19

Joke’s on you, I spent most of my time indoors already. That’s about the extent I’m willing to talk about that right now, though. I mean, it’s difficult to talk about anything else, but at the same time, talking about anything else is what keeps spirits up, and if someone wanted to come to this blog for news, well, I guess my only question would be: why?

My time has been spent listening to music, mostly, which is a good way to take one’s mind off things. I just found out about this long-running prog-rock band called The Legendary Pink Dots, so I’ve been going through those. They’re pretty neat, I think. I’ll link a song below.

Between that, working, and keeping social online, I think I’m doing okay. For now, at least. For now.

Stay safe out there.

-F

Eurydice

If you’re unfamiliar with the evolution of vocabulary used by “the youths” (scare quotes mandatory), you might not know what a “hot take” is. It’s not an especially difficult phrase to parse once you break it down -- a “take” is an opinion on something (e.g. “What’s your take?”) and the adjective “hot”, well, that has a couple synonyms ranging from “controversial” to “brand new” or even “poorly thought out”, decided through context clues, but no matter how it modifies the take, it’s always something that will bring energy to a given conversation. The opposite would be a “cold take,” one that people have heard before and/or just doesn’t get the blood boiling anymore.

Anyway, here’s a hot take: Eurydice, feminist icon?

I mean, obviously not according to the text itself. The surviving versions of the Orpheus myth paint his wife as not much more than an object for Orpheus to desire. She dies on her wedding day, having been bitten by a rattlesnake, and a major plot point in the myth is that Orpheus isn’t even allowed to look at her as he rescues her from the underworld. That’s Greco-Roman mythology for you. But as time has marched on, I’ve noticed both a resurgence in tellings of this myth in general and interpretations of Eurydice specifically.

To preface all this, I wouldn’t call myself either a classics expert or a feminism expert. I didn’t even know it was pronounced “you-rid-i-see” until earlier this year. But when you experience two pieces of media like this in relatively quick succession, you kind of have to make note of it.

The first is Hadestown, this year’s Best Musical according to the Tony Awards. On its surface, it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth replacing ancient Greece for depression-era America, creating a narrative distance between Ovid et al. to justify a couple things: its folk-opera aesthetic, and the ability to reinterpret the characters as it pleases. Hades, for example, is depicted as an oligarch who signs people into his employ permanently in exchange for a pittance while the Fates and Hermes are made into dueling narrators, each trying to influence the story in their own way.

But let’s focus on Eurydice. With the major story beats of the myth still there, it’s not like she’s a main character, but she does get, you know, an actual character. The Hadestown version of Eurydice is a realist who is attracted to Orpheus’ optimism, and instead of being killed unceremoniously, Hades attracts her to his underworld by promising her steady work and food to eat. She’s seduced into it, but it’s still a bit more agency than Eurydice has in the individual myths.

These choices are made at the beginning of the story, though, and from Eurydice’s perspective, the story plays out largely the same way once she arrives in Hadestown. To contrast, let’s look at this other piece of media, a film this time: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (trailer).

Portrait isn’t a myth by any stretch of the imagination -- it’s a romance drama between two women and set in the eighteenth century -- but it does spend a lot of time commenting on the myth. The introductory scene to this theme features its main characters sitting around a table with one of them reading aloud. The question arises: why did Orpheus turn around? To paraphrase using some modern (and not French) parlance, “If it were me, I would just not turn around.” The answer the characters come up with is, “Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around. She wanted him to remember her as she was.”

Already, too, the film has emphasized the two romantic leads’ looks at each other. “How you see me” is a recurring phrase throughout the film, as well as several shots of following someone close behind, so this scene, in essence, serves as the thesis of the film. But an idea like “Eurydice said something to Orpheus” isn’t exactly supported by the text of the myth, so the film then serves to demonstrate its reasoning by itself. There are several more callbacks to the myth, but I’ll skip ahead to its conclusion.

The final scene of Portrait is of its two leads, Marianne and Héloïse, having in the meantime been forced apart, attending the same musical performance by chance. Marianne sees Héloïse, but, as the camera lingers, it becomes apparent that it’s a look they won’t share. Héloïse is distracted by the music. Now it is the audience’s turn to ask for a look.

As a reminder, the film is set in the eighteenth century. The relationship between these two women was doomed from the start. And yet, all we want is a turn of the head and a look of recognition in Héloïse’s eyes. Héloïse chooses otherwise, though. She stays with the memory of Marianne as she was.

The symbology is reversed, but the message is still the same. Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents Eurydice as a woman who recognizes that her relationship with Orpheus will fail -- on a meta level, it almost presents her as someone who realizes she is but an object of inspiration to him -- and chooses to live in Hades with the happy memories of their courtship than to have them ruined by the passage of time.

Bookending Hadestown is a line sung by Hermes: “It’s a sad song, but we’re going to sing it anyway.” This is one of the major themes of the musical: its own commentary on using old stories to make commentary on modern issues (a joke title of Hadestown that gets passed around is “Orpheus Starts a Union”). And I thought that was worth talking about in regards to one figure that these two wildly different pieces of media share.

-F

Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday today, which, for the non-American readers out there, is a pretty big political event here in the race for our presidency. My state doesn’t participate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate a pretty funny story that happened around this time.

I went to a Catholic school growing up, which meant mass on many religious holidays. Ash Wednesday was one of those days. This was both a good thing and a bad thing, good because it meant an hour away from classes, and bad because, well, when you’re in Middle School, church is kind of boring. I’m not going to pretend I was paying attention the entire time, but one moment on this particular Ash Wednesday service stands out.

During the homily, the priest began by asking everyone what the day before was called. The answer he was looking for was “Mardi Gras” or maybe “Fat Tuesday” would also have been accepted. But Mardi Gras and Super Tuesday had happened to overlap that year, so I stuck my hand up and shouted, from the back of the church, “Super Fat Tuesday!”

Only one person laughed, but it was my English teacher so that has to count for something.

-F

The Mural

There’s a mural at a park near me. It’s of a bunch of birds local to the area -- I don’t know if it’s all of them or just the most common ones, but there’s certainly quite the variety. The most well-known one is one that, inexplicably to me, was painted with red eyes so it looks like an avian possessed by some sort of demon.

Calm down, this isn’t going to turn into a spooky story or anything like that (though that’s a pretty good hook to save for later).

My friends and I call it the “Demon Bird.” “Do you want to go see the Demon Bird?” we’ll ask each other when it’s nice enough to walk a block or two and then through the park’s one main pathway. I have to admit, though, we don’t even look at it most of the time. We’ll get caught up in our own conversation and not pay the mural any notice.

Recently, though, the cracks in the wall are starting to show. There’s even a part that’s been painted over, and I don’t mean, like, tagged or anything by someone with a can of spray paint, I mean just painted over the same color of the background. I wouldn’t call the mural out of the way, but it’s still, you, know, not visible unless you’re looking for it. I don’t know how many people care about this thing besides me.

I guess that this post is more about the nostalgia of it, which is probably ironic given what I could have been writing about this week. It’s my own personal memory of this landmark that I know isn’t going to exist for much longer.

There isn’t really much more to say about it than that.

-F

Nostalgia (Part One)

Alright, so it turns out that this is actually going to be a multi-parter thing. Length is still an issue, but I also have some concerns about my ability to talk about Kentucky Route Zero in a meaningful capacity given how recently it was completed (and how recently I completed it. I’ve got a lot to think about). In the meantime, though, I guess the other piece of media I recommended catching up on can serve as as good an introduction as any. Let’s talk It Makes A Sound.

But not right away.

Last week I mentioned that I was interested in dissecting a small piece of Americana. I was actually inspired by a set of posts I came across talking about how “western-centric” media has tended to be, especially “America-centric.” This was in response to Kentucky Route Zero’s release, which is why it’s so important to discuss in this series, I think, and the general reaction to these posts was, well, that may be so for a lot of media, but KRZ couldn’t really be set anywhere else -- it’s an Appalachian ghost story and it sticks to each word in that genre description very seriously.

I don’t want to link these posts here for a couple reasons. Firstly, it would have the potential to add fuel to an already (thankfully) dead discussion, but secondly, I’m more interested in the implicit question being posed here. What makes a story “American”?

We’ve seen attempts at this. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have led the charge in terms of American Fantasy Epics in The Stand and American Gods respectively, and what they both seem to emphasize is the country’s vastness. America is huge and varied, and yet the central “American-ness” of an individual town or city’s location can be connected. The Road Trip Novel is this sort of genre.

But America has another feature that, for better or worse, has become a facet of the country’s identity: The American Dream. The idea that this is the place, more than anywhere else, where hard work is rewarded. Of course, the idea only had to be thought once before it was viciously deconstructed. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle ends with a massive plea for socialism (that went unnoticed because the descriptions of the meatpacking industry were too visceral), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reveals that its titular character, despite his hard work, still didn’t get anything that he wanted, and so on, and so on. This is even ignoring a large number of black and other people of color’s experiences, or the native population’s experiences, or…

The point is, the failure of the American Dream also feels -- to this American writer, at least -- like an intrinsic part of quote-unquote American stories. It also ties in neatly with its last point: recency. America is a young country, and that youth means that locations can change massively at the whims of fate. There’s an entire subculture, for example, dedicated to exploring malls that were set up at the end of the last century only to collapse since the online shopping industry established itself.

I do want to stress, at this point, that these are large generalizations. Any one of these statements could easily be found to be overly broad. Some of that is the point, though. Defining a country’s “genre” is basically about finding its stereotypes, and stereotypes are nothing if not overly broad generalizations.

Anyway, It Makes A Sound is a podcast by Jacquelyn Landgraf set in the fictional town of Rosemary Hills. “Golf Capital of the World” it proclaims itself on its water tower, and yet, signs of decay appear everywhere, and the remaining population largely consists of old and sedentary people who have nowhere else to go. In the midst of all this, Deirdre Gardner (voiced by Landgraf) comes home and discovers a small piece of her childhood, a tape recording of a concert performed by local genius (her words) Wim Farros. It being one of her few happy memories as a child, Deirdre is desperate to share the music with the world.

One of the common initial impressions of It Makes A Sound is that, well, its first few episodes are a bit of a slog. Sure, it can end as strong as it wants (and it does end strong, I promise), but the first two episodes largely feature Deirdre waxing fake lyrical about her childhood crush without much to support any of that. And this is what attracted me to writing about it, because it’s in that instance that I think the nostalgia the story is going for takes hold. Remember Robert Mckee’s words from Adaptation.? “The last act makes a film. [...] Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

This actually goes one step deeper in the podcast’s album. A lot of attention is spent on Wim Farros’ concert, and so of course at the end of the podcast, the group’s next production would be a professional production of those same songs, performed by the cast of the show. And it’s a good album. I like it, at least. But what I find interesting is how different the show’s recreation and the recorded album sound.

It may be a bit pretentious for me to say, but I find it interesting that a show about memory and nostalgia creates its own nostalgia for itself. The early foibles are forgotten, replaced by a sort of “No, no, it was charming in its attempts to appear amateurish” and its brief nine-episode length also contributes to its quaintness.

It’s in that, though, that I also find the most “American” (heavy quotes there) qualities. It Makes A Sound is set in a town that America has forgotten in its rush forward, and all it can do for its characters is have them look in that same direction. Always forwards, and it guides its audience there too, through its music and its hopeful resolution. Just something to think about.

I don’t know when this series will continue, but I do hope that it was a good enough introduction to the things I want to talk about through it. It’s kind of like Raindrops on Roses but with a clearer overall theme than just “here are some things I like,” though of course that will see its own continuation soon as well.

See you soon, and remember Wim Farros.

-r

Foreshadowing

This week’s blog post ended up taking a bit longer than normal, so much so that it’s going to be a next week thing as oppose to a this week thing, but in the meantime, I’d recommend looking into the podcast It Makes A Sound and the game Kentucky Route Zero, though I understand if you can’t make it very far into either. But we’re going to be discussing a specific aspect of Americana using those two media as examples, so it would do some good to be aware.

-F

One Brief Encounter Among Many

We have our standard regulars at work, but I only really know a few of their names. I do feel guilty, though, forgetting the others, because they always seem to recognize me. Though in retrospect, they never actually call me by name, so maybe that’s just my own personal worry.

In any case, what I’m more interested in are the dozens upon dozens of other people we see daily that we never really see again. I prefer these moments because they tend to make better stories after the fact, like, when I’m talking with coworkers in between (or during!) meal rushes. My personal favorite actually comes from my first day on the job, where someone came in asking for a refund on their sandwich. Unfortunately, the reason for their dissatisfaction is lost to me, but that’s not the biggest problem with their story.

The problem is that, for as long as I’ve worked there and, according to coworkers who’ve been there longer, we haven’t for a good long while. When this was pointed out to them, they sort of whirled around and then said, “This isn’t Chipotle?” and, like, they don’t have sandwiches either so I’m not sure what that was all about.

It’s a fun story, though, and I’m glad I have it.

-F