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Eric the Ele Phant Eats Same Eggs
by Anonymous
August 12 , 2009
Review: eric the ele phant eats same eggs
Media: crayon on paper
Currently on display in the hallway of a local primary school is a work of art that never fails to fill me with a sense of dread. Entitled 'eric the ele phant eats same eggs', it features a hunchbacked, elephantoid creature with orange eyes, razor-sharp teeth, mouse-like ears, only two legs, and the ability to seemingly hover above the ground whilst it stares deeply into your very being.
It's eric the ele phant's posture and expression that haunt one the most - crouched over as though about to begin his egg-eating ritual, he looks upwards, directly at the viewer. It's this directness of gaze that involves the viewer in this image, perhaps bestowing upon them a degree of complicity in the egg-eating act. There is also a sense of the viewer having intruded upon the space of the image; that, in the act of viewing the drawing, the viewer themself has interrupted eric's meal. One is led to feel as though this moment could have been avoided if one's eyes had but stayed away from the paper but a second more - eric would then be consumed in the act of eating same eggs, oblivious to those who would view him doing so. But the viewer has intervened, leaving eric horribly frozen in a netherworld between action and inaction, yet acutely aware of the viewer's presence. He is surprised to see the viewer watching him, but the intrusion is not unwelcome; his eyes seem to show a hint of manic glee in the realisation that you are now sharing the world of the image with him.
But where exactly is the viewer now positioned? It is reasonable to assume that the image represents eric as trapped in a hell of some personal design. The title of the artwork hints at the nature of this world: eric the ele phant eats same eggs. Eric was perhaps once a normal ele phant like you or me, yet somehow he became trapped in a tiny hell dimension where he was doomed to repeat this singular moment over and over again. Perhaps he had been an egg-glutton throughout his life, and this fate was cast by divine retribution. Perhaps he was an egg-thief, and cursed to this dimension by whatever oviparous creature that did lay its children-to-be within small blue eggs in a tiny brown nest standing, oddly (and in apparent contradiction to our concepts of weight and mass), upon its side in grasslands. How eric the ele phant came to be there is not the concern of the artist; what matters is that eric is there now, and so, by extension of the gaze, is the viewer.
The mania present in eric's extremely constricted pupils as well as his deformed stature show us that eric is an ele phant far removed from what we may think of as normal. The duplicity of this 'outsider status' is one of the several defining achievements of this piece of work, setting it far above the common realm of drawings of elephants probably done by grade one students. Not only is eric cast in the role of an outsider due to his substantial deformities and isolation, but so too is the viewer, who is literally outside the drawing yet paradoxically connected to it through the intense, unwavering gaze.
We are left to ponder that perhaps eric may have once been a happy, ordinary ele phant, and that maybe it is the passing of untold centuries, trapped in this tiny place, which have caused his dementation. Lifetime after lifetime may have passed while eric has done nothing other than look down to find eggs before him, and, moments after having eaten them, looked down again in horror to find same eggs inexplicably re-materialising. The passing of countless days, trapped in this world without reason, where cause fails to be succeeded by effect, where one is compelled to repeat the same action with no hope of ever altering the outcome of eating same eggs has now come to an end for eric, as you have now appeared.
The unmistakable genius of this image can be seen in its refusal to offer the viewer any sense of closure. Will eric now consume the viewer as if they were same eggs? Will eric now escape, leaving the viewer to take his place in the unceasing torment of eating same eggs? These are the questions that will stay with the viewer long after they have broken their gaze from this remarkable, terrifying, and remarkably terrifying image.
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Tallahassee
by The Mountain Goats:
September 11 , 2007
Review: The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee
Media: CD
In 2005 The New Yorker awarded the Mountain Goats singer songwriter John Darnielle the not entirely appropriate title of ‘best non-hip-hop lyricist' . A more apt description may have been ‘the most literary lyricist', as Darnielle is revered for both the skill with which he constructs songs as tightly wound character studies, as well as his many references to classical literature. In Tallahassee, the eleventh album in Darnielle's prolific output under the Mountain Goats moniker, both facets of his literary proclivity are again in play. There are references to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, combined with characters who are richly textured fallible human beings. But what makes this album unique amongst Darnielle's others is that this marks the first time that the writer has followed the same characters over the course of an entire album. Yes, Tallahassee is that formidable beast one either loves or loathes: the concept album.
For fans of the band, the switch to concept album shouldn't be a jarring departure, as the Mountain Goats have long been telling character narratives. In fact, before 2004 Darnielle claimed to have released only one autobiographical song. The transition is also softened by the use of familiar characters, as Tallahassee reintroduces us to the Alpha Couple, who have appeared briefly on many of the Mountain Goats' previous albums. The Alpha Couple are named so after the usage of the term in relation to a wolf pack: in such a context they are the dominant male and female wolf who are the only couple inside the pack who are allowed to mate. Tallahassee's Alpha Couple are similarly animalistic: they're a middle-class married couple who were once passionately in love and who are now desperately fighting to regain that emotion even though they feel it irrevocably leaving them. The story opens with them attempting to outrun their marriage's demise, by seeking to begin a new life in the titular city: ‘We came into town under cover of night, because we were pretty sure the people here were going to hate us once they really got to know us. It was summer. It's always summer with us. In our lives together, which are sweet in the way of rotting things, it is somehow permanently summer '.
Darnielle has created characters so detailed that he can not contain them to the music alone, and their story spreads into the liner notes and through other Mountain Goats albums and on to a website that Darnielle has created, in which the user can explore the different rooms of the Tallahassee household, interacting with significant objects from the character's lives. Such an expansive canvass has the potential to make the listener feel as though the album experience is incomplete in itself, but Darnielle avoids this by using the album to tell a self-contained and accessible segment of the character's lives. The supporting material only serves to enrich this, whilst making us aware of the unusually high degree of character construction that has gone into the album.
Yet it is at heart an album, which brings us to the musicality of Tallahassee. Whereas Darnielle may be the best lyricist outside of hip-hop, his vocal delivery shouldn't rate a mention. Darnielle's voice is high and nasally, he sings a limited range, and he isn't adverse to hitting the occasional off-note. His guitar playing is likewise simplistic, but the shortcomings in both are diminished in appearance largely due to the sense of urgency with which most of the songs are conveyed. Darnielle is, after all, well versed in making simplicity work for him, as prior to this album, the majority of Mountain Goat releases were the epitome of lo-fi, as Darnielle alone would sing and play acoustic guitar into a hissing boom box. But on Tallahassee he's taken a dramatic step forward in musicality by hiring a studio and adding three musicians to his band, playing nine instruments between them. One might expect that with a lo-fi artist given such freedom for the first time that there would be a temptation to over-extend their musical reach, creating something uncharacteristically brash and crowded. Darnielle subverts this expectation by beginning slowly and surreptitiously adding instruments track by track until the band kicks into full swing during the later songs in which the Alpha Couple are at their most bitter and explosive.
Darnielle manages to examine this deteriorating marriage from perspectives both comic and tragic, without either viewpoint weakening the others impact. There are the darkly humourous overwrought lyrics of ‘No Children' in which he sings ‘In my life / I hope I lie / And tell everyone you were a good wife / And I hope you die / I hope we both die' . These instances of levity are balanced by moments of crushing sincerity where Darnielle constructs something profound from the mundane, such as ‘Game Shows Touch Our Lives', where the couple spend their day drinking and smoking in front of the television. It's an all-too-real image, made entirely compelling by the degree of compassion with which Darnielle constructs his ill-fated characters.
Because Tallahassee is as much, if not more, about characters as it is about music, it is likely to disappoint the casual listener. There are one or two potentially catchy, radio-friendly tracks, but listening to one song alone is akin to reading a chapter of a book out of context, and the strongest material is found in the songs of quiet desperation. The lyricism of the album is top notch, and the Mountain Goats have likely increased their potential audience through their switch to better production values. Through it all they continue to play with a subtlety that shouldn't alienate their lo-fi fan base. Tallahassee may not provide an ideal entry point into the band for those who are new to the Mountain Goats, but those who wish to devote their attention to the detailed narrative at play here should find it to be a very rewarding experience.
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Open All Night: New Poems
by Charles Bukowski
August 27, 2007
Review: Open All Night: New Poems – Charles Bukowski
Media: Book of Poetry
Though he passed away in 1994, poet Charles Bukowski has been steadily releasing new material every year since. In their acquisition of Bukowski's publisher, Ecco / Harper Collins have come into a wealth of the author's previously unpublished material and it seems that they're determined it not remain that way for very long. As could be expected from such a release strategy, the poems in Open All Night vary considerably in quality, and there's no real unifying theme running through the work save for the disposition of the author. Yet there's good news too, as this volume contains some of Bukowski's finest works as well as many poems that give insight into previously unexplored areas of Bukowski's life and character.
Compiled from work written over three decades, the poems here have been arranged so as to follow the author's life in a chronological order, beginning with Bukowski as a nine year old fighting other children on his lawn in Los Angeles and closing with him as a seventy year old sunbathing naked on his lawn in San Pedro. If you've never read Bukowski before, these two instances could serve as a representation of the author's work in microcosm: an unabashed look into the violence, sexuality, and near-madness of a societal outsider finding himself oddly at home in the most populous state of the USA. Bukowski deals with raw, primal themes, and his muses are likewise as base: you can expect a abundance of poems devoted to the racing track, the factory, loose women, and most frequently, the bottle. If you think it sounds lowbrow you're not alone, as Bukowski is a poet who is typically disregarded in academic circles. Not only are the subjects of his poems inelegant, so too is the language itself, as Bukowski writes in a predominately simplistic, coarse, accessible manner. While at a glance this book may appear to be the unsophisticated anti-poems of an alcoholic misanthrope, a deeper investigation will reveal that there's much more at work in the poetry of this under-appreciated writer.
For starters, there's a certain appeal in the baseness of it all. Bukowski often displays a dark sense of humour, casting himself as an antihero who lives outside the constraints of society. There's a charm in his refusal to play by the rules, a refusal which he sometimes carries past the point of sensible self-preservation. In the poem ‘Four Young Gang-Bangers', an elderly Bukowski writes of having a car containing the titular youths push up against his rear bumper at an intersection in a bad part of town. Unhappy after a fight with his girlfriend and further angered by a night at the racetrack where he'd been playing to lose their money but had kept winning, Bukowski pulls over, allows the car to pass and then begins ramming into the back of it at every stop sign.
In keeping with this premise, Bukowski's work is often darkly amusing pulp which one imagines would play well to a demographic of angry young men. That may seem like a low achievement, but just how many authors are there that could get angry young men interested in poetry? This leads us to the greater goal of Bukowski's work: Bukowski is a poet attempting to remove poetry from its lofty pedestal and return it to the masses, and with the current unpopularity of the medium, it's not an unworthy goal. In Open All Night, there's much of this ideology to be seen in the crudeness of word and character. Yet, balancing this are moments of lyricism where Bukowski demonstrates his competency as a skilled lyric poet. Even though these moments make up a minority of Bukowski's work, their presence gives the reader an awareness that this is a poet confined to apparent simplicity not through limit of ability, but through design.
The real appeal of this collection is not the persona or the vices or the intention behind the work, but the unwavering honesty with which Bukowski is able to present the human suffering. Open All Night also brings something new to the Bukowski catalogue: intimacy. In the past, the downside to the author's prized outsider status has been the distancing effect it creates. While it's apparent the author has suffered greatly, the actual emotion is often deferred to the imagery of the poem or to the circumstances surrounding it. Adding to this has been Bukowski's reclusive nature: by distancing himself socially, Bukowski has limited the potential emotional resonance of his work in appearing unknowable. He often divorces himself from his biographical poems even further by writing about his experiences through the eyes of his literary alter ego, ‘Hank Chinaski'. Chinaski and Bukowski are essentially the same, they both share the same geographic locations at the same times in their lives, both love the same woman, and both are reclusive alcoholic writers. The major difference is that Chinaski appears even further socially removed from the author, an accentuation of the outsider status. In Open All Night the Chinaski character all but falls away, referred to in only a couple of poems, although his dramatic outsider façade is palpable in several more. For a significant amount of the book we have what appears to be the unembellished author empathically connecting with his pain and the people around him. Nowhere is this more evident than in the series of poems in which the poet mourns the death of his lover, Jane Cooney Baker. He writes of visiting her in hospital:
‘your blood came again
and I held it in the pail of my hands,
all that was left
of the nights, and the days too,
and the old man was still alive
but you were not
we were not.'
These moments of raw honesty more than make up for some of the weaker material in the book, as Bukowski offers himself to us as an ugly naked creature, highly attuned to his own suffering and failings, yet capable of transcending it all through the act of writing. It's a fascinating insight into the previously unknowable outsider, and a shame that it has taken until well after his death for some of Bukowski's most compelling work to surface.
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Luna Park
by Bret Easton Ellis
August 10, 2007
Review: Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis
Media: Novel
Bret Easton Ellis's latest novel Lunar Park sees a dramatic shift in the direction of the author's work. The writer of the grim and grizzly American Psycho wants to talk about… love. And no, not just morally ambiguous, excessive drug taking, college student polygamy (although that's in there as well), but Ellis wants to tell us exactly what being a father means to him, and just how much he loves his son.
The trouble is that Ellis doesn't have a son. Not the real Ellis anyway. And this brings us to a second major shift in Ellis's writing: Lunar Park is a decidedly post-modern affair. Although the writer has long been associated with this movement for his fragmentary narratives and unreliable narrators, this novel sees him fully embrace the genre. The text is presented in the guise of memoir, as Ellis first gives us an autobiographical look at his life and publications leading up to Lunar Park, then focuses on a twelve day period in which a significant family drama occurs. It's obvious that Ellis enjoys playing with postmodern conventions, as he relishes the opportunity to parody himself, portraying Bret as the immoral, sensationalist author that the plethora of reviews misinterpreting American Psycho made him out to be. Ellis is at his most fun when he's attacking himself in this way: Bret is a narcissistic hack whose next novel is a pornographic thriller, to be titled Teenage Pussy because all other titles were deemed ‘noncontroversial' by his publisher. Daringly, Ellis even baits his readership, suggesting that they will attribute meaning to his exceedingly trashy novel by misreading it as satire.
Whereas a casual reader unfamiliar with Ellis might take all this a face-value, the novel soon moves into decidedly surreal territory, as Bret begins interacting with characters both from Ellis's real life as well as his previous novels. The character of Bret splits in two, there is the ‘I' who is telling the story and ‘the writer' an almost malevolent entity who claims to be controlling the world of the story and who has foreknowledge of the events about to transpire, but will not directly reveal them to Bret. Not only that, but the work begins spanning a number of genres, being a fictive-memoir, a family drama, and particularly in its final third, an unnerving horror. The horror here is of a different form to that of Ellis's previous works, where it was used to satirise and moralise about a surface obsessed society. In homage to Stephen King, Lunar Park allows itself to merge into the unadorned horror of a haunted house tale. This shift from the human monster to the traditionally less-literary horror form does not become as graceless the premise threatens to be, as Ellis treats it with respect and describes it with earnest, serious prose. It is appropriate, after all, as this act of the metaphor-made-literal is how Ellis created his most famous monster, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman: ‘It had been about my father (his rage, his obsession with status, his loneliness), whom I had transformed into a fictional serial killer' he writes.
Through it all he grounds the unthinkable and unexplainable through the very tangible fear of a father fearing for the safety of his family. For there are horrors facing Bret in the outside world too, just as brutal as the paranormal happenings inside his slowly changing house. Young boys are disappearing from the community, and a killer is on the loose, seeming re-enacting the murders from Ellis's American Psycho. Most troubling is that Bret believes this killer may well be the Patrick Bateman. This notion of the character confronting the author is not a new one, but what makes this interpretation so compelling is the suggestion that Ellis may have real blood on his hand for the creation of the character. In this novel Ellis makes reference to Paul Bernardo, a real-life Canadian serial killer whose defence attorney argued that American Psycho had provided a blueprint for his crimes. Ellis writes ‘there had been a serial killer in of all fucking places Toronto, for Christ's sake, who had read the book and based two of his murders on scenes from it' .
Though Ellis has refused to apologise for American Psycho, despite being publicly reviled to the extent of death threats, the weight of its influence upon him is palpable, as the novel sometimes moves into what appears to be a direct confessional: ‘This was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame […] I thought the idea was laughable — that there was no one as insane and vicious as this fictional character out there in the real world' .
Bateman isn't the only demon Ellis is attempting to put to rest with this book. He uses the device of a son as a way of connecting with his estranged, deceased father. It's a poetic way of continuing a dialogue that has been lost to Ellis in real life, and it often is explored through parallels. Bret first connects with his son Robby when the child instinctively reaches for his hand to show him a lizard, later Bret dreams of himself as a child, showing his father the same lizard. It's these moments in which the postmodernism brings something to the text that no other genre could quite capture, as Ellis weaves the power of the fiction together with the gravitas of biography. The result is a deeply intricate book that will stand up to many re-readings and re-interpretations. While it's unlikely that Ellis will ever equal American Psycho in its technical brilliance and sheer single mindedness, Lunar Park offers the reader the work of a more mature author who wishes to make amends with his past. He does so outstandingly, by intelligently, and most importantly, emotionally experimenting with the very nature of storytelling itself.