Culture

  Kendrick Lamar is one of the most popular high-brow artists. He is one of very few people in history whose work during their lifetime has been at once widely listened to (nearly 20 million hits already for the top tracks of this album on Spotify) and deeply scrutinised: every lyric, every note and harmony is unravelled, put together, unravelled, put together again.   How does someone become that person? Musicality. This cannot be reduced to craft, the manipulation of melodies and harmonies, just as painting cannot seriously be made a matter of oils and sketches, nor writing vocabulary and punctuation.   To an ordinary unversed person, Lamar’s tools would just seem like melodies and harmonies, but for him they are a language, an expressive medium: a way of reaching other people’s subjective interiority.   What unites his albums, for all their differences, is that the music is for earphones, for walking around with, eating dinner to, listening to: alone, again and again.   They are made for experience, that pre-interpretive affective field that we make around us in our ordinary lives; whose shape has been theorised by many but is obscure to all; which some people have misnamed the unconscious, and which others have – more understandably, although not coherently – called presence.   Kendrick Lamar makes people feel something. Not just pleasure – most of the music is hard listening, demanding attention but chipping away , sometimes excruciatingly: songs like ‘We Cry Together’.   In Lamar’s music there is an echo, however faint, of the good.   Listeners are willing to suffer for this music because there is more than just sensation to it: listening to it is not like drunkenness. Audible , making meaning of its essence, is a sense of theme, the serenity of an idea. In Lamar’s music there is an echo, however faint, of the good.   When people wonder what truth artists can express or if there is a connection between art and morality, they miss the point completely if they do not see two things:   (1) The echo of the good is the whole source of art’s power and its one true mission on earth; (2) When people misunderstand this they try and take more from art than is there, and it becomes corrupt – this nearly always happens.   The first of these is rich and profound. The second explains why our understanding of artists is split: we tend to think of them as either prophets or pleasure-spinners while also forcing them to be both which cheapens them. Like power, when it is twisted from a means into an end, art corrupts.   It is one of the myths of our time that taste in art is subjective and arbitrary, like the consumer’s favourite foods and the citizen’s contrived support for a foreign soccer team.   Any reasonably deep thinker would tell you that people’s favourite foods and soccer teams are not arbitrary at all but a projection of where they are from, and who they would like to be (i.e., of their social class and place in history) – art too.   But it is also not arbitrary because it comes from a need which is not arbitrary: the need for things to make sense.   Like the Andromeda Galaxy, the best art in the world does not need us. But we need its inferiors   Like the Andromeda Galaxy, the best art in the world does not need us. But we need its inferiors – false images, shaky edifices of bad sense – like the lies people tell themselves: for example, that society develops, that we are a Western liberal democracy, that bad things either happen for  a certain type of ‘reason’ or will not happen as much eventually, or that we somehow stand with the people who suffer them.   In ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ we hear the voice of a brilliant musician who at once asks too little and too much of his own art.   The album is full of snippets, flourishes, hieroglyphs, loose references, subtle indicators – they lead nowhere. You could walk them around the entire earth and end up where you started. The point of each hidden reference is overwhelmingly the reference itself; the allusion always alludes first to its own allusion. Near the beginning of ‘Father Time’ for example we are told to ‘reach out to Eckhart’. Thomas Pynchon for music lovers.   With such things there is an obvious kitschiness (and the lyrics sometimes too. From ‘Worldwide Steppers:’ ‘Photoshoppin’ lies and motives. Hide your eyes, then pose for the pic’.’ From ‘Purple Hearts:’ ‘I’m not in the music business, I been in the human business/Whole life been social distant’).   But what these references, and more generally all the songs, keep coming back to is the Christian God. This is not exactly the God of James Baldwin, the sheer overwhelming joy of life together in song – nor the sublimely Christian one of Marvin Gaye – because it is delayed, deferred, like the ‘happiness’ of the ‘pursuit of happiness’.   ‘God’ here means ‘Paradise’, the fulfilment of a desire; the album honestly and vividly makes you feel America’s most devastating delusion: that you can ‘pursue’ happiness any more successfully or less destructively than you can chase a dragon.   All the best of ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ is about pain: feeling pain, admitting to it, being afraid of it, working out where it comes from, understanding it will not disappear. ‘Mother I Sober’, the best song on the album, strips everything back to this – a story about something that happened to his mother when he was young, and what it meant and means, its place in history.   The worst is when a song leans complacently on its thought, such as the gimmicky and Macklemore-ish ‘Auntie Diaries’ – whose narrator describes his two trans relatives, mixing vulgar discomfort and misgendering with supportive indignance against

  In 2018, the New York Times named ‘An Octoroon’ by the American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins the second-best play since ‘Angels in America’ (putting first for some reason the excruciating ‘Topdog/Underdog’) – but despite this, the play is scintillating and worth seeing. It is complicated to summarise, but essentially, Jacobs-Jenkins reworks a Nineteenth-Century play called ‘The Octoroon’ by the then-famous Anglo-Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, who spent much of his life in America. ‘The Octoroon’ (Jacobs-Jenkins changes it to ‘An’) was a fairly standard melodrama with a mad plot set on a slave plantation in America. Shocking about it for us today are: on the one hand, not only its racism, but the chirpiness and assumed obviousness of this; on the other, how familiar are so many of its characters and devices. Originally all the parts would have been performed by white actors, some in blackface. Jacobs-Jenkins has actors of colour do parts in blackface and whiteface, adds some characters, and intersperses the scenes with a kind of commentary – one thing introduced by these is a sense of humour that manages seamlessly to pass into ‘The Octoroon’ – and at the beginning monologues by actors playing him and Boucicault. With this conceit the play manages to take on the entirety of race in American (and more broadly Western) culture for the last few centuries in a fresh way – none of it simply or cheaply. You leave with the feeling that you have experienced something new. I think part of the secret of this lies in how it manages to layer everything – melodrama, racism, humour, the two playwrights, the audience – so that there is not one word or gesture, not one decision that the play has made with fewer than three meanings. Like Moby Dick, this is a work of art that whenever it is faced between options somehow chooses all of them, and the result is extraordinary. Like Moby Dick, this is a work of art that whenever it is faced between options somehow chooses all of them, and the result is extraordinary. Schools should bring their students to this play instead of ‘teaching’ Shakespeare. It is true that, if they did, people would turn 18 not knowing whether the quality of mercy is strained and if a rose smells just as sweet when we call it something different, but on the other hand they would have experienced a much more important thing that in Ireland and generally life is too rare: actual theatre. Schools should bring their students to this play instead of ‘teaching’ Shakespeare. It is true that, if they did, people would turn 18 not knowing whether the quality of mercy is strained and if a rose smells just as sweet when we call it something different, but on the other hand they would have experienced a much more important thing that in Ireland and generally life is too rare: actual theatre. The whole point of actual theatre is that it is something only a play can do (otherwise it would just be something else: for example, ‘humour’) ‘But what is actual theatre – and who needs it?’ The whole point of actual theatre is that it is something only a play can do (otherwise it would just be something else: for example, ‘humour’), and so if you want to know what it is then you will have to see it for yourself. There is always a certain, essential gap between a distillation or description of something and it – any reasonably broad-minded person can understand this. But still let me try and explain. Near the beginning of this play and marking the transition from opening monologues to the action, Boucicault (played by Rory Nolan) dances to ‘WAP’ by Cardi B, at the end of which he turns into the character Wahnotee. We watch this large, bearded man playing a Richard Harris sort of character as Boucicault move his body in ways we would associate with a young, black hip-hop star. Actual theatre is the experience of actuality, of reality unmoored from the constraints of the imagination – reality as pure possibility. It would be easy to describe that movement with words such as ‘enchanting’ or ‘spellbinding’ but they would completely miss the point. In that movement there is actual theatre (which is one way of translating Bertolt Brecht’s term ‘Episches Theater’): that which puts before us with arresting and irrefutable power all the ways that our ideas about the world and ourselves and each other have nothing to do with reality. Actual theatre is the experience of actuality, of reality unmoored from the constraints of the imagination – reality as pure possibility. The mix of ignorance and feeling threatened which is behind most of the choices about our country’s education system will mean that at least in this place and time anyone who wants to experience actual theatre will have to go out and look for it with no guarantee of finding it. But what better for school students to see? This production of the play, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, is very good but misses opportunities here and there. Sometimes the actors show their characters’ hands too much, meaning that the obviousness of Boucicault’s play wins out over the subtlety of Jacobs-Jenkins’s. Patrick Martins is excellent as the lead once Boucicault’s play begins, but in the opening monologue he is not quite camp enough for the script. Umi Meyers and Leah Walker are memorable as Zoe and Minnie. Overall, the choice to run it by Caitríona McLaughlin, the new artistic director of the Abbey, was spot-on, and hopefully we will have more plays like this. It is certainly an overstatement in the programme for Simpson-Pike to call Boucicault “one of Ireland’s leading lights” – and awkward in a play that puts so much emphasis on exploding fake compromises to avoid the implications in the Nineteenth Century of Boucicault’s ANGLO-Irishness, however complex they may be – but for the most part such issues

When working within the confines of a short story, the result will either work or it won’t.

Irish as ecology

Both the source of the Haughey money and his energetic libido deserve more detailed exploration

Arthur Pinajian: number 7 after Da Vinci

Rory O’Sullivan watched Bridgerton Season 2 yet wonders why anyone would bother. A period-piece represents the past and by representing dominates it. In general, the past survives only mythologically, as a collection of loose figures and attitudes in the present. In a period-piece, the prevailing attitude imbues these figures with itself and alters the past in its image. Strictly speaking this is inevitable, which is to say that there is nothing wrong with it. But as a result the hardest, most important task for a period-piece is to avoid smugness and try to be a little searching about its own time, the time representing rather than represented, which Bridgeton does not do, ever. Season Two, Episode One: Kate and Edwina walk procession-style into what seems a purpose-built ballroom on the edge of a manicured think-of-Versailles Garden (the building looks weirdly like the White House), where two anonymous servants grandly open its doors to the dollying camera: inside there are innumerable pairs of perfectly in-sync dancers sashaying between neoclassical columns garlanded with floral wreaths. The music is a strings-version of ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna. Turning to Edwina, Kate says: “Remember to breathe”. Eighteenth Century, Actors of Colour, Madonna, Ballroom: Wow!Bridgerton is smug. At the heart of it is not so much a sense of fun as of giddy triumph. Some of this comes from the feeling all Netflix shows have that there is a joke everyone but the viewers is in on, but mostly it comes from this period-piece demeanour for which the normal and completely wrong word is irreverence. Irreverence is what you do in front of something sacred, powerful, a defiant sort of thing that leaves others staring at you in shock and awkwardness. On the other hand, for what Bridgerton does the word is domination. This show fills the eighteenth century with United States Democratic party donors: racists and sexists alike lose the day, every day, but no one says the obvious things about the British Empire; the country’s sarcastic but soft-hearted ruler and attendant are the queer-coded Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury, the heads of the two main families are men in name but in fact women, and all the fun is had by the people who are either young or in charge; and the sex scenes, disappointingly fewer and less varied than advertised it must be said. But if Bridgerton is about renewing our culture’s relationship with the mythology of the past, then the real lesson here is how much, in dominating these figures, in turn the show is dominated by them. Painfully so: ballroom-dancing, marriage plots, an absurd formal manner of speech that leaves you wondering why this show, so feminist-seeming, makes everyone say so often the words “My Lord”, and of course that soulless and destructive thing people mislabel ‘wit’. In Bridgerton’s plot there is nothing to spoil because in each storyline everything is so familiar and laid bare from the beginning, besides which, from the start to the end the characters do nothing except identify themselves on the moving escalator of these implicit figures. This makes the dialogue so awful that sometimes the show sounds like a bunch of spliced-together video game cutscenes. For example: Kate is in love with Lord Anthony Bridgerton, a fact to which she constantly alerts us by too much protesting – her every word is to do either with him or else how she loves her sister, who (from the beginning it is made obvious) is the romance plot’s blocking figure, and becomes engaged to Anthony until the viewer has waited long enough when she steps aside with the most figurative drama, but least actual fuss possible. One confusing thing about the show is the exalted place it affords writing. The pamphlets of ‘Lady Whistledown’ give both a plot device and the voice of the show’s narrator, but also some strange lines of dialogue here and there such as “It is rather clever the way she uses plant puns to belittle”. They make an identification of good writing with cleverness, about which there is nothing automatic in a series that no one would ever turn to for a good line. Indeed in general a healthy question to ask is why anyone would bother in this short life to turn to Bridgerton at all. Perhaps they wrongly think the colourful costumes and sets compensate for the bad writing, and those accents.  Personally all I can think of is that if they were to opt to ignore it they would miss the last shot in the fifth episode of the first season, the greatest moment in the entire series – even if accidental, short – because for once almost it tells the truth. In the first season Daphne, who is innocence pictured, meets and eventually marries the worldly Simon, and just before this moment, just married and with Bridgerton’s usual strings in the background playing Strange by Celeste, they have had sex for the first time in a scene which impressively skirts the line with porn. It is interesting how that sex scene’s intensity comes from when Daphne tells Simon that she masturbates to him – meaning that they both have sex with, or in or else under, the idea of her masturbating just as much with each other – which nicely proves Lacan’s point that at the heart of sex is the imagination and there is barely anything carnal about it whatsoever. But when they are done in bed Simon turns and asks, “How do you feel?” and lying there she says, out of breath, not very convincingly, “I feel…I feel wonderful”. There are at most three seconds before the cut to credits during which we see nothing except her face. What is her expression? Forcing a smile – but for some reason the barest emptiness. Yasujiro Ozu would have kept the camera there for twenty seconds. Bridgerton is available to view on Netflix but may be streamed illegally without much difficulty.