In Which We Evolve Into Something Extremely Dangerous

Greed

by JESSE KLEIN

“I watched a lot of movies, Paul. I know what I’m doing.” So says testosterone-infused, puffed out personal trainer Mark Wahlberg as Daniel Lugo to his future co-conspirator Paul Doyle, played by Dwayne Johnson, as they speed along the Florida coast in Lugo’s rundown cherry red sports car. Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain is a retelling of actual events that took place in the Miami area in 1994 and 1995, wherein a gang of body builders abducted, extorted, tortured and in one case murdered their victims for their own financial gain, for the piece of the pie they believed they had coming to them. The film, and the riveting article that it is based upon, paints the thugs as bumbling buffoons, as incompetent, and thus extremely dangerous, nincompoops never able to see beyond the tip of their nose.

Bay marvelously Bay-ifies this story, skipping over laborious introspection yet slowing down the action scenes so much so that time stops, Wahlberg frozen flying through the air, a blank look on his face so we have no idea what he’s thinking. With a story this ripe for adaptation, it’s interesting to think how the content could have been reinterpreted. The obvious pick, the Coen Brothers, would have Fargo-d it, injecting a more deadpan, arch quality to the hijinks. Spielberg would have moralized, giving Lugo a character arc and a better-late-than-never heart of gold. Tarantino’s version might be a not so distant cousin, a little more referential humor, a lot more blood and gore, and Scorcese would shoot it in New York. Suffice it to say that Bay keeps it light; when a character feels the immediate pangs of guilt after committing his first murder, he clears his head by doing a few reps.

Lugo, Doyle and Adrian Doorbal (played with small man syndrome aplomb by Anthony Mackie) are worse than mere petty criminals with the misfortune of getting in over their head, they are each in their own way utter narcissists, unable to love anything beyond themselves. Each worships an extension of who they think they are, or want to become, and each uses their self-prescribed symbol to define their worth. Like their forebears before them, if they just get this one last score…

For Doorbal, it’s masculinity (or at least the limited, sad way that he defines it). His rampant use of steroids leave him impotent and so he seeks out more drugs to remedy the issue. There he meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), and though he never seems to show any actual interest in her, he goes to bed with her (with some help), marries her and buys her a house. Mackie’s Doorbal never seems quite sure why he’s doing any of this. Even when the couple looks happy, Mackie’s glee is manufactured as if he’d read about it in a muscle magazine the week before. Doorbal only knows that he wants. Money, an erection, a house, a girl, sex, big muscles, a wife, each thing is interchangeable for him because they exist only as a yardstick against his own definition of manhood. If his use of steroids and consequent body image is any indication, nothing is ever enough, and he will do anything in his quest for satisfaction. When drinking his power shake of breast milk mixed with his drugs, he’s genuinely confused why Doyle doesn’t want a sip.

Doyle’s obsession is not as clear-cut. With money in his pocket, his drug of choice is cocaine. But after being beaten down by prison, Doyle finds Jesus and uses religion to cordon off temptation. He lives under the tutelage of a priest and tries to lead a virtuous life but at the first sign of a threat Doyle assaults and promptly abandons him. When the gang comes into some money, he is right back where he wants to be, knee-deep in a mound of cocaine though this time he refuses to shake his religiosity. Stimulants and faith give him the same jolt: a feeling of righteousness. For a man built like a skyscraper, Doyle is massively insecure and so both drugs and religion are used as a crutch to bolster what he sees when he looks in the mirror. When he runs out of one, there is always the other. And when he runs out of both, he can just take it from someone else. Anything less would be un-American.

Daniel Lugo, the mastermind of the Sun Gym Gang, worships stuff, but even more so, he worships “stuff-ness.” What bothers him most is not what he lacks, but what others he deems inferior to him have. He looks around and sees peons, parasites. Walking through his gym, looking at overweight housewives, un-toned businessmen, he sees amorphous blobs of imperfection, people who clearly don’t take fitness, and by extension themselves, seriously. And yet, somehow, he’s the one wearing jean shorts to a job interview, shamefully confessing to his rap sheet. The best idea he ever had was offering strippers free gym memberships to boost enrollment.

Soon though, he gets his one break. But it turns out, material wealth does not make him happy; it’s not the stuff, it’s what the stuff means. Looking out at the sunset in his massive, newly stolen backyard, the light shimmering off the water in front of him, Lugo finally lets out a yelp of satisfaction but does so with eyes closed—he doesn’t need to look at the sunset, he knows it’s there. When he’s playing basketball a la Billy Madison (and Mr. Blume in Rushmore, for that matter), he jams on a 12 year-old, telling his bud he could be his stepfather by the weekend. He has no intention of doing this, he probably does not even want to—he just needs to know, and needs everyone else to know, that he can if he wants. He’ll murder his way into a PTA meeting if that’s what it takes to appear legitimate. 

But how can you blame them? They learnt it from the movies.

Nearly twenty years ago, Wall Street’s Gordan Gekko’s oracular exclamation came down from the mountains: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of evolutionary spirit.” Bay’s revision of this idea comes through motivational speaker Johnny Wu (Ken Jeong) and his affirmation “Don’t be a don’ter, do be a doer:” “I had a wife, two beautiful daughters, thank God I left her, now I’m with seven honeys of which I can choose from.” Lugo’s inner monologue, “Oh my God, this guy understands me.” Lugo comes from a long line of solipsists who believe happiness is their divine right.

In Brian De Palma’s lionized 1983 gangster movie Scarface, a blood-soaked Al Pacino looks up into the night sky and sees the Goodyear Blimp staring back at him with the infamous ticker tape along the side: “The World Is Yours.” Pacino’s Tony Montana takes what he wants; his need for power is absolute and so any other desire is a distant second. He lusts after Michelle Pfeifer’s Elvira but does he do so because he is drawn to her romantically or because she is yet another status symbol he wants to possess? Moments after killing her husband Montana wakes Elvira saying, “Come on, get your stuff, you’re coming with me.” It’s not a discussion, what she wants has nothing to do with it. Tony knows little about her, and based on this discussion, it’s clear he doesn’t care to.

Scarface and movies of its ilk endlessly reference the ubiquitous yet increasingly nebulous “American Dream.” What at one point long ago imbibed a Leave It To Beaver mentality has over time shed the familial, relationship-oriented aspect of the Dream and instead focused on fierce individualism, Ayn Rand-ian capitalistic gains. The other Florida heist movie this season, Spring Breakers, pays a direct—if somewhat ironic—homage to the movie: James Franco’s character Alien coos, “I got Scarface. On repeat. Scarface. On repeat.”

Interestingly, though the film is based upon four girls and their communal thirst, it becomes apparent as the film wears on that the girls are not as close as first appears. The all-too-deliberately named Faith (Selena Gomez) is ostracized for not being cold enough, gangster enough for the other three. When she and later on Cotty (Rachel Korine) decide to leave, the other girls never contemplate going with them: their quest is a personal one, one defined by individual greatness. With two down and two left, this leaves no doubt that one would stay without the other, that each is superfluous in the other’s life. The unexpected reversal finds Alien becoming attached to the girls’ coldness, remoteness: “Y’all are my soul mates.” When Alien is shot, they don’t even turn around.

So Wahlberg’s Lugo “gives” his girlfriend Sorina (Bar Paly) to his buddy Paul because she is merely a decorative fixture to him. Paul, crawling around his hotel room floor searching for his fix, barely notices she’s there. Neither pay any real attention to her; based on their previous behavior, it seems odd to think they even might. The film’s slogan and opening line “My name is Daniel Lugo and I believe in fitness” can be translated into “My name is Daniel Lugo and I believe in me.” 

The granddaddy gangster film, The Godfather, sneakily espouses similar Machiavellian principles. Pacino’s Michael Corleone initially refuses to enter into his family’s line of work; he draws a line between he and his WASP-y new bride Kay (Diane Keaton) and the darkness that looms with his father and brothers. But, over the course of the film, Michael is lured to that darkness and ultimately chooses it. When he kills at the restaurant, he kills for his family. But when he orchestrates a coup to solidify his family’s dominance, he kills for power, for himself. Michael’s “American Dream” is to be as powerful and dominant as possible, the traits he had been suppressing his whole life. At the end, Michael looks out of his new office at his wife across the hall, his former partner kissing Michael’s hand between them. And though there is only around ten feet between them, it might as well be the whole world. The door closes.

Michael chose himself. So did Tony Montana. And so did Daniel Lugo. In this, they are all together, and alone. Perhaps Gordon Gekko said it best: "Greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much." 

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer and filmmaker living in Montreal. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"Husbands" - Savages (mp3)

"Waiting for a Sign" - Savages (mp3)

In Which It Doesn't Turn Out So Well For Those Kids

More Productive

by JESSE KLEIN

I have done many inane and more often irrelevant tasks in the name of productivity. I’ve cleaned toilets as a busboy and as a waiter. I have cleaned makeshift "country" toilets as a camp counselor. I have cleaned Porta-Pottys as a production assistant. It seems that between all the "productive moments" I spent serving food to people who didn’t like me and dragging kids around who didn’t like me I was cleaning up shit. And I’m not saying I had a problem with doing it or am resentful or regretful that I did it, I’m just not sure in retrospect how "productive" it was. So far, all I seem to have gotten from it is the impulse to write this essay and the lingering stink of human feces on my hands.

Unemployment is at its highest since 1948. I have had conversations with people out of law school lamenting their luck in today’s job market. This is not making light of the situation people in all markets are facing today. This is an attempt to describe the discrepancy between what we want to do, what we end up doing, and how we lie to ourselves and call the space between "productive." 

james dean & liz taylor

If you’re not in the sciences, business or a technical craft like becoming a plumber or politician, the line from school to job is not so much straight as imaginary. And when all you have are imaginary lines, you tend to make things up. You get really into your dietary habits, go on nine month bike rides it would take an afternoon to fly, go to Burning Man four years in a row. But, after a while, distracting yourself itself becomes a distraction. And so, almost all people in this confining space try to find some structure, a direction, a way to tell themselves, "This has been a productive day."

Regrettably, it seems that a day is made up of a lot of moments. A lot of moments to judge yourself and ask, "Is this productive?" If you’re not careful, you can ask yourself that question dozens of times a day. Like with googling, things get pretty intense pretty quickly when it comes to using the internet. I have spent hours googling "danny devito drunk" trying to find this clip of him drunk at eight in the morning on a local Philadelphia broadcast with the cast of It’s Always Sunny. I wasn’t trying to "pass time" or "relax"; it was really important to me to find that clip, my creative output depended on it. It took too long for me to realize the utter futility of my search.

An abridged list of things I have done in an attempt to be productive which now do not seem all that fruitful (and make me wonder about myself having thought they were a good idea in the first place):

Reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being while being very high when I was seventeen.  Writing one pretty terrible and one totally terrible play between the ages of eighteen and twenty (the pretty terrible one is called We’ll Just Wait and See while the totally terrible one is called Let’s Play). Going to Stratford, Ontario for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival twelve times with my family (at least a few of those I went on my own accord in my late teens). Being a featured extra in a short film that forced me to say "Fuck Santa" over a hundred times. In grade 11, unsuccessfully trying to mount Pee-wee's Big Adventure as a high school play (I was thwarted by the Fashion Show Committee who claimed 100% of the school’s "art" budget).

I have spent days just watching The Dick Cavett Show. Part phony nostalgia, part boredom, I got hooked watching John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzarra and Peter Falk promoting Husbands. After I’d watched that three too many times, I watched Norman Mailer argue with Gore Vidal, Groucho with Truman Capote and that was before I’d even started to focus on Cavett (he’s so interesting!). For most people, wasting time on YouTube is a harmless procedure. It becomes complicated when you begin to view YouTube as endless homework, where every random free associated thought could potentially lead to a new idea. Too often, it leads to watching seven consecutive hours of clips from The Dick Cavett Show. So out of nothing if not sheer guilt, I turn to reading.

Like a lot of people who are too scared to study literature, I have tried to read a lot of books on my own that are better suited to a class setting lead by someone who’s been trained to talk about that one specific thing. I did this when I couldn’t get work cleaning toilets. This great tradition started with (of course) Ulysses. I found a forty-year-old guide in my parents’ basement and figured I could read that along with the book. But wait, do you read the guide first and then the actual book to explain what you were about to read or read the book first and then the guide to explain it retroactively? I got nearly two hundred pages in and then decided to take up smoking. Now, all I remember is either Daedalus or Bloom shaving at the beginning and the phrase "sun like spangled coins" that I am sure I just misquoted.

As for Swann’s Way, I have read the first chapter twice. And it’s not that I didn’t like it or found myself drifting. It’s one of those books you have to read, and so you just can’t. Plus, the fact that it takes him eighty-five pages to go to sleep was a little daunting. Terrific eighty-five pages, but with no motivation other than my own impulse to do hard things for their own sake, I found myself wandering outside for too many smoke breaks.

I’ll skip recounting the experience of reading The Waste Land. Needless to say I found myself swearing a lot under my breath.

With movies it’s more complicated. Film is only a hundred years old and so people like me delude themselves into thinking they can see every movie ever made. Well not every movie, but every movie they’re supposed to see. I have spent/wasted a lot of hours thinking that this was not only true but a very good idea.

Early on in this crusade I thought, "If you’re a film student, if you’re a productive film student, you have to see The Birth of a Nation." I went to my local video store in Montreal and rented it on VHS. The problem is not even that the Klu Klux Klan are the good guys and victorious by the end (spoiler alert!). What’s important about this film is that it invented film language; the close-up, the wide shot, what we have taken for granted for eighty years. Thing is, seeing the film that invented film language is much like knowing that fact itself, and it did not take over three hours to read this paragraph.

Salo

Treading in international waters, I made my way through the European directors. The vast majority of works I saw and see are great, they inspire me to make films (which I do) and continue on this ridiculous quest. Take Pasolini. Many of his films are wonderful, and then you watch a movie like Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Based on the book by the Marquis de Sade, this film pushes the boundaries of how we use the word boundaries (with boundaries like those, who needs boundaries?). It was during the scene where the naked children are eating shit with nails in it with blood pouring out of their mouths while they’re being whipped and tortured when I asked myself, "Is this productive?" I must have thought it was because I finished the movie. It doesn’t turn out so well for those kids. For anyone, really.

Fassbinder is an amazingly innovative filmmaker. Some of his movies like In a Year of 13 Moons and Ali: Fear Eats The Soul are challenging and groundbreaking but also accessible and quite touching. But the guy made forty films in twenty years and died at thirty-seven because he did like ten grams of cocaine a day and basically didn’t sleep for twenty years and would fight with his many lovers and the German film industry and would go on-and-on-and-on at breakneck speed until he finally stopped.

Forget the fact that it’s basically impossible to find all of his films in the US; it would take a pretty long time to watch forty German movies. So, as a compromise, I decided I’d watch Berlin Alexanderplatz, his fifteen hour TV series. But, in the end, I Swann’s Way-d it. I watched the first five hours while constantly pushing aside the nagging question but finally asking myself, "Is there nothing more productive I could be doing?" So I stopped watching it and decided to move to Texas to go to film school.

Film school is a vortex of productivity. It’s a hall of mirrors where the idea of being productive distorts, changes shape and meaning. For one, all you do is work for free for three years. During these years, you learn about the equipment and refine your ability to do specific tasks, or even worse, "find your voice." (Just saying that makes it sound so fake that it makes no sense.) But really what you do is work for free for years and maybe end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. Productivity is an inherently subjective notion but here it’s stretched to its logical conclusion: self-implosion.

james dean
One of the things you’re supposed to do in film school in order to be productive is "make connections." Meet people? Make people like you? Marry someone and work for their father’s roofing company? It’s all a bit unclear. The wonderful thing about film school is this: everyone in it hates each other. It’s a perverse zero sum game. If that was not enough, everyone who works in film not in film school also hates you. You’re seen as this pompous, pseudo-academic cop out avoiding the slog of actual work. And forget it if you’re getting an MFA, then people basically just want you to die.

But still, film school does afford you some space, a break from cleaning toilets. Many of my friends are getting jobs out of film school worse than the ones they had before they started. But that doesn’t negate or devalue the time they spent in between (well, maybe it does devalue it a bit). Then as now, we think it’s a productive thing to do and so we continue to go. This is where subjectivity wins out.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about The Tree of Life and the archives of David Foster Wallace. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"To Have In The Home" - Woods (mp3)

"Out of the Eye" - Woods (mp3)

"Hand It Out" - Woods (mp3)

In Which We Hold The Tree Of Life At An Arm's Length

One Big, One Small

by JESSE KLEIN

The Tree of Life
dir. Terrence Malick
138 minutes

It is impossible to watch Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life without having an opinion. Some will find this year’s winner of the Palme D’Or a towering achievement, nothing short of a landmark in American filmmaking. Others will be underwhelmed, will roll their eyes at its sheer exuberance, scoff at the project's attempt to depict an American post-World War II consciousness alongside the birth and evolution of the universe in under two and a half hours.

Weeks before its national release, The Tree of Life has already been lauded, called a "prayer" by Roger Ebert and drawn comparisons to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from A.O. Scott. Though the film does contain images and sequences as broad in scope as can be imagined, its core lies in individual, fragmented childhood memories, likely those of Malick himself, growing up in suburban Texas in the 1950s. Memory and how the brain remembers and how it recounts to itself is the thread through The Tree of Life, and the juxtaposition of a post-war pre-adolescence with the birth of the universe is nearly oracular, and so, easy to criticize in its largesse. But The Tree of Life transcends criticism, even opinion. It just is. It does not entertain or explain; that is not the film's purpose. This does not make it better than others, or suggest it has necessarily achieved a level of greatness. Malick uses the film medium to show existence, in all its completeness, albeit from an individual perspective. And he does so through the refracted prism of memory.

The film begins and is defined by a loss, the loss, one we experience with Mrs. O’Brien, played by the relatively unknown (and soon to very well-known) Jessica Chastain. One day a man arrives with a telegram, a telegram that informs her of her son R.L.'s death at nineteen. We don’t know how or why he died, though the implication is that he perished during wartime. She calls her husband Mr. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt, and then the two are, together and alone, stranded in never-ending grief.

The other person forever ruined by this is the eldest son. Jack is played by Sean Penn as an adult and non-actor Hunter McCracken as a boy. Jack is the film’s ballast, the lens through which we experience this world. McCracken as Young Jack is an absolute wonder, a relic of the 50s, his wide nose and mouth challenged by his all-seeing green eyes, made light of by his big ears. McCracken’s sage facial expression, intently watching but seething with pre-adolescent passions, explains everything, somehow universalizing his experience with a glance.

After news of the middle child R.L.’s death, Malick takes us back to the beginning, showing us the Big Bang in all its godly mystery. Some will find this section of the film trying; it offers no connection, no narrative pull, it is simply a visual telling of the birth of the universe. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey aside, this section astounds because of its sheer beauty. It does not mean anything, it doesn’t stand in for anything else, it just is. When later we see a CGI dinosaur spare the life of its prey, we are tempted to draw parallels with the brothers, with the Darwinian nature of late childhood and early adolescence. But perhaps this is just another moment Malick chooses to show in the world’s evolution, like the jellyfish sauntering toward the water’s surface. And this evolution, this story of births and rebirths culminates with Jack O’Brien’s entrance into the world.

Jack’s infant life is told in isolated moments and details: two pairs of feet, one big one small, dragging across green grass, the look from afar of a crib, your crib, covered in an afternoon sun. These kinds of images are past clichéd, and yet, Malick reinvents them in their utter simplicity — one of the remarkable things about The Tree of Life is that it is a film made in 2011 devoid of irony and cynicism. We see Jack grow quickly, with music soaring through it all, pushing one image over the last. Nearly the entire film has music in it, and so there are not set pieces, distinct scenes and montages, but rather, the whole film is a montage, in the sense that it is an interlude told visually with music as backdrop. But, in this case, the interlude is eternity.

Malick slows his rhythm and settles into the O’Brien’s life, now with three boys, Jack, R.L. and the amorphous Steve, the youngest, who seems to exist if only as a witness, as proof that the other family members are really there, not merely dreams themselves. The events we see for the next ninety or so minutes belong to Jack. They are not dreams, they contain order and meaning, there is none of the randomness or hidden meanings of dreams. Rather, they are memories. Even when Jack is not present, we feel his gaze taking in the scene, experience his need for autonomy, for selfhood, and how that battles his need to be governed and loved by his parents. Indeed, the editing can feel random, overly frenetic at times, but it’s just Jack, sifting through time, remembering the tips of his mother’s arms in the sun, the length of chord between two telephone cans, the white hairs shining on his baby brother’s head, while he stands, inches away.

In a film told through the extraordinary cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, it is the editing that defines it. There is no coverage, no shot reverse shot, no method other than following a mind that recalls, that seeks. In that way The Tree of Life is a stream of consciousness work, a film that conjures Joyce or Woolf, rather than Whitman or Melville. The succession of images is what Jack, adult and child, is thinking, feeling. We feel his confused relationship with his father, and so we too feel conflicted about him.

Pitt as Mr. O’Brien is almost boorish, and almost brilliant. He is overbearing but does so with the best of intentions; he wants his kids to be better than he is. When, at around the midway point, Jack sees his father lying under his car fixing it in the driveway, he contemplates kicking the carjack away, crushing him instantly. There are a number of these moments in the film, where Jack realizes his own impulses, his own humanness, sees that he is capable of thinking things that are not nice about people he loves.

His relation with his mother is equally complex and charged. It is Jack and the Mother, and not the father, who speak in a whisper, not so much as voiceover narration, but incantations, talking to God, or R.L., or themselves. The Mother tells her sons that there are two ways through life, nature and grace. She admits the virtues of both but suggests grace as the path to follow. Indeed, Jack’s problem with his mother lies in her stoic passivity. As he grows more frustrated, he accuses her of not standing up to her husband, of not being strong enough. Chastain as Mrs. O’Brien is fleeting, almost translucent: beautiful and loving though forced into emotional absentia. These altercations with his parents confuse him and force him to rebel, from his parents’ stronghold, though mostly from himself.

In one scene, Jack stands in the living room holding a lamp toward his brother who holds a coat hanger an arm’s length away. R.L. is fair-haired, has a lightness to him, but here he stands with trepidation looking not at the open socket but into his brother’s eyes, looking for safety, affirmation. McCracken gives nothing away, not the sense of false safety, nor that of brotherly love — he wants R.L. to make this decision for himself. "I trust you." R.L. says. And slowly, really slowly, brings the hanger to the socket and with a quick thrust of his arm, puts it in. Nothing happens. It is not shown, but it probably was not plugged in at all. R.L. has a softness that Jack doesn’t have, can’t have as the eldest, the one closest to their father and his harsh affections. It is R.L. who shares his father’s passion for music, something Jack notices all too often. As the eldest, it is Jack who must experience everything first, what feels in the film like the first time ever.

As Jack sits on the front lawn, a lawn that feels expansive in play, tortuous in work, he sees a neighbor, a beautiful unknown neighbor, come and go. One day, when he sees this neighbor leave the house he sneaks in. Though it feels like he is already lost, this all being so new, he goes straight for her bedroom, for her drawers. He looks through the jewelry, through the dresses, things that have only had meaning until now in relation to his mother. He pulls out one dress, then puts it back. Finally, he takes out a slip or nightgown and lays it on the bed. In what feels like less than a second, there is a quick shot of him standing over the dress and then suddenly he is outside, in a forest, holding the dress as if it’s evidence that must be disposed of. (The implication is of his first experience with masturbation.)

He looks around frantically, throws the dress under some plywood but then soon picks it up. He sees the flowing creek and quickly throws the dress into it. He almost immediately understands the permanence of the act: he can’t clean it and put it back, there it goes. Cowed and confused, Jack returns home to see his mother waiting, arms crossed in the summer dusk. But, now, it’s not just his mother but a woman, a woman that someone might think about the way he thought about his neighbor. Jack can do nothing but walk with head bowed into his father’s house.

Moments like these populate Jack’s struggle, his inner conflict of love and resentment toward his parents, especially his father. As an adult, we see a successful Jack, presumably an architect, in a high-rise office. But in the office we do not see him making decisions or excelling but rather wandering around aimlessly, looking at people and things as if they’re everything but what they should be, need to be, his brother. On an elevator that seems to never end, he speaks on the phone to his father, a now elderly and more passive Mr. O’Brien, apologizing "for what he said." We don’t know what that is, but we do know that he still battles his father, and that he loves him.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about the archives of David Foster Wallace. He twitters here.

"Spellwork" - Austra (mp3)

"Darken Her Horse" - Austra (mp3)

"Lose It" - Austra (mp3)