In Which There Is A Lot Carrie Brownstein Neglects To Mention

Surface Envy

by ERIC FARWELL

Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, eschews the typical “tell-all” format of the rock confessional. Using music as a gateway to explore her identity – including influential bands and her own experiences in Excuse 17 and Sleater-Kinney – it’s as autobiographical as it is a sentimental love letter to the music scene. Music gave her strength to carve her own identity. It builds the memoir’s largest theme: one finds their identity through experiences and the art that helps us navigate them.

The first section opens up with Brownstein’s anxieties as a young girl who desperately wants to be noticed as someone who exists. An anxious child, she takes to performing and slowly segues her natural talents into creating music. In her element, she is a girl in search of herself, of power, of clarity. There’s a distance between her and everyone else, even those she loves, a characteristic that may or may not be attributed to her difficult parents.

Carrie characterizes her parents as ineffectual and aloof: her mother struggles with an eating disorder while her father slowly comes to recognize his homosexuality; both do so while she and her sister navigate life on their own.

The book explicitly deals with Brownstein's search for a sense of normalcy and certainty while working in an unusual field. There is little music industry struggle. In fact, the main area of contention comes from the press, who label Sleater-Kinney as a “female rock band” or some variation thereof, ignoring the fact that the label is useless for such a talented and undeniable group.

Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl is a literary product of someone who loves books and has developed their own writing style. The beauty of the language gives visibility to some of the more interesting decisions Brownstein makes. One aspect that's not written about but implied by the writing is a sense of privacy and control. This is especially evident in the memoir's lack of exploration of her relationships.

Most prominently, her romance with Corin Tucker is touched on, but the trajectory of their relationship is glossed over, with Brownstein abandoning scrutiny save for a few mentions of fooling around and cohabitation. While it's not uncommon to be reserved about certain aspects of life in memoir, Brownstein's decision to even mention topics is interesting. Intentionally or not, they paint a picture of someone with wounds and experiences that still seem strange and new. Not knowing exactly how to discuss them gives nuance to the inner world of an already complex person.

On the page, this creates messiness in an otherwise clear narrative, as if Brownstein is applying the subversive skills that Sleater-Kinney utilize to her life story. Sleater-Kinney gives the book its skeletal structure, and the revisiting of the emotional zeitgeist around each album and subsequent tour creates motion and comfortable refrain, as Brownstein finds pockets of personal growth in the monotony of write-record-tour.

Throughout it all, she vacillates between feeling slightly lost or in upheaval and having a sense of certainty and roots, yet this never comes across as peripatetic or pedantic. If anything, it solidifies the value of her band and bandmates to her, and unironically, earnestly offers up the tried and true story of music as salvation and respite from the dour world.

Eric Farwell is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New Jersey. He has written for The Rumpus, Electric Literature and Critical Flame.

"By The Time You're Twenty-Five" - Sleater-Kinney (mp3)

"Tapping" - Sleater-Kinney (mp3)

In Which We Pay Attention To The Signs Of Fate

Sacrificial Music

by ERIC FARWELL

On first blush it's easy to mistake the stories in Rebecca Makkai’s Music for Wartime as being haunted by the past; the collection finds its spine in short, quasi-recollections inspired by Makkai's Hungarian heritage and accounts of atrocity in the mid-1900s. Stories are marked by seemingly detrimental compromises made to undo those decisions. The question at the heart of each isn't "but at what cost," rather it's "how late is too late?" History, like an extra on a film set, lurks behind the narrative, giving struggle and panic to those Makkai renders so beautifully.

Characters function as vessels for history, and the best pieces find a way to move them beyond the constraints of their story. The story “Cross,” for example, the protagonist has her sense of a new beginning post-divorce (a drafty house with little furniture) interrupted by a memorial site erected on her lawn. The co-mingling of realities and the way one is an obstacle to the other gives the characters unspoken nuance. In Makkai’s hands, these characters come from somewhere, even the nameless. The only misfires are those that lack clear rumination or connection, those that look to avoid any real sense of the past, or worse, don’t go deep enough.

In her novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, Makkai established her hallmarks of immigrant life, gay characters, and a sense of history that is often too much to bear. Here, different strands of them play out in unexpected and playful ways. Two gay artists live as renowned celebrities while one escapes fame to live as a refugee during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. A young boy has Casandra-like visions of a violinist’s past that cause him to pass out from their pain. Makkai upends things where you least expect, and reading her short fiction offers the same joys that Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad did: just when we think we understand a person, we begin to see how wrong we are. In the case of the characters in Music for Wartime, someone wants to understand, and it’s up to them to turn away or embrace them like a beacon of light in all their uncertainty.

For all of her strengths as a writer — well-structured prose, strong plotting, a sense of grittiness and historical accuracy — Makkai occasionally turns up a weak offering. The magical appearance of Bach ends up being a bizarro version of The Puttermesser Papers by way of the clichéd I-was-using-you-to-get-pregnant trope. A story involving two gay old friends is overly obvious and lacks resolve. Interestingly enough, the best piece, “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship", is one that finds a middle-ground between her more rote offerings and her cleverest work. It’s a simple examination of a misunderstanding between an academic and a student over class participation and ethnicity, a character study really, and yet its mundane intricacies yield great treasure in the end. On its last page, after deconstructing the life of its academic young protagonist, it offers this:

In future years, when she told the story, she left out the part about Malcolm. It became instead the story of why she left Cyril College, of how she and Malcolm ended up at State, of how sweet Tossman had been to her, that year before he killed himself. Of how even in assessing all her misprisions, she’d still missed something enormous. But where had the signs been?

A search for signs of fate informs the book, especially in the fictional recounts inspired by her family, which are interspersed throughout between the “other” stories. At times, it’s hard to see the use in these quasi-anecdotes, as they’re hit or miss in terms of connecting to the collection. However, when they’re on point, they can work like gangbusters. One excerpt deftly handles three narratives,being a found bomb at a birthday party. It is the only piece that reads coldly, with Makkai/the speaker struggling to both accept and probe the events in question, yet taking the time (near exhaustively) to record them. Much can be made of the moral or thematic threads within the collection, but this work, “Suspension: April 20th, 1984,” stands against the grain. The stories here often end too softly, or come to a fairly neat resolve. Here, there’s a great deal of turmoil. Whether or not this is because it reads more personally, the narrator being an “I" rather than a “they,” is up for debate. Regardless, this short meditation on the lingering effects of war on otherwise untouched generations is a nice little punch in the kidneys.

Music flows in and out of stories, sound tracking different strands and forms of suffering. The violin in particular is used to express or mask heartache, sorrow, and longing. This use is subtle, and Makkai does an excellent job at getting things right in terms of portraying the act of playing, fingering, and emotion. Here, the concertos and quartet pieces function as another aspect of character, plastering a sort of emotional wallpaper up around them in their isolated worlds, both in a larger sense and in regard to their playing:

Aaron suddenly stumbled back into the consciousness of his own playing, and wished he hadn’t. His instinct had been carrying him along, but now he had to stop and think where he was, second guess, catch up, count. He felt everyone’s eyes on him except Radelescu’s; the old man was lost in the music. Radelescu did not close his eyes when he played, but he squeezed his face tight and gazed into the middle distance.

Ultimately, one can’t help but group things into categories, associate different ones that elevate or lower somethings credibility. Here, Makkai’s efforts are given more weight due to their relationship with death, terror, panic, and struggle, which are part of the Hungarian/Eastern European immigrant narrative. Each small world carved onto the page has a sense of something dark and profound nipping at its heels, just in the background where the characters avoid looking. The stories are richly detailed and well-crafted on their own, but they lack power.

In this respect, Makkai was smart to use the personal, albeit fiction mined from it, in order to give the collection a through line. We may well be equating the stories with profound meaning due to their correlation with one of the inescapable interim of atrocity in history, but perhaps that keeps us from missing its enormity while still marveling at how there had been no warnings.

Eric Farwell is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New Jersey. This is his first appearance on these pages. He has written for The Rumpus, Electric Literature and Critical Flame.

"The Stone Mill" - Atlas Genius (mp3)

"The City We Grow" - Atlas Genius (mp3)

In Which Father John Misty Remains A Cherished Individual

His Best Work

by ERIC FARWELL

Prior to the emergence of Father John Misty, Josh Tillman slummed it in indie pop, writing earnest songs about life tinged with slight Judaic-Christian undertones. He briefly toured as a drummer for Fleet Foxes, but struggled to gain any kind of real foothold. Near the end of his career as mere mortal, J. Tillman, on the album Singing Ax, the early seeds of Father John Misty were planted as he moved away from deeper religious undertones and found a slight Freudian bend.

With a slight disconnect, the songs of Father John Misty utilize a hodgepodge mix of jokes, wry honesty, and pseudo-spiritual awareness. Musical structures run the gamut between Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. In the same way Harry Nilsson’s best songs were, his work, especially his latest output, examines love from a cockeyed angle. The songs on the record, influenced by his then-recent marriage, drag their feet through different aspects of the viscera found within commitment, eventually achieving a half-hearted slacker sense of romance. Eschewing the straight forward proves to be an interesting choice, one that benefits and hinders the tracks. While lyrics like “ Say, do you wanna get married and put an end to our endless regressive tendency to scorn?/ Provincial concepts like your dowry and your daddy's farm/ For love to find us of all people/ I never thought it be so simple,” may be more cavalier and interesting, they keep listeners from accessing any deep feeling couched within their salon-ready discourses on romance.

The final product and character development is merely a Christmas dressing. There’s an icy detachment as Tillman bears down on dimensions of love, most of which are rote observations that avoid saying much of anything in favor of “trying to say something.” Women aren’t quite objects here, but the imagined female “you” is rendered a bit too on the nose as the now classic quirk fest of a Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig female. In “I Love You, Honeybear,” Tillman ends one verse with “I've brought my mother's depression You've got your father's scorn and a wayward aunt's schizophrenia.” The song, a dark take on a praise chorus of true romance, never offers stakes for the performer or the subject. Biblical imagery is invoked, sex flashes by, and yet the listener is left asking, “so what?”

Without the subtle visibility of blood and guts, Tillman’s oeuvre creates a distance between the listener and the performer, but more importantly, between the performer and the song. Live, he moves with a feline grace and rockstar pizzazz to really put on a show, before breaking into a dry winking joke about the absurdity of rock musicians. Because of this, the crowd is silent and still, crossing fingers and looking for the chink in the armor that will give way to a real connection. Tillman may have graduated to the big leagues with his posturing, but without the threat of real vulnerability, it might as well be dust in the wind.   

Eric Farwell is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New Jersey. This is his first appearance on these pages. He has written for The Rumpus, Electric Literature and Critical Flame.

"I've Never Been A Woman" - Father John Misty (mp3)