Ladies, gents, and gentiles, this is the first round of In-Fighting, where Steel Bananas columnists wrestle with their own. You may not know this, but we do bicker on occasion, and sometimes heated insults are exchanged, tears are shed, feelings hurt, sense is undone, forgotten, trampled in the dust. And then there’s the make-up orgy. So I figured, why not let the fight spill onto the front lawn for all to see? Perhaps the orgy should be made public as well. The jury’s still out on that.

The first target of my wrath is one Dennis (Danger-Dino the Dynamo, or, Chewable D, if you prefer) Reynolds who wrote an article last month titled “Am I Really Where I Say I Am? Local Music in Contemporary Space”.

Monsieur Reynolds’ article was sharp up until a point... or... until the blade wore dull. Not dull as in boring, of course. Certainly not that. But the precise nature of what the article was trying to argue became a tad muddled when it reached the Sufjan Stevens album The BQE. I can’t say my article will retain its sensical integrity either, as I frantically type to meet our monthly deadline on less sleep than coffee, but I will try my best to unravel the tangled web that Messr. Reynolds weaved.

Monsieur Reynolds first quotes Sufjan, speaking about his album The BQE (The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), as saying he had intended to create a non-personal album, for whatever artist’s intentions matter post-Barthes/Foucault. However, Mr. Reynolds then goes on to say that the album is less community-driven and more personal than his earlier work, and that the music somehow allows us to find “solace in the traveling experience it creates,” whatever that means. Later in the article, comparing The BQE to one of Sufjan’s earlier albums, Michigan, he writes, “Both are not so much about the physical spaces themselves but the universal experiences one may find unique to a place” (Reynolds). Messr. Reynolds goes on to express the sentiment that the actual BQE, while a particular place, is also a highway like any other, and thus “its appeal is not predicated on a particularly unique American experience” because “[e]veryone understands highway traveling.”

It seems that there is much confusion here. Has Sufjan in some way succeeded in The BQE where the 50 States project failed? Is it a more or less personal album than its predecessors? Which is responsible for the success or failure? Is the attempt to reclaim “America” by creating albums devoted to physical spaces and local histories a noble endeavour or a vain fantasy, especially given the dangers outlined at the beginning of Messr. Reynolds’ article? Where does the particular end and the universal begin, and vice versa? Where does the personal end and the impersonal begin, and vice versa? How the hell can he then go on to compare the 50 States project to the Japandroids and their album Post-Nothing? While certainly the Japandroids do not seek credibility through the invocation of some exotic influence, I would not have known that the album was about “love, despair, and partying in Vancouver [my emphasis]” (Reynolds) if I had not known the context of the album. I would have thought it just another album about love, despair, and partying, because the gods know, there are enough of those being churned out all across the globe.

The first thing I would like to address is the confusing notion of “universal experiences one may find unique to a place,” as Messr. Reynolds expressed it. Is this just a slip of a few fingers on the keyboard, or is there something more here? In other words, is this turn of phrase confusing not only because the article forgot what it was arguing but because the content over which we are arguing refuses to be contained within coherent expression?

In order to decide, let us look at the content more closely. The real BQE. I would argue that it is not just another highway. It is part of a uniquely American experience, being a project of the illustrious Robert Moses, the same man who tore the Bronx in half to put up the Cross Bronx Expressway, thus turning the northernmost borough of New York into the nasty place of which we know today. The irony of Moses’ name has not been lost on his many critics. Moses embodied a uniquely American modernism that has indeed spread across the globe but that is paved in the trauma of a particular nation. His roads bleed smog like still-open wounds across the face of America. Another strange irony: the same man is responsible for beautifying New York’s “Valley of Ashes” made infamous by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in the early years of the New Deal. He even built playgrounds in Harlem and on the Lower East Side. Yet those who knew Moses also knew that he did not do this out of love for the people. “I’ll get them!” he said of the people. “I’ll teach them!” It was not for the love of the people but for the idea of the public good that Moses did what he did, as Marshal Berman points out in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

Unlike the Japandroids’ album Post-Nothing, the context of The BQE is front-and-center. The context is contained within the album, within the name of the album, as well as in the multimedia experience of its accompanying photographs and video footage of the expressway sold with the album. The context is not merely tacked on. The context is the content. And yet the content eludes the album, for while the BQE is a particular cultural artefact evocative of a uniquely American trauma, it is also a form of trauma that modernism and post-modernism have wrought across the globe. We confront the same difficulty as when we look at, well, anything really. Let’s say death. To look at death as a universal idea we lose sight of the particularity of those who die. We call them “those who die,” not by their names. We do not see their faces. Each death is like the other, because people die, yet each death is also a particular death not at all like any other.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas addresses this universal-particular dialectic in his discourse on “the face” of the human being. The face is at once a human face, like all human faces, and it is human because it is held in common, universal, yet it is also a particular face. At the primordial event of the beholding of the face, prior to cognition, the other is not a specific other as object in a specific context but an other as the possibility of any other, including the self as other, in any context. But as soon as cognition occurs, which is always re-cognition, as soon as the face contains particular meaning, this meaning becomes trapped within the signified, and the addresser and addressee become fixed, particular entities. However, once again, the particularity of the other as an object is unattainable for us, for the other’s face, even as it is re-cognized, continues to slip from its particular manifestation and to exist as something prior to recognition, something non-present and thus un-re-presentable.

That which makes the face a human face is prior even to some universal concept of humanity. Similarly, art is always failing to capture its object in the very pursuit of its object as an object. Though Levinas would probably turn in his grave, I would take Levinas’s description of the face a step further into the realm of artistic expression attempting to “capture” any given object. Thus the structure of the BQE is its particular cultural context, but it also bursts out of that particularity. Like light, at once wave and particle, any object that we seek to describe is at once particular and universal, and regardless of our attempt to express it, it is something prior to both.

Perhaps Sufjan’s one failing is that in the attempt not to humanize the space he does not, ironically enough, “recognize” that he cannot but impose his own humanity on the space and thus render the space uncontainable and unappropriable. Perhaps what the album unconsciously laments most of all is that it can only ever be a fantasy of reclamation. In which case, it is an album not so much about the BQE as it is an album about an album about the BQE.

Where the 50 States project fails is that it is constantly overwhelmed by the personal, by Sufjan himself, inserting himself into the history, though this is a necessary failing. Perhaps it was Sufjan’s frustration over constantly finding his reflection, his face and the faces of others, and his face in the faces of others in the places he sought to document that led him to The BQE, an album that seeks to bypass the artist, to bypass any human face, shedding lyrics in favour of images of steel and concrete to accompany the music. This is at once consciously and unconsciously horrific. Because he could not capture each state he sought to refine the description to a smaller scale, to a “more particular” physical object, only to have what he sought to capture become all the more slippery. The result is gorgeous, but not only for the reasons he had, perhaps, intended. It is beautiful not because Sufjan succeeds in creating a less personal album but because the album, having slipped the conscious grip of its creator, makes a lie of the very intention behind it. It is an album about an album about the BQE, but not necessarily because Sufjan intended it to be so. The very lack of words gapes its silence louder than any words.

To return from the lofty heights of our abstraction, which is also to plunge deeper, a more interesting album to place at the center of this discussion than Post-Nothing might be the recently released Joanna Newsom triple album Have One On Me, and not just because I have a huge crush on Joanna Newsom, but because it really does fit.

It is always difficult to pin down what Newsom is talking about because she is talking about so much and yet nothing all at once. The characters of the album are mostly, it seems, young women dreaming of the foreign and exotic in one form or another, or of a lover far away, though the lover of which she speaks is also, always, the idea of the foreign itself. As in the song “Go Long,” a retelling of the French Blue Beard folktale, of a woman left alone by her roaming husband and told she may open any door in his palace except one, which she opens, and she doesn`t like what she finds. The woman left alone in the song does not seem to know if she is a princess of India or a princess of Kentucky, and such confusion haunts the album both in its content and its form. Where are we in this song? Are we in continental Europe, the Orient, or the New World?

“Have One On Me” is saturated with sounds of “exotic” places, mixing the “traditional” and “global” with more “contemporary” and “American” sounds. A song like “Kingfisher” contains a panoply of exotica whilst never losing sight of the artificiality of that exotica. It sounds like a young girl’s dreams of far-off places, like the yearning of an American woman of a post-modern age for times past in places far away, locked away in that which was, that which is particularly represented and yet general in its romanticism. This is readily apparent given the album cover, depicting a full-colour Newsom decked out like a modern-day Cleopatra, sprawled on a couch that is covered and surrounded by antique exotic paraphernalia. In contrast, the black and white photographs within the album depict the “real life” Newsom, insofar as we may talk about a “real life” Newsom in this colour-drained representation, containing a vestige of the cover art in the form of a single leopard print draped over the back of her chair while she toys with her hair, posing as we might expect of the princess of Kentucky in her stylized faux-overalls.

The final track of the album is telling in that it depicts a woman packing up her pretty dresses and high-heeled shoes, her sparkling rings, coats of bouclé, jacquard and cashmere, cartouche and tweed, etc. The song itself, coming on the heels of the globe-trotting “Kingfisher,” is a sparse vocal and piano affair, until it draws to a close and her closet is empty. The final words of the album, “everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again/and only yours” tell the story not just of a woman letting go of a lost lover but of the loss of an idea of the foreign and old, of a greater elsewhere. It tells the story not of people reclaiming places but of people allowing places to reclaim themselves from our clumsy attempts at claiming them in the first place. The character of Newsom’s final song learns to let this elsewhere simply be. In practice, Newsom/her protagonist does not give up on the foreign, for she continues to appropriate, despite her recognition of the futility of the attempt. She does, however, give up on the attempt to represent her appropriation of the foreign as anything more than appropriation. She recognizes, insofar as one may consciously recognize, that her appropriation functions “through cultural reference rather than cultural experience” (Reynolds), and that to think it can be otherwise is a foolish dream. It is her pretence that she gives up. Then, cue the strings and a blaze of percussion and forbidding, piano-flecked electric dissonance barely hinted at in the album previously, but only for a few fleeting moments.

C’est ça pour, Messr. Reynolds.

My next beef is with an article by a new Steel Bananas columnist. And I hate to pick on a fresh face, especially when I have only met that fresh face once in passing, and I hope we have the chance to get along famously, but Marshall Lau, your time has come. Last month, Mr. Lau wrote an article titled “An Education in the crux of Art Cinema”. Well, I too saw An Education just over a month ago, and I was a little bit confused by some of what I read last month.

To give Mr. Lau his due, his article was well-written and coherent, more than I can say for this piece of shite that you are still, somehow, reading. That, and he knows far more about film than I do, but that won’t stop me from venting my opinions on his opinions like an angry, angry monkey... as opposed to a hungry, hungry hippo. Don’t ask. Way too much caffeine. And my journalistic integrity was down the tube before I started, so let’s just pretend that I’m someone worth your precious reading time.

My beef: Mr. Lau’s thesis. “Art cinema is a representation of reality.” I won’t say it’s not. Obviously it is. But I will say, well, so is all cinema! How can one brand of cinema all by its lonesome hold the sole title of “That Cinema Which Represents Reality”? All cinema, all art, all communication re-presents reality. All perception, for that matter, is a function of memory and thus holds up a distorted mirror to that which is. Even documentation is representation, and I would not exactly call An Education a documentary.

Mr. Lau follows this up with some good ol’ Charlie Kaufman worship. That’s fine. I’m down with that. But then he comes out with this: “Putting it bluntly, classical-narrative cinema films have nothing to do with your life. These films do not represent the reality of your life (if you choose to have your life represent the reality of a film, that’s something else)” (Lau). True, narrative cinema films have nothing to do with your life, but neither does art cinema. And these films do, precisely, re-present the reality of life. Not sure if any films have anything to do with your life in particular, whoever this you may be.

As for Lau’s division between films we see to escape life and films we see to expand our views of the world, one can learn a hell of a lot from films marketed to the escapist audience. I mean, you want to know what your culture’s about? Go to the trash heap. The trash always teaches you more than the treasure. I don’t go to mind-expanding films to expand my mind. Sorry. I go because it feels so damned good to expand my mind. I go because it jerks off my mind.

That said, having seen the trailer to An Education, I was under no illusions about what I was walking into, and I knew it was not to jerk off my mind but to pick apart a bizarre cultural artifact. And I was, as I could not help but be, rather pleased with the sturdy construction of said artifact. Perhaps the fact that I wasn’t going in with expectations of an art cinema throwback had me leave the theatre if not in a post-orgasmic daze, at least satisfied from having eaten a decent meal.

And wasn’t the point of the film to check such expectations? I mean, if you visit France and expect your colour vision to go the way of the dog when you step off the plane, think again. There’s a reason protagonist, Jenny, beautifully acted by Carey Mulligan -- and it is for the acting that I’d highly recommend the film -- who grows up adoring said art cinema and wants desperately to be French, having made love for the first time in an apartment in Paris, wonders aloud to her lover what all the fuss is over sex when it’s really so brief and disappointing. She wonders why so much poetry is written about it.

The point is that what you expect when looking at the fully clad woman is never what you get when her clothes come off. An Education is not a failed throwback to French art cinema of the 60s, or even a mock throwback. It is a lamentation of the death of said art cinema. The film is able to lament this death precisely by not being an imitation of said art cinema.

As for the resolution of the film, is it really as clean-cut as “it’s actually very easy in life, work hard and you’ll get there” (Lau)? The film, after all, does not just end with Jenny getting into Oxford, hurray, she did it, lesson learned, phewf! Sure, it’s a bit more feel-good than the art cinema of yore, and I’m not claiming that An Education is a brilliant film with a brilliant ending, as it is a good film with a good ending. The only thing I’d call near-brilliant in it would be the acting, but I would like us to look at the ending in its entirety and give it its fair due. Jenny returns to Paris with a boy from school and pretends she’d never been before. As with Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me protagonist, the romance of the place and the time slips away, and Paris is allowed to simply be. It is not the Paris of 60s art-house cinema. It is a contemporary Paris, which is both good and bad. Certainly there is something lost, but we cannot simply remake the old films. We cannot live Paris as we did the first time. We may feign virginity, but we are not virgins. Nor is this ending reality as such. It is a re-presentation of reality. It is also a response to French art-house, but that does not make it French art-house. Call it “growing up” if you will, but I think it more sincere and less cliché than that. It is a paradoxical recognition of the impossibility of recognition. It is a rejection of appropriation in favour of... well, in favour of something I can’t yet name. Perhaps I will never be able to name it. For, as we have seen, re-presentation always fails. The power of French art-house was that it recognized the failure of any attempt to make sense of life. The genuine novelty of An Education is that it recognizes the failure of art-house to make sense of the senselessness of life.

In closing, I encourage other members of the sb crew to take up the in(-)fighting in the months to come. I’m also thinking of finding some way to get the readers of sb more involved in responding to and contributing to what is said in our virtual pages. Because really, we’re just a bunch of folks who like to talk about things we like, and you like things, and you have voices, so if you can think of any good ways for making those voices heard, send me suggestions at devon.x.wong@gmail.com.