Jeffrey Lewis is a cult boyfriend

Overheard at his recent gig in Bristol: "Everyone here thinks that they know Jeffrey Lewis". And it's true; Jeffrey Lewis invites a sort of over-familiarity, both on and off record. It may be to do with the fact that he doesn't so much sing as he does speak with little affectation and a blatant disinterest in technique. Raw vocals are an obvious summation of his voice, perhaps but it’s a perfectly apt description. He has a distinct conversational tone which suggests that there is no distance, no skin between him and the listener. It is easy to feel like you are on intimate terms with him, especially when his American drawl breaks into a squeak ('Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song') or when he can't help laughing at his own sexual inadequacies ('Life'). As he pours his stream-of-consciousness lyrics into your ear, you believe every word that he is saying. It's like being involved in an intensely personal and private conversation with a good friend in a public place. Other people might end up hearing their words but still, their words were only ever intended for you.

Jeffrey Lewis is losing his hair. In Bristol, he tried to hide it by having it longer in the front and sweeping it into a cool guy haircut. But when he bends down over his guitar, the bald spot is there for everyone to see. But that is the appeal of Lewis. He feels so achingly human, so very accessible, so easy to relate to. He does not look down upon the masses as this blasé, cooler-than-thou rock star; his popularity and relative success has not turned him into one of life’s winners. After all, his songs have always concerned his failings in life: both the big ones which slap you in the face and the small ones which persistently itch. He is hopeless with women; he is no good with drugs. And when they’re at the best, his songs manage to walk the line between emotional honesty and a suitable level of self-awareness. ‘ Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror’ is still his best ever example of line walking. It’s a dark tale, a jet black comedy for our times, instantly recognisable to anyone who has had artistic pretensions. With lyrics that are as tight as telephone wires, Lewis both laments and lambasts the hipster indie rock lifestyle, where studied aloofness masks a desperate need to be validated: ‘noble starving artists fighting hard to feed our egos’. Lewis is making fun of Williamsburg scenesters but he also knows that he is part of that crowd and he shares their concerns and their fragility. He knows too well their insecurities. The lingering fear that behind dark glasses and great art, there is nothing but unoriginal and unpoetic brutality, is quite horrifying but also, quite funny.

Jeffrey Lewis with the amazing Peter Stampfel

Jeffrey Lewis is, in many ways, the culmination of his influences. He knows this, naming himself as a ‘cover artist in disguise’. The only way to get over the anxiety of influence is to accept that it exists. Lewis’s strength lies in a respectful and deferential deconstruction of his influences in order to produce a reading of folk/ punk/ rock music that is his own. Sure, he often gets it wrong, usually by tipping the balance between irony and sincerity, therefore, becoming either disingenuous or melodramatic. He always risks the possibility of becoming a parody of himself, not a cult boyfriend but a self-proclaimed cult boyfriend, too affected, too self-absorbed, too navel gazing and stoic to be any good in bed. But the majority of the time, he comes across as someone with no interest in trying to be cooler than he is, happy to expose the jugular, to write down the bones, to lay bare. And he’s probably a good lay as well.

The Devil Knows My Name: The ambivalence of motherhood in 'We Need to Talk about Kevin'

There are very few mainstream anti-mothering films. Those that do exist tend to be horror-films which essentially take the pregnancy-as-infection/invasion discourse to its logical conclusions. Considering the massive physiological and hormonal changes the female body is forced to undergo through pregnancy, along with an ever growing baby bump which looks exactly like a massive tumour, it seems that pregnancy is uncomfortably close to being a disease. Films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Brood express this instinctual fear that pregnancy is not necessarily experienced as a powerful maternal bond which connects mother and baby as kin but rather, as an outside colonisation of the female body where a woman is forcibly disconnected from her own body, unable to recognise that which grows within her as a part of herself. This feeling can only be made worse by the societal expectation that she will be suddenly transformed into a paradigm of maternal instinct from the moment of conception. In this way, those films that do explore pregnancy as disease function as one of the only ways to offer up an alternative narrative of motherhood, one replete with the anxieties and fears that are so thoroughly jettisioned from normative ideals. Of course, they can only do this under the protective guise of horror or science-fiction which ensures that any controversy can be made palatable through an insistence on its fictive nature.

We Need to Talk about Kevin refuses to hide behind such notions although its director, Lynne Ramsey, has described it as a psychological horror. A few genre conventions aside, the film concerns itself with the reality of mother-hood, with the unsettling fact that it is possible to mother a child and from the moment of birth, feel nothing but absence. After giving birth to Kevin, Eva (Tilda Swinton) sits in a hospital bed, staring into the distance as her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) dissolves into his own deluded world, in love with the new baby. In one image, we see how isolating it must be to feel so separate from what is undeniably your own flesh and blood. And of course there are reminders of this everywhere, from the accusing looks from other women as she pushes a crying Kevin in his pram, to the similarity of their faces as Kevin grows into a coldly beautiful young boy. Precocious and dangerously intelligent, Kevin very quickly begins to actively participate in Eva’s ambivalent experiences of motherhood because he refuses to recognise her as kin either. Actually, he more than refuses to go along with her attempts to fulfil the traditional duties of mother as play-mate, teacher and confidante; he reveals these enactments as pure performance, reminding her that she is merely going through the motions. ‘Just because you're used to something doesn't mean you like it’ he says to her. ‘You're used to me’. She knows there is no point in contesting his implication.

We Need to Talk about Kevin has been called an anti-Oedipal film but I think that it is precisely the spectre of Oedipus which haunts its main concern- the relationship between Eva and Kevin. Really, Kevin is absolutely devoted to his mother in that his only desire is to destroy her. It is a commitment which becomes obsessive. Poor naïve Franklin barely comes into it except as a pawn in a terse battle of wills between mother and son. Kevin only pretends to be close to his father in order to more thoroughly torment his mother. Any identification is pure simulacrum; the mere fact that he can so easily manipulate Franklin means that there is no fear of castration here- Kevin does not see Franklin as being anywhere near his equal. Updating Freud’s original theory, Jacque Lacan envisioned the Oedipus complex as that which ‘superimposes the kingdom of culture upon the person, marking his or her introduction to Symbolic Order’ (Escrits). If we were going to read this film purely through a psychoanalytical lens, it could be argued that it is no surprise that Kevin becomes the amoral creature that he is. No resolution of the Oedipus complex means that he never has to recognise a symbolic system that is independent of him i.e. a societal moral code. Instead, Kevin is a grossly exaggerated Ubermensch, pure cartoon nihilism as read by a smart but stubborn teenager. ‘There is no point’ he says, dead eyes staring at the computer screen whilst his mother looks at him with hopeless despair.

And of course there is a vague sense of sexual tension between the two, although it’s hard to say if this was intentional or not. A lot of this comes down to the actor himself, Erza Miller, who is all pouty-lipped and snake hips, already sort of screaming sex anyway. The camera emphasises this physicality as it focuses in on specific parts of his body, the male gaze in reverse. He is nearly always shirtless or in tiny t-shirts which ride up to expose his stomach. It all adds up to an overt and somewhat disturbing sexiness, considering that Kevin is supposed to only be fifteen. But it adds a layer of Freudian complexity to what was already a deeply ambivalent relationship between him and Eva. He is not embarrassed about his sexuality; if anything, he parades it in front of her. In a scene where she catches him masturbating, he barely flinches. Instead, he continues, his eyes fixed resolutely on her until she closes the door, disturbed and offended. There is definitely a fuck you attitude there but there is also a sense of him displaying his sexuality as a dark threat. When he speaks in aggressive sexual terms about the girls in school, he is almost pushing her, daring her to admit that she has no traditional maternal feelings for him. With every languid movement, with every smirk, he forces a sexual element into their relationship which reminds her and us that this is no traditional mother and son paradigm. Indeed, what we understand to be natural and essentialised regarding being a mother or a son is suggested to be a societal fiction which has merely been naturalised into our present discourse.

Of course, despite everything, Eva and Kevin cannot do without each other. Ultimately, Kevin goes the way of Oedipus Rex, disposing of the father, finally alone with the mother. Towards the end of the film, we witness Eva fixing a room for Kevin which is identical to the one in their old house. It is understood that even though he has committed awful crimes against her, he will come back home after he is released from prison. She continues to visit him. She takes the punishment for her son’s sins with mute acceptance. And she accepts that he cannot really tell her why he did what he did. Perhaps because she knows deep down, that everything he does is about her. She is his entire life. Really, until the day that he enacted his will against a bunch of unsuspecting school children, the only person who knew what he was capable of was his mother. She was the only person he allowed to see it; in a twisted way, she is the only person he trusts. ‘It was the most honest thing you ever did’, he says, referring to a moment of domestic violence which he used as a gun held up to her head until the day of his crime. Her disavowal of motherhood means that she sees Kevin for whom and what he is, unlike Franklin who buries his head in blind paternal devotion. Despite his sociopathic lack of empathy, he seems to respect her for this. It is hard to tell whether his emotional reaction in their final scene is genuine or just another manipulation but therein lays the importance of the film. Everything is resolutely ambiguous when it comes to these mother-son interactions. There are no easy and ready answers.

And so too is this film’s honest and unflinching presentation of motherhood as it exposes the myths surrounding that strange ontological status, those very myths which continue to isolate and imprison women. Motherhood hangs over Eva like a dead weight, like an ill-fitting jumper. She never quite embodies it. But who can ever really embody that word, that notion- mother- when it is so heavy, so stuffed full with connotation and expectations and demands? We Need to Talk about Kevin is unique amongst modern mainstream cinema for daring to ask and encourage debate around central questions regarding motherhood. What does it mean to be a mother? Are you made a mother by virtue of giving birth or do you become one? What if you never really become one despite giving birth? What if you give birth to something that you despise? What to do if the devil doesn’t only know your name but shares your name and your blood?

Excerpt from short story collection

Excerpt from a short story written by me. It will be part of a four story collection (illustrated by Andrew Godfrey) which you will be able to buy from me for £1.50 if you come to the Bristol Comic and Zine Fair on the 25th.

" After paying for their room, they seem to forget about sleep and invite me in to share their alcohol. They have a lot of stories and they want someone to tell them to. There was doing coke in a Memphis jazz club, where they were later thrown out for trying to sing along to the trumpets. There was passing through New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and trying to communicate with the dead that they truly believed still haunted there. There was running out of gas halfway through Tennessee and having to sell Jenny’s vintage clothing at the side of the road for gas money. They picked up a stray kitten there, which they later gave away to some kids. They regretted the decision now. ‘Those kids were evil’, Steve says. ‘Tough little shits. They probably burned the kitten alive for kicks. But we were too stoned at the time to realise’.

The road stories keep on coming but I hear nothing about who they were before they started driving, whether they are married or having an affair, what they do for a living, not even their ages. It’s as if the past doesn’t exist for them, as if starting up that car erased all that had happened before. And in fact, the absence of past does not seem like an absence at all because it’s all about now, right now. What others might call absence is only irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. I wonder if that is what freedom is; having no past and not even noticing that you have no past."

'Berlin, My Heart' in The Pygmy Giant

'Berlin, My Heart' has been published in The Pygmy Giant.

Mini-comic on Borderline Personality Disorder

The beginnings of this collaboration between myself and a close friend can be found on the blog 'Better, Drawn' here. It is a bit unsettling to start the process of being open about something that has previously only ever been revealed on a need-to-know basis but also, strangely exciting.

It needs to be said that this panel is not going to be completely indicative of the work as a whole. It would be easy to just write about BPD negatively but I don't want to further perpetuate the stereotypes and associated stigma of the illness. It is certainly possible, with time and the right treatment, to live life well around and alongside BPD, if not recover completely. I don't think that this is said enough. Having BPD- or any mental illness- doesn't turn you into some cartoon version of a lunatic or a bunny boiler or someone incapable of rational thought. That said, whilst it is important to remove the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate that mental health/ illness always exists on a spectrum, it is also important to legitimise the very real presence of mental illness when it does strike. Otherwise, we risk suggesting that it doesn't really exist, thereby negating the validity of diagnosis and subsequent treatment. And then, what was meant to be liberating could only end up repeating prior injuries.

I was diagnosed when I was nineteen but it wasn't until last summer that I, my family and my doctors started taking my treatment seriously (being sectioned tends to do that). It shouldn't have taken so long and so much for all of us to get to that point. Recovery is hard enough without the incredible delay of treatment. A year later, I am nowhere near done. I may never be truly done. But in the meantime, the culmination of medication, treatment, good friends and vigilance has meant that I am coping. I laugh a lot in an obnoxiously loud way which I'm no longer embarassed about because I am truly grateful for that moment of joy. I try to enjoy myself and try to make sure other people enjoy my presence. I immerse myself in as many good things and good people as I can. I believe that one day I really will believe that I'm resilient enough to withstand the battle wounds of BPD.

And actually, I'm okay with the half-light between well and unwell, considering where I have been. With the actual possibility that one day, the lingering shadows will recede and I'll find myself bathed in a light that somehow makes my skin shimmer.

Image by Andrew Godfrey

Judith Butler and Materiality (from dissertation)

"Butler’s definition of materiality may differ from those who consider the body as that which is before signification but still, there is a kind of materiality to be found in her work; that which can be best be described as materialisation. These emerging bodies, implicated as they are in discourse, are important because their very presence, which can never truly be made abject, has the power to threaten and subvert the hetero-normative matrix. However, she is also insistent on the contingent and non-foundational nature of identity referents as this is the only way to ensure that it can become ‘a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance’ (Bodies That Matter, 231).This is a hugely important statement and one which I believe must be taken seriously. We cannot presume that it is possible to discuss materiality as a pure and sanctified ontology. As we continue to navigate the complicated terrain of materiality in terms of female bodies, Butler’s work becomes more important than ever in its commitment to the opening up and democratising of the terms in which we speak of the body."

© 2011 Emma Mould

Mutual Predators

My dad was at the pub in his usual seat. He didn’t look up when I came in, didn’t look up until I was standing awkwardly right in front of him. He looked tired. He didn’t have a drink in front of him and his fingers kept rearranging themselves in restless lattice patterns. His yellowed nicotine fingertips looked strangely beatific, like stigmata. The pub air felt heavy like the start of a migraine.

‘You gonna get me a drink or what?’

I automatically put my hands in my pockets, traced the outlines of a few coins. What I had to live on for the rest of the week.

‘Buy one yourself’.

He sneered at me. He had a devastating sneer. It felt like someone pulling your trousers down in front of a girl you really liked. And of course, she catches a glimpse of your sad flaccid cock and laughs, all mean-mouthed and gorgeous. ‘Look, it’s the least you can fucking do. I’m the one that’s been dead a week, after all’.

‘That’s why I’m quite surprised to see you here’.

‘I’m not going anywhere without a drink’.

I glanced at the bartender. I knew her, sort of, and was pretty sure that she’d sub me one if I put in a few words about my current circumstances and looked suitably distraught. I had been hoping for a bit of privacy, a bit of space to drink myself into somewhere new. I was in no mood for a reunion.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’

‘Are you thick or something? I want a drink’.

‘That’s what killed you’.

‘So? Better to be killed by that than something less enjoyable’.

We eyed each other, on guard, mutual predators. He broke the silence. ‘Alright, forget it. Just sit down here for a minute. Come on, sit down next to your old Dad’.

‘Why?’

His eyes flashed and I knew then that the tug-of-war was over. I was to do as I was told. ‘Just fucking sit down’.

I sat down.

‘Do you remember when I first caught you with one of my beers?’

I tensed up with the cold steel of bad memories. I waited for a second until I was certain my voice was steady. ‘Yeah. You took me down to the off-licence and we spent the whole of your dole money on alcohol. All kinds. Then we went home and you poured it all together in several of mum’s mixing bowls. I remember that it smelt horrible. Then you made me fill up every cup in the house with the stuff. Then you made me drink it. After a while, when I felt really sick and started to refuse, you held me down and pinched my nose until I opened my mouth’.

He nodded. ‘Well, you had to learn. You threw up a lot, do you remember? I got you to throw up into that piece of shit fruit bowl your mother found at a jumble sale’.

‘And then you made me drink the vomit as well’.

‘Well, I wasn’t about to clean up after you’.

‘No. Of course not’. It was the texture of it all that was actually worse than the taste. The remains of my school dinner swimming in bile and acid. To this day, I can only drink vodka, neat, over ice. Anything else tastes like a contamination.

‘Anyway. That’s why you owe me a drink. I got you drunk once; you can return the favour’.

I’ve had enough. Even dead, he can be an unimaginable bastard. I get up to leave but then suddenly, he grabs my hands from across the table. His eyes bore into mine and they look like dead space.

‘You should hate me’, he says. ‘Why did you never hate me?’

I have no real answer for this. ‘You were my father’.

He shakes his head slowly, deliberately. ‘You should try to start hating me. It might help. Promise you’ll try’.

I pull my hands away, wipe them on my jeans. ‘I’ll give it a go’, I say as I turn my back on him and leave the pub. Outside, it’s beginning to get dark and it’ll keep getting dark. Nothing can stop the night from falling.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Image: Larry Clark, 'Untitled 1963' from Tulsa