“Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.”
— Dorothy Allison
The role of childhood influences art in numerous ways. As a child, one is handed a lot of variables and decisions to not necessarily figure out, but perhaps use for adaptation. In James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” we are allowed to grow in language with our protagonist. In Harry Crews’ Grit Lit classic “Childhood,” we are allowed to live through the tragedies and travails of his life just as he did.
However, one question that both works bring up is “What did we learn from this experience?” It is one thing to sit with a book or watch a movie feeling discomfort during and after as it provokes much thought and reflection. It is another to see a work (and the body that follows) as a rebirth of the self and a realization of self-expression.
Dorothy Allison is one of the previous generation of Southern writers. Her debut novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” remains so harrowing that even re-reading it can be painful. Take into account that after its success in the Nineties, its film rights were purchased by TNT. However, once the basic cable network saw the parts of the final product - it was shuttled to pay network Showtime instead.
Again, as harrowing as the work is, it is bold and completely honest. Allison was terribly abused as a child in South Carolina and the scars follow her to this day. However, one of the key facets to the novel is that Allison, as the protagonist Bone in the book, found refuge and love in her family. In other words, a family brought her the lessons she needed to understand that survival of this magnitude of tragedy did not make her bitter and world-weary. It made her more loving and more herself because she came from an extended family who, like Crews, had nothing (which was seen by so many others of a previous generation as a justification for castigation.)
In the follow-up, “Cavedweller,” Allison tells a fictional story about the complex relationship she has with her mother. After failing at her career as a rockstar in Los Angeles, Delia Byrd returns home with one of her three daughters. After working as a cleaning woman, as Allison describes it her “crying season” concludes and she brings her other two daughters to their new home. This flashpoint from three generations of women and family allows to you pay close attention to the tribal alliances that drift in and out, and how they weather change together ultimately learning that no matter how different they are - their blood keeps them united.
On the other side of the world, German filmmaker/actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born into a family in the newly established Allied part of Germany after WWII. His mother came from the free city of Danzig (first protected by the League of Nations, now Gdańsk - the city where the Solidarity movement originated) and the complexity of their relationship is a thread throughout many of the 40 films, 24 plays, 2 TV miniseries and more that he drilled out from 1965 until his death in 1982.
For all of Fassbinder’s profligacy and leaping from medium to medium and genre to genre, his immersion in the process was a means of escape. At three months, Fassbinder was left with an uncle because his parents feared they would not survive the cruel winter. When they returned, they had careers to reclaim, so Fassbinder went to the movies - sometimes as much as four times a day. When he was around his newly-divorced mother, he clashed with her lovers and she clashed with him over his sexuality. After attending acting school, he began to build his own “family” of performers beginning with the radiant Hanna Schygulla who had a role in most of his films until he died.
Film and drama were a substrate for Fassbinder’s eye for experimentation. Practicing the Berthold Brecht style of confrontational performance, actors stayed with Fassbinder even in the smallest roles. The theatre company he inherited and in turn recreated became his family. What is most interesting is the continuing use of his own mother (billed as Lilo Pempeit) in small matronly or maternal roles. In 1970's "Gods of The Plague," Pempeit appears as the mother of the protagonist. In her brief scene, she deals with the grief of losing a son and seeing her other son freed from prison in a weirdly flighty and distracted manner. However, her looking at the actor Harry Baer off camera and her son behind it makes her bittersweet intoning of "My son." one of pride, reality, and sorrow.
Fassbinder, for the most part, is working hardest to create his own reality. Much like the youth in the cinema, those on-screen lessons he saw as a spectator are revealing answers as director. For someone who was tossed around from home to home, then boarding school, Fassbinder felt like he never belonged where he was. As his films become more artistic and therefore serious, they too address the family discord that Allison lived through. For example, the simple world of a fruit seller in 1950's Munich in 1974's "The Merchant of Four Seasons," becomes both Douglas Sirk-ian melodrama (always look for the mirrors) and British kitchen-sink stark four-act family implosion. Using his "family" to work out his questions about his own family may sound "meta" according to today's film standards. However, it is designed to feel both like a play and a film.
In 1975's "Fox and His Friends," Fassbinder pushes the envelope as a gay man who falls on hard times (he loses his carnival job because the owner is convicted of tax fraud) until he spends the last of his money on a winning lottery ticket. The money gives him an identity, it opens doors for him. However, it also changes the minds of people who meet him so quickly that he begins to doubt and question anyone new entering his life. While Fassbinder is telling (and acting) in his own modern Kafka-esque tale, we realize that he is nothing without people around him. In the end, after his business fails because of a simple financial mistake, we see how having no money shuts him out of this world and leaves him all alone and bereft.
In his first short film, 1967's "A City Tramp," we follow the misadventures of a lonely, depressed, abandoned man. He wanders from place to place aimlessly. Fassbinder's camera is harsh and realistic but arouses empathy in us as viewers. As he drinks, smokes, and eats what he can scrounge up in a mostly empty park, he finds a gun. Like anyone with absolutely nothing, he holds on to it - not for protection - but as an earthly possession. The fact is, he cannot get rid of it as much as he wants to. In turn, his honesty about having dark thoughts weirdly precludes them from coming to their fruition. Fassbinder will continue to deal with loneliness, abandonment, and disenchantment for the next fifteen years on screen - thankfully, this "family" understands him enough to help him maintain the grandest lesson of all - looking at the world with empathy.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
New music this week
JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT - Weathervanes [LP/CD](Southeastern/Thirty Tigers/The Orchard)
On the latest from the Grammy winner, Jason Isbell continues to write about how if we do not deal with contemporary problems, we simply cannot also confront the past. "Save The World" seems like a grandiose statement about how we become absorbed in our own problems only to break out of them to mourn major losses. However, its nervy, skittering pulse is really echoing desperation that we all feel like this and simultaneously feel powerless to do anything about it. Elsewhere, "Cast Iron Skillet" throws back to the bare-bones feel of "Southeastern." While "Death Wish" reaches into the same world of darkness that Isbell chronicled escaping from on "Something More Than Free." However, unlike that album, "Weathervanes" wants to go in several different stylistic paths and see to it that each song finds its place of strength in opposition to meeting some unwritten standard or balanced attack. For Isbell and his band, the album clearly reflects a world that is out of balance and traveling in all directions at once.
JANELLE MONÁE - The Age of Pleasure [LP/CD](Atlantic/Warner)
After several years of pursuing her acting career, Monáe returns with a sensual, summery but happy blast of danceable Soul. Inspired by partying and love, "The Age of Pleasure" dives into pan-African rhythms ("Float" with Seun Kuti & Egypt 80) and Nineties-style Boom Bap-style R&B ("Lipstick Lover.") "The Age of Pleasure" puts a lot of island and worldly rhythms to work, even bringing along legends Grace Jones and Sister Carol for the half-hour celebration.
CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS - Paranoia, Angels, True Love [LP/CD](Because)
Back to the original incarnation after Redcar's appearance, Christine, Chris, and Heloise work with producer Mike Dean on a booming R&B-style album. "Tears Can Be So Soft" reconfigures Christine's specialty, the heartbreaking ballad ("People, I've Been Sad") around huge beats and some very lonely-sounding reverb. For warmth, Dean brings in 070 Shake for the falsetto "True Love" on an album that makes a worthy successor to the powerful 2020 EP "La Vita Nuova." Just to up the stakes on this newest release, "Paranoia" also features the legendary Madonna.
KING KRULE - Space Heavy [LP/CD](XL/True Panther/Redeye)
Since the mindblowing "The OOZ," Archy Marshall has been on a tear in what we will call "subterranean" songwriting. His deep voice and the purposely blustery "sunken treasure" weirdness of his creations are new mood music. Druggy and drunk musically, yet lyrically poetic, "Space Heavy" is King Krule's "subterranean" take on Soul. "If Only It Was Warmth" is an R&B ballad caked in self-doubt and woozy effects that only emphasize the sharp waver in his voice against the chime of his guitar. While the brighter, machine beat-driven "Seaforth" is like Robert Wyatt-meets-Mac DeMarco. For all the wavy guitar and Archy's singsong melodicism, this is a love song that seems to emerge from industrial/consumer ennui only to announce that faith will get us through anything.
YOUTH LAGOON - Heaven Is A Junkyard [LP/CD](Fat Possum/Light In The Attic)
After a pair of uncharacteristic albums as Trevor Powers, Powers returns to Youth Lagoon and the haunting, piano-based sound of his early works. "The Sling" and "Prizefighter" are both deep, dark ballads that extract terrible memories and try to close the door on them. Powers' coded lyrics and the unique clipped high voice he uses inject all the feeling necessary to make these points of high drama. The autobiographical "Idaho Alien" shows Powers almost employing a Jazz-y underpinning while lushly telling a harrowing story of drug use wrecking a home.
ROBERT ELLIS - Yesterday's News [LP/CD](Niles City/Thirty Tigers/The Orchard)
Texas' Robert Ellis has always been far more a singer/songwriter than a performer. While Ellis does have the ability to play all of the instruments, longtime producers/collaborators Niles City Sound (Leon Bridges) have enough faith in his pen and voice to sit out. So with hushed classical guitar and a little plucked bass, Ellis takes on his deepest writing pocket yet. Long-time fans know it all fits together. On 2014's excellent "The Lights From The Chemical Plant," Ellis was able to do his dream cover, "Still Crazy After All These Years." With "Yesterday's News," Ellis truly gets a chance to be his own Paul Simon.
ROB GRANT - Lost At Sea [LP/CD](Decca)
GIA MARGARET - Romantic Piano
[LP/CD](Jagjaguwar/Secretly/AMPED)
Described as an "accidental recording artist," Rob Grant has apparently never had a piano lesson in his life. Sitting down with his daughter Lana Del Rey (who appears on the title track,) Grant has written a fairly placid/melodic ode to the nautical. At best, an explanation of how controlled languidity is a family trait. On the other hand, a curiosity that joins his daughter's poetry album on the far end of the collection of the LDR completists.
If you really want a solo piano instrumentalist that composes with true meaning and can arouse feelings within you from her melodic choices, Gia Margaret's "Romantic Piano" is a stunner. Margaret possesses an innate ability to communicate with you without words. To top it off, her productions work in natural sound, subtle loops, and environmental elements. So each track seems to be in a different "color." Margaret's melodies are delicate but memorable. This is the kind of record that could bring back Windham Hill. Beautiful.
