Dear Friends,
I’m sharing an essay on ‘rawness.’ The essays on this site, in general, tend to be on aesthetics - trying to think through a particular aesthetic, what it’s more broadly reflective of in the culture at large, what directions it’s headed in.
Best wishes,
Sam
RAW AND FAKE RAW
For a little while I took an acting class, which I loved. The class was broken into two parts, at the beginning everybody took the stage one by one, was given an opening line, and instructed to deliver a monologue to whomever popped into their head first. I thought this was terrific, and if it had been a show I would have paid to see it – ten or twenty New Yorkers each given a minute to unload on somebody or other from their life, no limitations, no holds barred, and it was always funny, moving, always had unexpected arcs and movements. The second part of the class was also improvised but it was a scene – a series of prompts and objectives whispered to the actors – and these could be funny and interesting, but it never would have occurred to me to make a show out of them. All of the problems of craft reappeared, everybody’s imaginations turned out to be somewhat limited, it wasn’t really possible to create a character or a story, just a gesture towards one, and, as works of art, the scenes were always a bit ragged and threadbare.
What the monologues had, and the scenes didn’t, was that they were raw. It sort of wasn’t the thing to do to talk about them as coherent pieces – they were meant to be exercises, emotionally freeing – but I kept thinking like a producer, thinking of Eric Bogosian or John Leguizamo, fantasizing, I suppose, about a very particular flavor – The Velvet Underground in 1964, Blondie in 1979 – the feeling of something that wasn’t developed, wasn’t necessarily even good, but was rough, connected to a particular place and moment in time, that was better than anyone expected, than it had any right to be. There was one actor there that I really had trouble watching, I’d be careful about when I went on stage so that I didn’t have to be stuck doing a scene with him. His manner was very whiny and gestural, everything with him was camp, he was obviously a very kind person, very smiley, was clearly desperate to be praised, and his acting, honestly, made my stomach turn – as I could tell it did for the teacher of the class. Then he got up, did a monologue about his drinking, “And then it’s more and more and I want to stop and I can’t stop,” and he suddenly became a different person, the whininess was gone and the smile and the camp, he was very still and pure and his eyes were suffused with pain. At the end of class there was a tradition to acknowledge one person and everyone lined up to talk to him and with good reason – it wasn’t just that he’d come out as an alcoholic in front of everybody, and that was brave and so forth, it was also that he had given the best monologue I’d seen in the class, and all the more shattering because it would never happen again quite like that and he, in all likelihood, would never have the skill to repeat it.
I don’t think there’s any other culture that values the ‘raw’ in the way that ours does. Certain kinds of religious enthusiasm are raw – St Francis of Assisi was raw, Jesus was raw, at least when he wept. Carnival had an element of raw in it, as does the art of political insurrection, and certain shamanic trances. But street art is never raw – the exact opposite – street artists have the appearance of being raw, make a certain amount of effort to appear spontaneous, but what makes it work is the mastery of the performer, which is both charmingly understated and completely a given: knife-juggling is very different when it’s done by a past master as opposed to when it’s improv. Same goes for the circus, commedia dell’arte, virtually all forms of folk art, which are rooted in a sense of mastery, in many cases extending backwards for generations.
‘Raw’ strikes me as being intimately connected with the ferments of modernity. Democracy has a component of raw to it – the Boston Tea Party was a striking piece of political theater. Blake was raw, Coleridge was raw. 19th century religious movements – Baptism – were raw. Whitman’s ‘barbaric yawp’ announced the aesthetic of the raw to the world. Jarry and Marinetti were raw. Paul Klee was raw when he painted with his non-dominant hand; Picasso’s Primitivism was raw (although not the tradition it was based on). Now, raw has become a cult – it’s thrilling when music is raw, there’s almost no higher praise for live performance than to call it ‘raw,’ certain types of highly-stylized fashion are raw (e.g. Kate Moss), the final frontier in sex is to do it ‘raw’ – so much so that it’s startling to realize how new it all is: improv, which seems like it would be the most natural possible art, was created, essentially, in the mid-20th century.
So what exactly do we like so much about being ‘raw’? Some of it is ideological – it connects to the ‘conversion experience’ in Protestantism; connects also to moments of high revolutionary drama, the sudden marching to the barricades, the very modern feeling of the world being turned this way or that by a dramatic ‘live wire’ event. Luther’s tacking the theses to the church door of Wittenberg was raw. Kerensky’s fainting fits, timed for the ends of his speeches, were raw. And the Romantics channeled the energy of a revolutionary era into their art, just as Whitman made his poem an emanation of the democratic spirit. And some of it is technological – we still have a child’s fascination with all the modern toys, there is something that lights us up about the idea of being at the initial recording of something that will live on in posterity (which is why, I suppose, I always prefer to listen to live recordings of music, where available, as opposed to the studio version – there’s something cultic, electric, about the reverb in the hall, the stray noises from the crowd, a live ‘raw’ event being frozen permanently at a precise moment in time). And, conversely, paradoxically, there’s a thrill at being present for something that isn’t recorded, why everybody is always so excited about being backstage, why musicians are always going on about wanting you to see live events, why a certain kind of person spends their life dreaming about having been at the performances of a band just before they caught on (I’m thinking of a mural on Second Avenue – a tribute to a Blondie performance at CBGB in 1979 – which is, above all, a shrine to the ‘raw’). The monologue I saw in my acting class wouldn’t have especially caught my attention if it had been filmed and I’d come across it on Vimeo; it struck a chord because it was in-the-moment, never-to-be-repeated, but there was a sense, whether accurate or not, that it could have been a turning point in that actor’s life.
I’m not being facetious to link rawness to specific historical ideas and trends. As an aesthetic, rawness at the moment feels permanent and sort of inarguable, but my sense of it is a bit different – that it’s beautiful and fragile, and there’s a new poshlost challenging it. That the feeling of rawness is hard to maintain is obvious enough – think of all the aging rock bands touring around with their long hair, still jamming like they were at CBGB, oblivious both to their calcified fame and to the fact that their music has become completely routine, both to their audiences and to themselves, that they’re playing the same song for the twenty thousandth time and pretending it’s fresh. Or think of the disappointment when you learn that the first draft of On The Road really was written in three weeks but then was edited extensively for publication – and it’s telling that the scroll of the first draft, sold for several million dollars and exhibited in museums around the world, is more beloved than the edited novel itself.
My affinity is always towards the raw. I like Allen Ginsberg’s line “First thought best thought.” I love the story of Walt Whitman writing the preface of the first edition of Leaves of Grass at the print shop, actually composing in the moment as he placed the type on the pages. (I try, incidentally, to be as raw as possible in these essays, something that I was partly inspired in by the improv class, rewriting slightly to make myself not seem stupid but trying to respect the rhythm of the thought as it first occurred to me.) The point is not to create some crafted piece, some marvelous toy. The point is to be truthful to who you were at a particular moment in time – and, since no one ever really improves – there’s very little point in nursing or rehashing or hoping that, over the course of time, one will become better than one is at the moment.
The raw is always in danger of collapsing, almost immediately, into self-parody, into mannerism. For instance, Yevtushenko, whose first poems are brilliant, gorgeous, an announcement of self – and whose subsequent poems are the same thing over and over again so that he straight away becomes washed-up, hackneyed. But there’s another danger to the raw, which is a very particular manipulation of it. In my improv class, an actor got up to do his exercise, he was given the prompt ‘this is why I act.’ It turned out that he was from a very poor background, was a veteran, started shaking with rage and determination, saying he needed to give a voice to the people he knew growing up, to the vets. His veins were throbbing, his eyes were unblinking. For a while after he finished, he just stood on the stage letting his emotion subside. It was very raw, it was also terrible, and it was strange why it was so bad – he was probably telling the truth, he probably had gone through all kinds of bracing experiences, he believed he was called upon to express them – but he wasn’t honest, and all of us in the room could feel it. The teacher tried, gently, to tell him to simplify it, to come just from what he authentically felt, but the actor didn’t pay attention, in his logic the point of acting was to be raw, and he had been raw and was sure that everybody in the room must be reacting just as he hoped we were – but we preferred a thousand times over the quiet confession of the guy talking about his drinking habit.
I saw something similar in The Fleabag, which everybody loves. It’s a very raw show – her mother dies, her best friend dies, she’s constantly in tears, constantly making a mess of her life, the style is very off-the-cuff. And I don’t believe a word of it. Waller-Bridge strikes me as slumming it, someone who’s basically pretty together pretending that she’s a wild mess, someone who’s smart and cunning pretending that she’s much dumber than she actually is. It’s the same sort of impulse that makes high-end fashion brands sell distressed jeans, that makes highly manufactured, calculating companies pretend they’re raw. And it’s in otherwise very good shows like Louie and Crashing, which are extremely perceptive when the character is down-and-out and struggle perceptibly to find a point-of-view once the character starts to do better.
Raw has become a shorthand for suffering – downtrodden, victimized, poverty-chic. When it works, when it’s electric, it’s something very different – an absolutely honest acknowledging of who you are wherever you happen to find yourself.
This has me thinking of literary readings. Writers are, by and large, terrible performers of their own work. Even the poets who are thought of as good peformers all read with the same cadences and volumes. Their rawness is rehearsed, not raw. And the poor literary performers are raw but not compelling.
I found this really interesting, and it clarified something for me, in a different context. As I was browsing the tv channels yesterday, I happened upon an old TV programme. I didn't have the sound on, but I thought the acting was atrocious. However, I couldn't understand why, given that it was very naturalistic, not histrionic. I think that, applying your analysis to that context, I must have been picking up on the fact (as far as I'm concerned) that the acting wasn't natural, but fake natural. In other words, I suspect the actors were thinking things like "a person in this situation would do a double-take here, so I'll do a double take" etc. It reminds me of the George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made.”