated sophomore effort.

Although quite attractive, with rather striking and visibly intelligent facial features, Agnes Moorehead never became an "A-list" actress, with many starring and top-billed roles over the course of her long and distinguished career. Told early in her career that she was not "the right type", she was predominantly relegated to "supporting roles" which she always gave her all in with great range, originality, effortless poise, naturalness and zest. She had a great reputation for being a consummate professional and dedicated thespian in the truest sense. For better or worse, she is best known for playing the haughty, eccentric and mischievous witch, Endora, mother to Samantha, on the very popular 60s sitcom "Bewitched" for eight seasons. In my opinion Agnes Moorehead was greatly underrated and one of the absolute greatest actresses of her, or any, era!