ESSAYS
World Without End: The Weeknd's Divine Comedy (Image)
To Hell and Back: The Weeknd’s Musical Odyssey Through Life and Death (LitHub)
An essay exploring hedonism, nihilism, and redemption in contemporary pop, cross-published (under different titles) by Image and LitHub.
JUDSON RECOMMENDS
Each week, Image sends a staff recommendation to 35,000+ subscribers centered around the themes of art, faith, and mystery. Below are a selection of mine.
The Disintegration Loops
How does a song sound as it dies? The question never occurred to me until my wife recently introduced me to The Disintegration Loops, a series of albums by the avant-garde composer William Basinski. In his Brooklyn studio between August and September of 2001, Basinski took some old recordings he’d made in the 1980s and attempted to digitize them. In the process, he noticed that the archaic magnetic tapes—already deteriorated with age—were further decomposing as they were being played and recorded. The effect is gorgeous and unsettling as the melody gently distorts and cracks and eventually disintegrates across its five-hour duration, but the piece’s meaning wasn’t clear until the day it was completed. After finishing the piece on the morning of September 11, 2001, Basinkski watched the twin towers collapse from his rooftop, and his newly completed piece transfigured into an elegy for the lives lost that day. The album covers feature photos of the smoldering skyline taken by Basinski from his rooftop that evening.
Art often gains its meaning after the fact—perhaps immediately after, while witnessing the incomprehensible from a Brooklyn rooftop, or perhaps a quarter of a century later while watching fresh horrors loop on a phone screen. It’s been twenty-five years since the release of The Disintegration Loops and the image of a blazing city skyline is no longer novel. America has begun a new war in the Middle East. Death, disintegration, loops, cycles. Basinski’s haunting, yawning, contemplative composition continues to be an offering, a space to breathe and mourn. Somewhere, a gentle, elegiac melody loops, crackles, distorts, struggles to endure, and as I strain my ears to hear it I pray it never ends.
FATHER FIGURE
Is it a flex to be a good dad? Where are the pop songs about loving your spouse? Jon Bellion has a bone to pick with the types of things esteemed in our culture, and on FATHER FIGURE, his first album in seven years, he makes clear what really matters to him. “There's nothing sadder than a father stuck inside a much, much younger man's bravado,” he raps on “ITALIA BREEZE,” a breezy ode to his Long Island Italian heritage. The singer/songwriter can be polarizing, in part because of his genre-promiscuity—he’s just as indebted to golden era NYC rap as he is to the arena-pop-rock of Coldplay and Oasis, and he even flirts with country on a Luke Combs-assisted track. But after his seven year hiatus, his sampling is more inventive, his flows more voguish, his faith more focused. Bellion has always been cocky, but on the titular track he turns his New York swagger toward the care of his family (“Father figure, known to protect / I do that shit however”) and he flips an iconic status symbol into a metaphor for self-aggrandizement: “Big Ferrari / You look so sick inside your big Ferrari / Gave up your children just to be somebody.” “WASH” is an unselfconsciously schmaltzy serenade to Bellion’s wife—a contemporary Song of Songs that blurs the line between religious devotion and spousal desire: “Treat your body like a river and / Let it wash over me;” “Lay your grace on me / Hallelu', you amaze me.” Bellion’s stilted, syncopated delivery on the chorus bursts with enthusiasm—an endearingly overeager boy seeing his spouse naked for the first or five thousandth time. He can’t contain his affection—six tracks later is “WASH2,” an acoustic version of the same song. On the second half of “GET IT RIGHT,” he slips into a nonchalant flow over a sunny sample to celebrate the quotidian beauty of domestic life:
“I know a lot of CEOs with billions and resentful kids, yikes
I also know a lot of famous people that are wishing for an average life
Talking, Tums on the nightstand at sixty-five
The good shit, babies and sleepless nights
The craziness of man and wife
The good, the bad, the dark, the light.”
Bellion has always assimilated and subverted trends, and FATHER FIGURE is most interesting when he integrates the cadences and aesthetics of contemporary pop to skewer its superficiality. But in the end he’s not stuck on polemics—he’s too busy having fun with his family.
The Grid
Even a dead language is full of life, as Eli Payne Mandel illuminates in his debut collection of poetry, The Grid. In the titular section, inscrutable archival notes and Mandel’s original translations of Mycenaean fragments are interspersed with a series of prose poems to construct an intimate portrait of Alice Kober, the linguistics professor whose scholarship was “fundamental but inconspicuous” to the deciphering of the ancient system of Greek writing known as Linear B. Mandel writes with unusual tenderness about Kober, finding “unsung music” in the bewildering geometries of her diagrams and grids: “what for crooked irregular gods / childbirth a context unknown / with lions she dances resin vine.” Mandel’s excavation of apocalyptic languages—from Ovid’s exilic epistolary poems to Kober’s cryptic notes to biblical passages to nuclear submarine orders—is strangely moving, often confounding, and unpredictably beautiful.
Jack Whitten’s Greek Alphabet Paintings
Sixty miles north of New York City, nestled among the trees and overlooking the Hudson River, is a massive, stately Nabisco factory that has been converted into one of my very favorite art museums. Dia Beacon makes perfect use of its singular, sprawling space—with entire galleries devoted to Sol LeWitt and Louise Bourgeois, as well as titanic site-specific works from Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter. Even with these old favorites, a new highlight emerged during my visit last weekend: Jack Whitten’s Greek Alphabet Paintings.
These paintings from the mid-’70s came as Whitten grew increasingly disinterested in Abstract Expressionism (which he considered too compromised by white masculinity). He chose instead to explore and embrace new forms of experimentation. Though Whitten is certainly invested in deconstructing the Euro-centric art canon, the paintings strike me as less de-constructive than pre-constructive—stripped to an elemental form which vibrates with divine energy. Strangely, these meticulously nonrepresentational paintings somehow immediately evoked in me images of John 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is what Jack Whitten’s paintings have left me with: invisible visions of the pre-incarnate God and the immaterial density of the pre-created cosmos.
The Dunkirk One-Shot Sequence from Atonement
I recently did a Dunkirk double feature with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, (both from 2017, a year with three(!) different films about Dunkirk). Both are fantastic but neither can touch the single-shot Dunkirk beach sequence from Wright’s 2007 film Atonement, which has haunted me like few other film sequences I’ve ever seen. The long, uncut shot follows three soldiers as they walk around the beach where 400,000 Allied soldiers await evacuation. I love this sequence, and I’ve rewatched it half a dozen times since my double feature. I’m also convinced it manages to do more in five minutes than Dunkirk and Darkest Hour can do in a combined four hours—capturing the chaos and claustrophobia and absurdity and despair of war as well as the ordinary humanity of the masses through the set’s overwhelming density. I love the way the sequence is described by Peter Robertson, the Atonement camera operator: “The uninterrupted flow of images drift in front of our eyes like a hallucination from a Bosch painting or, in the case of the dying horses, like the contorted images from Picasso’s Guernica. The shot, unedited, has the power of a real nightmare with its bizarre associations.” It’s an incredible technical feat involving the meticulous choreography of one thousand extras, and even after dozens of viewings, new details emerge and surprise me—like a Where’s Waldo? page, something will suddenly stand out that seems impossible to have missed before. What is impossible to miss is the brief but potent respite from the beach’s disorder, as the camera circles a group of soldiers singing the American Quaker hymn “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” For the soldiers, it’s a song of peace and praise in the face of oblivion: “Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still small voice of calm!” The moment is a balm for all who face chaotic times, and I can’t stop watching it.
A Fortune for Your Disaster
There is a certain kind of art that refuses to imagine suffering as beautiful, while nevertheless insisting that there is beauty to be discovered amid the rubble of loss. This is evident in the work of anyone who labors at noticing and creating beauty in this shivering world, but few writers in recent memory do this as well as poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib. His exhilarating essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is a favorite of mine, but recently I've been revisiting his 2019 poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster. His rasping laments contain a poignant solace:
In this version of the gospel, the flood is already there.
In this version, Noah opens the doors to the ark and begs
the animals to come inside but they shake their
heads and march into the drowning one by one.
Written in the wake of his marriage’s dissolution, these poems are tender and bracing, with long, searing, abruptly earnest titles (“What a Miracle That Our Parents Had Us When They Could Have Gotten a Puppy Instead”) that are sometimes repeated over multiple poems (the title “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This” appears thirteen times). Abdurraqib is uninterested in obscuring the devastation of suffering: “Some wounds cannot be hushed / no matter the way one writes of blood / & what reflection arrives in its pooling.” Instead, he writes from the pooling and strains toward the light: “into the hollow void I’ve left / I echo the names of all who have pulled me / from the depths of my own design. …we can all mourn / until the mourning trembles out a celebration.”
The Brutalist
It seems like The Brutalist is everywhere these days, but there’s good reason. The three and a half hour film by director Brady Corbet is every bit as “monumental” as its ultra-chic promotional campaign would have us believe, approaching its ambitious subject matter with gorgeous cinematography and marvelous set design. It tells the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States. Once in America, his Bauhaus training and innovative vision go unappreciated until a wealthy patron commissions a revolutionary Christian community center. The film stunningly materializes Tóth’s architectural vision, achieving an uncanny verisimilitude that had me Googling László Tóth during the film’s intermission (the character is wholly invented, though he pointedly shares a name with the infamous vandal of Michelangelo’s Pietà).
As good as the first half of The Brutalist is, its second half has been understandably controversial, as even its monster runtime struggles to bear the weight of all it wants to say about the immigrant experience, creative legacy and obsession, art and commerce, identity and assimilation, sexual trauma and transgression, Zionism, exploitative capitalism, midcentury American idealism, and the relationship between creator and patron. Have I made it sound like a slog? It’s not, because even with its muddled threads, a film this colossal has at least something of thematic, visual, historical, personal, architectural, typographical(!), or some other particular interest to nearly everyone.
As for me, I’m left thinking about slivers of light cutting through a concrete cross; about a cruciform shadow cast upon an altar; about an architect creating a space for others to worship a foreign God. In The Brutalist, these are haunting images of oppression and malice, rightly criticizing self-serving, exploitative Christian philanthropy. And yet these lingering images can’t help but evoke a very real Brutalist masterpiece—Tadao Ando’s extraordinary church in Osaka. The central concrete cross—a likely architectural inspiration for Tóth’s fictional cross—is not an image of darkness, but the very reason for the space’s name: Church of the Light. Maybe The Brutalist simply miscasts its eponymous architectural style, or perhaps it bears witness to a more mysterious reality—that sacred structures are more than their materials, sacred symbols are less than their referents, and that sacred spaces can never simply be bought.
Mahashmashana
Father John Misty’s 2024 album Mahashmashana has captivated and confounded me ever since its release. Five months later, I still have no idea what to make of it, but I can’t stop listening. Father John Misty, the stage name of Josh Tillman, is often polarizing—he’s still pompous and condescending on this album—but perhaps that’s the only way we can get a record this musically and spiritually audacious.
The title track opens the album with a searching, nine-minute mystical manifesto, crescendoing to an inversion of Amazing Grace: “what was found is lost.” This doesn’t appear to distress Father John Misty. Mahashmashana, referring to the Sanskrit word meaning Great Cremation Ground, is a site of spiritual transformation in sacred Hindu literature, and Tillman seems to find some liberation in his immolation of religious consolations. But this is only the first song, and things don’t remain so clear.
On “Screamland,” the emotional climax of the album, he returns to Christian imagery of communion, resurrection, and baptism, and at times the lyrics even tiptoe toward the devotional: “God must be with the outcasts, 'cause when I call, you come.” He insists that “Love must find a way” and he wonders aloud, “Maybe we are living in a state of grace returned / Maybe faith like this has at least one practitioner,” and as the music swells, I’m surprised to find myself moved. Tillman has said that “Screamland” was inspired by Christian pop, that he wanted to create a “mutilated Hillsong” track. Is it all just a trick, an elaborate satire to expose the hollowness of Christian symbolism? I’m not so sure. Father John Misty is most compelling when he blurs the line between cynicism and sincerity, and Mahashmashana reminds me that the distance between the two is rarely as wide as we imagine.
Blue Moon
Everyone knows Rodgers and Hammerstein—the golden age musical theater duo behind Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music—but how many of us remember Rodgers and Hart? Lorenz Hart partnered with Richard Rodgers for over twenty years before Rodgers began his new duo with Oscar Hammerstein II, whose partnership debuted with Oklahoma!. Hart’s response to this new partnership is depicted in Blue Moon, a delightful and heartbreaking new film by Richard Linklater. The film follows Hart (played brilliantly by Ethan Hawke) on the night of Oklahoma!’s premier, sulking at the bar of the musical’s opening night celebration. Like some of Linklater’s most groundbreaking films (Slacker, Before Sunrise, Boyhood), Blue Moon has a loose, plotless story—the whole thing is really just an extended conversation at a bar, occurring in real time. Hart is a tragically pitiful figure, drinking himself to death and desperate to find some sort of meaning—in the creation of great art, or in the attention of a desirable younger woman. The best scenes are both electric and excruciating, like when old tensions quietly simmer and flare between Hart and Rodgers (Andrew Scott, in a captivating, restrained performance) as they discuss the possibility of future work together. Alcoholism is devastating, yes, but there are other torments that are much harder to depict on screen. Blue Moon’s tender portrait of internalized shame avoids so many Hollywood clichés, and in so doing offers something both more hilarious and far more haunting.
Tech Free Roadtrips
It’s a rite of passage for young people to romanticize the simpler technology of a bygone era. I’m old enough to laugh when I see a teenager on the subway cloaked in an early aughts aesthetic and listening to a Discman, but young enough to find payphones delightfully inconceivable and vinyl records magical. Drivers who recall the danger of navigating a Thomas Guide while steering or the tedium of MapQuest printouts may roll their eyes at anyone willingly turning from the miracle of GPS, but I’m convinced that roads are less enchanting when navigated through a smartphone screen. Particularly for those of us who had smartphones before we learned to drive, there was little need to internalize maps, routes, or traffic patterns; our devices know the most efficient path better than we ever could. But then again, there’s so much to discover when we allow ourselves to get lost. I recently took a trip following only maps, road signs, and the whims of delight, and I recommend it. An unexpected stop for pie or a carton of fresh strawberries, bid by a hand-painted billboard, is more gratifying than a trip to Yelp’s highest rated bakery. Stopping to ask for directions at a cafe in an unknown town might kindle a conversation that would otherwise never have occurred. Pulling over simply because an area looks pretty fosters greater attentiveness. Of course, this wide-eyed, credulous relationship with unfamiliar places is only afforded to certain individuals, as the enduring legacy of the Green Book (which Black motorists used to safety navigate potentially hostile territory) makes clear. Still, such a relationship makes us interruptible to the beauty around us and more intimate with the land we inhabit.
A Ghost Story
One of the most haunting movie scenes in my recent memory is a woman eating pastry. In a five-minute, uninterrupted take, Rooney Mara’s character stress-eats nearly an entire pie. It’s an amazing practical stunt—Mara said in an interview that she had never even tried pie before eating this one on camera—and the result is both excruciatingly long and eerily mesmerizing. The scene is from A Ghost Story, director David Lowery’s strange meditation on love, loss, and existence itself. Considering such lofty preoccupations, the film is short and surprisingly playful. The recently deceased husband of Mara’s character, played by Casey Affleck, is a white-sheeted ghost like you might see while trick-or-treating. The costume’s decidedly silly quality makes the film’s poignance all the more mystifying.
I hadn’t watched A Ghost Story since it came out in 2017, and since then I have become far more acquainted with grief in my own life. When I revisited the film last week, I wondered if it would feel overwhelmingly sad. Instead, I found it all the lovelier: yes, the tedium of grief is here, but so is the wonderful, precarious life we get to share with others, and even the tiniest traces of this shared life echo into eternity.