Tag: art

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A Subtle Haunting: Lana Del Rey’s “Flipside” Video

MHE


In the summer before the pandemic, I’d begun boxing with more seriousness. But unlike Thailand—where joining a fight gym was a way of life and could easily consume entire days—in Budapest lessons were offered piecemeal. A few hours a week wasn’t enough. So I’d put on my twelve-ounce gloves and take out my aggression on the enormous ceramic furnace in my rented bedroom, aiming at the corner to approximate body shots and hooks. Each strike, loud and flush as a handclap, sent shockwaves through my arms and down my spine. Still, I kept digging at it, this unmovable object, until I felt my wrist begin to give under the stress.


I was fresh off six months of fight training, eager to return to Thailand for what I hoped would be my second Muay Thai bout. Between relationships—ending one in memory and beginning another in real time—I fell asleep and woke up to Lana Del Rey’s smoldering lo-fi torch song “Flipside.”

Lana Del Rey, “Flipside”


“Flipside,” written with Blake Stranathan, is a Del Rey rarity: never released on an album, and usually available only through fan-uploaded videos. The most familiar one features the cover of her album Ultraviolence, a black-and-white shot of the singer standing before a vintage Mercedes coupe, her gaze confrontational. The raw, minimalist image feels like an analog snap from a hot, uneventful summer where something should have happened but never did. A mugshot of youth, whose only crime was dwelling on heartache.


You can hardly call it a music video. More a kinetic film still: Del Rey contained by the frame, unmoving but alive. It works because the song is so emotionally potent that it needs nothing but a signature image. “Flipside” resonates in negative space—from the opening chords, high-tensile and precarious, like the breath held at the edge of a precipice before falling or righting yourself. The prowling bassline (the track has no drums) is taut with anticipation, damage waiting to happen. Its delicate structure becomes a web that catches every last overflow of pain, along with the self-importance that pain enables.


The terrain Del Rey explores on “Flipside” aligns less with contemporary pop divas and more with rogue artists like Greg Dulli and Sun Kil Moon, with a streak of LA noir that invokes Chandler, Welles, Veronica Lake, Charles Bukowski, James Ellroy, and any number of strip-club torch songs. Dangerous in her rawness. Vulnerable in her emotional violence.


To appreciate Lana Del Rey is, in many ways, to be a fan of American crime fiction. She didn’t fully come into her own until she moved to Southern California, though it always felt as if she had been writing LA noir since Born to Die. A new location can be liberating, and LA is a city alive with tragic narratives to inhabit. On Ultraviolence, she becomes less femme fatale than femme noir—a distillation of dark Americana. “Flipside” turns that violence inward: Are you gonna hurt me now / or are you gonna hurt me later? Few of her contemporaries—except perhaps Courtney Love—render emotional self-harm so convincingly. Pain hurts more in the hothouse of memory.


In Budapest, itself a noir city, I compulsively listened to the song while having an affair with a younger, taken woman. Rita, a writer and fellow cafe dweller, would sneak out of her boyfriend’s apartment to meet me in a cemetery or in the park behind the library. Everything felt urgent. With the prospect of a ring fight fading, I put that energy into her. Winning her felt like my own form of ruthlessness, a triumph both hollow and satisfying.

2.

Six months later, the world was in lockdown. Del Rey’s Southern California couldn’t have been farther from the icy Budapest winter. Rita and I had moved in together in the autumn. We both quickly realized this was a mistake we had rushed headlong into, and for me, the pain of it arrived almost immediately. Without the tension—the illicit danger—of her ex, the relationship collapsed under misaligned expectations and the claustrophobia of proximity.


I retreated into music, as I always did when suffering. Rita was intuitive enough to indulge this, buying Del Rey’s newly released Norman Fucking Rockwell! on vinyl for my birthday. Sometimes I wondered if she gave it to me as a substitute, knowing how much she disliked Del Rey.


Rita contributed a turntable to our life together, and I made good use of it. The album, pressed on pink vinyl, looked like a bubble-gum whirlpool. It reminded me of a scene—perhaps misremembered—from Haruki Murakami’s overlooked novel Sputnik Sweetheart, where a record needle devours a Louis Armstrong album like a greedy LA nose snorting an endless line of coke. Or maybe I’ve invented that memory. It feels appropriate either way.


The songs on Norman Rockwell are memoir-esque: distilled pathos without stooping to narrative. Untold backstory, suicide ideation, trauma bonding over the airwaves. Bring your own narrative, and it will fit. The story lies in the emotional unfolding—disintegrating and regenerating only to collapse again. Who owns the catharsis: the performer or the audience? During lockdown, narrative didn’t need to make sense. The world was paused; the music kept moving.

Lana Del Rey, Norman F****** Rockwell on vinyl

3.

One virtue of getting older is no longer needing to venerate artists for anything but talent. You don’t have to identify with or emulate anyone. It’s freeing—especially after years of disappointment with Morrissey. You can just admire Del Rey as a kind of bomber-pinup muse of destruction, equal parts Aphrodite and Kali. (America has always wanted to burst out of its monotheism—Joseph Smith to Scientology—hungering for more lore, more imagination, a Hollywood ending to religion.)


But in Rita, I encountered a stronger, more sexually assured force. Soon, I began to suffer. Training was impossible; my energy rerouted into masked distance runs. Without fighting, without writing, locked inside with an increasingly painful relationship, defeat turned inward.


So I filled the growing void with Del Rey. The album held dark pathos but also escape—sun, open air, California beaches. The pink vinyl was sensual: a slice of rare tenderloin, labial, a beautiful maw. There was no denying the sexuality of it. Maybe overplaying it was a small act of revenge, until Rita finally asked me not to play it when she was home.


In pain, I closed inward. Rita did the opposite—radiating outward, making friends, letting men believe they had a chance with her. She was more present for men she had no interest in than for me, the one sleeping in her bed. She was there, but absent.

4.


Are you gonna hurt me now? / Or are you gonna hurt me later?


I choose both, thanks.


Not long after lockdown ended—though too long, really—I moved out. I left Norman Fucking Rockwell! behind with Rita. Maybe as revenge, rejecting a gift I had internalized too deeply. But “Flipside” wasn’t something I could leave. It wasn’t tied to any album. It lived in the ether, or YouTube, re-uploaded whenever it vanished.
After moving to a larger apartment alone, the song took on new meaning, haunting but delicate, providing a template on how to love someone who wasn’t there.


In that dark Pest apartment, Del Rey’s voice felt like the haunted Santa Ana winds: alive with something beyond its elemental force. If it was invention, that was fine. Language is invention too, puffed with our own projections. A ghost is not an absence but what the absence generates—Spotify wrapped in a sheet with eyes cut out.


To get the song out of my head, I started outlining a novel inspired by it, filling it with my own heartache. Researching the title on Goodreads, I discovered the actor James Franco had already claimed Flipside for a book of interviews with Del Rey—real and invented—apparently hoping to conjure his own phantom muse. I never wrote my book. Franco’s was never released. Lana, present as she is as an object of inspiration, eluded both our interpretations.


In Mexico now, a place as carnal, violent, and haunted as any noir setting, “Flipside” drifts through me like a familiar ghost. I hear its echo in “La Llorona,” another song about loving what is beyond reach. But unlike before, the haunting feels companionable. Maybe that’s all a ghost is: our own impression in the shape of the departed. I’m alone, and for once it feels like presence—not absence—with only my sensitivity, and a single still from “Flipside,” keeping quiet watch.

More takes of woe and music in my 80´s memoir, Strange as Angels, for Kindle

or, Strange as Angels as a free PDF.

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Magdalena Bay’s “Image” Video and the Art of the Uncanny

MHE
Drawing by Leonora Carrington

Since their inception, Magdalena Bay have been enthusiastic and discerning world builders. Like magpies, they’ve gathered fragments of diverse musical tropes, Internet culture, and the nostalgia of previous generations. Over time, they’ve assembled an aesthetic that is now all their own, to the point where their influences no longer feel curated but sublimated into an aesthetic that’s at once digestible, delectable, and erudite.  

The duo of Mica Tenebaum and Matt Lewin hides their virtuosity in plain sight. The music feels effortless, like vivid prose writing. Think of the difference between Haruki Murakami’s simple sentences and the discipline he exerts on them, and those of hack horror or genre writers. This isn’t to say Magdalena Bay is simple, but the synth-pop idioms they work in just don’t historically hold the gravitas as, say, jazz. But genre is just a conduit for their creative brilliance—they shapeshift with each listener, and you can also appreciate them solely as a party band.

As their confidence and ambition grew, their visuals likewise evolved. Before their breakthrough album Imaginal Disc, Matt and Mica created their own music videos—clever, home-grown works that suggested they could’ve just as easily attended art school as music school. “Secrets (Your Fire)” in particular is a pastiche of vaporwave aesthetics and Gen-X nostalgia (they make the Miami Vice color palette pop like they invented it). Only with the Imaginal Disc singles did they hand over directing duties, and the videos became less personal projects and more promotional tools. Yet they remained rich with meaning.

Foremost among them is “Image,” directed by Please Baby Please film-maker Amanda Kramer. It’s unsettling if not horrific. And not in the “Everlong” tongue-in-cheek way (the Foo Fighters could never get away with the layered meanings Magdalena Bay bring to a track and video). Mica—the exuberant vocal half of the pair—playing a character named True, is menaced, snipped at, and actually cut up by a robed star god/cosmetologist on one hellacious spa day. Anyone who has been chased in a dream and felt their limbs go sluggish and non-reactive (and I assume this is most people) will recognize the claustrophobic dread that is amplified by the dream state. Mica’s diminutive frame only heightens the sense of menace as she flees across a cosmic, hyper-synthetic nightmare. And he’s just so big, compared to the singer. This is a change from the usual dynamic, where Mica is riding dragons, beating down Clippy widgets, or breaking the fourth wall with a wink.

But as much as adding depth to a dance song, the video has captured what literary critics call ‘the uncanny.’ The uncanny lives in that liminal space where the familiar turns strange, where reality warps just enough to induce dread. It can range from the works of Murakami to Aimee Bender, Leonora Carrington, and, some say, Kafka. It is the commonplace waiting room of “Image” that turns into a showcase for Eraserhead extras, whose carved-into-flesh smiles come off more as mutations than expressions, radiating the menace in the mundane.

The video is propulsive, and there’s little room to breathe. In her quest to ‘upgrade’ her image, True offers, sacrificially almost, her stylized dancing, and you can enjoy the grammar of sex appeal, though the underlying message is one of threat and conformity, with the singer as a willing final girl. Sex and death are forever the deepest drivers of our dreamscape, no matter the genre.

It’s fitting, then, that the next track on Imaginal Disc is “Death and Romance.” Matt and Mica clearly understand more than how to drop a single—they understand how to build an album. Imaginal Disc might be the first-ever synth-pop concept album. The sequencing matters—almost quaintly so—and yet the songs still stand alone. Like any great concept album, its parts cohere without sacrificing independence.

Ultimately, in “Image” and Imaginal Disc, there’s an intimate menace at work in the duo’s vision, one that fracks the depths of an ambitious vinyl collection. It’s pop that transports, yet remains grounded. In the end, Magdalena Bay is more wormhole than rabbit hole, blowing you away while leaving you standing on your feet.

Magdelina Bay, “Image”

I write more on the uncanny in my memoir, Strange as Angels.

My playlist for this post, Imaginal Desk.

peerfume genius and Arpad Miklos
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Perfume Genius’s “Hood” Video and the Freedom of Exposure

MHE

It’s easy to focus on the sensational aspects of the Perfume Genius video for their 2013 single “Hood.” There are a lot of them. Foremost, the banning of the advertising clip for the video by YouTube made news outlets from Pitchfork to the Huffington Post. While the subsequent outrage and charges of institutional homophobia failed to get it reinstated, the publicity amplified the video’s reach. Then there’s the semi-nude appearance of beefy Hungarian porn star (and chemist!) Arpad Miklos, who would commit suicide in New York City soon after the video’s release.

“Hood” landed in my life at a time when I, too, felt unrecognizable to myself. I came to this song during one of the most challenging periods of my life: a winter when I was having daily panic attacks, which persisted for months. It was the beginning of what would be a long and dark Central European winter, a place where the sun seemed to fall faster and more definitively than in my former home of Brooklyn. When the sun goes down on a Budapest winter, you feel less certain it will rise again, as though it simply called it quits. Because I’d stopped socializing and going out, for the most part, I used media as a window to the world, and videos like “Hood” became reflections to locate myself within.

Perfume Genius, and the emotional forensics Mike Hadreas brings to their music, became part of my survival mechanism. Alongside red wine, Xanax, and no shortage of music, “Hood” and “Dark Parts”—both directed by Winston H. Case—offered immediate emotional payoffs but also layers of meaning that revealed themselves over time, like the echoes of other queer artists who used vulnerability as a form of defiance.

“Hood” may seem like a simple expression, but it comes with quite complex footnotes. Hadreas was too young to be a part of the ACT UP movement that fought against discrimination and for the acceleration of AIDS treatments, and was also integral to the downtown art scene in New York, enlivening the work of artists like David Wojnarowicz, who lived and died in that reality. Hadreas’s songs are more personal, though that doesn’t make them less of a political statement.

Wojnarowicz, a former street hustler and heroin user, with no formal art education, used art as a lifeline, and despite actively working outside the prevailing establishment, did achieve recognition in his lifetime, and was included in a Whitney Biennial. His 1989 photograph Untitled (Falling Buffaloes), later featured in the ‘Buffalo version’ of U2’s “One” video, remains one of the most devastating visual metaphors for the AIDS crisis. Like those buffalo, so many artists of that era, from Keith Haring to Robert Mapplethorpe, were forced off a cliff by neglect, stigma, and political indifference. Long before “Hood” was banned, Wojnarowicz faced censorship and attempts to defund his shows by politicians at the highest levels of the US government, fighting many of these attacks while succumbing to the ravages of AIDS.

Untitled (Falling Buffaloes) by David Wojnarowicz

The concept of Eros has always embraced both love and death. In Untitled (Falling Buffalos), the death, from having nowhere else to turn, would be echoed in the suicide of Arpad Miklos, who took his own life in a Manhattan apartment just one year after “Hood” was released. It would have been little consolation to me to know that during that winter, as I was hiding from the darkness that provoked my panic attacks, Miklos was apparently suffering much worse and finding fewer places for recourse, living on the fringes of a foreign city.

There are a few things we will never know about Miklos. One is why he killed himself. He stated in his suicide note that he wouldn’t give people the satisfaction (is there any satisfaction to be gathered with that information?); and also why, when he took a second name, he chose one more Hungarian than his original name of Kozma Péter, when historically film creatives have hidden their foreign origins, from Michael Curtiz (born Manó Kaminer) to Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz).

Like many Hungarian actors, including Bela Lugosi, he came to the States to make his dreams come true, all without speaking a word of English (it was easier in porn; Lugosi had to memorize and phonetically repeat script lines he didn’t understand). In New York, Miklos achieved iconic status in the gay porn industry, where he was also sought after as an escort. Like Lugosi, he’ll be remembered for a bloodsucking role, his in the cult porn romp “The Vampire of Budapest.”

In “Hood,” Miklos plays a Svengali to Mike Hadreas’s doll-like plaything. But as in most relationships, the actual power dynamic can only be known by the participants. What comes off the screen is an intimacy so electric it crackles. Miklos dresses Hadreas up as though he were a toy left out for his pleasure, undresses and redresses him for a photo shoot conducted by an unseen photographer. It’s important to remember there are three people in this relationship, the photographer acting as a stand-in for the viewer. Would it be as erotic for the couple if they were not being watched, if they were not being recorded?

But the real memetic desire comes from the lyrics of the song itself, so vulnerable, addressing a lover in a warning, “You will never call me baby/If you knew me true;” the audience listening in on the confession. Music is, of course, created twice: once by the composer and again in the ear of the listener. Music, like literature, is personal that way.

On a side note, I played the video for Hood for a war-correspondent/writer I was translating when we were in Kyiv, Ukraine, hanging out on 2013 Maidan Square in the days before government snipers fired into the mostly peaceful protest. My colleague was taken by Hood, and it became the soundtrack song to our weekend witnessing history, a time when the urgency of the event lifted me from my own personal pain. We probably weren’t Hadreas’s target audience, but such is the power of music.

I had originally wanted to write about Perfume Genius’s video for “Dark Parts,” which, in its Kill List-esque dark and enigmatic storyline, best expressed my own feelings at the time, excavating persona trauma and dragging it into the light. But something about “Hood” was easier to return to. Maybe because, no matter how bleak its delivery, it carries within it the quiet insistence that life continues.

To close, I’ll say there’s something heroic in “Hood’s” mere existence. The song is about fear of exposure, but gaining power from embracing that fear. The content itself actually loses its power if viewed as salacious. What it is, is tender, intimate, and quietly erotic. Do power dynamics and queer relationships still shock in a post-Call Me by Your Name world? Given our current political climate, maybe don’t answer that.

I discuss Perfume Genius and David Wojnarowicz in more depth in my memoir, Dare and You Win My Heart, which my agent, Madison Smartt Bell, is currently seeking a publisher for.

My playlist for “Hood/Mexico City”