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内容：Smiling Sima 编辑：Sirrena Lai
Wechat ID: NativeStudy / Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
Part I: Speaker
Protests For Racial Justice Bring Light To Anti-Blackness Within Communities Of Color
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday, July 25, 2020
[Rephrase: 8:56]
Source: NPR
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/25/895329201/protests-for-racial-justice-bring-light-to-anti-blackness-within-communities-of-
Part II: Speed
How Does a Movie Composer Write the Perfect Score?
Michael Abels on writing the music for Get Out, Us, and Bad Education.
By ISAAC BUTLER
AUG 10, 2020
[Time 2]
On this week’s episode of Working, Isaac Butler spoke with Michael Abels, an orchestral composer who wrote the music for the movies Get Out, Us, and Bad Education. This partial transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Isaac Butler: What’s the step-by-step process of scoring a film. You said for Cory Finley’s Bad Education you first saw a rough cut. Did it have temp tracks on it already? Was it cut to preexisting music?
Michael Abels: Some of it was, and some of it wasn’t. Temp tracks are a necessary evil. Directors usually offer to screen the film for a composer without any music, but time is short, and you need to know what’s informing a director’s view of the film musically. A composer needs to get inside a director’s head as quickly as they can—and not just their head, because music lives in our soul. You’re having to suddenly get to know someone in an intimate way and then be able to use your skill to express them as if they were a musical artist in the way they are a visual artist. That being the challenge, temp music does a lot to help you fast-forward the conversation.
I always ask the director, “What emotions or what actions do you want the music to tell the audience at this point?” I don’t want visual artists to have to speak in musical language. It’s my job to take what they tell me and what they’re feeling and translate it into music. Rather than to try to use language they’re uncomfortable with, I encourage them to speak the way they would speak to an actor or to a cinematographer or any other of the craftspeople they collaborate with. Just to hear someone speak about what they’re feeling or thinking without them trying to process it, you get a much more accurate impression about what’s going to be correct, I think.
[355 words]
[Time 3]
How do you actually learn how to do that? Someone is giving you information, and then you have to process it into your art form and language and then give it back to them. Then they have to listen to it and say, “Ah, yes, this is actually this thing that I was thinking,” or, “This isn’t the thing I was thinking, but it’s better,” or, “Nope, never mind.” How do you learn how to do that, especially since you’re working with different artists each time, who each have a different vocabulary?
You’ve summed up the whole challenge! For those of us who write or create anything, there’s two brains. There’s the creator and the critic. The critic is the one that tells us what clothes to put on and is this room too warm, and what are we going to have for lunch and all these judgments we need to make to function. But when you’re creating, that voice can shut down every good idea you’ve ever had. You have to learn to let the creative voice just do something without explanation and justification and let that bloom for a while. Only after the flower has had some water and some sun do you want to let that critical voice that you use every day have at it to say, “Well, this is the flower, but it could be so much different. It needs to be a different color, it needs to be taller, the leaves are the wrong shape.”
[275 words]
[Time 4]
But if there is no flower, your critic doesn’t get to make those judgments. How that relates to a filmmaker is that you have to be the creator and create based on what they’re looking for and then allow them to have that voice that says, “I love it and it needs to be totally different.” One of the notes Cory Finley gave me was about a piece called “Eye Contact,” which is in a love scene. After he heard my first version of it, he said, ” ‘Eye Contact’ is insanely gorgeous. Can you change the first three chords?”
What did he want out of those first three chords?
It was too dark. In this scene, at least one of the characters is in a lot of conflict internally, which he doesn’t express, but it’s clearly going on. I was feeling that and responding. In his mind, in the way it was landing for him, the music was implying that there was something darker in the scene that the audience should really be feeling at that point.
It strikes me that you faced a particular challenge with the Jordan Peele film Us, because you have two antagonistic groups combating each other. How does the music express point of view when you have two opposing point of views at once?
Jordan is someone who likes to start hearing music in preproduction, while he may still be working on the script of the film, in fact. Because when he imagines a world and a story, he imagines the music in it as much as he imagines the characters and the setting. The first thing he said to me about Us was “Well, obviously it’s about duality, so give me some instruments that don’t belong together. Give me some duets of things that don’t go together.” I had read the script, so these were inspired by the film, but when I sent them to Jordan, I didn’t tell him which scene they were for, because I didn’t want my conception to limit him. If he liked them, I figured they would speak to him in some way that related to the film.
[387 words]
[Time 5]
I think that the demo I did is in the film virtually as I first wrote it. It’s called “Beach Walk,” and it plays as you see the family walking down the beach. It’s supposed to be a happy day at the beach, but the music’s really troubling and unsettling.
I read an interview with Jordan Peele, where he said that you were a good fit for his work because you’re a nice person, and the best horror is made by empathetic people. I was wondering what you thought about that.
First of all, I’m flattered that he said that. So much of my job is to channel the emotions of the lead character. I write frightening music because I’m genuinely frightened by the things that are happening on the screen. It doesn’t matter how many times I watch them, it’s still terrifying. The characters don’t know what’s happening, and that’s why they’re terrified I have to express the emotion in music as well as the actors do in their bodies and voices.
[199 words]
Samin Nosrat’s Instant Green Soup With a Power Ingredient
By KRISTEN MIGLORE
AUG 11, 2020
[Time 6]
This soup, which comes from our great Salt Fat Acid Heat teacher Samin Nosrat, could not be more satisfying, just as it’s written. It comes together in moments, yet makes an astonishingly green soup that sings and dances and hula-hoops with flavor.
But it first grabbed me in an even more pared-down, quarantine-friendly form, as Samin talked about it in the first episode of Home Cooking, her podcast with host, producer, and pun enthusiast Hrishikesh Hirway.
Samin and Hrishikesh launched Home Cooking—which started as a four-episode miniseries and recently (thank goodness) continued with four more—to help all of us make sense of suddenly cooking a lot more, with fewer ingredients around. They’ve been so effective in their mission that I can listen to each episode repeatedly, plucking new dinner ideas out each time.
So when, in the burbling fountain of meal inspiration that was the first episode, Samin said we could make a vibrant green soup out of nothing more than stock, frozen peas, tahini, and lemon, plus fresh herbs if we wanted, I took my first note. I had all of those things! Why hadn’t I thought to put them together?
The soup was based on a recipe Samin first wrote about for the EAT column she contributes to at the New York Times Magazine. In another moment of scarcity—a restorative cleanse Samin embarked on in the desert after two years of travel and events for her many-award-winning book and TV show—she found comfort not despite but because of the limitations she was facing.
[269 words]
[The rest]
The answer she found was in tahini—the roasted sesame paste that’s a staple in Middle Eastern cooking, used to add creamy, smoky oomph to everything from hummus to cookies. It’s also conveniently vegan and, in Samin’s case, cleanse-approved.
The savory richness that tahini adds is remarkable—especially in a recipe as simple as this, in which fistfuls of green things are just-melted into hot stock and blended till neon. Consider stirring in a few spoonfuls anytime your soup or stew is tasting flat.
But if you want to take it one step further, Samin drizzles in more tahini at the end—as a sauce spiked with lemon, garlic, cumin, and chile flakes. This move is just as pantry-friendly and swift, and takes the soup from very good to how did I not know soup could taste like this?
[148 words]
Source: Culture
https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/samin-nosrat-spinach-cilantro-soup.html
Part III: Obstacle
Raven Leilani’s Début Novel Deconstructs Domesticity
The story of an extramarital affair undergoes a stealthy reversal when the homewrecker becomes part of the family.
By Alexandra Schwartz
August 10, 2020
[Paraphrase 8]
One reason that the novel, despite so many tedious predictions to the contrary, stubbornly refuses to die is that the world that fiction helps us see keeps shifting shape. Take Raven Leilani’s first book, “Luster” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which tells the story of Edie, a twenty-three-year-old publishing peon who begins an affair with a married man she meets on a dating site. You could be forgiven for thinking that adultery, a cornerstone of so many great nineteenth-century novels, had been exhausted as a subject. Sexual barriers have long since been torn down, taboos lifted, transgressions neutralized; from Anna Karenina’s point of view, things would look positively utopian. Yet the heart is as muddled by freedom as it was by constraint, and that is where the mordant, bruising “Luster” charges in.
Leilani is twenty-nine, a graduate of New York University’s M.F.A. program in fiction, and from the opening sentence her novel showcases her style with, well, a bang: “The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light.” That casual disclosure is typical of Leilani’s knowing, understated wit. She is a sharp phrasemaker—we get “the high-fructose sun” of an amusement park, and an older co-worker’s “bleached, Warholian cool”—and she loves catching her reader off guard by tweaking a sentence midway through, switching up speeds, like a pitcher, so that a passage that begins modestly suddenly gathers momentum, shooting forward in long, arcing phrases that stay improbably in flight. Here is Edie with Eric, the guy she’s having cybersex with at the start, together at a club’s throwback disco night:
But the beauty of disco is the too much, is the horn section and the cheese, and so Eric and I convene in the bathroom over a spoon and someone is in the stall next to us with bare feet weeping and we go out into the middle and Eric is a very coordinated white man but given to fall back on the cabbage patch and the diddy bop, which is fine, and then we’re in his car with the AC all the way up, on a reasonable clip through the Holland Tunnel, and he’s handing me his phone and asking me to decline a call from his wife, which makes me feel terrible, not out of any fealty to Rebecca but because this night appears to have generated from some greater marital drama, though of course I relish denying the call . . .
This is a hundred and forty-two words and still Leilani hurtles on, taking Edie to Eric’s house in suburban New Jersey and into his bedroom, “where all the pictures are facedown, which is a level of premeditation that gives me pause, but that ultimately eases me out of my clothes because to do all this he would have to know I would say yes, he would have to believe himself capable of finessing the initial yes into the terminal yes in such perfect order that I would even go to Jersey and the idea that he understands this, his total control of the situation, is what does me in.” There’s a “look what I can do” joy in Leilani’s prose that delights in the rapture it describes, capped, in that surrender to “yes,” by a nod to Molly Bloom, who knows a thing or two herself about the erotics of a breathless run-on.
The novel is narrated in the present tense, for a reason. Edie can’t get much purchase on her past. If she could, she might avoid making the same mistakes that sink her over and over. Sex is the big one. She is, by her own description, the “office slut” at the publishing house where she works as something called the “managing editorial coordinator” of the children’s imprint, and has slept with everyone from the I.T. guy to the head of the art department. This has done nothing to advance her career—quite the contrary—though there is a recalled episode of humiliation in which Edie begs the art-department head to take a look at her sketchbook. (Even the past is rendered in the blunt present tense.) She wants to be an artist, but doubts her chances: “I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad.” Sometimes Edie allows herself to dream of a parallel life in which, “fatter and happier,” she paints in her own studio. It’s telling that this fantasy is seen from the outside, like a magazine clipping taped to a vision board. In reality, she barely eats, lives in a mouse-infested apartment in Bushwick, and has been in a state of creative paralysis for two years.
Edie is drawn to Eric by “the potent drug of a keen power imbalance,” a familiar aphrodisiac, and here a lightly comedic one; Eric is a depressive library archivist, not some mogul, and it’s debatable who holds the advantage. During the heat of the MeToo movement, it was often said, by people who were dismayed by the explosion of so much fury and retribution, that young women wield their own power over older men. This is undoubtedly true, as Edie knows; the trouble is that such power quickly expires, and tends to leave the woman the poorer for having spent it. But it is exactly this threat of being used, and used up, that appeals to Edie. Disappointment is assumed; so is the expectation of pain, queasily reframed as desire.
To the loaded differences of age, gender, and income, Leilani adds another: race. Seen through Eric’s eyes, Edie, in the American formulation that expresses racial embarrassment by attempting to hide it, “happens to be black,” while Eric is white, and awkwardly sidesteps the subject: “I can feel it in how cautiously he says African American. How he absolutely refuses to say the word black.” Edie is used to navigating white self-consciousness. It’s an unspoken requirement at the office, where she is one of only two Black women. The other, Aria, is a sparkling overachiever who does “that unthreatening aw-shucks shtick for all the professional whites.” Edie wishes that they could be in cahoots. Instead, they are nemeses, Aria repelled by Edie’s alienation and slacker’s petulance, Edie envious of Aria’s cold-eyed, obsequious compliance, her willingness to play the corporate game. Leilani takes advantage of this setting to lampoon the grist that passes through the corporate publishing mill for the “general” reader—the lurid fetish for historical trauma redeemed by white heroics, the ill-informed cultural voyeurism:
I go up to the table and scan the books, and there are a few new ones: a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative about a runaway’s friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a black maid who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who exists only within the bounds of her employer’s four walls; an “urban” romance where everybody dies by gang violence; and a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods.
It’s daring of Leilani to launch such a hilarious salvo on the publishing industry from within, and her timing turns out to be spot on. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has led to public critiques of the persistent whiteness of the publishing world—and, perhaps less usefully, to the circulation of a slew of anti-racist reading lists on social media which tend to posit books by Black authors as the broccoli of American literature, to be consumed by white readers for nutrition, not enjoyment. It seems like a delicious trick that “Luster,” a highly pleasurable interrogation of pleasure, should be born into this context. Imagine looking for a lesson and finding, instead, lonely, mixed-up Edie, mercifully unqualified to teach anyone, least of all herself.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine. The novel dramatizes this situation, not through Edie’s affair with Eric but, unexpectedly, through her relationship with his wife. Eric’s marriage is open, an arrangement that resolves ethical tangles by creating new emotional ones. For the first stretch of the novel, the wife, Rebecca, is visible only as a name on a cell-phone screen, or in the list of rules that she has written to govern Eric and Edie’s behavior: no unprotected sex, no ignoring her calls. Edie sees such boundaries as provocations, and one afternoon, crazed with longing and loneliness, she sneaks into Eric’s house. She is rifling through his wife’s closet when the woman herself appears, in a Yale T-shirt and yellow dish-scrubbing gloves. Disaster! Except, weirdly, not: instead of kicking her out of the house, Rebecca insists that Edie stay for what turns out to be the couple’s anniversary party. She even lends her a dress.
The spy has made it inside the gates only to be recruited by the enemy for some obscure, possibly vengeful purpose. In short order, Edie loses her job and her apartment, and, after a harried stint as a messenger for a delivery app, is taken in by Rebecca, while Eric is away on a business trip. The invitation to stay, as much an act of brazen aggression as it is one of charity, disguises a grudging call for help. Eric and Rebecca had recently adopted a Black preteen girl, Akila. Rebecca’s idea seems to be that Edie can serve as a figure of solidarity and support, a “Trusty Black Spirit Guide” who will help the friendless Akila find her way. Akila, sniffing out Edie’s own isolation, will have none of it. Armed with brutal adolescent candor, she would rather sit behind her closed door, playing video games and watching anime, than take pity on her father’s flailing girlfriend.
Still, as it becomes clear that Edie has installed herself in the house, an incongruous family unit begins to form, with Edie in the unstable position of Rebecca’s partner, ward, and, after Eric’s return, sexual competitor. This stealthy domestic reconfiguring of a novel that began as a challenge to the domestic is an ingenious move on Leilani’s part; the putative homewrecker has become part of the family. Abandoning the chaos of New York for the carpeted hush of suburbia seems very “Get Out.” The twist is that Edie wants to stay in. There is calm in New Jersey. Insulated from the world’s pressures, she starts to paint again.
And there is Rebecca. At first glance, she seems a stereotypical, high-strung suburban white woman, preoccupied with living-room yoga sessions, forever tugging at something in the garden. Yet she has an inner ferocity and bewildering composure in the face of her improbable circumstances. She can be a maddening adversary. After Rebecca icily dismisses Edie’s report of a racist aggression directed at Akila, Edie plans her response: “By midnight, I have a carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an entire treatise on the conspiracy of oppression, though at one o’clock when I have rehearsed my supporting data and reimagined our conversation as one in which I don’t let Dr. King down, I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself.” Leilani thrives in this hyperconscious register; this is the sincere comedy of a powerfully observant mind spinning its gears as thought rushes far ahead of action. Edie rattles on righteously to herself about “intellectual labor” and how “the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor,” before arriving at a simpler realization: “It becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone.” Edie is learning a kind of novelistic way of seeing, one that requires looking into, rather than through, another person. The novel echoes this looking, transferring its erotic attention to Rebecca. Edie, dwelling on Rebecca’s body, “as smooth and as featureless as silt” (there is some snooping after Eric returns home and to his wife’s bed), is both jealous and admiring of Rebecca’s ability to seize control of a situation that was meant to exclude her: “It bothers me that she doesn’t wear prettier underwear, that her marriage is inscrutable and involved, and that I am somewhere inside it.”
Leilani, a commendably patient novelist, comfortably dwells in such inscrutability. She sometimes falters when she tries to be overly legible, or pushes her vivid sensibility a measure too far. Rebecca works as a medical examiner at a morgue, sawing through skulls as she listens to the Hall & Oates station. At one point, Edie, on a fruitless job hunt, interviews to be the receptionist at a clown school. Although people do work at morgues, and clowns must come from somewhere, these garish touches, in a novel already highly attuned to the everyday surreal, lack the subtle weight that makes invented things seem true. Rebecca’s job, in particular, functions as unneeded shorthand for parsing her character, and Leilani does something similar with Edie’s penchant for pain. Throughout the novel, we get glimpses of her past in brief, vivid scenes woven into the broader narrative. We learn that she was brought up in upstate New York as a Seventh-Day Adventist. Her mother was a mentally unstable addict who committed suicide, her father a remote veteran given to domestic violence and womanizing. “I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit,” she tells us, with definitive, moving simplicity. But too clear a tethering line is drawn from Edie’s sorrowful childhood to the masochistic streak that emerges in her relationship with Eric. (She likes to be punched and choked beyond the bounds of mere role play; more troubling, he obliges with glee.) The violence, figured as a distress signal glossed as kink, feels familiarly coded—action that clarifies, rather than complicates, character.
In a sense, such stumbles are the flip side of the novel’s successes; both stem from Leilani’s hunger to pack so much of what she knows about the world into one deceptively narrow drama. Artistic trial and error is a precious prerogative, and one that the novel explicitly enacts through the motif of Edie’s painting. “A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t,” Edie thinks. “So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing.” There’s that word again, “inscrutable,” applied to herself. There is more than a touch of Ralph Ellison here, the hypervisible invisible woman who is cast by the world in categorical terms while trying to be seen for herself—or, as Edie puts it, “I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes.” When she wants to understand something, to really see it, Edie makes a painting. She has been trying and failing to do a self-portrait; the colors are off, the likeness doesn’t work. Still, she sticks with it, driven by the truest of all desires: to make her own image appear.
[2715 words]
Source: Culture
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/raven-leilanis-debut-novel-deconstructs-domesticity
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发表于 2020-8-12 11:37:18
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