Truth | The Grain

ESKIMO SNOW BY WHY?, THE ‘LEAST ACCURATE, BUT MOST FACTUAL’

Why? - Eskimo Snow

George McGovern’s campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz, famously said that Hunter S. Thompson’s chronicle of the ‘72 US election was the “least accurate, but most factual” account. I think much the same could be attributed to the lyrics delivered by Yoni Wolf of Why? on the basis of his recent output. On ‘This Blackest Purse’ Wolf sets out his own mission statement of sorts; “I want to speak at an intimate decibel/ with the precision of an infinite decimal/ to listen up and send back a true echo/ of something forever felt but never heard/ I want that sharpened steel of truth in every word”.

The lyrics of Why? have always been something worth dissecting, acting as both the distinguishing factor between any comparable act and the singular element that unites his discography from his time as a solo artist, through his collaborations, cLOUDDEAD, and the current incarnation of Why? as a fully formed band. The topics here remain largely the same; the full contents of his thoughts on display as Yoni dissects death, sex and his own anxieties at every turn. He is his own therapist, the language of self-analysis pouring out every song. The albums opening line, “I wear the customary clothes of my time/ like Jesus did with no reason not to die” ensures you are instantly aware the lyrics will continue where they left off on Alopecia, a stream of Jungian psychoanalysis and border-line perversion (“and I never got a name for my shady compulsion”) that could be easily mistaken for narcissism (”will I gain weight in later life?”).

Wolf again shows signs of the sort of self awareness rarely found in popular music and couples this with a new self-referential streak. ‘This Blackest Purse’ provides the most obvious example, opening with the lines “I’m not who, with my eyes, I claim to be/ I’ve only cradled death in my own ending flesh from far off and abstracted lit/ candlewick flickering”, a reference to the most prevalent topic on Alopecia that was at the forefront of tracks like ‘Song of the Sad Assassin’ with its first person account of lifting a body out of the water, and signals the beginning of a differentiation between the person or persona and the doctrine he has set himself. His embellishment is in the quest for ‘truth in every word’.

Eskimo Snow is made up of recordings taken from the same sessions as Alopecia, separated for the sake of coherence, so perhaps it is no surprise to hear “looks like a sky for shoeing horses under” on the refrain to ‘One Rose’, or his calls of “no flash photography” on ‘Even The Good Wood Gone’, taking you back to the same train of thought first heard on ‘Sick 2 Think’ from the Sanddollars EP.
Read the rest of this entry »

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK AND YOUTH

Synechdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut has met with some mixed responses. For every critic praising it, there is one whose reaction has been one of bafflement. Kaufman, who has the (possibly unique) position of being a script writer as famous as half of the directors in Hollywood, has followed up his collaborations with Spike Jonze on ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’, as well as the Oscar winning Michel Gondry collaboration ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, with a film that again embraces an unconventional narrative.

Synecdoche, New York[1] is the story of Caden Coutard[2] (played impeccably by Philip Seymour Hoffman) a regional theatre director struggling with his life and relationships (as well as the belief he is will die imminently). He receives a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant and chooses to produce a work that will finally realize his desire to be brutally honest, and in which he can immerse himself in an attempt to provide authenticity. He gathers his cast in a hangar in New York, and starts his production as a recreation of the surrounding city, instructing his cast to re-enact the mundane, quotidian details of life as he has experienced it. As time goes on, the play is increasingly populated with actors playing their real life counter parts, including Caden himself, and his ‘life’ begins to slowly disintegrate. His relationships fall apart as his body gradually begins to shut down as a result of an unspecified disease, increasingly burdened by the weight of his attempt to present truth and his own life failings.

The experience of watching Synecdoche, New York reminded me, in a number of ways, of J.M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical novel Youth, and the comparison is an interesting, illuminating one. In S,NY Kaufman has made a creative leap forward: his quintessential concentration on neuroses, and his preoccupation with the creative process bizarrely and multifariously refracted in his narratives is still present, but here this tendency is combined with a pathos and a sense of the struggle to carry the weight of searching after purpose and accomplishment, with the constant prevailing threat of death and mortality, and ultimately Kaufman succeeds in attaining to a depth of personal emotion that many thought were lacking from his previous efforts.

Youth is far removed from S,NY in many respects, but what links the two works is the neo-existentialist focus on their protagonists’ quest for meaning in their lives, in their art, the evocation of that indescribable feeling that you are slowly wasting your life, never to be productive, or creative, or anything you ever believed you could be. They are both quests for identity, for truth, for purpose. The feeling of yearning for achievement, worn down by the weight of ambition, whilst the real world gradually recedes into the distance pervades both works, and they are both centred on one man’s perspective.

Read the rest of this entry »