It Is What It Is

Coming out of Bowery rain into downtown New York’s New Museum last Friday, I didn’t expect more than to spend an an hour or so with some installations and some video art, — I’d just come off a long bus ride and was hoping the video rooms might have pillows on the floor. I didn’t expect a change in the way I think about the world and I didn’t expect to be be emotionally moved, but if you can make it to the Bowery show in the next three weeks, or to any of the dozen spots across America where It Is What It Is travels this year, you can safely expect to leave feeling fascinated, bent out of shape, and grateful.The physical space of It Is What It Is doesn’t carry the viewer away. Two maps take up one corner of the wall — one of the maps is an outline of Iraq with the names of American cities inside it, the other vice-versa. Across the room sits the husk of an exploded car, which a little card explains was destroyed in an explosion on Al-Mutanabbi, a street of bookshops. There are some before and after pictures of the street there too.But these things are mostly on hand to begin conversations with the attendant Iraqi citizens, academics, and soldiers, name-tagged participants who have had real experience of the country and who will appear throughout the next few weeks on the gallery’s couches in shifts. They are the installation, and they are not only fascinating but welcoming and solicitous. Although I haven’t asked, I suspect that the artist and organizer, Jeremy Deller, coached some of the participants on how to begin conversations with potentially unadventurous gallery goers. I talked with artist and Lieutenant Colonel Peter Buotte about my life and my family’s military history and it turned out that we had a surprising amount in common. I asked him what he’d done in Iraq (infrastructure repair) and what Iraq’s most pressing problems were (massive corruption, among others, and no one knows what’s up with the electricity).

Shortly, a woman, also wearing a name tag, arrived and sat down next to us. Her name was Zainab Saleh and she and Peter were as anxious to talk to each other as I was to talk to both of them. He and I both listened to stories about her life growing up in Iraq (her family had been murdered there and she escaped shortly afterward by “knowing the right people to bribe”). She told us that sectarian violence has increased enormously in her lifetime, that much of the unemployment and despondency now chronic there began as a result of the embargo in the 90′s, that normal people had turned to radical religion when they felt hemmed in. She said she never wanted to go back.I can report these facts and more, but we have all read plenty of articles about Iraq and most of this has been observed by others and is somewhere in print. But the genius of the exhibition is its humanity, how normal and strange it is at once. The effect isn’t at all that of going to a lecture, since you’re just sitting around talking. But it isn’t exactly like a dinner party conversation either: there was no pressure to be amusing or to entertain. Even though I paid ten dollars to have the conversation (gallery admission, student rate), I felt privileged to be a part of it. As new people walked into the gallery — one or two every few minutes — we waved them in.Later that day, I told a number of friends how much It Is What It Is had moved me, and a few were more than suspicious: What corporation had funded it? Were antiwar activists represented? In what ways had they tried to change my mind? I was against the war from the start and I still am, and no one tried to change my mind. (I asked a soldier how he felt about the decision to go and recent decision to leave, but he responded in the way soldiers have to: “we were ordered in and so we went, now we’re being ordered out, so we’ll go”). No, you probably won’t have your mind changed about whether or not the invasion was a good idea, but you may find yourself feeling differently about other aspects of the last six years; you may even find yourself finally knowing why something you’ve always suspected to be true really is true. But the one thing I can promise you is that both the war and the history of Iraq and the Americans who are over there now or who have been there in recent years will feel more real to you.You owe it to yourself to go, and to ask questions, no matter how foolish they may seem (and plenty of mine were plenty foolish). Talk with everyone who’s there and shake their hands. A better world would have more art like this.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Carnival of Light

Paul McCartney doesn’t need to worry about his legacy, but he is worried. Perhaps The Beatles Anthology (both book and three (double-disk) CD sets) was the first indication, but Wingspan, a Wings greatest hits compilation (do any of you not know that Wings was McCartney’s highly successful (and highly inconsistent) post-Beatles band?) and the attendant television special clearly announced his… anxiety.I don’t mind a little aggrandizement, especially from someone who did, undeniably, contribute (positively) to our culture. As a Beatle, he not only co-wrote and wrote excellent pop songs, both for the Beatles and for a myriad of other artists (the first no. 1 for The Rolling Stones, Peter & Gordon’s no. 1 “World Without Love,” Badfinger’s “Come and Get It,” etc.), but he was also concerned—more so than John Lennon—with the evolution of the album as a single work of art (now perhaps a quaint idea, due to the reemergence of the single as the dominant pop unit), most obviously evident on the McCartney-driven Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and the linked b-side of Abbey Road. More important, though, than attempting to parse out who did what as a Beatle—they all contributed significantly to their collective sound, look, and spirit—McCartney’s need to work kept the band moving forward. Even as Lennon sank into sloth, suburbia, and heroin, McCartney’s drive inspired Lennon to write. McCartney showed up to the studio with five songs for Pepper; Lennon replied with five more. Post-Beatles, McCartney has given us a lot of silliness (though far less than people seem to think). This silliness is the likely reason why he may now seem slight—not, as he seems to think, because of the vast shadow his murdered best friend Lennon has cast.And now he’s being silly again. No, his efforts to release The Beatles track “Carnival of Light” isn’t silly. Maybe unnecessary—though considering the significance of The Beatles, it’s no less necessary than publishing newly uncovered Robert Frost poems. What’s silly is McCartney’s hope that “Carnival of Light” will serve as evidence that, as McCartney says through the mouth of interviewer John Wilson: “it will help reaffirm McCartney’s claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles.”It won’t. Whether or not it will be good isn’t the issue. “Carnival of Light” will be fun to listen to—as a relic.I like “Revolution No. 9,” the Lennon-Harrison sound collage on The White Album; I imagine that “Carnival of Light” won’t be as strong, but will be more fun—this is Pepper-era noise-play, after all, and you’ll know just how much fun when you pull your copy of Pepper off the shelf and listen to all the wonderful noise on that record—the instruments tuning up, the laughter at the end of “Within You Without You” (quite possibly my favorite moment on the album), the rooster that kicks off “Good Morning Good Morning” or the animal sounds at that track’s end, the roar of the crowd, and the “Sgt. Pepper Inner Groove” (as it’s called on Rarities) that ends the record.Release “Carnival of Light”—please! And every little scrap of studio (Abbey Roadand otherwise) noise The Beatles ever made. I will bankrupt myself to buy it because it adds to the joy The Beatles have given me since I was five years old. But Paul, don’t do it to sort out your legacy. You don’t get to sort out your legacy. Rather focus your energies on making new (and worthwhile) music—as you have lately done—and let us decide who Paul McCartney was, Beatle and otherwise.____Adam Golaski is the author of Color Plates and Worse Than Myself. He co-edits for Flim Forum Press, and is the editor of New Genre. Check in on Adam at Little Stories.