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At a high profile time like this, with everyone watching, if your society doesn’t express social solidarity with the tens of thousands or millions who may die of a pandemic, it doesn’t just send a message to the elderly and infirm. It sends a message to everyone on the spectrum of endangerment in your society. Everyone who feels threatened by police, economic forces, environmental threats, and more. It tells them that when they are under siege, they should expect no better, and give the same.

The cats are on the balcony, the ice rink is a giant glistening puddle, I know we have a couple cold snaps left here, but it’s starting to turn to spring, so it’s time to wrap up my winter playlists. Here’s a few albums and artists I recently discovered and really enjoyed:

Marika Hackman: Any Human Friend (2019). Hackman’s latest album is infectiously catchy and viscerally sexual. The songs are little urges and the lyrics are invested in finding the depth in those urges — the emotional resonance, sometimes even holiness. It has me bopping along dirtily and “dig[ging] for light in the eye of my thighs.”

The Weather Station: The Weather Station (2017). This Torontoise chanteuse has been making some excellent folk music for a few years, but the rock-adjacent full band arrangements she plays with on her latest lend her Joni Mitchell sensibilities a little more dynamicism. She’s a lyricist first, second, and third, though. These are all stories about measuring what we owe to each other in our relationships, and they hit with insight and intimacy. “Thirty” is a highlight if you’re anywhere around that age.

Benjamin Booker: Witness (2017) and Benjamin Booker (2014). I couldn’t easily choose between Booker’s albums, they’re both so solid and mature. Booker’s got the ability, in each bluesy vocal hook, to find those minimal 6-10 words that sink in like mantra and define the world against you. His voice is silky and husky at once. His work is politically and culturally aware, visiting hate crimes by the police (Witness), the poverty pipeline into the army (Believe), the stubborn persistence of old oppressions (Slow Coming), while also being surprisingly vulnerable when it comes to reflecting on his personal relationships. The video for “Believe” is particularly worth seeing.

Weaves: Wide Open (2017). These Torontois rockers just have a good time. The early two-punch of “Law and Panda” to “Walk Away” is great dance stuff.

The Accidentals: Odyssey (2017). This orchestral indie trio have what I’d call a young sound — by which I mean, the songs are very inward-focused, very concerned with locating the self. But the sentiment is earnest and confident, the music is tight, and the lyrics are inventive and playful, and sometimes it’s nice to close your eyes and indulge that sense that everything in the universe is bright and tragic and your new heart is a privileged thing in it.

J.E. Sunde: Now I Feel Adored (2017). J.E. Sunde has a certain quality I can’t put my finger on. He’s earnest and mature. He’s melodic and rich. He’s wholesome, in an era when to sound wholesome means old-fashioned, and he leans into that hard on songs like “Color Your Nails.” His bio reads something about how he cleans houses between record tours and he’s happy with that life. He’s the Mr. Rogers of indie rock, which is to say, a little revolutionary.

As is in vogue these days, I saw “Cats” high and I must impart to you all, the cognitively-bounded masses, that the film is a misunderstood masterpiece.

Let me be clear: I acknowledge that “Cats” is very, very bad at being a certain type of movie — which may be precisely the type of movie that you expected and/or wanted to see. This is true.

In fact, I cannot say that “Cats” is particularly “good” at being any type of movie, per se — because declaring something “good” really requires us to have a body of films in its genre to compare it against, and I’m not sure there’s anything that plays quite on the revolutionary terrain of “Cats.”

But I do believe that one can experience “Cats” with a mind opened (perhaps chemically) on a certain reading of the film that makes it, in a word, transcendent. That renders all of its foibles into expressions of a deeper theme and begs us to invent new vocabulary to describe what exactly it is doing.

Let me tell you how the expanded mind must receive “Cats,” and the concepts we need to add to our lexicon in its wake.

First: “Cats” takes its surreal premise deadly seriously at a thematic and aesthetic level.

Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote a Broadway musical about the societies of cats explaining themselves to people, starring people as cats. Consider that. Here’s how you could’ve written that synopsis just as honestly:

An alien intelligence lives among us. We have conducted our lives in parallel to it for millennia — superficially orbiting each other, but never really seeing each other, or possessing the concepts to do so.

One day, in a burst of ambition, the alien decides to try and transcribe the experience of its bizzare-o religious death cult society into a form that the humans would understand: that of a Broadway musical. To breach the bounds of empathy, they represent themselves to us in the forms of men and women — at least, men and women as they conceive them. These unreal creatures try and relate to us how the aliens conceive of themselves, individually and collectively, in our vocabulary, and tell us what gives meaning to their rituals and traditions. To make the experience familiar for its audience, the alien renders its self-expression into how it thinks a three-act structure probably works, with “characters” and “plot” and “pacing” and “mood.” It is a rough attempt, but a noble one.

The creatures we see on the screen before us, of course, are never real. Cats do not look like Rebel Wilson covered in fur. They are irreal, and yet it is precisely their irreality that hints at something more profound than a normal human character behind its eye — they are the cipher to another quality of mind altogether. We require, here, our first term of art to describe what we are seeing:

The uncanny mountain. The uncanny valley, we all know, refers to when a CGI creation looks so close to human as to almost trick us into believing it — but, perversely, that postured near-humanity registers as danger and evokes revulsion when the viewer notices all the subtle ways in which it is not quite right. The uncanny mountain, on the other hand, is a parallel and opposite experience. It is the experience of seeing something that is almost human in many ways. Yet it insists to us, openly, that it is not human, that it represents something more, something superhuman, and that makes its eerie facsimile of human features covering the unnatural thing behind them actually alluring, fascinating, the opposite effect of the uncanny valley. It is the feeling of looking on a god in its almost-human form, or a demon that slips us a peek of the horns under its hat.

That is the feeling one is overcome by watching the uncanny human-cat hybrids dance — they move like people, and yet one can detect in the artificial shiver of their graphically rendered fur as they spin and contort that they are but the shadows cast by another reality outside the cave. In that way, the question “why are the cats sexy” is the wrong one altogether — of course they are sexy, they are urgently sexual creatures locked in a fertility-death cult — the reason they might appear sexy to us is that we are only prepared to receive their essence disguised through Taylor Swift’s hips. The wrongness of their bodies itself is a metaphor for an unsurpassable separation between us and the expressive force outside our cave.

Read through this lens, all of the surrealism of the movie “Cats” resonates as an artifact of the incredible distance traversed in trying to translate cat consciousness for humans. Of course the chorus line of roaches should have small human faces, think the cats in their cute little writer’s room, for we are trying to represent them to people, after all. Of course the magical cat should be represented in a top hat, making disembodied trombones float through the air in celebration while bouquets of flowers burst out of the aether. That will be how people understand that he is magical.  Of course the story should shift, within 30 seconds, from the most tragic song’s final chord, to a laughing villain threatening his victim in a dark alley, to the broad and joyful chords of “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” as that is what the humans would call an “emotional transition.”

In this way, the film is able to overcome the viewer with laughter at its absurdities without ceding to the emptiness of camp. It employs what I believe is the second piece of new aesthetic vocabulary that “Cats” requires from us, deep camp.

“Camp,” of course, occurs when an artistic creation is so poor (often deliberately) at mimicking the reality that it purports to represent that the viewer laughs at its shortcomings. “Deep camp,” par contre, exhibits its shortcomings as thematically relevant to the meta-oeuvre. When we are watching “Cats,” we know, as we have already established, that we are not looking at real cats. Moreover, we are not intended to be deceived that we are looking at real cats. We are fully aware at all times that these are not actual cats, and we are invited to experience their irreality as a gesture towards an impossible translation — that of the cats presenting for us a version of their reality in a format in which it cannot naturally exist.

It is therefore with joy and acceptance that we greet the absurdity of Ian McKellan dumbly stooped with his face hovering half an inch over a bowl of milk, badly lapping at it with his all-too-human tongue, a poor representation of catness indeed — and yet noble in its affect, as we are made to grapple, in that image, with how deep the chasm lies between our two realities (Sir Ian’s and the cat’s). It is with a kind of respect that we hear Idris Elba’s laughably feeble hissss at his co-stars and how unspeakably stupid the whole line of performers appears simulating “cat applause” by alternating their left and right paws up and down. It is unbearably bad, and that is fitting, and its badness is itself a source of meaning in the art.

[It is, in fact, sometimes so unbearably campy that I cannot accept that the creators of this masterpiece did not know what the movie was doing. Here is their self-aware signature, if nowhere else so clearly. Sir Ian McKellan yowling in cat does not happen by accident. Sir Ian always knows what the movie is doing. He is a knight.]

The third term of art we require to appreciate “Cats” is what I would call decriticalization. It describes the sensation of being taken out of one’s critical mind, leaving one more receptive and vulnerable to the appeals of an art. As one watches a film committed to its well-established genre, one is able to separate oneself from the experience of the film in order to critique its execution of certain expected genre elements. In “Saving Private Ryan,” for example, we can stop and appreciate how realistic the war cinematography is, in part because we are already anticipating the beats of the story while we are supposed to be experiencing it. In a romantic comedy, we may groan at how predictable the plot is, or appreciate small subversions of the formula. In a Marvel movie, we may spend the entire running time critiquing style.

In “Cats,” the film loudly declares early on that the viewer is not permitted to anticipate anything intelligible. As the second cat we are introduced to jovially sets enslaved human-mice hybrids to play in a cupboard band while swallowing human-cockroach hybrids, the viewer is violently decriticalized. We are neutered of our expectations, and with them, our critical faculties. We are confronted with the possibility that this movie could do anything — anything at all — and so experience it in a state of wonder and/or suspense at its vision and/or terror.

It is this suspension of the critical mind that grants the film latitude to play emotionally on the viewer. Because we have not steeled ourselves against the tropes of any genre, I am in full and genuine suspense when “The Magical Mister Mistoffelees” becomes a public trial over whether the titular cat can reapparate the kidnapped leader of the cats before she is murdered by a criminal cat on a remote gangplank. Will he do it? Are the first four times he has failed just baiting the audience’s expectations for a final success, and emotional release? Or will he fail at his ultimate attempt, too, and be disemboweled by Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat in retribution? I have no beliefs left. These are all possible worlds.

In this state of critical vulnerability, even the tired conventional appeals of “Cats” have greater resonance. When Jennifer Hudson wails her sad little cat song, I can’t gird myself against that pain. This may partially have to do with the weed. When the cat society breathlessly receives its hallowed leader, Old Deuteronomy, I too feel touched by a transcendent presence as she passes, grazing their blessed cheeks.

***

Two notes on “Cats” that do not fit precisely into the themes of this review otherwise:

First, I have not seen the original 1998 PBS recording in its entirety, though I have seen 15 minutes or so of it in passing. I have never, of course, attended a live performance. Nevertheless, I could immediately detect which song was the new one, “Beautiful Ghosts,” and whispered as much in my best demure, not-at-all-high aside to my wife in the theater, who confirmed. There is something in that new song’s lyric and melody that sounds too easily human. In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s original score, every song subverts your musical expectation in some way — a slightly wonky tune, a lyric that drags on a few syllables after it should have returned to tonic. It all sounds like a jerky translation of a story that might have been written, originally, in cat.

Second, the moment when Sir Ian McKellan topples his cat enemy from the end of a long pier by forcefully exclaiming “I am Firefrorefiddle!” reminded me of another career moment of his involving an enemy on a long pier. Although “You shall not pass” doesn’t quite have the same oomph as “Firefrorefiddle!” I expect the internet will remedy the original LOTR footage for us soon enough.

Come From Away, about a small town in Newfoundland that takes in stranded passengers when US airspace is shut down after 9/11, is a deceptively affecting piece that weights its unassuming premise with a kind of sleight of emotional transference. So I found myself, unexpectedly, crying within the first twenty minutes of the performance. Based on what I’d heard about the show, I’d thought that the emotional valence would be about welcoming the stranger (which may not be surprising, I suppose – our culture does tend to interpret every story through contemporary politics). And on the surface, that is what it’s about. But the gravity of the show is all about people processing mass tragedy.

Art that deals with mass tragedy has a tradeoff to make. It can hover directly over the tragedy, and that can give the audience a real perspective of what happened and what it was like to be there, which is vital. But it also shuts us down emotionally. Watching a mass tragedy occur, the scale of loss is inhuman, numbing, emotionally inaccessible to us. Our animal brains know very well that when you see a cloud of ash sweep across a city like the fist of God swallowing people whole (or a gas chamber in Germany, or a machete genocide in Rwanda) that this is not a time or place to access our feelings. This is a time to run. Our other systems shut down. The fully engaged audience comes out battered, but not necessarily enlightened or cathartic.

To offer catharsis about a mass tragedy, focus just to the left of the tragedy itself. A rural town in Newfoundland, just turning on the news (the abandoned building where the pianist discovers a piano that he can’t yet play, the hotel in Hotel Rwanda, etc.). You take the audience someplace safe. And then you give them a smaller, more human-scale drama onto which they might project all of the feelings that inform that day, about which they can’t directly speak, because that surrogate of the experience is what we need to process it.

A less emotionally intelligent show, for example, might give you a glimpse into what was happening in New York on that day, just to set the context. But Manhattan doesn’t appear in Come From Away. With a conspicuous discipline, what happened there is not even spoken of. We see people turning the radio on. And then, with ashen faces, telling other people to turn the radio on. When the passengers disembark the plane at nightfall and ask the woman running the shelter finally what happened, she struggles to find the words, and then tells them that the televisions are on in the cafeteria. They can see for themselves.

In any other context – say, an airline goes bankrupt in midflight – the spectacle of a few dozen planes full of international strangers without a common language and a crate full of animals plus a rare pregnant baboon touching down in a rural backwater where everyone has to run in circles to find food and toiletries is a setup for a comedy. What happens to these stranded people for five days doesn’t particularly matter in any material sense. Whether the Newfoundlanders, in a vacuum, are hospitable or a bit prickish isn’t that important, because we know that on most days the world is full of casual indecencies and we probably wouldn’t believe a fairy tale about general Canadian saintliness anyways. But on 9/11, as everyone getting off that plane and everyone on the ground is struggling to come to terms with an act of mass inhumanity just a few hours away, the tiny trials of this nowheresville becomes weighted with processing that trauma. And suddenly, whether everyone gets hot showers deeply matters. Whether people give up their barbecues to the community center is important. Whether somebody goes into the cargo hold and makes sure the cats are fed is paramount – because however morally insignificant these particular passengers are over a given five-day layover, it is the sharp insistence on decency and order and kindness that we need to see, regardless of who receives it or how effective it is or whether the world is really any better for it. We need to believe that these forces respond when they’re affronted, whether they can heal Manhattan or only make tea for group of inconvenienced strangers. We need that insistence for its own sake.

In that sense, I think Come From Away could have been about anywhere and maintained resonance. And whether the folk who touched down in Iceland were greeted with cocoa or forgotten at the airport, the emotional heft of that story, about people trying to come to terms with how to respond in all the little ways that affirm or deny their humanity in the days after a traumatic event, would be intact. That’s the sucker punch that I didn’t quite expect walking into the theatre, focused on the foreground of the story. Just watching people probe their humanity in the shadow of that trauma makes you realize what that trauma really meant.

Many thanks to Kelsey Trom, I have a quasi-poem out in the 2019 Tusculum Review (for paid subscribers only). They published a selection out of a piece I’ve had kicking around for a long time, a 17-poem suite titled “Fable.”

Announcement here: https://ttr.tusculum.edu/2019/11/13/2019-issue-launched/

“Fable” is a longer series that develops this archetypal myth of a girl named Marina who falls mute and how she recovers her voice again. I’ve had it for some time, but don’t get an option to submit it very often (not a ton of publications looking to put out epic poetry). The selection that The Tusculum Review chose to publish comes from the second section of the piece — where the angel steals into her room and takes something from her.

I’d still love to see the entire suite printed together one day. I’m not primarily a poet, so it may wait a little while before there’s a manuscript-length collection to send it out with.

Among all the ways of interpreting society’s generalized angst at Mark Zuckerberg, the most helpful, I think, is becoming the call for more publicly supported media. See, e.g., this CIGI piece.

I’ve been known to spout off about the corrupting effects of new media on democracies here on the blog. Public media is one route you could take from here, so is banning advertising in the news (i.e., everyone is a subscription model), licensing web media sources, hiring the truth panels and suppressing misleading sources on Google and Facebook. You could probably come up with your own list.

Many thanks to Nadia Wolnisty, a poem of mine, “Wolves”, is out in Thimble Lit Mag.

Many thanks to Jason Jordan, I have a new flash piece of parable out today at decomP magazine, “The Tree and the Worktable.”

I have a rule that if something is ever stuck in your head, you should probably just write it. This began as a little moral argument I was having in my head, walking across town. And I had this self-rejoinder, well, as you all know from the famous parable about uh … well uh …. and it felt like something about moral relativism that we should have in the vocabulary as shorthand, but I didn’t know what I was reaching for. So I sat down and wrote one.