In Which We Manage To Make It Work

End of the Trip

by JOANNA SWAN

The dwarfing stones caused the city to be even more gigantic for him than it already was. The manmade horizon, the brutal cut in the body of the giant city — it felt as though they were entering the shadow world of hell, when all the boy was seeing was the railroad's answer to the populist crusade to hoist the tracks above the grade crossings so as to end the crashes and the pedestrian carnage.

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Davis, California: a veritable Cow-Town where the U.C. Davis Aggies rule the playing field, displaced snowy owls and rabbits foment rage, passionate debate, and press at city council discussions, and Baggins End exists. Davis, California, where greenbelt lanes snake and bike cop citations are a very real threat. Tiny little Davis, my childhood home, where Mom's piano studio was always 98% Asian (to my great delight when Chinese New Year brought moon cakes and recitals brought homemade refreshments and charming extended family).

Yearly hongbao, bi-annual chicken foot-y outings to the New China Buffet, shopping at the S.F. Supermarket in Sacramanto, and a plethora of Guangdong take-out notwithstanding, my small-town schooling could never prepare me for the Mainland itself. From childhood home to college life in Walla Walla, Washington, I traded a small-town high school for a degree in a city known for its sweet onions and Seattle expats, and thus was most green (in the wet-behind-the-ears sense, and also in the where-is-the-azure-sky-and-recycling-program sense, too) upon arrival in Beijing.

Peering out of the Beijing taxi window at endless monstrosities of human engineering, I relished the romantic evocations of Scarlett Johansson's Tokyo scenes in Lost in Translation — and felt very small. This wasn't my first experience with Roth's "man-made sublime that divides and dwarfs," but it was the first time I'd been besieged on all sides by Joy City Malls and Easy Life Malls and Paradise Malls and unfinished subway lines and other things that make David Sedaris' snarky turn snarly.

"Plan of the City of Peking," British LithographIn one of the cafes where coffee is not served to businessmen in a corporate casual atmosphere, I was approached by a small man from a table of The Cools: a Chinese girl with platinum white hair, several subscribers to the black monotone dressing doctrine, and a bald Spaniard who kept giving my boyfriend flirty eyes over his latte. Said small man introduced himself as Juan and asked in adorably broken English if I'd like to model some t-shirts as a "foreigner friend." For want of a more compelling professional life, I consented to do a few jobs for VANCL, a Beijing-based online company that seems to hire hoards of waiguo and nationals alike whose thighs are uniformly much less thunder-y than mine.

This baffling shirt may or may not be an inside joke of the Chinese youth. Either way, it regularly serves as a reminder of why my boyfriend is extra-cool.

VANCL paid better than my teaching job — 600 RMB per 2-or-3-hour job — and visions of free t-shirts with cutesy graphics danced in my head, reminding me that I had yet to purchase a shirt from Threadless.

The first shoot took place at what had been some sort of factory or government compound: firebrick warehouses and snaking alleys now peppered with hints of film and fashion industry gentrification: shiny luxury vehicles, decay-chic rusted doors, an eerie veil of anonymity. The shoot itself was fun, if not a ringer for Bob Harris' "Suntory Time" translation troubles. I was instructed by photographer Han, a most genial young fellow involved with directing and shooting films (many were, he admitted ruefully, "boring propaganda"), to look happy, drunk (I think?) and also that very distinct misty/innocent/pensive pose that's spotted in manga and certain Asian fashion circles — eyes demurely downward or at a thoughtful 45-degree upwards tilt, chin coquettishly jutting, hands behind back, or finger at lips, feet together, or slightly pigeon-toed.

During most shoots, a young man would crouch below me, aiming a hairdryer directly at my head. Half the photos capture my futile attempts to extricate flyaways from my over-glossed lips.

What ultimately inspired the photographers would always be my hair. I'd come with it tied up in a bun, hoping to keep my tresses locked away from the snarls, split ends, and the leonine mane it revels in when freed from ponytail prison; everyone always wanted it down, though — I was to shake, twirl, fluff, flip, twist, braid. I ended up under a curling iron more than once and 45 minutes later the proud stylist would present his creation: Sandra Dee meets Amy Winehouse with bubblegum lipstick.

If I look happy, it's because I thought they weren't going to curl my hair.

I made friends with a girl who'd seen my photos on VANCL, a friend of Juan's. Her job confounded me until I realized that rather than sell clothes, she contracted out photography jobs for companies — they chose the model and backgrounds, she styled and produced the photoshoots. Once, I modeled 60 down coats in June for a big website. It was cool, I got free Victory Vitamin Water.

Sweating under my pancake makeup. Fashion. It's Height.

I took the 991 bus to her studio to model various outfits, and the bus trip alone cost me three hours of my life roundtrip. I'd sit with my magazines and iPod, watching the bus TV and trying to spot horse-drawn buggies on the road and marveling at the tinted, removed insulation of the Audi dashboards and BMW backseats idling at red lights below me. Such insulation was never afforded a bus passenger, leastwise a laowai.

Once, the blue-uniformed ticket collector helped me with some directions and then asked me about my other, less compelling job: how much did lessons cost for each student? (I told her — 100 RMB to me, 300 RMB to boss-lady.) She had a bit of cilantro in her teeth, perhaps from a recent Beijing Breakfast stop, and gestured at my Lapham's Quarterly every time she mentioned teaching or English. On TV there was a video of Michael Jackson performing the Sawing A Woman in Half magic trick while singing "Smooth Criminal." There were also many yelling ads.

Raised voices being frequent and tolerated in most areas except perhaps temples, shrines, and the respectable sit-down restaurant known as Pizza Hut, the promotions heralded the imminent glee of summertime, liberation at hand. Everyone yelled in these ads: old ladies exclaimed about online shopping deals, a young woman called "wu ba dian commmm!!" (online classified ads) to the world through her cupped hands, two young lovers yelled coyly about chocolate popsicles, an actress and popular microblogger rode a CGI donkey and hollered about something that sounded like "ganji-laaaaaa!" All the while, we scuttled past the blue and white corrugated walls of Yah Gee Modular Housing or JH Prefab Housing, the two choices migrant workers seemed to have regarding city lodging.

On the return trip from my last modeling job, I fell asleep and woke up sweaty as from a fever dream, wondering if my stop had already passed. Wrong as always in my evaluation of China's great breadth, I inconspicuously peeled away my false eyelashes, stained my last Kleenex with melted mauve and dripping beige foundation, and settled down to the last hour of the myriad strange smells of public transportation, aircon drips, and a stomach aching for an icy pop to usher in the oppressive Beijing summer.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Beijing. She last wrote in these pages about living in China. She blogs here and tumbls here. 

Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

"Love Handles" - Akon (mp3)

"Lock Down" - Ya Boy ft. Akon (mp3)

"Freaky" - Mook, Jadakiss and Shella ft. Akon (mp3)

In Which We Are Feeling A Lot More Solipsistic Than Usual

No Room for Muses

by KARINA WOLF

Where else can you be paranoid and right so often?

All of Manhattan is Woody Allen’s Manhattan: the reservoir, the restaurants, the skyline, the shrink’s office, the horse and carriage, the modern art, Central Park, Minetta Lane, the Great White Way, the Pierre, and Elaine’s. Most of all, and most importantly, the patois.

New York is a solipsistic, humanistic kind of village. Despite his singularly white and wealthy cast of characters, Woody Allen’s work reflects the way we live and speak. His post-9/11 short, Sounds of the Town I Love, is illustrative: in one-sided phone chats, New Yorkers are narcissistic, petulant, self-serving (the comedy often masks the aggression), hypochondriacal and high-handed. They’re also survivors, with a measure of warmth that keeps them human. They’re all of us.

It’s the idiom that makes Allen believable — that grasping, uncertain mode of talk. When it works, his dialogue is spot on, full of latent aggression and open insecurity. For actors, his words are perfect storms of contradiction. And the delivery, tossed off, half-recalled, is probably the element that allows people to conflate Woody Allen the actor with his characters. His words sound like him, how could this be fiction?

But Allen is a more complicated talent than his hapless schnook act suggests. He’s a comic workaholic, a tireless spinner of jokes, gags, sketches, sex comedies, murder mysteries, chamber pieces, ensemble dramas, fictional biopics, false documentary and ragtime jazz. He’s been at it since he was 15 and commuted from Brooklyn to churn out punch lines for $40 a week. His is a formidable discipline: writing, directing, exercising, practicing the clarinet, going to bed and rising on a precise schedule. Woody Allen leaves no room for muses.

According to Allen, many of his films are unsuccessful in some sense or another, but the work is his goal. Just as his characters seek a meaningful experience of the universe, Allen finds purpose through creativity. He explains why he continues to make films (his latest, Whatever Works, is his 40th): “You don’t think about the outside world, and you’re faced with solvable problems, and if they’re not solvable, you don’t die because of it. And then, if it’s the right film...for several months, I get to live with very beautiful women and very witty men.”

He writes for his limited range as an actor – he says he can play only low lives or intellectuals – but it’s a broad canvas for film: bank heists, mysteries and magic acts for the comedies; adulterous love and morality plays for drama. If he returns to certain motifs, he is a kaleidoscopic innovator. If the wind-up to the jokes seems wordy or his sense of drama derivative, there’s still the inescapable: he’s created a vocabulary for the urban American.

Allen’s art has progressed in leaps – he was dismissed from NYU film school in the 50s, then immediately employed writing for TV. When he moved to filmmaking, he received an on-the-job apprenticeship with some of the world’s finest technicians. Ralph Rosenblum, the editor who cut Annie Hall, taught Allen about shaping a story; Gordon Willis, who lit The Godfather, instructed him in framing a shot. Then Allen moved on to simpatico collaborators who matched his on the fly approach: cameraman Carlo di Palma, for example, who’d arrive on set without knowing the day’s shot list.

With these artisans, Allen created the signatures of his filmmaking: the long takes with little coverage, the amber glow that makes his actors beautiful and his interiors romantic. He claims his aesthetic is borne of practicality. Husbands and Wives, composed with a handheld camera, mid-scene cuts and equally jagged exposures of the human heart, was the result, says Allen, of ‘laziness.’ He didn’t want to be bothered with the formal niceties of American films.

"Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?" he ponders in a remembrance of the Swedish director. Allen’s idols are the somber giants of world cinema, and when he stretches himself, it’s because he wants to make the kinds of films that fulfill him: the stark emotional landscapes of Bergman or Kurosawa, the family melodramas of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. This attitude may be forged (just as his view of Manhattan was) in the traditions of Hollywood, where comedy is a jester and drama is artistic king. As Eric Lax says, for Allen, the comedy was never disparaged but it certainly was considered a route to drama.

Woody Allen’s descendents are numerous – what contemporary filmic romance doesn’t owe something to Annie Hall? But his movies often subvert the laughs, with Allen supplying happy endings when they disturb and less sanguine ones when they’re hoped for. When a man gets away with murder—and goes unpunished, and feels fine—here, you see his darker view of human nature. “Your mind will never be able to give you a convincing justification for living your life, because from a logical point of view, if your life is indeed meaningless — which it is — and there’s nothing out there, what is the point of it?”

But whatever his diagnosis of humanity, his comedy has healing powers. In a way, the 2002 Oscar ceremony was the world’s reconciliation with Woody Allen. The heart wants what it wants, says Allen, but punishing judgment was passed upon the direction of his desire when he left Mia Farrow for Soon-Yi Previn. More than a decade later, the couple was still together and Manhattan falling apart; the world needed Woody.

His appearance at the Oscars, after he’d so frequently refused to show, was a gesture for survival. Allen introduced some clips about New York and brought the audience to their feet. “I said, 'You know, God, you can do much better than me. You know, you might want to get Martin Scorsese, or, or Mike Nichols, or Spike Lee, or Sidney Lumet...' I kept naming names, you know, and um, I said, 'Look, I've given you fifteen names of guys who are more talented than I am, and, and smarter and classier...' And they said, 'Yes, but they were not available.'" He was transformed from a polarizing figure to a reassuring one. And by remaining recognizably himself, he made New York itself again.

When I saw him perform at the Carlyle, there was a similar elation in the audience. I’ve never felt the same lift as when Woody came out: good will, excitement, childish thrill. The Café Carlyle is café-sized. Every seat was a good seat and from where we perched we could see that Woody was suffering a cold. He stared fixedly at the floor, as a friend who’s worked with him had warned, and he slumped through the beginning of his performance, but roused himself to play the tunes of Jelly Roll Morton. His balding piano player sang “Because My Hair Is Curly,” one of Sam’s comic songs from Casablanca (this, even though Allen has confessed that he doesn’t much like the classic film).

Geoffrey Rush stood at the back, spattered with rain, just in from his Broadway performance of Ionesco. The maitre d’ was unerringly hospitable as we shuffled a wad of dollars to pay the daunting dinner bill. It was a packed house: tourists and Upper East Siders and locals like ourselves, who arrived at Bobby Short Way to listen to the jazz we hear in his films and share a bit of his time. He played for two hours, and left the crowd wanting more: “That’s all folks. I’m going home.” And he wove through the tables, nodding at a few, disappearing, perhaps, to his planned, early bedtime.

Some will say that Allen doesn’t speak for them, or that his films are no longer relevant, no longer funny. But what he’s done is create a consciousness: some of his works shape how we perceive places, people, even feeling. Some of his lessons are so persuasive that you want to be a part of them. In Manhattan, his character constructs a convincing list of things that make life worth living. As viewers, we have the pleasure of adding to that list the films of Woody Allen.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.

"If It's True" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Why We Build The Wall" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Our Lady of the Underground" - Anais Mitchell ft. Ani DiFranco (mp3)

In Which Michael Jackson and Diana Ross Become MiDiana

When I Think of Home

by REA MCNAMARA

The Wiz

dir. Sidney Lumet

Somewhere between moving its operations to Los Angeles (but definitely before that Motown 25 Tribute), Berry Gordy Jr. decided to re-assemble his Hitsville U.S.A. factory line into the motion pictures business. Motown had long established a reputation for deftly packaging blackness as mass entertainment, so a big budget adaptation of The Wiz, that 1975 Tony Award-winning "super soul" Wizard of Oz b-side, was a sure bet. (Especially if it were to be headlined by the only two Motown acts he ever managed, Diana Ross and the Jackson 5's Michael Jackson.)

Sidney Lumet directed the musical with typical Rotten Apple grit, long shooting the extremes between a hazy 'Poppy Love Perfume Co.' hootchified street corner, or green-tinting the then-gleaming World Trade Center plaza as an Emerald City louched out with Norma Kamali parchute dresses and Halston slim sarongs. But that, alongside Quincy Jones' Oscar-nominated original music scoring, wasn't enough: the musical's $30 million price tag was box office poison, and some critics reacted adversarially to either Diana Ross not being naif enough as Dorothy, or Joel Schumacher's est-ian script.

Yet perhaps Dorothy's plaintive 'Are You There God?' lyrical request in "Home" was too close to what the Sound of Young America had become for Diana and Michael: nothing more than a K-Tel Records Greatest Hits compilation. "In the film, Dorothy was facing her fear and that was the same thing I was going through that year in New York," Diana Ross told Elin Schoen in an intimate Good Housekeeping interview of that fall/winter of 1977. "I was really facing the fact that I was out there on my own for the first time in my life. It scared me, but I got a chance to face all of the fears." For Diana and Michael, Beverly Hills was "Kansas"; New York City was the Oz of disco-fied glitter chic, and a chance finally to grow up, together.

When the Jackson 5 first came to California in 1970, they all moved into Diana's Hollywood Hills home. Michael was 11; Diana, 26. "I remember that we used to go out to buy paints and easels and we did artwork together," said the mother, lover and sister of Michael, who inspired in him a lifelong interest in art. "I am pleased that I touched him in the early days of his life."

Black outs, block fires, bankruptcy: if Oz was New York City, then Studio 54 was Emerald City. For a brief moment in his life, Michael was a grown man. Him and his sister La Toya shared a downtown apartment free from Joseph and Katherine, and he "danced almost every night at 54 with Liza Minnelli," said Michael. "We'd talk about Judy Garland." Diana was there too, singing in the DJ booth.

"The two singers wear matching costumes: slacks, shirt, and tie," wrote Hilton Als of a live televised "Ease On Down The Road" crisscross kickstep special that replayed constantly on Paradise Garage's large video screen. "Jackson dances next to Ross, adding polish to her appealingly jerky moves; he does Ross better than Ross." 

Oh Mahogany Lady, how were you always "washed out in the bright light"? Michael must have slept on this question every night in the solitude of his candle-lit Diana Ross shrine.

The Wiz shot six days a week, so most nights were spent alone: at home in the Sherry Netherland co-op still reeling from the first "Mr. Diana Ross" divorce, or sitting in the boardroom at 19, wrestling post-breach from Philly International to Epic.

Did they find in each other the yellow brick road to self-actualization? Diana called Michael “an inspiration”; he declared his intentions to marry her in an Ebony interview. They both had grown up, and friend to friend, had finally loosened that Gordy-an knot.

"Michael will you come?" At the edge of the Forum Theatre stage, she gyrated in a clingy sequined white, waiting for her 'Muscle man'. He emerges to turn the pink spotlight, corkscrew kicking out the bottomline in tight blue jeans. They rock around and round until she passes the microphone; he leaps away to solo so she can finally dip down low.

But Michael was an Off The Wall supernova, a triplicate peak luminosity soon to be scaled by moonwalk. He moved mountains and charity singles; she however, was now the eclipsed light curve who flooded Central Park with her rain dance.

For the sparrow and crow who suffered everything and nothing, the twilight was interiors filled with mirrors and poses. Ross renovated a Tobacco Heiress fortress in Greenwich, Connecticut with gold records and Rembrandts. Michael retreated to Neverland's carnival rides and dollhouses, lining walls with his mortality.

The Wiz will always be the cellulite proof of their then-brand-new post-Motown world — nightlife, record sessions, sound stages and late night phone calls. The scarecrow's knock-kneed walk was an abridged farewell to Michael's ex-child stardom; Diana was Dorothy, and by the time the film wrapped in 1978, she had gone inside of her self, love overflowing the “long suffered-emptiness...I, like Dorothy, had found everything I was searching for was right there with me all along."

Rea McNamara is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Toronto. You can find her website here. She tumbls here.

"Ease on Down the Road" - Diana Ross & Michael Jackson (mp3)

"Go Bang 3" - Gang of Two (mp3)

"Friend to Friend (Original CHIC Mix)" - Diana Ross (mp3)

Credits

DOROTHY/DIANA Sarah Taylor

SCARECROW/MICHAEL Daniyah-Daniel Gordon

EMERALD CITY BUS BOYS The House of Monroe

DIRECTION Rea McNamara

PHOTOGRAPHY Alyssa Katherine Faoro

STYLING Filipe Ventena

MAKE-UP Roxanne DeNobrega

HAIR Israel Garcia of Salon Daniel

ASSISTANCE Jeba Bowers Murphy

SPECIAL THANKS: 69 Vintage, Chasse Gardée, Gadabout Vintage, Sian Llewelyn, Lost+Found, Rozaneh Vintage Clothing, Textile & Accessories, Todd-Rod Skimmins

Shot at Studio 107, Toronto

actual cast photo, 1978