Write to Him and He Will Make You a Drawing, Call Him and He Will Sing You a Song

It takes a lot of imagination to have no talent

For all its mind numbing, ear shattering idiocy, lobotomizing pictures, and supposed child predators, the internet can be a magical place. At the moment, that magic is Willis Earl Beal. But then again, he's much more magical because he's only been digitized ex post facto.

I admit to have heard of the man through his recent story in the Chicago Reader and his interview on Pitchfork. The basic story: he moved back to Chicago after a stint in Albuquerque where he started singing. He posts flyers with his phone number asking for friends and sings songs to people that call. Until recently he's been performing at the Jackson L stop. For a long time he refused to put himself on the internet, instead using his flyers and the CD-Rs he left around town for his only publicity. Oh, and he's amazing.

He told Pitchfork that he wanted to be the black Tom Waits. And lucky for us it seems like he can back it up. Wavering Lines shows the simple beauty of his voice and his genuine delivery. "I gotta bladder full of piss and I'm gonna let go," he sings, somehow turning it into a thought each of us has had, an understanding residing in it you never could have explained before. Take Me Away swaggers with a bravado that matches Mr. Waits and connects Beal to a whole different side of the musical world. "Right now, if you believe," he scowls as you realize just how much you really do believe. And somewhere in the middle, Evening's Kiss breaks your heart and bolsters it all at once.

The most amazing part of Beal is his how earnestly he means everything he sings and draws and says. According to the Reader, he lives with his grandmother,

sleeps on an enclosed porch and sometimes, if the weather permits, on the roof. He plays with the feral cats that hang around the property, sometimes feeding them or burying the ones that die. He occasionally fights with his brother, and he doesn't pay his grandmother rent anymore, like he did when he was working more regularly. He's also having trouble connecting with people in his neighborhood. "I'll turn on some Bo Diddley and I'll get into the music and start dancing, and people will walk by there and they'll look in and be like, 'That guy is crazy.'"

It's impossible to read about or listen to Beal and not smile, not feel that longing for a childhood with warm summers and starry nights. A first encounter with Beal, like a first encounter with a lover, feels nostalgic. The man encapsulates everything sincere and decent about society. I realize exactly how grandiose that sounds, and yet I can't bring myself to dampen it.

Beal, in a very real way, stands apart from what makes our age our age. He neglected his internet presence, he says, to "get these young people understanding what it's like to hustle as opposed to just typing" (from the Reader article). In other words, Beal is doing something real, something that can't be co-opted an twisted and made into a twitter trend or a thing you find on tumblr. He isn't making mixtapes and pushing them on reddit and he isn't the person you'll stumble upon and email to your mom with emoticons in the subject line.


But he is the kind of person who could use emoticons and make it seem natural. I used the present tense in the last paragraph despite the fact that Beal has a website now, and a record deal with XL, and is currently not answering calls because he's on a tour in Europe that's being tumled, tweeted, and stumbled. But you can still get his voicemail, his voice sounding much smaller than you'd expect. His website is a simple self-portrait he drew, a link to tour dates, a single video, and his address and phone number. Even while he tours Europe.


I'm disappointed that I didn't find one of Beal's flyers and call before he had a website. I find myself wondering if I walked past him on the way to the North Side one day before he landed his record deal and didn't notice him. The internet acts as savior here, showing you the good things you've missed. But it also tends to corrupt, to ruin the simplicity of beauty with the sociological travesty of youtube commentary. I saw a .gif of a bear mauling a man today and it seemed expected, like something mundane given what exists in the internet's garbage dump. 


Beal, on the other hand, stands out. In some way, he doesn't belong to us, to the digital age. He knows it, too. It's his beauty and, I imagine, his sadness. But if he can exist with that, if he can be more Devendra Banhart than Jeff Mangum and embrace that status as the sublime thing it is, Beal will be more than the cult star he claims he was born to be.


And I believe him. And in him.

Race and Bad Television: The Case of Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry is awful. He makes extraordinarily bad movies and TV shows. And I do mean extraordinarily--they are not your normal philistine entertainment. Jersey Shore, the typical punching bag here, is truly a blight on everything intellectual and cultured. But it's a show for and about the people who have done the mindless blowout partying for decades. It is a reflection of something that has been around American culture for a while, and I would think hope that most a good portion of its audience accepts its "reality" with their tongues in their cheeks.

Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is something worse. His work appears in the same benign light as Jersey Shore, but what the (justifiably) pretentious dismissal of Diary of a Mad Black Woman or Madea’s Family Reunion or Madea Goes to Jail or Madea’s Big Happy Family or Madea’s Witness Protection (I’m assuming on this one) misses by putting it in the same category as the mundanely terrible is the effect it has in promoting racism. 

Now, before I go on with this, let me take a minute to explain what it is I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Tyler Perry is a racist. In no way am I claiming that he is positing a poor view of his people or that he is using racism to his own profit. I’m not saying that anything he’s done has been racist. His characters are poorly developed and his scripts are beyond cliche, and as a result his character types parallel certain racist stereotypes--but that is a fact of (some parts of) our culture twisting those stereotypes into a bad light (just the same as any stereotype can be). And finally, I’m not saying that I know more about any of these things than Perry himself. I am well aware that he knows far more about racism than I ever could.

But what I am trying to do is point out a fact that I’ve noticed--a fact that is perhaps more easily viewed from the perspective of a middle class white guy from South Carolina. (I privileged to the unveiled view of racism, after all.) That fact is that Perry’s work, in resting on common stereotypes, presents a picture of race relations that far too many white people point to as a way of justifying their own casual racism. Ignoring the obvious bigots and focusing on the more obscure--and more dangerous--racism, Perry’s work stands out as the thing people point to and say: “Look! See? Everything’s fine!”

But, of course, it’s not fine. Not at all.

I’ve watched and listened to far too many people use the very material Perry’s work is based on as the basis and justification of their racism to not think his work deserves some kind of deeper investigation. Whatever the race problem in this country is at its core, I can’t help but think it’s reflected in Tyler Perry’s House of Pain or Tyler Perry’s For Better or For Worse or Tyler Perry's whatever.

I’m not entirely sure what this calls for as a response. The scary thought is that Perry’s work is just like Jersey Shore but the fact that it’s a show by a black man and directed towards a black audience means that in being bad it will always be more than bad because our society will use its lack of quality in more nefarious ways. Or perhaps the fact that I’m not a part of Perry’s target audience means I’m missing something important that justifies it. The answer here is not something that I’ll ever be able to give. But I still feel like someone needs to ask the question.

Post-post-modernism?

Being a good post-modern student, I've been trying to find new ways to define post-modernism. I think I've got a good one: it’s whatever you’re self-aware of. Modernism, says Stanley Cavell, is when art begins to question, in the very act of making art, what art is. Post-modernism, says I, is when the artist becomes aware of it being cliche to ask what art is. He makes art that questions art and simultaneously questions the questioning of art.

The worst of post-modernism--the stuff that makes you cringe like you’ve done four times now while reading that awful word--is the result of that awareness taking too great of a stage. It’s the art that tries to defend itself by making the risk inherent in art a joke of the art itself. It’s a questioning of the questioning of the questioning that’s become as meaningless as this very sentence. (Which of course means that this article has now become the worst of post-modernism right? But then what does this sentence mean?) In short, it’s Derrida.

But to be fair to post-modernism--and to all those people who take poor Jacques seriously--this is actually the condition faced today.

Real, actual people find themselves worrying about whether or not the things they say in conversations with their lovers and in fights with their children are just poor paraphrases of old lines from poorly reviewed movies. I’ve listened to people crying about relationships gone bad or some other slight tragedy eke out through gritted teeth some commentary about how typical it is for a person in their place to be acting like they are. And you can see that awareness beginning to take away from the honest emotion that actually matters.

A friend of mine once said that “the worst part about emo is that it made emotion trite.” But he was only partially right: emo certainly did so, but the people who made making emotion trite trite have done much more damage to the American psyche. (Really, friends, I apologize for the trite post-modern syntax.)

American culture has come to the point where it oscillates between pure emotion and meaningless nonsense. It’s emo or it’s dubstep/post-ambient-noise-somethingorother. And of course, the common denominator is everyone’s favorite punching-bag, the social group that exists despite the lack of a single person claiming ownership to it: the hipster. Pathos and it’s denial are all that remain, and the cultural battle has taken place in arguing over who fits into that very matrix. The secret, of course, is that everyone does and no one admits it.

At some point, when you begin arguing over the difference between irony and meta-irony and meta-meta-irony, everything starts to blend together.

Of course, I’m neither denying nor arguing for something like the moment at the end of Madonna’s half-time show, where the camera pans back and ‘world peace’ is displayed in bright lights across the field as an aging pop star faux-sings the end of a song about dancing. Our overwrought complexities can’t be solved by such simpleness.

The question really is about experience. Namely: where did it go? Louis CK will brilliantly tell you how our shitty generation watches everything through a tiny smartphone screen and misses out on the glory of actual life experience. And he’s right, as always. But I wonder why it is that everyone is so worried about doing things in some novel way that they don’t do anything. In other words, why the people without the smartphones are so intent about not having a smartphone that they still don’t enjoy anything.

But then again, you shouldn’t take my word for it. I just wrote a self-aware blog post about post-modernism. I must be the biggest asshole hipster of them all.

The Idiot Race

Four years ago the ratty trust-fund communists I knew in college bought Ron Paul stickers and banners that they proudly displayed (ironically, of course). "I'm gonna vote for him because if he wins the country will collapse and the revolution will come!" one of them excitedly told me once.

That joke isn't funny anymore. It's too close to home. It's too near the bone.

Take a brief stroll through the internet and you'll find it all a-twitter with undereducated undergraduates telling you that Ron Paul's poll numbers are higher that whatever candidate's from years past were and he should be treated like a real contender because he is one, damnit. He speaks honestly and he doesn't bow to corporate pressure and he has ideas, man.

I know, I know. It's serious.

But he's not. The man wants you to vote him in so he can disassemble everything but the election commission (and maybe that could be privatized too). That's just ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. No amount of respect I have for the guy for calling bullshit or for abusing an already ruined Rick Perry can make up for that. You only really think the hyperactive Texan deserves credit because he's in the running with Rick Santorum (come on, don't make me make a shit joke) and the previously mentioned George Bush Redux (we'll miss you, bud) and Michelle Bachmann (eh).

Of course, there's also the Mormon robot who's stuck on robo-call mode and the guy who (allegedly) left his wife while she was in the hospital and wants to institute massive child labor programs and who only loses the worst name award because his competitor (yep, I'm doing it) shares a name with anal sex aftermath.

Here's the point where most people say: "How are these people serious candidates!?" Well, they're not. Yes, people take them seriously, but that's a different question--and, more importantly, it's a question no one's asking.

I don't just mean that the big, evil media is pretending Rick Santorum should be considered as a possible president and that they're secretly tricking our poor nation into believing it. I mean you should stop talking about these people with any sort of significance. Just ignore them. No, really. Next time you're chatting with some friends, talk about something boringly serious instead, like campaign finance reform. Or just take the easy way out and watch Stephen Colbert ridicule it.

Unity Without Community

It’s become trite, but nonetheless true, to cite the emptiness captured by ‘America.’ To be an American today is merely to take part in a nationalism that has mires itself in wars, ideological battles, and a post-Cold War history that prizes rhetoric over value. Many look back at the daily pledge of allegiance with a kind of knowing smirk, their pride overshadowed by propaganda. However, this does not mean that there is no truly American bond. It exists in what is missed by patriotic thought: In the place where national unity is broken into true community.

I spent last winter traveling this country–13,000 miles in total–stopping in as many towns and cities as I could find places to stay. If nothing else, I saw the way communities–real communities–exist in this nation. I missed many things, but the murky swamps of Louisiana and the pristine mountain roads of the Pacific Coast Highway all told the same tale: a tale of communities where bonds stem not from images, but from true personal interaction. These are places where social interactions have nothing to do with clichéd identities or a common brand loyalty or imagined culture, but concrete experiences and solidarity. In other words, these are not artificial cultures.

This tale (my new American thesis) came first in a shock while standing on an empty New Orleans block. The Lower Ninth Ward, pockmarked by Katrina’s indifference to a historic city’s past, limped into its sunny, spring-in-winter existence, sagging skeletal homes still labeled with warnings of gas leaks or structural instability. And yet here, in this most forgotten of places, neighbors called out greetings and jokes from homes still broken and those being rebuilt. This neighborhood, ignored as it drowned, stood out as the most removed, isolated place within a city unrivalled in America. And here I found community that grew from the cracks unaided by cultural fads.

Perhaps some parts of New Orleans attract new residents because of an aura they are supposed to have. Perhaps some imagine New Orleans in a particular light that suits them, the images of the French Quarter or the Garden District having been played out on the Real World or in movies. The effect of mass media is the dissemination of manufactured images that create self-fulfilling cultures: the culture put across in media attracts those seeking that culture, and a city is built from artificial images or what were once half-true stereotypes.

The Lower Ninth Ward, on the other hand, does not attract new residents. If anything, its supposed image keeps it from fostering this artificiality. Left out of ‘America’, the neighborhood has been left to grow on its own, shared experiences pushing neighbors together, bringing them closer, cementing and crystallizing the bonds between them.

And there is our truth–only in these circumstances does community exist. Only in being not-American can one find what is American. The forgotten of New Orleans–as well as the mocked in the Tennessee hills or the Utah deserts–find their homes in being separated, cast-off from the rest. Community, in ‘America’, finds the soil to grow only in the spaces declared different from the whole, where the content isn’t filled in beforehand with a cookie-cutter culture. Raised on symbolic flags and soaring eagles, American unity fragments itself into something that is much stronger: community.

Perhaps this is a necessary thing. Perhaps it can only ever be through negation of another that a people can define its borders, its customs, and itself. The birth of a community may only ever come from this trauma. But then the question arises: what does our bankrupted American ideal serve? Our communities exist only on the obverse of the American identity. But then is this identity necessary for the obverse to exist? In other words, must we posit the American whole in order to make community possible?

That is a question that can only be answered with a thorough theoretical investigation. But as a question it serves to mark out an important point. Our American way, unity without community, serves at most to prepare the way for the true bonds to grow behind this totalizing ideal. Mythical America cannot be: we can never exist simply as Americans. We need our hidden communities.