Insidious Lassitude

As part of what will doubtless be a returning theme, here is a post about a famous (relatively speaking) vegetarian. I may use subsequent posts to evince the eons-old postulation that vegetarianism begets a more artistic disposition. And a clearer understanding of one’s place in the cosmos. Amongst other things. 

But before I get amongst those other things, Jenny Lewis has a new record coming out later this month. She’s a vegetarian, has an artistic disposition, and thus logic has my thesis proved incontrovertibly. I need only write up my findings in an irreverent prose style befitting of my ’significant findings about the human condition I’ve garnered from pop culture/art and delivered to the people with whimsy’ schtick, and I shall surely be acclaimed as a ghetto-vaulting populariser of philosopher responsible for social reform and the empowerment of the masses. I’ll be regarded as a kind of 21st century Bertrand Russell, my teachings allowing the downtrodden to escape the monopolising clutches of Wal-Mart, reject 99p battery farmed chickens and embrace a self-sufficient vegetarianism which halts global warming kyboshing meltdown and allowing man to live on for centuries in a newly fecund gaiaed-up world climate. All this from my insights into a new record by a vegetarian? But oh, what insights they must be.    

Before I commence writing up this proposed thesis, I’ll first conclude this unfocussed blog post about the record. Ok, here goes: I’ve not heard it, but it’s probably very good. Now, back to more fabulous freewheeling drivel from which great truths of humanity can be gleaned. Earlier, before I started to imagine emancipation and a Wal-Mart-free world, I was - rather more prosaically - thinking I could also file this post within the ‘culturally dislocated’ or ’culturally hard to place’ Insidious Lassitude dossier on (relatively) famous people. Cultural dislocation and vegetarianism are one and the same where I grew up. Being a vegetarian is but one of the incongruent things a person like me could get up to in a place like this. Others could include, say, being a bookish fop, knowing what the lumpenproletariat is, or not being whacked-out on horse tranquilisers. Though, if I’ll allow myself to betray this whilst writing a high-falutin’ discursive essay thing, I also digest celebrity gossip, have on occasion bought slacks and plimsols at Topman, and know rather a lot about about football - especially for a vegetarian, to whom stereotypically the game is boorish and unsophisticated and rather too un-limp-wristed. I mock because the lie is clearly given to this good/bad, low-brow/high-brow, working-class/some other-class paradigm. Lest it seems I’m setting this up in too (or two) simple terms, the point is not that one set is good and the other bad or whatever - the point is that they aren’t even necessarily a set; a single person needn’t be a bookish fop or a pot-bellied football goon. One can be both, as it were.

As if to prove this I shall now recount a neatly appropriate football anecdote from my vast mental repository of things I read in the Sun. (It almost certainly wasn’t the Sun, for reasons which’ll become clear.) Chelsea and England midfield dynamo and goal-machine (yuh huh, I can deploy this vernacular too) Frank Lampard has always been regarded as somewhat of a outsider in football. His father - West Ham legend Frank Lampard Snr - used the money he made in the game to send his son to private school, and ghetto-vaulting East End boy Frank Jr even has a GSCE in Latin to show for it. The working-class that traditionally make up the majority of football players and fans have always seen this (often perhaps only subconsciously) as a betrayal of the family’s working-class roots and a slight on the working-class culture - of which football is itself a big part. Lampard Jr has consequently forever been regarded with suspicion and considered a ‘Charlie’ or a charlatan. Hence even when he was voted the second best player in the world he was still routinely barracked by England supporters who still seemed unwilling to accept him as an Englishman. And hence too the hollering of ‘Fat Frank’ from the terraces - a nickname that seems less about Lampard’s physical appearance and is more indicative of fans’ distrust of the class outsider - since the industrial revolution the fat have been up in the townhouse scoffing roast while the scamps were running the machines on the factory floor. Up in the townhouse is no place for a modern dynamic midfielder to be; witness the footballing vernacular: the midfield is the ‘engine room’.

As an extension of this, it might also be worth noting the English football fan’s enduring love afair with Lampard’s England midfield partner, Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard. The received wisdom of the football fan is that Gerrard and Lampard can’t both be accomodated in the same England team as they’re too similar. Too similar in footballing senses - both box-to-box attacking central midfielders, both goal-scorers, both deadball takers, both among the best in the world. They are habitually discussed in what football managers would doubtless called an ‘either/or situation’; the accomodation of them both in the team makes the team unbalanced and dysfunctional. The similarity as players - what they are ostensibly judged on - makes clear the dis-similarities which are really what the face-off is about. They make a revealing binary construction which the average football fan and the gutter press barely make any attempt to disguise (though they’re probably not aware of it): Fat Frank the untrustworthy class deserter, and Stevie G the loyal working-class hero. One is northern - from the industrial heartland; one is southern - from the economic centre. One is a fat stroller; the other an athletic grafter. One is vaguely aristocractic to the average footie bloke; the other is a scouser. One has a Spanish wife; the other took a local lass. One is a dark handsome man who earns £130 grand a week; the other is an earthy rugged man of the people who ‘plays for the shirt’. Lampard probably even eats organic vegetarian food at a gastropub, for God’s sake; while Stevie is dependably nourished with hearty down-to-earth fare. One of these men is bad; and one is good. As football players there’s nothing to choose between them. But after all, this is a national team, and so what is really being mostly laid bare and discussed through a veil of footballing euphemisms is the identity, the consolidation of the meta-narrative, the appearance, maybe even the morality, of the homeland.  

As I have neatly demostrated the world of low-brow/working-class football can be appropriated to my higher-brow/some other-class learned writings. The twain shall meet and be effectvely conflated. Identity needn’t be delineated so crudely, and indeed can encompass a kind of multiplicity of sub-identities. This multiplicity of identities is of course a principal feature of postmodern society, and has problematised the project of the self. These sub-indentities (as I am now calling them, without ever having considered if that tag makes any sense) can perhaps be confusing to one’s sense of self, and there are identity-forming activities/interests which militate against one another - and there could, I suppose, be those which are deleterious to each other and morph the self into an unbearable contested being. But let’s lighten up! So, to get back to Jenny Lewis, here she is: shimmering hot pants-wearing, fashion-curious, former child star, and LA resident. And here she also is: vegetarian, erstwhile vegan, politically and ethically engaged, articulate songwriter, who says California is a ‘desperate’ place. Because she grew up there she says that she spends most of her time avoiding ’almost everyone’ she’s ever met. Familiar. 

Her last record was called Rabbit Fur Coat. The Independent said of it: ’It retains a thoroughly modern feel thanks to songs whose bittersweet and sharply observed lyrics reflect the US’s current moral crisis and articulate Lewis’s confusion at a God-fearing/God-searching America splintering under the weight of religious, racial and economic divisions, while California basks complacently in its shallow obsessions with cash, youth and beauty’. But, though Lewis feels alienated and repulsed by Vegas and LA and California, there is a part of her which she says is always drawn to fashion and appearance and the Californian shimmering of a spectacle. The assimilation of this with the rest of her identity is a constant project. She needn’t live in LA, but chooses to continue to do so. There is a sense of not belonging to her home, to her culture, to her peers. In a broader sense, maybe this is something that many American artists have been engaged with post 9/11, and the search for a national identity, narrative, and morality is certainly a recurring theme in recent US art, Rabbit Fur Coat included.   

David Byrne - another (more) famous vegetarian - says of Lewis: ’her lyrics are some of the best around - they take some unexpected turns and hit some resonant truths in completely unclichéd ways.’ And then, dismissively of her penchant for what he calls ’spangley’ dresses and acoutrements: ’The showbiz elements are meant ironically’. Perhaps they have the playful touch of irony, but I think Lewis has spoken candidly enough times to make clear that she really does love spangley things. They are maybe not just acoutrements to her personality and identity.

Can she - or anyone - be a serious artist with a genuinely intelligent and enagaged agenda, and also sustain and furnish a love of designer frocks and LA parties? Are these oppositional interests, or can they arrise together and co-exist? The binary construction is depth vs surface. And like dark and light, good and bad - and even knowing and unknowing - we know one by its counterpart or opposition - Fat Frank’s not one of us, he’s other; Stevie G is one of us. In her essay ‘Some Thoughts on Feeling at Home’ Lily Markiewicz argues, in more complexity than I can be bothered to go into here, that we also understand, feel, or know involvement through disengagement - and that it is the principal project of art to alchemise this binary construction into a mobilisation of our comprehension of our self and identity. Artistic practice, she says, is a the making of place which is synonymous with feeling at home. But - and this may be the most pertinent point for those who are displaced in their own culture or hometown or country or team - home ‘references other meanings of the word to accomodate: to become familiar and even familial. Yet in paradoxical turn, the notion of becoming accomodated also references a dimension of already inscribed ‘unbelonging”.

Rather than become further waylaid with Markiewicz’s sematics, I’m grasping for a Talking Heads lyric to liberate a rather less academic denouement from this journey - a lyric to be the ’two’ of the old journalistic ‘one-two’ article punchline. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ has been going through my head, and led me into this Talking Heads cul-de-sac, so there must be within it a line or two that can redeem me from this dead-end and get me out on the open road to a dazzlingly neat and perceptive conclusion. I think I’m just striving to make some comment on feeling alienated by you’re own culture, or being bereft of signposts in your hometown, or looking for a reflection of yourself in the window of these places, or just seeing a reflection of the clothes draped on an estranged and unrecogised body. Or something. As the Independent says, Rabbit Fur Coat was about all of these things; the wish to find your self - or something else - despite yourself. 

When my brain refrains the Once in a Lifetime chorus, I think I’m thinking of it as an interogation of the need to be one thing - have one fixed self or identity - in your life, and that there are things which are untenable with that. There are things which people are concurrently, things which seem deletrious to one another, but the challenge is to sustain them all, or to encompass or accomodate them all within one sense of your own identity. Maybe these could be things like being poor and valuable, rich and ethical, or other things which are posited as competing dichotomous essences. Like being pretty and intelligent, or hot-panted and literate, or spangley and serious. The project is to accomodate the unbelonging of ‘this is not my life / this is not my house’.  

Here’s an MP3 of the title track from Lewis’ new record. The record may be a further set of ruminations on the perpetual wrestle betwixt a self/God/others/internal and external personal identities that we present to the world and ourselves and which life enternally unresolves.

‘He took one look at my face / And said ‘I can fix the hole is you’

Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue