I’m going to be doing a lot of traveling and book reviewing in the coming weeks, so here are some short hits that have been knocking around for a bit (as well as, if you’ll indulge me, a lengthier appreciation of Mick Jagger, who turns 80 this month). I’ll be back in August. Or later.
Tár (Todd Fields, 2022)
Before it even came out, I knew I would want to see Tár. Then it came out and I didn’t see it. After it was nominated for several Oscars, it came back to some area theaters and I checked out times, made plans to see it with my wife, and eventually even schemed to abandon my familial duties and see it alone (knowing that it really only appealed to me anyway). But I didn’t do that, and Tár seemed set to suffer the fate of most of the interesting intellectual films whose target audience includes me: maybe I’d get around to it at some point. Then in June, it was available during I flight I was on, so I watched the first twenty-odd minutes. This month, I finally watched the rest, then went back to watch the first scenes again, and some later scenes again, and paused some shots so I could read the fake Wikipedia page. Then I stayed up until after 1 a.m. reading in-depth analyses of it. I am strongly tempted to watch it again right now.
It feels hackish to call a film a masterpiece, but, well, I think this is a masterpiece. The artistry is flawless—so much is said with throwaway references and trivial conversations, the interiors are practically characters by themselves, the Juilliard scene is a claustrophobic single take—and the plot is shockingly original. It is not an ingratiating movie; I’m a reasonably knowledgable fan of classical music and I needed Wikipedia at several points. But the withholding of the kind of moral and discursive payoff we have been taught to expect or even need is not just ill humor on Fields’ part. If you’ve read any decent reviews of it, you know that it’s only a film about “cancel culture” or “#MeToo” in the most superficial way, and indeed that any attempt to summarize the action will miss whatever is actually happening. In that sense, it’s a very musical film—dreamlike, associative, haunted both literally and with echoes and notes that create an architecture of feeling rather than a meaning that can be expressed in words. How guilty Lydia Tár is, and of what, are not questions the film answers for us because it’s not about guilt or accountability but about genius becoming disconnected from its originating desire. The main character’s vampiric attraction to and exploitation of her protegées seems to come from her inability to experience the kind of love for music that they still have. She is kind to her predecessor and genuinely self-giving with her daughter, but those relationships don’t offer the freedom and discipline of obsession, so they can’t save her. I could go on about this movie in minute detail but suffice it to say, if you thought “I should maybe check out Tár,” you absolutely should, and if you saw it and were disappointed, I think you should consider watching it again.
Live classical music (multiple venues and dates)
While I was failing to see Tár, I was, however, seeing live classical music for the first time in ages. By the standards of a brutally balanced middle-aged suburban dad life, I was doing so rather obsessively. So perhaps I was primed for a sympathetic reaction to the movie. Anyway, I turned this episodic adventure into a story for The Bulwark about why we seek this experience out, with reference to Lydia Tár, Vladimir Lenin, and a Huxley character who stages his murder to Beethoven’s A-minor string quartet:
Even Lenin, a ruthless architect of suffering, felt his nerves unsettled by too much music because it made him politically unreliable: He reported feeling inspired to stroke heads rather than strike them. One wishes he had yielded to that temptation to become childish and politically useless in the thrall of that experience, which (he would certainly agree) is not a private possession. It connects us, and not only across the aisles of the concert hall, but across years, languages, and political orientations. We might have shared that experience of chest-swelling delight at the work of the human mind with the music’s own progenitor, in some long-vanished concert hall where even a struggling early-nineteenth-century rendition would have left us helpless in the face of something our highest intentions don’t explain and our words are powerless even to describe. The respectable uniform of the concertgoer just conceals the fanny-packed, gape-mouthed tourist of the soul.
With most forms of “going out and doing something” having suffered decline recently, I find the case for live music in general, and classical music in particular, pretty strong. I left a few things out of this story, including a fascinating mostly-contemporary free program in the Dallas Fine Arts Chamber Players series and a guest conductor at the DSO who broke the string of rather listless emeriti baton-holders by giving us what I think of as the “mincing garlic” and “marionette” conductor moves. I did nod off briefly at that show, but in my defense it was a Sunday matinee and I had worked all morning. The 2022-23 DSO season struck me as cautious and uninspiring, which makes sense in light of the financial disaster of 2020-21, but the coming year is full of classic bangers and some interesting-sounding new stuff and I’m really excited to go. But even when the programs or the performances are a bit flat, a couple hours at the concert hall always seem to be well spent.
Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian by Tara Isabella Burton (Public Affairs, June 27, 2023)
In a half-sentence in a scene set in Staten Island, we learn that “Lydia” was not Lydia Tár’s original name. That little reference to the character’s self-invention said a lot, not just about her but about a culture that rewards that kind of initiative. Tara Isabella Burton (who co-writes the very good Line of Beauty newsletter) has a new book about this history of self-invention, self-fashioning, and self-improvement. My full review will be out in the Christian Century fall books issue (subscribe now, it’s a great magazine), but this book prompted a lot more thoughts than could fit even in a long review-essay. I’m a fan of Burton’s two novels, Social Creature and The World Cannot Give, both of which focus on relationships between a blank, provincial main characters and the more charismatic, wealthy, or impressive people whose mannerisms and needs they shape themselves to mimic and satisfy. So I couldn’t really help reading the cultural history Self Made as a non-fiction companion, covering desire and imitation from Renaissance art to Enlightenment philosophy, 19th century dandyism, and modern celebrity. Maybe that enhanced my enjoyment of the book, but in any case it’s a lot more fun to read than I expect from any cultural history, especially one treading such well-worn ground.
In the review, I try to describe what I think Burton does differently than the many others who have told the story of changing conceptions of the self from the Renaissance on. But what I didn’t find a way to get to in the review is what her story says about the omnipresent feeling, or at least threat, of failure, especially among [cough cough] workers in the softer side of the “knowledge” professions. Part of this is no doubt financial and professional precarity, but I think there’s more to it than that. Not long ago, I read and knew general-interest writers only as a byline and as a body of work. After years of Twitter-curated media consumption (either directly, through what was shared onto my feed, or at a remove, by the way the platform shaped all kinds of editorial and stylistic choices), I feel a curious blankness where I would have felt professional enthusiasm, and instead have strong perceptions of writers I’ve really known only through a very weird platform. To lack a profile or a brand in this environment is not just to be professionally mediocre or obscure but to be a less than fully realized personality. I wonder how much of “post-material politics” springs from a thwarted need for significance or recognition.
BDM on bad artists and bad platforms
One of the many good writers I encountered through Twitter, BDM has a prolific Substack on…well, let’s see: reviews of everything from books and movies I’ve never heard of to non-alcoholic spirits, commentary on arts and culture, reliably edifying takes on the discourse of the week, and more Taylor Swift content than I ever imagined reading. Two good (short) recent pieces on some themes I’ve been interested in here: David Foster Wallace and bad-person artists, and what has been good and bad about Twitter:
What if we just let the age of social media–driven writing… die? If I had to guess, I think it’s dying anyway, whether we let it or not. Yeah, it was good that Twitter was centralized. It was a place to meet people and a place to go. But it was also bad! It was really bad! It made writing boring, especially culture writing, which was flattened out to cover three or four topics over and over from increasingly desperate angles. It ran on context collapse and status anxiety and resentment. It encouraged everybody to be kind of the same. It was basically a social media platform built by and for crabs in a bucket.
Sacred Signposts: Words, Water, and Other Acts of Resistance by Benjamin J. Dueholm (Eerdmans, 2018)
This month marks five years since my only solo-authored book was published. Earlier this year I got a statement indicating that sales had finally recouped my (laughably modest) advance, though not by enough to meet the threshold for issuing a check. If everyone who reads this newsletter buys a copy, we’ll get there. You should do that.
After five years, a commercially unsuccessful book feels something like I imagine a brief early marriage does: it was an all-absorbing thing at the time but at a certain point you prefer not to talk or think about it more than you have to. I’m proud of the writing I did, though I can see now (and could tell even at the time) that it was hard for me to escape the essay form and create something really coherent at 35,000 words. I hope the chapters hold up ok; I suspect they do. At the time, there was a lot of enthusiasm for describing Christianity as a set of practices or social formations that made the church a polis or community of its own, somewhat apart from and independent of the dominant forms of social organization and ideology. This is partly the legacy of Hauerwas (who probably influenced me well beyond what I actually read of him), partly the act-based ecclesiology I found in someone like Vítor Westhelle (whose The Church Event was big for me at the time), partly the political dissatisfactions of the War on Terror/Great Recession-era bipartisan nightmare. I wrote it before The Benedict Option came out in book form, but it was implicitly a response and alternative to that idea.
Now it seems that this aspiration, both in its conservative and progressive flavors, has pretty well vanished as American Christianity gets incorporated fully into culture war teams. This was already underway five years ago, but QAnon, the pandemic, and the 2020 racial justice protests accelerated the process to the point where it’s pretty hard to discern a distinctive public Christian witness in any quarter.1 I’ve even found myself starting to give up here, not in the sense that I’m just playing on Team Lib or anything, but that I’m content to make more or less “secular” arguments on political issues and leaving it at that. Which is not good, but there we are.
Every now and then, I get asked about doing another book and it’s honestly pretty hard to imagine. By now I can admit that I never really warmed to the title (which I didn’t choose but did have to agree to), I never had a persuasive plan for how to sell it, and whatever chance I had to break the essay-review-sermon iron triangle of literary underachievement is pretty far behind me. And that’s ok. I can’t make myself stay up that late anymore (unless it’s to watch Tár) and the people in my house and my church and even my city need my time more than the trade paperback audience. They’re the people who made a cake with the cover printed on the icing and who lined up for raffled copies and signatures back then, which is my fondest memory of the whole experience. Anyway, if you did read it, I’m assuredly grateful to you. I hope it was useful to you.
Appreciation: Mick Jagger in Nine Tracks
A few years ago, I wrote about seeing the Rolling Stones live in Chicago as the payment of a debt to a past version of myself. That tour was interrupted by the pandemic and by the time it resumed, I lived in Dallas and had a son who had become a big fan himself, so I took him to their date here. My fandom leans more toward the Keith Richards pole than the Mick Jagger one, but however resentful and belligerent their relationship has been, they have always needed each other to amount to anything. There’s a novel waiting to be written about that particular partnership, which began as something close to a lark, proceeded to change popular music dramatically, and ended up enmeshing its members in an unstoppable commercial and professional death embrace. I have the suspicion that Keith has played his last big dates, but Mick could clearly keep going. He’s really a marvel, both in singing and in showmanship, not just outpacing but outlasting the Daltreys and Plants who stormed the stage around the same time. As he reaches 80 this month, here are some hight points, not necessarily of the band’s work overall but of his particular contribution.
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
This is a gimme, but the core of the song has aged really well, especially for a track that was just meant to be a demo for a cleaned-up version with a fuller arrangement (like the Otis Redding cover, which is great in its own right). Keith’s distorted guitar riff made this a genre-defining hit (compare it to anything the Beatles had produced to that point) but it played, then and now, because of Mick’s restless, bored, horny lyrics and perfectly pitched delivery. The resentment against consumer culture was not a theme they would work much longer, and it went in more critical directions in pop culture after this, but it strikes a note you can still hear today. This live version may not be the best, but it’s the one where Keith Richards clubs a guy who rushes the stage with his guitar.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
It’s a testament to how insanely creative the Rolling Stones were in 1968 and 1969 that this song was a B-side for “Honky Tonk Women.” Keith did the larger share of songwriting for Let it Bleed, widely considered (though not by me) to be their best album, but this one is mostly Mick’s. It’s about the usual stuff—relationships, drugs, protests—but the wry lyrics, perfect chorus, and choir soaring over the chording of the last sections lifts this one out of the usual late-60s clichés to a perennial validity. It’s a rare tour staple that is never really surpassed in live performance (though this version is pretty good).
Brown Sugar
This song was quietly dropped from the setlist between 2019 and 2021 for obvious reasons (“Some Girls” which, let’s face it, is a pretty good song too, already met that fate years ago). It’s an absolutely scabrous piece of work. But while the guitar part sounds like something Keith would write, it was actually all Mick, and it’s just ridiculous how well the verse, chorus, and channel all work together.
Shine a Light
By the early 70s, Keith’s addictions had made him unreliable enough that a few tracks were made completely without him (“Sway” and “Moonlight Mile” on Sticky Fingers, both terrific songs, have no contribution from him beyond one background vocal). This eulogy for Brian Jones, who’d died a couple years earlier, is a rare genuinely moving song from that period, where Mick’s lyrics and vocals work perfectly with Billy Preston’s keyboards and Mick Taylor’s limpid lead guitar part (Charlie Watts is a big part of this one too). Like the rest of the Keithless tracks from those days, it was under some kind of live embargo until the mid-90s, when it turned out to still be a fan favorite. Mick also wrote some good songs about Keith (especially “Torn and Frayed” and “Look What the Cat Dragged In,”), and Keith returned the favor.
Time Waits for No One
This is another Jagger-Taylor collaboration (though Richards got the co-writing credit, as usual) that stands out as an early entry in the Ruminative Mick genre. It’s not a great lyric, but it’s an interesting departure at a time when Keith’s songwriting had found its limit, and he does really sell it. And inasmuch as Mick Jagger can ever be described as “earnest,” I think this mood is it. Another really solid entry in the genre is “Laugh, I Nearly Died” from 2005.
It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)
My recollection is that Mick wrote and recorded this with David Bowie and Ronnie Wood, and when he heard it, Keith insisted they steal it for the next Stones album, overdubbing the (admittedly pretty clutch) distorted lead part. It’s not an endearing lyric—the decline in the Stones’ work was clear by this point and whingeing about the critics wasn’t the best way to handle it—but if there’s such a thing as sincerely phoning it in, Mick does it on this track. I don’t know if this outside collaboration was an early jailbreak attempt (among several) by Mick, but if it was, it’s grimly funny that it became such a live staple for the Stones. This is a pretty good live version.
Miss You
By the time they got to recording Some Girls, Keith had been a mess for years (with massive legal problems to boot), they had made their worst album to date (Black and Blue, still a big turd), and they were in serious danger of being left behind by popular music. While the survival of the Rolling Stones beyond 1985 came down to their massive tours, they only got that far because Mick went to dance clubs and cribbed some grooves. This one was the hit, and for obvious reasons. It evokes the New York atmosphere that shaped that album and the next one, and it plays like hell. The lyric is wispy but Mick works it for all it’s worth, the central riff is catchy and memorable, and the structure allows for as much guitar/sax/harmonica/bass soloing as a live show ever needs. As far as I know, it’s been a standard on every tour since they released it. This is my favorite live version, though they are legion. In this vein, he did good work with “Dance, Pt. 1” and “Rain Fell Down” too.
Undercover of the Night
Mick wrote the only good song on 1983’s dark, unpleasant, muddy Undercover, this unusually ambitious pastiche of William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night and topical Latin American political violence. The production is off here, and you can imagine a better setting for the lyrics and the percussion core, but it’s the relatively rare serious Mick track that had a real up-tempo groove. Mainstream rock-and-roll wasn’t at its best in 1983 and the Stones had been turning out a lot of filler for a decade, but this one still kind of works and suggests the places Mick wanted to go with a band that didn’t necessarily want to follow. The original video is nuts.
Saint of Me
This is one of two decent songs on 1997’s otherwise forgettable Bridges to Babylon tour hook (the other one is all Keith). It’s Ruminative Mick in a religious mode (see also), overlapping with Literary Mick who references figures like St. Augustine. There’s a tantalizing strain in Mick’s songwriting, going all the way back to the early 70s, in which he seems to be chafing at the constraints of his genre and the despair of having achieved basically every pleasure a person can experience while remaining essentially unsatisfied. That’s an old, old story, of course, but for a commercial empire based on the illusion of perpetual youth and the undulled thrill of chasing the next conquest, it counts as introspection. Keith could only ever have been a guitar player in a band—one of the best, in his way, and for a time a major innovator, but still a man chained to an instrument. Mick offered these fleeting glimpses of wanting, and maybe even having the potential to be, something very different before lapsing back to the thing he knows and does best, and better than any of his British-invasion contemporaries ever did: standing in front of a band, hitting all his notes, and getting us to sing along.
It’s an old story by now, but it’s still striking to consider how utterly what used to be called the “Christian Right” has abandoned everything it was about in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s proven to be a remarkably protean tendency. The “Christian Left,” such as it is, hasn’t really changed its positions but has more or less given up its rhetorical stance as the conscience of center-left electoral politics, lifting up poverty, oppression connected to U.S. foreign policy and the like in a moralistic register that was clearly meant to goad establishment Democratic sensibilities. Today the rhetoric seems much blander to me, reflecting not just the issue priorities but the stylistic moves of House Progressive Caucus liberalism. Maybe this is in part an effect of the Democratic Party moving to the left on some issues, I don’t know. In any case, it’s rare that I hear anything really insightful about politics from a specifically Christian figure.