Warranted: Pendleton Shirts And Authenticity

Pendleton Woolen Mills was founded in Oregon in 1863 by a British weaver, Thomas Kay. They’re most famous for their wool blankets, including Native American trade blankets, and their wool shirts. I used to sell the shirts and blankets when I worked in a men’s retail store. Inside every shirt was stitched a label, on a blue background in yellow letters: WARRANTED TO BE A PENDLETON. The wording always struck me. Warranted. 

I don’t really understand copyright law, so I hope this painting (by me) of the Pendleton label does not result in any phone calls from their lawyers.

It’s the past tense of the word warrant, which is itself a version of the word warranty. The word warranty comes from the Old French guarantie, which means that, yes, it’s cognate with our modern English word guarantee. It first referred to a covenant made in real estate transactions binding the grantor of an estate and the grantor's heirs to warrant and defend the title and the estate itself. Nowadays it’s morphed into a promise a manufacturer makes to repair or replace a product within a certain time frame. The ironic thing is that Pendleton doesn’t have that kind of warranty attached to the shirt itself--the company website cheerfully explains that “‘Warranted to be a Pendleton’ is our quality credo pertaining to the product, the people and the personality that make our company unique. It's a vital part of our family legacy, as honored today as it has been since 1863.” If one of the seams needs mending or you need more replacement buttons, you can’t send the shirt in somewhere for repair. The warranty label is simply a pledge that this shirt is a Pendleton. 

In other words, the warranty is a mark of authenticity. Warranted to be a Pendleton means it’s the real thing, made of US-sourced and US-woven virgin wool (although it’s often cut and stitched together in another country). It means you’re getting the high quality garment you paid for. And people love Pendleton. To my dad, the word Pendleton refers to the entire product category of mens plaid flannel shirts (such as, “should I bring a Pendleton?”). He won’t wear any other kind. When I sold these products in store, people would point to the Pendleon label and talk proudly about the wool blanket that had been in their family for eighty years. I saw countless customers run their fingers over the front of a shirt and pause for a second, realizing that it actually was made of real wool. The brand really means something to people.

All of this makes me think about the concept of authenticity. 

Authenticity is a buzzword, which at the very least renders its meaning bifurcated. There’s what it really means, and what people want it to mean. Corporate leaders talk about authenticity as a way to make themselves seem…less corporate. Music blogs are obsessed with it as a metric of an artist’s merit. Instagram influencers, who happen to be predominantly women, are held suspect for their apparent lack of authenticity. But what is authenticity really about? If we use the Pendleton shirt and its label as an example, it refers to a deep kind of integrity. The Pendleton shirt cannot be anything other than what it is; you can button it all the way up and tuck into some nice pants, but you’re still going to look like a lumberjack or a ranch-hand, at least a little bit. The Pendleton shirt has no pretense, it puts on no airs. You’ll never confuse it with some logo-festooned shirt from Gucci. Nor will you confuse it with one of its cheaper imitators; the fabric is too sturdy, the design details are too distinctive, the colorways are too classically masculine and understated. It smells too much like wool to ever be confused for a polyester blend. You can wear it most places, but not everywhere--not in a heatwave, not to a wedding, not to a christening, probably not to court. It remains indelibly marked by its own origins and history, so much so that for many people it more or less symbolizes the American West, and all the miners, loggers, and fishermen who settled there. Its symbolism has evolved over time--it’s now heavily associated with surfer culture, too--but its essential qualities have remained the same. In other words, it’s true to itself. 

But I don’t really think that this kind of authenticity is what the corporate fucks are talking about. Or even what we are talking about half the time. Authenticity in the corporate world and in the culture more broadly, seems to have been conflated with uniqueness. Being ‘authentic’ means having several unique qualities and unique achievements. This is why people like craft beer so much, because you can get distinctive, weird beers that stand out from the plain, mass market stuff at the liquor store. (Whether or not a mango milkshake hazy IPA should exist is another question). My own generation, the relentlessly pilloried millennials, apparently care a lot about authenticity, judging by our penchant for artisan sourdough, craft cocktail ‘experiences’, boutique coffee roasters, and so on. Think of the maligned “basic bitch” stereotype--a woman who likes basic things like Starbucks, Top 40 music, and shopping at Target is an object of ridicule. It’s embarrassing to admit you like pumpkin spice lattes or Katy Perry or lululemon yoga pants. You must not be trying hard enough to be authentic. To be different. How humiliating to like the same things that other people do.

It’s not enough to buy the right kind of artisanal oat milk matcha latte, the right kind of one-of-a-kind typography print for your wall. It’s not enough to participate in the economy of “authentic” brands and products. You have to show people all the time how authentic you are, by showing yourself experiencing these authentic experiences and being authentic as a person. You have to post about the latte on Instagram. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Clubhouse—they’re all there to telecast your uniqueness on the regular (side note: what the fuck is Clubhouse). Even your job is supposed to be an arena where you can show off your unique, singular qualities and skills. But all of this social pressure to “be authentic” carries an inherent contradiction. Sociology professor Joseph E Davis writes, “in order for people to distinguish themselves, they must seek attention and visibility, and positively affect others with their self-representations, personal characteristics and quality of life. In doing so, they have to take great care that their performance isn’t perceived as staged. To be ‘authentic’ – genuine – they have to give the impression that they’re just being themselves.” If they show the effort involved in this performance, it ruins the whole effect. Authenticity must be uniqueness, broadcast to the world. It must appear to take no effort at all, and yet it must be performed.

Now, for people who are born performers, this is perhaps not such a problem. Mariah Carey would still be the way she is even if she had become a nail technician, a receptionist, or a lawyer. But for the rest of us, it’s kind of crazy-making. This is because much of the work of being authentic--of being true to yourself, and having integrity--happens on the interior, in private. We behave authentically when we decide whether or not the caprices of a certain job will come into conflict with our own moral code. We behave authentically when we engage in deep questions of faith, doubt, love, and trust. When we make choices that align with our beliefs and principles. And for a lot of us, behaving authentically--I mean really authentically--would include disqualifying ourselves from at least one component of the rat race. 

Our “true” selves are often at odds with society. An example of this is the story of St Francis. He was born wealthy, but he gave it all away, including the clothes on his back, to follow God. He committed to a life of poverty, chastity, obedience, and public service. That’s an extreme example, but it’s helpful because it illustrates my claim that the “true” self doesn’t always conform to societal standards of excellence. You know, St Francis’ parents thought he was a fucking nut. But what mattered to him more than anything was serving God, so he was happy to be labeled a fool. A friend of mine decided he wanted to be an outdoor photographer. In order for him to take this path, he lived on a bicycle and slept in a tent for two years. Eventually he upgraded to a van. It took a long time for him to get any paid work, and he made many sacrifices. And yet, he basically has no regrets. He has something I envy: he has peace of mind. And when he does share about his life on the internet, it doesn’t come across like he’s got anything to prove. He’s just telling you a story about his life, about what it took to get the shot of that particular wave. In other words, he would still be doing this job even if there weren’t people on Instagram to show it to. 

Paradoxically, it’s hard to be authentic to yourself when there’s always pressure to perform. When it feels like you aren’t meeting the cultural standards of success, it’s easy to feel isolated. I think for a lot of us, a more authentic life would include deeper ties to our families, relationships, and communities. It might involve greater social cohesion, more involvement with political or social movements. But the expectations of authenticity are mostly centered on the individual and that individuals’ differentiation from the collective. In an already highly individualistic society like America, this is a recipe for further alienation from each other. It’s no wonder so many of us are pathologically lonely, and were that way even before the pandemic made it worse. We don’t need to impress each other with our differences as much as we need to connect with each other. And I just don’t think that can happen effectively if we’re performing all the time. 

The performative quality of ‘authenticity’ has also contributed to the rise of social media activism. By this I mean the very surface-level sharing of infographics and hashtags associated with certain movements, without doing the actual work of joining the movement. This is a pretty screwed up dynamic because people prioritize public-facing signals of solidarity over doing the work. Sometimes activism means doing work that is difficult, and that no one will see. Sometimes it is also more honorable to do the work without drawing attention to it, even if you could. But we seem to be prioritizing more public-facing kinds of activism. We need to show everyone the receipts. The emphasis on sharing everything you’re doing to combat a societal problem also ends up putting the focus on you. And that doesn’t sit right with me. It also seems to result in less effective, you know, activism. If you care about homelessness, the thing to do is to donate to a homeless shelter, or write to your city council about it. But if you don’t post about doing these things, people might think you don’t care about homelessness. And of course it’s important to be vocal about issues we care about, and to engage in both public and private discussions about them—my point is that the work shouldn’t stop there.

The Pendleton label—the one with the warranty—goes on the inside of the shirt. The idea is that you don’t need to broadcast the logo because people already know just by looking at it, that it’s a Pendleton. The label is there to assuage any doubts. I would like to be that way—more concerned with going about my day to day life in a way that feels true to me, than constantly checking to see if other people are also seeing how authentic I am.

Because people in real life, in real interactions outside social media--they can usually tell if you’re putting on an act. Not just with activism, but with everything. You can’t keep up the charade forever. Our performances are creating more distance between each other, rather than actually fostering connection. We must work harder at introspection, not performance. That way our outside behaviors and our inside beliefs will match up so well that we are warranted to be our real selves. 

I mean, I know none of this is news to anyone that’s been paying attention. But I know that I need to be reminded of it all the time.

Closeouts

Every Saturday my father and I go surfing, and nearly every time we are faced with the same thing: closeouts. A closeout is when a wave, rather than having a discernible direction in how it breaks, crashes in on itself like a wall of thunder. You can still surf them on a longboard, but on a shortboard, that requires a surface on which to carve a path, it’s harder. Closeouts happen all at once, instead of peeling left or right like the lighting of a long fuse. They are a closing of the eyes to bad news, the slamming of a door.

You know what I’m about to say, what comparison I’m about to make. But as we come upon the anniversary of when life changed (at least for most of us in the US) as the result of the pandemic, it seems like the only cogent comparison I can come up with. This has been a year of closeouts. If you’re lucky enough to have the right surfboard for these conditions, you can make it work. But for most of us, it’s been a year of doors slammed shut, dreams deferred or destroyed. It’s been a year of ceaseless death, both on the societal scale and on the individual scale as so many of us have lost loved ones. It’s been a year of sudden loss and vanishing livelihoods, inequities and moral crises. It’s been a year of blinding pain, and profound loneliness.

I find myself lately blaming the conditions as an excuse not to go out surfing. Where I live, the conditions rarely change in this aspect; it’s almost always closeouts. But one of the reasons why I have been doing this is because my ambient anxiety, dread, and sorrow all come to the fore when I’m on my surfboard. It has always been this way; perhaps there is something uniquely psychologically resonant to lying stomach-down on a giant piece of fiberglass and navigating the treachery of the waves. But I have been holding so much in, and holding so much back, that when I’m on my surfboard, the terror of it all becomes overwhelming. 

Surfing requires much more foresight and skill than swimming alone. It’s relatively easy to duck under a wave when it’s just you; but when you’re on top of something tremendously buoyant, and you yourself are rather small, you can’t shove yourself under the wave. You have to crest over it, which I have always found terrible. I would much rather duck under, descend to the black. These days, though, even that is frightening. For I hear, as I never have before, the silence of the drowned when I pull my head underwater. I am tormented by images of the legions of dead--the grannies, the dads, the grumpy bartenders, the teachers, the brick masons who breathe no more. The Indo-European peoples supposedly believed that when a soul died it went back into the water--be it the ocean, the lake, or the river. This belief is probably why the Vikings had ship burials. Perhaps this belief lingers on in me like muscle memory. I wish the drowned would talk to me. I wish they would not be so quiet. They must still have so much left to say. 

The unpredictability of the ocean is also a visceral reminder of the uncertainties of this year. The ocean has its patterns; but within all patterns aberrations exist, too. You learn to expect this in the ocean, which means you must always be ready for the worst case scenario to strike at any moment. It is an environment of pervasive danger. We had a bumper crop so to speak of stingrays this summer because of the abnormally warm water. When the surf went out and the water cleared I could see them, hovering drone-like over the sand. Walking into the ocean felt like walking into a land mine in a way, because any step could result in injury. This just reminded me of what it felt like to go to the grocery store, and to go to work, and to visit a friend while sitting six feet apart. Would this be the inhale of breath from which I contracted the virus? Or the next one? Or the next one?

That has perhaps been the most insidious part of it all. In addition to the very obvious and undeniable effects the pandemic has had on our lives, there’s also been, at least for me, the slow withering of courage, the slow but steady growth of fear in seemingly every aspect of life. I never used to be this afraid of the ocean. I grew up in it. It used to connect me to a deep intuition within. Now it makes me feel small, hopeless, useless. 

painting by me.

I do have my moments, but never on the surfboard. In December, I went hiking with a friend at Temescal Canyon, which was hilarious because it was insanely crowded. In the hour I spent on the trail, wheezing through my mask (I have asthma), I counted about two hundred other people. In the open air, it is less risky, of course, but it was still an intensely claustrophobic experience, and I insisted on going to the beach afterwards as we had originally planned to do that day. My friend agreed, and paid for parking at Will Rogers even though the sun was setting. That same friend had told me earlier that they’d be moving to a different state. Their house was already full of boxes. Yet another upheaval. And a wild urge seized me, and I changed into my bathing suit and charged straight into the water. My friend was too frightened to come with me. Will Rogers has a funny wave pattern: there is only one wave, instead of an inside and an outside, and it crashes close to shore with punishing force. But once you get past it, there is nothing else. No other obstacle besides the fast moving current. 

The water was freezing, in the low fifties, and the surface shimmered with the diffused light of the sunset. It was opalescent, iridescent, like the underside of abalone shells. Lilac and green and spitting white foam. I took a deep breath, and went under. I came up, and felt gloriously happy for just a moment. 

Maybe I was happy that I was somewhere no one could follow me; I was alone in the water, and I had space after an afternoon full of people. Maybe the unexpected pain of losing this friend to another state spurred me away from them. Maybe I wanted to show them that I’d be okay without them...after all, I was a part of this place and they clearly were not, since they didn’t want to swim in frigid water, but I did. Maybe I was showing off for them. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that at the time. I was mostly just reveling in the short-term absence of fear. And it was a total absence. I was not afraid. I could have stayed there, twirling and frolicking and dancing in the waves, for hours, if it had not been so close to sundown. 

More recently, a couple of weeks ago, I went for a swim again, this time while my dad surfed. It was low-tide and crowded, so I resigned myself to picking up trash on the beach (on that day I found decaying roses, brilliantly red against the sand, a rusted tent stake, a single Adidas sneaker, an orange needle cap, chewing tobacco wrappers, and numerous fragments of Styrofoam.) Picking up trash on the beach is one of the many pointless things people do, even though they know they’re pointless and futile, because they hope maybe it will matter to God. But then as before I was seized by a longing to enter the water, so I took off my clothes (my bathing suit was on underneath) and left them in a heap on the sand, and walked in. 

This time my entry was more tentative. The water was especially cold around my knees. The sky was smoggy, and the two parallel lines of shipping barges snaked along the horizon in the distance. If you watch them long enough, you will notice that the shipping barges lined up to come into Long Beach and Los Angeles are always turning and re-orienting themselves. Maybe they do it to stay on the right side of the wind, I don’t know. I like to look for Maersk barges because a friend of mine works for Maersk. It reminds me, when I see it, of the blue of his eyes. But often by the time I remember to check the barges, they’ve all turned their backs to the beach and I can’t see the logos on the sides. They had their backs to me now, stacked high with containers. I stood there with the water up to my knees for a moment, gathering myself, before fully running in, and letting the waves crash over my shoulders. 

When you cannot go anywhere or do anything except take exercise outside, it becomes its own special thrill to be chilled by the ocean. It is almost like being held. This time in the water I felt even more aware of my body and just how cold it was. But it was a joyous feeling. It felt like coming home, or like I was fully inhabiting my body for the first time in months. The primary way I have gotten through this year mentally is by never being fully here. Feeling connected to my body, and by extension my health, felt too close for comfort most of the time. But in the water I was granted a short reprieve. I was allowed, for a moment, to just be and not think or worry or cry or hold my breath.

And then came a wave, a backhanded wave, a closeout, and it knocked me off my feet.

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Unpacking The Controversies of Lana Del Rey

I’m trying to figure out precisely why Lana Del Rey’s recent…album promotion tactics (?) have disappointed and upset me so much. You see, I love Lana Del Rey, which is one reason why I’m taking all of this rather hard. I have seen her in concert, purchased her albums, and analyzed her lyrics like they are scriptures. I’ve watched hours and hours of her interviews on YouTube, scoured the Internet for her unreleased songs. I’ve been Lana Del Rey for Halloween. 

Lana is an utterly American figure, who like Marilyn Monroe before her, created a persona for herself as an artist, complete with stage name and ultra-feminine public image. In a review for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson calls her a “Concept Human.” Lana Del Rey, the artist, writes and sings slow, melodious meditations on love, depression, drugs, and the men who treat her badly. Lana Del Rey will never write radio hits. She will never forfeit her artistic vision for a towering Swedish-megaproducer-penned hook. She will always be a high priestess of melancholy, and she will always sing about masochism, lust, and her own version of America. That consistency, that refusal to bow to trends, makes Lana an unusual figure in the current musical landscape. Taylor Swift, in many ways her closest analogue as a pop star, is no trendsetter. Taylor and Lana are both songwriters first, singers second. Both of them have expressed this. You know a Taylor Swift song from the extreme specificity of the lyrics (the infamous Scarf in “All Too Well”,) her preference for loping melodies (“betty,” “ivy,” and “Our Song”), and her warm, conversational familiarity as a singer. Taylor feels like someone you know. She also follows the crowd when it comes to musical style; her single “cardigan” is kind of a copycat Lana Del Rey song. So is “Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince”. It even has a reference to Americana (something Lana’s lyrics are known for) in the title. 

Lana, on the other hand, remains committed to her own unique sound. Set apart by gauzy layered vocal tracks, trip-hop flourishes, consistently downbeat tempo, a general air of melancholy, and Old Hollywood strings, you know a Lana song from the sound first and the lyrics second. If you don’t believe me, listen to the title track of her third album Honeymoon and ask yourself if anyone else in the pop world is writing songs that sound like that. Lana also possesses a singular, distinctive voice. She doesn’t belt; she croons, sliding up and down different parts of her expansive vocal range with apparent effortlessness, gliding above the music like the mist over a meadow. It’s not hard to see her influence in younger artists like Billie Eilish. 

But having extolled her unique artistry, we must now come to the controversies that are distressing me so much, at this point so numerous and interconnected that reciting them all in detail would be exhausting. I will link some more in depth pieces at the end of this essay. Viewed together, they showcase a specific pattern. Here’s a summarized rundown: In September 2019, she sicced her fanbase on Ann Powers, a critic who wrote a rambling--but largely complementary--essay about her for NPR. In May of 2020, she complained that her contemporaries in the music industry could sing about sexuality without getting criticized for it, while she apparently had been “crucified” or accused of “glamorizing abuse” by unnamed critics and singers. The fact that most of the female performers she mentioned were Black women revealed a stunning lack of awareness. Did Lana really think that Beyonce had never faced blow-back for her art? The woman who got repeatedly shut out of Grammy nominations, and who lost Album of the Year to Adele, despite Lemonade being an absolute cultural phenomenon? Did Lana really think that Cardi B had never received criticism for having worked as a stripper? Even stranger, this diatribe came out after months of career-best, glowing praise for her album Norman Fucking Rockwell. She made it worse by repeatedly doubling down on her remarks in subsequent social media posts. As Ashley Reese wrote for Jezebel, “the optics of Lana, a white woman, complaining about feminism lacking space for her while critiquing the acclaim allotted to several Black pop artists is mortifying.” That kind of sums it up.

And now the disastrous rollout of her latest album has seen her repeating this template. She wrote a comment seemingly pre-empting criticism for having women of color on her album cover, bragging that she had “always been extremely inclusive without trying,” and that her boyfriends had been “rappers,” as if “rappers” were an ethnicity. Then she went on BBC with Annie Mac and said that Donald Trump “doesn’t know that he’s inciting a riot” in reference to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol.  Then, when magazines like Complex reported her comments, she lashed out at them, and then posted a rambling Instagram video defending herself, all while adamantly refusing to take any accountability or show any self-awareness at all. And I love Lana, and I’m biased towards her, and ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but with this most recent controversy, she didn’t give me an opportunity to do so.

excerpts from Lana’s tweets and songs, and essays by Ashley Reese and Ann Powers. Collage by me.

And so, what are we to make of this? I don’t think anyone really expects Lana to be an astute commentator for political or cultural matters; we want her to be a songwriter and make beautiful art. Part of me wonders what Lana thinks this is going to accomplish for her as an artist or as a celebrity. She’s gotten this far. She must be shrewd enough to recognize that this parade of bad press is not the best way to promote an album. As a long time fan of hers, I was thrilled for the album rollout. Now, I’m so embarrassed by Lana’s public comments that I tend to forget that new music is coming. In fact I even feel a sense of unease about it.

I also wonder at how someone with a degree in philosophy--metaphysics! From a Jesuit school!--can be so bad at argumentation and rhetoric outside of songwriting. You can’t escape philosophy without studying rhetoric and formal logic. And yet Lana’s scandal-generating remarks are vague and unsubstantiated--who are all these people critiquing her for “setting back feminism a hundred years?” Who are the people supposedly criticizing her album cover’s lack of diversity? Additionally, she repeats again and again that her comments have been taken out of context, always the refuge of the person with an inherently weak argument.

But the flaws of her argument are not the root of the problem. In all the controversies I mentioned, there is one through-line, which is that Lana takes criticism personally, even if that criticism is in good faith. When she lashed out at Ann Powers from NPR, it came across as absurd because Powers’ essay was a serious, thoughtful response to Lana’s work as an artist. It wasn’t about criticizing Lana as a person, yet she responded to it as if it were some kind of personal attack. In a post that mentions several Black female pop artists, Lana only pays attention to her own perceived persecution, only the criticism lobbed against her and not against her Black contemporaries. In the many follow-ups to this post, it is the same. Lana’s feelings, perspective, and story are the only ones that matter. In 2019, she had earned enormous critical clout for her work, but as Ashley Reese writes: “why embrace that clout when she can fret over, say, a Pitchfork review of Born to Die from 2012 instead?” In her interview with Annie Mac, she said that racism “can’t” be her problem, and no one can “make” that out to be one of her issues. As if it were impossible. When Complex reported factually on the contents of that Annie Mac interview, Lana took it personally, as an attack on the supposed “relationship” she’d had with the magazine. The antagonism Lana has towards critics is even displayed in one of her songs, “Coachella: Woodstock In My Mind,” where she sings that critics can be so mean sometimes.

Maybe this is just what happens to you when you become famous; maybe it becomes harder to distinguish good faith criticisms from bad. And Lana has faced bad-faith criticism, especially early in her career when people were convinced that having a stage name made her totally inauthentic. There were plenty of critics and writers in 2012 who seemed to be rooting for her to fail because she confused them. But maybe these outbursts have nothing to do with the nature of fame. Maybe this is just who Lana is. This fragility is a difficult, reckless aspect of her character. But like many of her own songs, Lana’s behavior also reveals something difficult about America itself.

excerpts in from Lana’s tweets, interview with Annie Mac, Lana’s lyrics, and essay from Ann Powers. Collage by me.

America is full of people who can’t take responsibility for any part they may have had in upholding toxic systems. That is after all what Lana’s doing when she says that she can’t be accused of being racist. She’s conflating prejudice, which is personal, with racism, which is systemic. You can be free of prejudices and genuinely enjoy being around all types of people, while also perpetuating injustices against them--you could vote for policies that discriminate against them, or vote against policies that would help them. You could fail to stand up for people or speak up for them. You could work to maintain the status quo within a business or an industry because it’s comfortable for you, even if it is hostile to BIPOC contemporaries. Or you could simply fail to understand that the system is rigged, and rigged in your favor. I’m not accusing Lana of being either prejudiced or racist--I’m simply saying that she doesn’t seem to get that these are two different things. 

America can only be understood through a system of dialectics--it’s a both-and country. It is both a country of extraordinary resilience and moral character, and a cesspool of bigotry and greed. It is both a country of opportunity and a country of oppression, poverty and splendor. Both things are true, paradoxes and contradictions abound everywhere you look. You have to both-and your way through this American life. Lana Del Rey’s songs often describe a similar dynamic: It hurts to love you and I still love you anyway. Love is like smiling when the firing squad is against you. He hit me and it felt like a kiss.

So how does she not see it?

It’s not enough just to have Black friends. You have to actually advocate for freedom and justice, and that means being willing to sacrifice some of the ease you’ve previously enjoyed so that said Black friends can have equitable access to resources and opportunities. It means you don’t automatically center your own experiences in discussions about race or racism. It means simply apologizing when your comments hurt people, and taking that hurt seriously. It means a lot of things. But in all actions, the work of anti-racism requires one particular trait from white people: humility. And yeah, being able to learn from good faith criticism is a big part of that.

Humility means recognizing that you are not at the center of this particular story. You have a part to play, but it isn’t about you. Too many white Americans have a hard time with this. I know, because I’ve been that reflexively defensive person. I’ve been the person who talks when they should be carefully listening. I’ve defended myself, absolved myself of blame, when I should have acknowledged that the status quo benefits me. I didn’t take accountability or look inside myself. It’s sad to see that same thing in an artist I deeply admire and whose work means so much to me, because I guess I expected more from her. 

It must be said that we don’t really know who Lana Del Rey is in her private life, and so we have to take the sum of her public comments and actions as they are. In fairness to her, she has pledged to donate half of the proceeds from her recent poetry book to Native American organizations--and she made this pledge months before these controversies happened, so she’s not doing it just to save face. It’s a commitment she made in good faith. So the concept of making reparations--at least to some people--is clearly something she cares about and takes seriously. Also, again, I don’t think any of us want Lana to be a cultural critic who writes or educates about issues of race in America. I don’t think that would be all that interesting, and we already have activists who do this very well, such as Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Rachel Cargle. What I hope for her is that she is able to engage in some introspection. I don’t want to see a professional adjustment from Lana so much as a personal one (although she could stand to get a different publicist). 

What I think she should do from a public relations standpoint, is issue a genuine apology--no excuses, no caveats--and let her music speak for itself for a while. She should then do the work of confronting white supremacy within herself--work that is private, ongoing, and difficult. She should also learn from Beyonce, who has for years retreated into public silence, making statements only when it’s really important. This silence has lent Beyonce an air of mystery unique in the social media-obsessed world of contemporary celebrity; it also gives her unmatched levels of control over her public image. Image-craft is as much a part of the project of Lana Del Rey as the music is. She would do well to remember that. When all people are talking about are the controversies, the glamour her songs possess quickly fades. 

Lana has something of a tradition of covering songs performed by Nina Simone. At the end of the album Honeymoon, she sings: “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good/ oh Lord please don’t let me be misunderstood.” And I wish we could chalk all of this drama up to misunderstanding. But I think the problem is deeper than misunderstanding alone.

Sources and further reading:

https://www.insider.com/lana-del-rey-problematic-backlash-timeline-2021-1

https://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5814038/heres-why-lana-del-rey-is-so-controversial

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a35311661/lana-del-rey-appropriation/

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757545360/lana-del-rey-lives-in-americas-messy-subconscious

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000r3k5

https://themuse.jezebel.com/lana-del-rey-could-have-left-this-one-in-the-drafts-1843586630

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19449-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence/

Bright Star In The Darkness:

Christmas pulls me in each year. 

The goofy thing about me is that I both do and don’t believe. I am what you might call a reluctant atheist, although even that isn’t quite true, because I still believe in God and I still believe in Jesus. I believe that Jesus was born the son of God, and died and rose again, and will return. I have tried not to believe it, yet I do. Jesus the man in the gospels has influenced most of my ethical principles and the way I see the world. Jesus always prefers the company of the outcast. He is not excited by fancy parties, or wealth, or status, and none of these things have any sway over him at all. It’s one aspect of his character that is frankly very likeable. He responds to the genuine integrity of people, like in the famous example of Magdalene washing his feet with her tears. He responds to suffering. He responds to faith. In any room, he would go first to the person who is the loneliest, the most frightened, the least loved. Power, as we define it, is meaningless to Christ. 

This makes him terribly subversive, and he cannot be bought, and he cannot be subdued. He was, and remains, radical. He stands in direct opposition to controlling power at every turn, and he is not interested in working within existing structures of power. There’s nothing diplomatic about him, which is probably where Winston Churchill got the idea. This is why he overthrows the tables in the Temple. Jesus exists to overthrow all of it. Hell, he doesn’t even have a home. The hope of the whole world rests on the shoulders of an itinerant preacher, or more simply, a homeless man. His willingness to die represents divine intercession, radical submission. He could have killed the ones who betrayed him with the snap of a finger. He could have brought himself down from the cross. Jesus was resplendent with power; he chose instead to act with love. His attendant suffering on the Cross closes the final gap between God and humans. There is no length to which his love will not go, and in the end his love is what overcomes death. It is his love that terrified the powerful, and continues to terrify them now. Because they knew, and they know, that power is never enough.

I love this man and want to follow him. But for a variety of reasons, some of them theological, some of them personal, I am not able to have a relationship with God or belong to a church anymore, though both things were part of my life for nearly a decade. I loved the church, and I loved my rituals of reading scripture every night (which I did faithfully for eight years), and praying. I have experienced profound intimacy with God. I have also experienced profound disconnection, and in the church, I have experienced even worse. Betrayal. 

So I can’t go back. I will not go back. I haven’t felt welcome in a church service in many years; it’s as if everyone can see that I am reluctant, that I have questions, that I am hard-wired against obedience and the very idea of doctrine. The church is not welcoming to a lot of people, which is one reason why membership is declining throughout the United States. 

But then Christmas comes, and I am reminded again of Christ’s birth and all it means to me. Even in his birth, he is humble; the son of God, born in a barn, with animals mucking about and hay and birds cooing in the rafters. Here, too, the circumstances of his birth foretell the rest of his story--that he will eschew power and control in favor of radical humility. The shepherds get a message from an angel, telling them the son of God is here, but they are frightened, because angels are warriors of God. The fact that there are so many angels in the sky seems to me more like the assembly of an army than of a choir. Christ’s birth brings with it tidings of the war to come. So it is thrilling to me to imagine the angel with flaming eyes. Your hope is fulfilled. Prepare for the coming storm. 

The bright star in the darkness. Oh, how I long for it to be true, the message that hope is here at last. I am always reluctant to trust hope, and then Christmas comes and dares me to place my bet. Some years I don’t. Some years I do. 

And I imagine what it was like for Mary, her deep joy at the birth of her son. The Bible says that she cherished all these things and held them close to her heart. I think that is because Mary knew her son would be persecuted. She knew his life would not be easy. What must it have been like for her, to watch her son grow. Perhaps she saw him running through the field with wild abandon and it seemed to her that he’d been here before. Perhaps his dependency on her filled her with wonder. Perhaps it was bittersweet because she knew that as he aged the distance between them would grow, as a result of their different natures and the demands of his fate. 

At the beginning of the story and the end, Mary gets something of a raw deal. She would have been shamed for her pregnancy as an unmarried woman, and she would have to watch her son suffer brutal torture and an agonizing death. By the time his ministry begins he belongs to everyone, not just to her. But before that, she gets to raise a child who is actually, truly, Gifted. 

The older I get the more interested I am in Mary, the woman in the story without whom none of this would be possible, who is marked as holy, but who is left as something of a mystery because most of the gospel writers don’t think of her as very important. Mary is totally instrumentalized, but she is also given the most crucial job of anyone in the entire Bible, perhaps in history: raise the Messiah. Greatness is thrust upon an ordinary teenage girl, an angel pops out like a demented jack-in-the-box and gives her this tremendous duty that will implicate her standing in the community, and she is frightened. But she rises to the occasion. It’s like any bog-standard hero’s journey, except the MacGuffin is the Christ. Mary is the Everyman and Everywoman’s hero. If you’ve been overlooked your whole life for the family member who is *much more important,* or told that you’re supposed to put other people before yourself, or been given a seemingly insurmountable set of expectations without much support, or been shamed for circumstances beyond your control, or been powerless to protect the ones you love, then you can find kinship with Mary. If you’re a mother who feels the weight of the world on your shoulders, who’s constantly exhausted from the demands of raising children, you can find kinship with Mary. And who knows--maybe Mary is the one who taught Jesus to speak in parables. Maybe she encouraged his distrust of authority figures, having been chased across borders herself because of Herod’s baby massacres. Maybe she was every bit as subversive as he was. We don’t know. 

But this year, as I think of Christmas, I am with her, full of longing and love for her newborn son while also aware that separation from him is inevitable. I am there as she comforts her son as he cries. I am there as she is exhausted after a long journey, and in pain. If I cannot approach Christ directly, then Mary will do it for me.

we will meet again

We will meet again.

I know it, for all things end. Sentences, rainstorms, movies—all of them end. So too must this season of bottomless grief and fear.

And we will meet again.

I will come to you and embrace you, and the scent of someone else’s shampoo will bring tears to my eyes. Perhaps we shall sit across from each other at a table, and I will count your freckles and synchronize my breathing with yours. Perhaps I will collapse into sobs of mingled euphoria and grief, to see your face before me, to acknowledge the pain of having been apart from you. It could be that I hold you so tightly that I bruise your ribs, or approach you cautiously, like a lone wolf padding her way out from the cover of the trees. Tentative. It’s been so long, in the forest.

But we will meet again.

Maybe I will kiss you, even if you are not a lover. Maybe you will make us a pot of coffee and I will watch your hands as you do, which suddenly seem godlike as they sweep through the space that has been empty and cold for so long. Look, how you are bringing motion into stillness, waves into oceans, wind into trees. You might get awed silence from me, or I might want to talk to you for hours, about everything. What an extravagance it is, to behold someone who, for months, I could only reach out and touch in my sleep, in a dream.

But we will meet again.

Maybe we will cry together, because we have been holding in our tears for so long just to cope with each day, and we must weep for those now lost, for destroyed futures and vanished livelihoods. We will cry for the lost time, for our own loneliness. Sometimes—usually—you need a witness to your grief. Maybe I can be that for you, and you for me. It is hard to cry alone.

Perhaps we will dance together, just because we can, haltingly at first, and then with abandon.

We will smile. We will grasp hands.

We will meet again.

A Voice That Touched The Beyond

It doesn’t make any sense why, but the burning of Notre Dame has made me extremely emotional. As it is a symbol, its destruction cannot help but feel symbolic, and therefore loaded with significance. I read somewhere that someone described it as an image of “the end of the world,” an emblem of how close we are as a species—and a planet—to extinction and decimation. I can’t help but agree. I am as heartbroken as if it were my own church, which of course, it is not. Still I feel compelled to share a memory of it as some kind of tribute.

I was there over five years ago, at a 9AM Mass with my friends. I have found it painful to go to Mass or church or any religious service for the past seven years. I avoid it, because I always cry. Uncontrollably, hysterically, with an abiding sense of loss. This once was mine, and now it feels alien. My friends wanted to go to Mass, they are good Catholics, so I went with them. There is something to be said about attending religious services in the cathedrals of Europe, even if you are a secular person or of a different faith tradition. For one thing, on a practical level, you bypass the sightseeing charge. For another, you experience the structure as it was meant to be experienced: the organ ringing out, the shy chorus of voices rising and echoing, the prayers that have resounded iambically across Europe, almost unaltered, for centuries. Silence, suspended in the air like so many flecks of dust. Gentle grasping of hands for the Lord’s Prayer. Flashes of gold as the sacred Host is lifted in the air, the sudden catch in the priest’s throat when he seems to remember just who he is summoning here. Even if you don’t believe a jot of it, it’s like watching a very earnest play, where the stage is built to emphasize its beauty and sacred repetition. On this particular day, I was not doing well with being in a church service. We were at one that was very hymn-heavy, it was longer than the typical Mass I was used to, and I was getting antsy. But in the pew behind us was an old man, singing along to every hymn in a beautiful, clear, powerful baritone. Because I speak some French, I could understand him most of the time. It was just an extraordinary experience. He was totally giving himself over to the music and you could hear the pain and the hope and the love in his voice. There was so much depth to his voice and his song that it touched the beyond. It was mystical. Today I feel so grateful to have experienced this moment, so much more so now that Notre Dame has been damaged.

We spend so much time profoundly disconnected from each other. We spend so much time avoiding each other’s eyes. I know for many, the Church is not a welcoming place—it stopped feeling welcoming to me a long time ago. The “church” in Christian tradition refers to a type of building, but most of the time it refers to the body of people who gather within. The “church” is supposed to be a place of belonging and connection. That’s what they tell you in the Instagram ads. For many of us, it is not. However, moments like the ones I had listening to the old man—I believe they are all around us. It was significant to me that it happened in Notre Dame, such close intimacy in this grand cathedral. But we can experience belonging and connection in so many places. Even if they are fleeting, it’s worth it to look for these moments. The older I get, the more I see, and the more I grieve, the more I know that these moments are all that really matter, and nothing else even grazes the surface.

Lovers Forever: Part One

Then you take it away from him.

Then you take away the dimpled chin and gold-green eyes, the haughty cheekbones and perfect lips. You take away the woman whose pure and talismanic beauty transforms her into a goddess. You take away the woman whose eyes hold all his secrets. The same kind of scorn he learned to fear from a mother who could either kiss or hit him with no warning. A heart that hurts the same as his, that breaks the same as his. The only woman he can never possess, rejecting him all the way to Rome, and quickly taking up with the greatest bullfighter alive. It takes him a few weeks to realize that she’s serious this time, that she’s walking out on him for good. By then, it’s much too late.

This loss will propel him into sublime art, the kind that seems almost holy, but he will never recover. No one else will know him as deeply, and he will never surrender his heart to another woman ever again. He will build shrines to her in his home, little altars with photographs and candles and old letters. He will have one of her photos enlarged into a ten-foot tall poster—and shoot bullets at her face all night long, until he passes out from exhaustion. The rest of his life he will search for what he had with her, gorging himself on earthly pleasures while painfully remembering the ambrosia of heaven. Other people didn’t observe heaven between them, but to the lovers, it was there.

It was there, but now it’s gone.

Or is it?

Years later, she sits in her apartment in Madrid and plays his records at top volume. This is where she goes to be with him, for in these songs time and space are suspended, dissolved, fractured, cracked like doorways. On the other side of the door shines once again the flicker of his eye, and she begins to speak to the records themselves, responding to his songs as if in conversation. “No, no, don’t say that.” Then, “yes, I know.” Then, “darling, you must forget…” All the while she seems on the verge of tears. Remembering, suffering. She lapses eventually into a wordless communion with him, staring out the window as if he is just across the plaza from her. Maybe he is, in that amorphous but tangible way that a former lover can be. Or perhaps the door is pushed further open. They lock eyes, and in this shared glance is greater intimacy and feeling than in any physical touch—or indeed, proximity. They lock eyes, and a tear falls down her face, its beauty decaying but undiminished.

A flash of blue, then he vanishes. “See you later, baby,” she says, and lights another cigarette. Her current lover emerges from the next room.

“I’m still here, my darling.”

“Yes, I know. That was Francis. He really had a lot to say tonight.”

This is the story of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.

The Night Is More Than Darkness

I Am A Young Gatekeeper Of An Ancient And Endangered Art

Poetry is more than line breaks. Just like a martini is more than vodka. And in fact, if you’re having a martini, especially one that is being use to symbolize poetry, it should be made with gin. This is because vodka is soulless. It doesn’t stand for itself; you can mix it into anything and get away with it, because vodka has no hard edges. It takes on the personality of its successor, especially when it comes to grapefruit juice. But gin always tastes specific, of juniper and Nordic sunshine and London in winter.

Poetry is more than line breaks. Just like the night is more than darkness. It also contains the cry of the deer and the silence of cold marriage beds, where the bewilderment of love settles and broods above a couple like a dove on a wire. Night also contains the stars, of course, which appear to us as pinpricks of light, even though many of them are really swollen nurseries of thousands of baby stars, buzzing blue with false promise, or Greek heroes eternally frozen in combat. The night is when you can kiss someone over and over, in a kind of relentless trance, with a warmth that no longer has to compete with sunlight. The night is when you are free to feel everything you have suppressed during the day, and these emotions often surprise you.

Poetry is not simply a collection of fragments, or worse, a cavalierly shattered run-on sentence. Poetry is both infinite and fleeting. It summons the memory of heaven, a place you long to go again, but remains painfully out of your reach. Except in moments and in dreams. Poetry is both the most mysterious and the most personal of all forms of art. At least it used to be. Now it is only ever one or the other.

Poetry is not accidental. It must be as formal, as purposeful, as delicate as an operation on a human heart. And yes, that parallel was intentional.

Poetry is not a bomb. It’s not built for self-destruction or confusion or chaos. It is not the right kind of weapon for cowards.

Someone should tell the poets this, but no one will. They only talk to each other.

A New Beginning

“What would you do if you had no fear?”

That question eats away at me all the time. It rings in my ears whenever I wish I had said or done something different, asserted myself or stood up for someone else, but let the moment pass. I think of it more and more now that fear increasingly dominates my life.

But I have such a deep longing to act with courage. The times in my life when I have acted with courage have not always been ‘successful,’ strictly speaking, for courage is not a strategy. It’s more of a moral code, I guess, a combination of deep integrity and a willingness to do ‘the honorable thing’. However, I have always felt more at peace with the courageous decisions than the decisions I made to hedge my bets, even if they ended in disaster. (And quite honestly, they have usually ended in disaster. Someday I will write a hilarious book about it all.) Often we think of courage as a martial quality, the fire in the bellies of soldiers or firefighters or other people who regularly put themselves in danger or take serious risks. That is undoubtedly true. But I think courage also involves acting from the heart, and that can mean a million different things depending on the heart in question.

Some background: I thought I had found my purpose in life (which was phenomenally stupid of me, I know), and I was passionate about it. Now I am disillusioned. I have to find a new purpose, and I don’t know what it is yet. What I do know is that I have always loved writing, and I have always loved creating beautiful things. Whether that’s a poem or an outfit or a drawing, whatever I do, whatever I make, I want it to be beautiful. Some people value efficiency, some people value trendiness, some people value ease, and I value beauty. I spend most of my free time chasing after it in some way already. This blog is an attempt to do that more constructively.