In Which We Dance Like A Fool

Deliberately Complicated

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

Solange is so likeable. Big sister B is cool in an obvious, occasionally ironic way (like, the fact that you taught the “Single Ladies” dance to your 5 year old niece is a cause of joy and shame) but Solange is the kind of cool you want in your cool girl posse. She ups the amp on cool. You look at the neon clown eyes and lips, at the orange power suit on that skinny frame and you’re struck by how oddness, by how personality as an ever-evolving set of shades and symbols can be can be so intriguing. Like Beyonce, she’s got great entertainer DNA — those cheekbones, the hair, the voice, the legs — but, for the younger Knowles, weirdness is a deliberate complication. Her style, both in her looks and in her tunes, isn’t weird enough to alienate or disturb but just weird enough to keep you guessing: how do I define this? and, if I can’t define it, is that okay?

Which has a lot to do with the appeal of her new EP on Terrible Records True, a small offering of 7 artfully moody songs. The record blossoms with a specific brand of quirk and taste — intelligent enough to engage you, pop and familiar and retro enough to make you lose yourself and groove — with each song a profile of a different mood, each dipped in a different candy-colored hue. “Losing You,” the first single, for example, is so hard to get out of your head. Swimming over Afro beats and a single cracking yelp that loops madly in the background, Solange’s voice is a wash of pool-blue that suns itself and stretches. The dreamy warmth of the synths and vocals rub up against the playful, infectious schoolyard beats, and the result is sly and feel-good delightful. It sends tendrils of sex and sunshine curling through your body.

True offers no power songs, no anthems, no declarations. R&B may be known for its tradition of pairing sweet blue melancholy with anthemic posturing, but Solange and her co-writer/producer Devonté Hynes bring to their work a dreamier, weedier sensibility. They abandon traditional song structures in favor of elastic, layered arrangements that grow, like strange tropical gardens, with a logic of their own. They can be brief and sweet — like “Look Good With Trouble,” a breathy, cooing vocal concoction laid over a trembling synth beat which finishes in just a minute & a half. Or they can be as intricate and winding as a rainlit drive down the Pacific Coast Highway — like “Bad Girls (Verdine Version),” a near six minute mood indigo affair in which sultry synthy hooks and wordless crooning are anchored by a smacking bass line (played by Verdine of Earth, Wind & Fire) that sends lizards marching up and down your spine. 

Most of all, there’s Solange’s voice. It’s flexible and warm and she uses it like an instrument, to fill the open spaces, and to open up more space. Hynes’ production makes use of arrangements and vocal harmonies that showcase the versatility and expressiveness of her singing. It’s not a ferocious voice but one that, whether it’s crooning low or reaching for wordless heights, slips straight under your skin. A storyteller’s voice: one that knows that it’s not the whole show, but a part that plays with other parts, moving sometimes in tandem, sometimes slipping past, sometimes ricocheting in ardent challenge. True is all about these tonal landscapes, dripping with beats and honey, a gauzy stretching wasteland of candy-colors and electric lights glimpsed through a muting haze of dust and rain.

Over the past year or two, critics have been considering the shape of the new R&B. Not only do acts like Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, J*Davey and Solange herself bring a vagrant darkness to R&B’s bedroom sensibilities, but they bring a confession booth in as well. The “I” has always been central to R&B as the claiming of a space to declare oneself but who that “I” is becomes a lot more fluid and shifting when a performer like Solange takes the stage. The songs don’t sound like declarations, but like explorations of works {of selves} in constant evolution. Who is the real Solange? What is the real R&B? What does real love mean? Or loss? Or real style? Or sexiness? True has a distinct mood, a distinct point of view, but it never quite crystallizes into something solid. As soon as you think you know what it is — pure ‘80s new wave stylings, for example, or Afro-pop, or Motown retro cool — she shifts into a subtly different mood. She has so many different looks and tricks, and the freedom to encompass it all is part of what she wants to tell us. Every moment is it own experience: you go with the groove, you let it wash over you, and then you let the next one take you. Baby, it’s all good.

The video for "Losing You" is worth talking about for the way it illustrates something essential about this kind of self-making. “Losing You” — which was filmed in a humble township in South Africa and features a crew of Congolese dandies from Le Sape Society (as in, Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance) — is a strange video, full of self-conscious poses, self-conscious dancing, self-conscious outfits. Solange is framed dancing her signature marionette moves in doorways, in front of display shelves full of used pastel-color radios, in the back seats of commuter vans. For the most part, she doesn’t interact with those around her, except when someone else needs the space that her body occupies and then she moves aside. The choreography is out of sync with the song, the main actors are out of sync with the landscape, her print blouse is out of sync with her satiny diaper shorts, which are out of sync with her leopard loafers...

And that’s exactly the point. What we have is a bricolage of different elements which don’t appear to relate to each other — what are these impeccably elegant men in their Union Jack attire doing strutting their stuff on these corrugated tin hemmed streets? — but their unrelatedness is not a statement of the surreal. Rather, it’s a statement of the everyday. Dissonance is what populates the frame, what drives the rhythmic and sartorial logic of Solange’s body. Dissonance creates playfulness, creates freedom, creates a space for us to imagine and perform and become — and keep becoming — ourselves.

Does it matter who we are when the “we” — or the “I” — is ever a thing in flux? At Solange’s Bowery Ballroom show on December 11, there was joy and intimacy in the room. So much affection. So many afros. So many well-dressed handsome plaid-clad black men. You could tell that those of us in the audience felt a special kind of kinship with her. She wore a suit that looked like someone’s old curtains and danced like a fool, and she looked so great and sang her heart out and all we could do was whoop and sing and dance along with her. 

At the end of the set, she turned her eyes up at the rafters, jelly-kneed, exhausted, smiling that beautiful dizzy grin and the camera phones started flashing and someone told me that Beyonce was on the balcony… Of course she was. Of Solange’s many selves, one is weird kid sister Knowles, and no one will ever let her forget it — but it doesn’t matter because she owns it.

Shahirah Majumdar is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Vertigo.

In Which We Consider The Problem Of Ex-Girlfriends

Myriad Complications

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

Ex-Girlfriends
dir. Alexander Poe
71 minutes

I can’t help but read the new comedy Ex-Girlfriends, Alex Poe’s first feature film — which he also wrote, produced and stars in — as less about girlfriends than about the business of being a storyteller. On its surface, the film is about love and its complications, and untangles a succession of moments in the lives of three people who find themselves interconnected in strange and unlooked for ways. At its heart, however, it’s more about our ache for something profound in our lives, and our tendency to inscribe beauty and significance into ordinary, sometimes unlovely things.

The plot is pretty simple, except where it becomes convoluted. A boy named Graham meets a girl named Laura. Boy chases girl. Pandemonium ensues. Journey of romantic conquest becomes journey of self-revelation. But the girl is an ex from Graham’s past who reappears the same day he’s dumped by his most recent girlfriend and the love story is complicated by a quadrangle involving Graham, his friend Kate (Jennifer Carpenter of Dexter), Laura (Kristin Connolly) and a guy both Kate & Laura are dating, with all the vectors pointing in all the wrong directions. And as for this notion of self-revelation, isn’t that just another word for fleeting moment of clarity that evaporates with your morning cup of coffee?

You could call it a romantic comedy — Ex-Girlfriends is, after all, funny and sweet and captures the lives of 20-somethings in New York — but it’s really a hybrid sort of thing. Through its use and misuse of the common tropes & beats of romantic comedy — including first-person voiceover, quirky sidekicks played for dubious hilarity, and a madcap car chase to win the object of attraction which hinges on the highly banal detail that she can’t check her email because she doesn’t have a smartphone — it interrogates the romantic comedy as a genre capable of representing the messy reality of love in our lives.

Similarly, one of meta-gags employed by the film are the MFA workshops in which Graham, a fiction student at Columbia’s School of the Arts, presents and endures comments on the very story that the film is telling. His fellow students are a Greek chorus of derision. They don’t want things as they are; they want a prettier version, a more enlightening version, a version that empowers and reassures us with its articulation of things important and empyrean in life. Things as they really happen, oh how very boring…

Throughout, the film plays with conventional emotional & narrative expectations. There’s no sex, for example, and ideas of love and happiness are only seen in their absence. It’s not clear why exactly Graham wants Laura back in his life — does he love her, or this merely a habitual apophenia, willfully creating significance out of a random constellation of details, such as the fact that she’s read War and Peace? — and all the ex-girlfriends (except Kate) seem to blur together: a revolving door of blondes with soft faces and soft eyes and softer voices. All blondes being equal here, are we being told here that no one of these girls is qualitatively better than the other?

And yet it’s a tender film. The characters all have the grace of human awkwardness — because they are so flawed and so yearning, they move us — and there's a kind of weariness that colors the mood: in the way the city is depicted (water or bridges are always in the background; you can’t help but be aware of how New York is a city surrounded by water, and how vulnerable we are in that isolation, especially in this post-Sandy age), in the plot-structure and use of voiceover, in the music, and in the way that moments of silence or non-verbal response are sometimes stretched out between characters and left to linger in the air… But that weariness is also ironic, the weariness of someone weaned on Proust who tastes a madeleine for the first time and discovers that it’s, eh, not what you thought it would be. It is weariness as something palpable you note and file away; the failure of significance is in itself what becomes significant.

Still, Ex-Girlfriends offers Jennifer Carpenter’s Kate as a counterpoint. It’s fitting that her character is the one non-New Yorker in the film and that she sets a chain of events in motion with her arrival in the city. She’s ferocious, her voice pugnacious, her body wild with uncontrolled energy and emotion; she seems to exist in a different world than the other characters. In Ex-Girlfriends' most poignant scene, she and Graham lie next to each other, just two friends, lonely & exhausted, and she asks, “Will I ever find real love?” “Yes,” he says. “When?” “Later.” And that’s it.

If this exchange feels incomplete, the slippage into the fragmentary is emblematic of what the film has to tell us about stories & how we locate ourselves in them. It is impossible to represent totality, in film or in fiction, or even in 3 a.m. moments of perfect drunken clarity. Our perceptions about ourselves and the world are always incomplete. We mine the past, we make lists representing who we were and where we’re going, and rifle through the archives of memory knowing that the moment, the fragment, the very things that fail and remain unfinished have a vitality that is indelible.

In his attention to such moments, Graham is not a cynic; he’s a romantic. He doesn’t stop hoping, or longing, or working to create meaning, or believing in the astonishingness of what is (or what fails to be), or even in the promise that true love is still out there. Someday, something different will surface. The gerbil wheel will break. The Mobius strip will take you somewhere else. You’ll wake up to a different reality. And you wait for that moment that will make the other moments make sense: “the moment when your eyes will lock and everything will come together…”

For the characters of Ex-Girlfriends, as for many of us, that moment hasn’t yet come. Maybe it never will. And maybe failure and repetition are just ways of saying that transcendence is no more important than this hands-on, knee-deep, impassioned mucking through the damned untidiness of life itself. Memory bleeds. Coincidence is the order of the day. Happiness, like everything, is arbitrary.

Ex-Girlfriends runs at Cinema Village (22 E. 12^th Street) Nov 28-Dec 6, and is available for download from iTunes & OnDemand.

Shahirah Majumdar is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Vertigo.

"Most of the Time" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"My Back Pages" - Bob Dylan (mp3) 

In Which We Submit To The Fantasy Of Vertigo

In the Realm of the Senses

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

Vertigo
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
128 minutes

Love me for as I am, for myself.

–Judy/Madeleine

We forget that Vertigo is also a love story. Its love narrative is a twisted Calvary road, undermined by death, splintered by betrayal, and a film that twice kills off its female object of desire is perhaps not the most appealing of romantic studies — yet, there are few films that recreate so powerfully what it feels like to fall in love.

Vertigo recently took the top slot at the BFI Sight & Sound poll of greatest films, displacing Citizen Kane. Some would say there are many others better made, including others by Hitchcock, but what is unforgettable about Vertigo is how it resonates with the senses: how it compels through its use of sound and stillness, the human face and figure, story and symbol, light and color and camera movement. As a movie experience, it is hypnotic, disorienting, and works with a logic loosed from linear or rational constraints. Its magic — its sheer gorgeousness — is that its logic is purely that of the cinema: of the senses, of the artifice of attraction.

When you look at the premise that Scottie, Jimmy Stewart’s retired police detective, has been sold, it is terribly wonky. A girl believes she is a ghost. She succumbs to fugue states after which she does not remember what she has done. She wanders San Francisco, driven by memories that could not possibly be hers. Her husband, unnerved by worry, hires Scottie to make a study of her and arrive at a set of foregone but impossible conclusions.

Scottie is a rational man, a man who has made his living through investigative, evidence-based reasoning. He is dry, educated and affable; it seems unlikely that he would be so gullible, so ripe to consume the strange plot spoon-fed to him by Madeleine’s husband. But he swallows the story without skepticism, mouthful by mouthful, until it consumes him. Both consumed and consuming, with childlike wonder and a grown man’s sexual obsessiveness, Scottie opens himself fully and is possessed.

Surely, what madness is this? We believe it is Madeleine who is mad, yet it is Scottie who sinks inexorably into madness as he succumbs to an experience that has been scripted for an audience of one, an experience designed to prick his particular senses and loosen his particular mind. His friend Midge tries to pull him back into the rational world with gentle affection and by pointing out the dissonances in the Carlotta Valdes story with irony and wit, but the task is impossible.

Love — the kind of love born out of irreducible desire, not the kind founded on OK Cupid stats, good conversation and shared history — itself is a kind of madness. What Gavin Elster — who assumes (like the Great Oz) the role of the little man pulling levers behind the curtain and thus becomes a proxy for the director himself — achieves is the willing suspension of Scottie’s rationally functioning self. He is unraveled, undone.

What Vertigo, as a cinematic experience, achieves is similar. Mesmerized by our senses, we submit ourselves wholly to the machinery of the movies: to Bernard Herrmann’s circling score (now lush & moaning, now skied & skittering; always vibrating bones and belly with vertiginous sensation.); to the marble whiteness of Kim Novak’s face (as Judy, she is merely voluptuous; as Madeleine, she is simultaneously voluptuous and yet her face and body cold & hard like marble); to that shallow San Francisco light which filters and obscures through its foggy radiance; to dizzying camera movements that make what is far near and what is near far again; to the revolving door of chromatic schema, textured with rich shadows, smeared colors, symbolic shadings; to a world in which passages ever open upon other passages, a world where the self can never be still…

Vertigo’s signature camera movement — the dolly zoom (zoom forward, track backward) — echoes the movements of love, madness and memory. We hurl forward while simultaneously pulling back. Things are not as they appear. Rooms, chords, pupils, hearts dilate & contract before us… Similarly, this is representative of the way that cinema itself works, of the kind of double vision that is necessary in order to fully possess the movie viewer. A film must seduce — must pull you forward — with all the tricks of lighting, mise-en-scene, make-up, wardrobe, camera movement, etc. At the same time, it must allow the rational mind to stretch and wander, to pull back and observe its own experience with fluid curiosity. Vertigo creates this easy slippage between the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the sensual, the material and the ineffably ideal. In doing so, its dissonance becomes irreducible: impossible to collapse, to render into the realm of the ordinary.

We love movies because, for a brief moment, they allow us to live in a world in which things are not as they are but as we want them to be. Vertigo achieves this in a double way: not only does the subtle manipulation of cinematic syntax draw us into Scottie’s interior, a lovely but haunted place increasingly dominated by an obscure object, but Scottie becomes a proxy for the way we — as viewers, as lovers, as flawed and fragile human selves pushed by the surging pulse, by the blundering mind — allow ourselves to submit to fantasy. In this hunger for astonishments, Scottie and audience are twinned.

Juxtaposed against Vertigo’s grand themes of love and death and obsession and castration anxiety and the construction of femininity, this theme of how the language of cinema is the same as the language of desire perhaps feels small, unremarkable. Yet it is impossible to talk about movies, particularly Hitchcock’s movies, without talking about the male gaze. There’s been a lot said about the camera’s capacity to render the female as a passive body, blank and willing, ripe for possession by a penetrating gaze. But perhaps, like Scottie, we long to be possessed. Perhaps this desire, this gaze is what also nourishes an immense & myriad self. Perhaps, sometimes, we awaken only by submitting. Perhaps we all, if but for a moment, long to go mad —

Late in the film, after Scottie has endured the tragedy of Madeleine’s demise, survived its traumas, (re)discovered Judy/Madeleine and embarked on the project of remaking Judy in Madeleine’s image, we are given a glimpse into Judy’s interior. We learn that her desire for Scottie is a mirror of his for Madeleine. Despite the reservations of her practical Kansas upbringing, she also forsakes what is “safe” and chooses to submit to a fantasy of what could be versus what reality suggests there is.

Hoping for completion, she asks that Scottie “forget the other and forget the past,” that he “love me for as I am, for myself.” But, if anything, what Vertigo tries to tell us is that loving a thing for what it “is”— this abstracted, Platonic notion — is an order of experience which the self which is obscured to itself fumbles to achieve. How can you love what you do not know? How can you know what you cannot see? Always the senses veil the object, and always the veil reconstitutes the dream.

When Judy, in her final lines, before the fall, says, “I let you change me because I loved you,” she defines how the artifice of attraction becomes the logic of attraction itself. Her artifice is what Scottie loves; her artifice exists because their love does.

I am always bothered by Vertigo’s ending, its achingly fateful final scene. Scottie’s nagging intellect finally discovers the deception, rends the veil and pushes violently back against the betrayal. The motivations and machinations of Judy/Madeleine are laid bare, and we long for an ending in which both see each other for who they are and embark on something—whether alone or together—founded on evidential truths. Instead, there is the scream and the fall and the clamor of bells and the nun. Again, Vertigo eludes rational reconciliation by flooding the senses. What did Judy/Madeleine see? From where the nun? Why the scream? The orchestral strings thicken, the camera tracks backwards, framing Scottie in the hollowed white drum of the Mission… We will never know.

We are left with the not-knowing — and that is where Vertigo locates the heart’s own vertiginous commotion. Movies, madness, love. All so irreducible. Abide these three.

Shahirah Majumdar is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Argo.

"Scene D'Amour" - Bernard Herrmann (mp3)

"The Necklace" - Bernard Herrmann (mp3)

"The Rooftop" - Bernard Herrmann (mp3)