In Diegesis

[Spoiler Alert]

The performances in Fritz Lang’s “M” (1931) are constructed in such a way (by the actors, however unconsciously) and arranged in such a way (by the director, very consciously) so as to shape, mold, skew the viewer’s sense of morality; in other words, “M” creates within itself its own spectrum of humanity. Through the performances and their aesthetic portrayal, the story progresses in a manner which is, at times, aggressively and starkly deterministic, at other times, heartbreakingly empathetic.

First off, there is no one protagonist to consume the viewers’ sympathies. The film observes the ordeals of an entire town as it struggles with the fact that one of its members is a child rapist and murderer. We watch concerned mothers, playful children, overly zealous, protective neighbors, stolid- police, bloodthirsty criminals, all united by the great vacuous abyss of hurt that has opened up in their society. We do not (until the end) watch, however, that hurt directly. The film is comprised mostly of reactions with some straying towards the occasional depiction of antecedent: we are allowed to see, on occasion, the criminal’s attempts, both futile and successful, at luring the youth. Indeed, these various narrative strands of the causal murderer and the reactionary society provide a striking harmony, at times synchronous and at other times wildly out of tune.

For there to be synchronous harmony at all between scenes of cause and reaction, already there is an implied spiritual parallel between the performed persona of the murderer and those reacting to the murders, the main difference being that the former is morally disgusting in concentrate; the latter is moral reprehensibility diffused through the many. Thus, nearly all the characters share in some degree of negative moral responsibility, and the performances reflect that. The murderer Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, seems filled with a disconnected, but nonetheless determined, resolve, which he later admits to stem from a feeling of helpless immoral propulsion – he’s fleeing from himself as Bad begets Bad all around him, so to speak. Lorre’s every facial intonation is pitch-perfect, but how I could ever suppose to know perfect in a depiction of such foreign human activity is beyond me; he owns the role in more ways than one. Regardless, his expressionistic faces evoke a sort of eternal, basic anguish that by the end, it’s difficult not to find his conviction wholly credible.

Meanwhile, the behaviors of the townsfolk reflect confused, terrified ignorance, which ends up being so widespread it manifests itself as inane pride, particularly in the unification of the criminals. Within the upper ranks of the criminal underworld, Beckert is seen as a threat to business stability and consumer support and must therefore be eliminated. Where and how does that sort of prudential maxim, at heart, turn into something which could only be considered more sinister than what is simply prudential? It’s difficult to say, but there’s no doubting that when the man known in criminal circles as Safecracker explodes in a furious, self-righteous tirade about how Beckert must be “obliterated” without trial, he has adopted a persona infected with more murderous than prudential intent. His composure is sure, his posture straight, his face forward, body covered in the armor of leather gloves, and seriously says that his charges of three counts of manslaughter were “irrelevant” to him being a leader of the prosecution at this informal trial; this is a man surely profiting from hurt, confused, inanely united pride.

Lang directs all this with a keen sense of politics and personality, insofar as we see how the wills of some persons or quite crucially, organizations, affect and dictate the behaviors of external persons or organizations. For instance, in a police raid of a local nightclub, we see just above the upper-halves of the bar patrons the police chief descending down the stairs ahead of them. “Now,” he says, “stop this childishness.” Another step, and only his neck and head remain above the tipsies’ torsos. He informs them the raid is inevitable, without reason. Another step, and we can hardly see him through all the “children”; he’s using his advantage of political power to push them back towards and past the camera, like a child with muscles. Such is an example of disharmony between two sects of the masses, where the interest of one oppresses the interest of another. For poetry’s sake, I believe it’s worth mentioning that insofar as this type of social alcohol consumption presupposes the will to have a good time, the police view these people as escapists in ignorant denial of the responsibility all members of the community have in this crisis. Serves ‘em right to be invaded, oppressed. Lang’s blocking perfectly captures this inane power imbalance, revealing the childishness in both groups.

This ebbing continuum of will-power against will-power weaves and flows between various political opposites: cops and criminals, neighbors and strangers and strangers and neighbors, the rapist and a child. This river flows until it turns into a waterfall of offended ego fury, as represented by the bloodthirsty criminals and the common will. Fortunately, the waterfall is limited in power, only so elevated, and lets out into a beautiful sea of Platonic reason, as represented by Beckertt’s state-appointed lawyer, who is played with such inspiring aplomb (deep bellow; pointing, stern arms) I cried watching it. Go humanity, Go reason, Screw “an eye for an eye“. This is the note the film ends on; the police get the criminal they were searching for, but not before the victims tally high and the town’s wounded ego fully expresses its sincere lament. Reasoned humanity prevails harmoniously; tragic death and hurt nonetheless linger wild and chaotic.

How does the power of objective reason infiltrate the budding child’s subjectively egocentric mentality? In the history of mankind, there has hardly been documented an entire behavioral set, or whole personae, as principled as Socrates’, and yet even Socrates, who claims in Crito that he is “and always [has] been one of those natures who must be guided by reason,” on occasion drops hints to his more childish, egocentric nature. There is a subjectivity to Socrates’ reasoning that he shields with language. Consider this exchange from Crito:

“S: Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought he to betray the right?

C: He ought to do what he thinks is right.”

Socrates’ language suggests that rightness is very clear objectively, yet Crito’s response twists the meaning of rightness in just such a subtle way as to make it a little more imperfect – that is, rightness is what we believe it to be. Socrates, in embracing Crito’s answer, endorses this level of subjectivity within rightness; however, he seems also to believe that subjective believing is aligned more towards rightness when reason is used as the means to rightness as opposed to any other means (for instance, social acceptance).

Even Socrates’ way of presenting his reason allows for a deeply personal (dare I say even – aesthetic, artistic) manifestation of thought. Yet it’s no person’s reason who he empathizes with, but the entire Athenian state’s. His entire argument which he presents to Crito is from the supposed, personified point of view of the Athenian government or as he puts it, “the law”, which answers and argues and concedes using Socrates’ own tongue. Though the laws of the state are as objective as they are written down, there is truly an element of empathy in Socrates’ understanding of them – by realizing a point of view outside his own, he superficially abandons the simple confines of the child’s self-loving-interpreted-into-self-preserving ego. Of course, the reasonable man is also a grown child with emotions and desires and needs; however, the truly reasonable man (which Socrates undoubtedly, inspiringly is) is sad only when his actions betray virtue; desires only to be engaged with reason; and needs only to live according to his principles. Those principles he accepts as being in some ways contingent, but he respects the means (a la reason) in which they are derived from their contingencies. Insofar as reason is a subjective faculty of the mind, Socrates admits that the arguments of the Laws, which he has been channeling as his own arguments, comes to him as a voice. He says, “This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.” In this light, reason is not simply a mathematical abstraction of life, but an aesthetic obsession, an artistic arrest by the least likely, yet perhaps most effective, of artists – Reason!

There’s a dissatisfaction settling into my feelings regarding this journaling that I need to address more fully than I did in Journal 2. I want to tell my story, I’ve wanted to for some time. It began last year as I slowly emerged from the haze of ignorant adolescence to the lucidity of inspired education. I began seeing my life as a story, as a spiritual continuum with constant relation to beauty. I wanted to share it, I still do. I had fantasies of Keith visiting me and Janelle during my summer at her place; we’d start some drinks early and then I’d ask if it’d be cool for me to share my life story as beautifully as I see it. Hours later, I’d be explaining my freshman year at college developments and how they relate to my life and from what spring in my Soul they originate. That never happened; I was too timid. These journals are the first step towards the grandaddy, the beautiful. It’s starts by me simply sharing and rendering the story not so novel. From there I will try to make it timeless, endlessly appreciable.

That’s the ideology. The practical matter is, no way could I just sit down and summon the beauty of my life. My memory is awful. I’ve got to get back into these things, these moments, deal with them in gradations of remembrance and poetic understanding.

Already these journals have conjured so many questions in my mind, loose ends of meaning, poetic points that are mentioned lightly but I know are absolutely integral to the story of my soul. I mean, stories are pockets of contextualized life, always relative to something: to this circumstance or that happiness or this sorrow or that ending. When I say my life has been mostly perceived in a relative manner to my mom, that’s a true story, but what exactly does that mean? Well, the philosopher Ian in a detached-yet-earnest fashion would probably say that my life has been constantly relative to Agapic, un-conditional love, that indeed it was that relativity that made me fall so cathartically in love with Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. However, there is something different between understanding the concept and feeling the meaning of the concept’s contextualization, there’s something imperfect about living which makes life all the more tragically beautiful. Did my mom love me truly unconditionally? To the extent that she was able to, Yes I am sure she did, but in her own imperfect way. And it’s that imperfection which I perceive and interpret emotionally to be the Agapic-love standard to which I understand my life relative to. It’s that imperfection which is going to sink me into such a deep depression as I become more and more estranged from it.

In many ways, depression is the Lover’s reaction to a dwindling sense of value. I cried, because I missed love, because I was valuable enough to cry over. SIGH. Ignorant yes, but innocent too; they go hand-in-hand.

Delorean is making the best dance music around right now. They’ve got that wonderful maximalism of early Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk, the super-euphoric psych-dance-layerings of MPP-Animal Collective (think “Brothersport”), the Balearic ecstatic sound of Swede-pop groups like Air France and The Tough Alliance, and fortunately, they’ve also got a new album coming out, “Subiza”, which I’m happy to report is not going to include a single gem from their terrific Ayrton Senna EP. This might be worrisome (like, the more songs, the more chances for mediocrity, right?) if not for the absolute wonder that is new single and opening track, “Stay Close”. The truly wonderful thing about Delorean (which is demonstrated remarkably on “Stay Close”, which you can check out here: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11862-stay-close/) is that they make music which reveals the line between content and form as being a total illusion (which it is). Their music is so damn whole; the music and the lyrics get lost and found in one another; they share the same earnestness. The song is the lyrics and the music; the song is the feeling; the feeling is explored through the lyrics; the lyrics are wholly enveloped in the music; the music is the song! It’s impossible to abstract anything from anything in a Delorean song, which, I might add, makes it very difficult to write about but all the more worth it. Ultimately, though, the only reason I am writing about it is to persuade someone to listen to it, and listening is really the best and only way to experience a Delorean song. So…do it? That’s a rhetorical question.

My favorite band circa ages seventeen-thru-nineteen has a new album coming out on May 18, entitled “LCD Sound of Platinum”…just kidding, but -!- for the sake of a point. First single, “Drunk Girls”, does manage to combine the raucously energetic urgency-of-expression which illuminated much of LCD’s first self-titled album (uh, “Movement”) with the wise-man retrospective sincerity of their sophomore effort, “Sound of Silver”. “Oh-oh-ooooohhhhh, I believe in waking up together” James Murphy croons , “so-oh-oooooooohhhhhhhhh, that means making eyes across the room.” We all know what waits in between the two events, and you can guess from the title what sort of substance Murphy might suggest using to accomplish that middle ground. Sure, there’s an immorality (you rationalize by saying “she consented” but even sex between two people when one person isn’t as into it as the other constitutes something comparable to rape – think about it), but there’s also a goodness (uh, love; i mean, on some level, one night stands aren’t just fun because you get to cum; you also get to MEET someone!), and it’s that goodness which elevates this song two-thirds of the way through (note that the transcendant, epic and building near-finish BEGINS with the good; the soaring riff starts with Murphy saying “I believe in waking up together”). The finish and hope for goodness wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying, though, without the beginning chants and Murphy comparing drunk boys to pedophiles. Oh, and aesthetically, this song is bangin’ and will help you dance, which your doctor told me you ought to be doing more anyhow. That it makes me want to feel like a twenty-something year-old is an extra bonus; here’s to engaging in immaturity for the sake of the good (and also to being exactly twenty as the post-SoS album comes out; man, I love making meaning, it’s way more personally useful/rewarding than critiquing).

Check out the song here: http://pitchfork.com/news/38291-listen-lcd-soundsystem-drunk-girls/

Ousmane Sembene is referred to by some as the “father of African cinema”, but filmmaking was not his original passion. Indeed, like other pillars of the African artistic landscape such as Fela Kuti, Sembene was born a sensitive soul – a social activist at heart, not a filmmaker. Thusly, the sort of art (books as well as films) that he made was imbued with his specifically individual sensitivities and if his final film, Moolaade (2004), is any indication, Sembene’s sensitivities are powerfully – inspiringly – humanistic.

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Old Joy (2006), dir. by Kelly Reichardt

Picking the representatives for my love for realism was tough. The toughest choice in regard to realism was between Kelly Reichardt’s work. Her brilliant, Wendy and Lucy, from 2008 is, by my money, the strongest symbol for “neo-neo”-realism’s relevance in the modern cinematic landscape. A spiritual sequel to De Sica’s classic, Umberto D, Wendy and Lucy has all the typical trademarks of great realism: extreme poverty, a bare-bones representation of the love we have for which we choose to endure, and an ending to rock the core of the stablest of souls. It’s not on this list though. Old Joy is.

Any initial criticisms I had against the film disappeared immediately after it ended. Namely, I discovered that its politics was actually its character development and, more profoundly, its character development was actually its politics. The film takes you to a place between a scared-numb marriage (symbolic of age and the responsibilities which it connotes; the wife is pregnant) and an impoverished free spirit (same age, no future baby). By the end, the free spirit is massaging the shoulders of the marriage in a hot bath in the middle of the woods. Of course, the reason why watching films are way better than reading about them is that symbols don’t actually exist the way we write about them. People are people; they’re not inane. Tones are tones for a reason; we feel them. In this movie, two guys – old friends – get together to go on a trip. They talk, smoke pot, drink beer, drive, get lost, camp out, feel awkward. They’re not as alike as they used to be, but the thing about love in friendship is that it endures. You change, your friend changes, but you still call each other firiends. You are still, even, willing to go away with said friend, despite your differences. Reichardt’s triumph in this film is her Persona-esque depiction of love finding the oneness between two people. It’s simple, it’s hot water, it’s a massage, it’s blankness, it’s two guys and a dog in the woods, it’s freedom, it’s old joy.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Dir. by Guillermo Del Toro

My mind is hesitating at the thought of putting this movie on the list when I know that Spirited Away is coming up later. My heart, however, is saying something like “buh bum. buh bum. buh bum. Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterpiece. buh bum. buh bum…” The truth is (ha! TRUTH!) that Pan’s Labyrinth is an incredible movie. Del Toro OWNS his space (remember all those it’s-a-wall-now-it’s-a-tree-now-you’re-somewhere-else! transitions?), which means that he pretty much owns the viewer’s perception. For the length of this movie, I am (emotionally) at Del Toro’s bidding. This means that by the end of the movie, I am (probably) crying pretty hard. It’s scary, fantastic, aesthetically gorgeous and dripping with profound humanism. Unlike the girl in Spirited Away, adulthood becomes a non-option for our protagonist. The beauty of the film, though, is contradictory; its end is both tragic and liberating. Tragic, because the world sucks and people are evil. Liberating, because the world sucks and people are evil! Who WANTS to live here? Honestly, I’m asking you. The only reason I’ve made it so long is because of the joy I find in art, or humanistic aesthetics, which is exactly what Pan’s Labyrinth excels at. To watch the film is nearly to watch yourself die, because the realm of art is a giant playground and our adorable protagonist only wants to play, to fantasize. So as we indulge our own play-drives by watching this art-work, the protagonist becomes our surrogate selves into Del Toro’s vision of the evils of man and the wars that man creates. The final shots are representative of our liberation through play. The REAL tragedy is when the lights of the theatre came back on.

Interesting side-note: when the lights of the theatre DID come back on, I had to drive home through a really awful blizzard. Luckily, there were no cars around, so I called up my friend, Nathan, who was in Edinboro, PA and told him that I thought I had just seen the best movie of all time. Youth!

Mulholland Dr. (2001), Dir. by David Lynch, starring Naomi Watts & others!

This movie plays with aesthetics for the sake of tone. What’s not to like? The aeshetics are original and unique; the tone they elicit is terrifying. Perhaps its transition from the surreal, murky impression of connotative reality to the sober vision of denotative truth is not as seemless and beautiful to me as, say, Waltz with Bashir’s. That’s why this list is one based purely on taste. The critics are calling this and There will Be Blood the best films of the decade – well, why not? Were there any films more aesthetically unique? Were there any films more thematically cohesive? The meaning of this film is not as subjectively profound as many of the films which I rank above it, but the Schiller-esque freedom which it expresses is palpable. Artists are players – they play! David Lynch plays, PTA plays. And really, there is no film on this list which could concretely be called more playful than this one. It’s new, it’s frightening. If I were a critic doing the whole trying-to-be-objective job, this would be at the top of my list too. But taste is about meanings and, while this film has an incredible amount of meaning, ultimately I find that meaning must be realized for me on an emotional level, and the final third doesn’t really take me there. I enjoy the whole movie, but once the blue box gets keyed into, the dramatic realism doesn’t have the emotional heft of the earlier surrealism. But damn if the whole dang thing isn’t one of the craziest, most terrifyingly wonderful cinematic rides I’ve ever been on.

The Departed (2006), dir. by Martin Scorsese, starring you-know-who

ONE MAJOR SPOILER BELOW!

So, I saw this with my brother, the day that I turned old enough to see rated R movies in theatres. A junior in high school, I would soon be at the point where La Dolce Vita would become my favorite movie. I cherished formalist, traditional aesthetics combined with untraditional, episodic plot construction. In other words, I was seventeen and I thought I knew things about movies. The Departed forced me to concede a lot (“oh, the rat at the end, that’s not silly, that’s just playful!” “it’s not a totally inane deus ex machina – those deaths are thematically significant!”). The great thing about the movie, looking back now, is that it’s just so damn intense that its joyous, pulpy, riveting playfulness eschews objective criticism. One man’s “inane deus ex machina” is my “holy shit – the world that Scorsese has made in this movie is batshit crazy!” But whatever criticisms we all might have lobbed at it (the academy wasn’t going to give best picture to Children of Men – they’re the academy – they’re dumb! – get over it!), when Leonardo Dicaprio got shot in the f*ck*ng face, my brother and I (and everyone else in the theatre) jumped.

Flight of the Red Balloon (2008), dir. by Hsiao-hsien Hou, starring Juliette Binoche

I’ve not seen any of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s other films (for me, this is more a statement of excitement than an admission), and I should probably take this time very quickly to mention how many movies from this decade I have NOT seen – tons. There are directors who are world renowned (presumably for good reason) who I have had absolutely no exposure to. Mostly foreign, but not all. There’s an Amin Bahrani film on this list, and the film listed is the only film of his I’ve seen. I have a document on my computer which has compiled on it a list of just the movies from this past decade which I feel absolutely compelled to see, and there are well over a hundred. There are many others which I do NOT feel compelled to see, but would certainly love to, given the oppurtunity. This list of favorites, at the very least, could be called “malleable”. Truthfully, it is really just a snapshot of my tastes right now. These thirty films are films that I cherish very deeply in my heart. Many I have only seen once, but have left such an indellible emotional (mostly joyful) impression on me that even years later, I find that they have made a home in the meadow of my taste.

Such is the case with this film. When I originally made a list of my favorite movies of 2008, I really wasn’t sure where this film fit – how far above Slumdog Millionaire and how below 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. What made it especially difficult was that this film is just so damn modestly wonderful, that it doesn’t demand to be loved (unlike, say, Wall-E, Man On Wire, Let The Right One In, which all originally made it above this movie). This film is wonderfully slow. Hou’s camera behaves like no one else’s, carefully observing normal life in long shots (long both in time and in space) which pan back and forth between action, and cripes! some of the action just takes place in a small apartment. Still, no space is too small for Hou to treat with gentle care and epic scope. After I surrendered to this minimalistic-but-deliberate cinematography, I was enchanted. This film captures connotation like no other movie on this list. Check out the way the sunlight illuminates Juliette Binoche’s face on the train, or the way the young boy’s caretaker asks the boy if he wants to play on his playstation and his response, “no.” The way the red balloon floats through time and space, slow and still, magically unexplained and yet connotatively perfect, forces the adult viewer to slow down, adjust, perceive Hou’s world the way the child in the film does – that is, simply, purely aesthetically. Everything has a connotation, not just a purpose.

Since I Left You by The Avalanches

In the year 2000, to promote their upcoming release, one of the members of the Avalanches created a mix which served as a sampling for the many songs which inspired Since I Left You. The mix is called “When I Met You”. The songs mixed range from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to The Smiths’ “The Boy With a Thorn In His Side” to De La Soul’s “A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays” to Fern Kinney’s “Together We Are Beautiful” (by the way, thanks for the intro, Avalanches) to, and most importantly for this writing, Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. The track begins with Lauper’s “I come home in the morning light…” Her voice is riding the guitar line from Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic”. Off in the distance, the faint chanting of “Saturday! It’s Saturday!” from the aforementioned De La Soul jam can be heard. Lauper goes on: “Oh, mother dear, we’re not the fortunate ones. Oh, girls, we wanna have fun.” The reason why this is my favorite track from the mix comes up next. Lauper goes on: “The phone rings in the middle of the night. My FA!” Then her voice gets muted. Her crying “My father says ‘what you going to do with your life?’” is drowned out, muted underneath the cryings of “Saturday!” It’s an effect that The Avalanches are so good at, they make it sound easy. They get a good thing going, the listener gets to loving it, and then they turn it way down. From Since I Left You: think “Little Journey” or “Live at Dominoes”. Personally, it works for me like a damn charm. I get to dancing, I fall in love with a sound, and they steal that sound back, and I love it even more for having gone. They have Lauper repeat her line about her father’s inquiry several times, still underwater, until she finally emerges. “Oh daddy dear, you know you’re still number one! But girls, they wanna have fun!”

Such is the reason why Since I Left You is my favorite album of the decade. Like Lauper, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I don’t know how I am going to be able to enact my morality to its fullest extent in my behavior, or what I do. I’ve spent my whole life focussing on my perception and all its potential capabilities. For me, the search for great art has been the search for a perfect perception. Now that I am content with my perception (relatively!), I just want to have fun. If I want to experience art anymore, it is for the sake of joy. I realize that I am not helping anyone or doing any good by listening to a piece of music. I realize that I am stuck in my ego, focussing on my self, when I listen to music. If I am going to focus on my self/ego and my perception, it follows that I should want to nurture that ego so that I arrive at a place of real joy.

And Since I Left You is that place. Every sound is buoyant; every transition, perfect. Every muted note balances another raucous note to create two halves of beauty, in between which is my sublime heart. The closing track, “Extra Kings” shares a similar structure to Fennesz’s “Endless Summer”; each’s sense of the sublime seems identical, or at least very like. The only difference is that in The Avalanches’ vision of the sublime, I can dance. In this way, Since I Left You is a perfect balance between my spiritual learnings from Endless Summer and Sound of Silver.

That isn’t to diminish its individuality, however. Since I Left You is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Its sounds are globetrotting. East-coast-hip-hop. Mariachi strings. Jungular parrot squawks? To listen to it is almost to feel one with the sounds of the world, to plug into the global sound-spirit of human-kind. Case-in-point: the parrot squawks are only included, because a parrot is the only thing a boy in “frontier psychiatrist” can think of that also talks, besides a human. Since I Left You is the sound of connotative communication. I don’t have a favorite song from the album; I only have favorite sounds. For my girlfriend, Erica, it’s the “la da da, la da da, la da da, da da da” of “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time”. Though I can’t be certain, I feel that for me, it might be the split-second in “Extra Kings” where the vocals change from a muted “since the day I left you” to a fully audible “I tried, but I just can’t catch you since the day I left you.” A perfect metaphor for my relationship with the sublime and why I listen to music in the first place.

Bitte Orca by The Dirty Projectors / Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal

“Definitely you can come and live with us. I know there’s a place for you in the basement, yeah! All you have to do is help out with the chores and dishes, and I know you will!” I interpret this line, taken from Temecula off Bitte Orca, as being a metaphor for the musical listening experience. Emotionally, I’m about to burrow into this guy’s album, or home. He’s going to let me in, so long as I first take care of some physical requirements. Okay, well my rent is paid, I’ve got electricity, the apartment is clean (relatively!); I want to listen to an album.

And albums don’t really get funkier than these two. Once you get inside, once you’re down to roll around and play with aesthetic semblance, these albums are about as funkily fun as you can get, straight from the Nietzsche-esque (not my interpretation; Dave Longstreth has admitted to it) minds of “nihilists with good imaginations.” The bad news gets pretty horrifying on these albums, but the good news is “that no one has any good reason to live”, so there’s our perspective, and damn me straight to hell (I wouldn’t mind sharing a hell with Kevin Barnes – picture that for a moment!) if these guys aren’t far from being right – all the time. These are the perfect albums to listen to while trying to restructure your character. When your mind rejects the frequency, when the past is a grotesque animal, when you suffer for fashion more than you suffer for oh – let’s just say, anything worth suffering for – why don’t you try being still for a while? You might find that you’re caught up in a storm that you don’t, in fact, need any shelter from. You might find that you’ve been standing in the middle of your character the entire damn time.

Or you might not. That’s the thing about nihilism.

Endless Summer by Fennesz

This is what Caspar David Friedrich meant by ‘the sublime’. The Field had his own vision, which was incredible, but this album is where my sublime heart rests. The title track illustrates the beauty of this album perfectly. The first half of the song is all underwater static with a beautiful guitar line weaving in and out. High pitched tones bounce around like sonar waves in the ocean. Random low beeps give the impression that the wave of the song is hitting something obtrusive. Then: submersion. We go deeper and deeper into this musical landscape. The sound gets fuzzy, then it doesn’t. Another blast of sonar. I begin to get the feeling that we’re going somewhere incredible. We’re almost there now. I can tell, because the static is worse than ever. Now it’s gone. The sound is ascending, coming back up to the sky. Then, in the 4:46 mark, there’s a split-second break in the music, and afterwards we’re completely submerged in the beautiful guitar line. It’s been released, and so have we. We follow it out until it fades away, without any emphasis whatsoever. At first I felt unfulfilled. Where was my completion? Where was my heart at in that song? Eventually I discovered that the entirety of my emotion was encapsulated in that fraction of a second when there was no sound at all. The sublime is infinitesimal. It’s the point of horizon between the ocean and the sky. We can never fully reach it, but if we ever hope to try, we must first follow the beauty of both halves.

Where they meet is where my soul will rest, where my ego finds peace, where Christian Fennesz’s heart had to go through to make this album. The sounds he has made take me there. Indeed, the first time I ever heard this album, I felt as though I had been to a new land. A land like Avatar’s Pandora, where spirituality is made tangible through aesthetics. That is why this is my #2 favorite album. I have always been addicted to the sublime, and this album presented it in such a way that I felt as though I had never known sublime before hearing it. And in a way, I hadn’t.