Episode 107: Genre Bending, Talking Heads, Niko’s Wild Ride and Ringtones

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• Author Carmen Maria Machado Isn't Afraid

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  Carmen Maria Machado is fearless.

  Just ask author Junot Díaz. Machado confronted the acclaimed author at a live Q&A event and inquired about some troubling misogynistic tones in his work. The two then had an uneasy exchange with Machado standing her ground, citing specific passages.

  When Díaz was later accused of sexual misconduct and misogynistic behavior, Machado took to Twitter to share her account of the encounter and to show support for the victims:

  During his tour for THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, Junot Díaz did a Q&A at the grad program I’d just graduated from. When I made the mistake of asking him a question about his protagonist’s unhealthy, pathological relationship with women, he went off for me for twenty minutes. https://t.co/7wuQOarBIJ

  — Carmen Maria Machado (@carmenmmachado) May 4, 2018

  Machado for her part has left the episode behind her, telling WPR’s “BETA”:

  “I think I’ve said what I have to say about it. I also think it’s not really about me and I sort of want to make sure that conversation is directed toward the women who specifically he victimized,” she says. “I had this interaction with him, it was very unpleasant. I think it said a lot about who he is as a person, as an artist, but I think I’ve already said everything I kind of have to say about it.”

  Her fearlessness remains.

  

  In her award-winning and genre-bending collection of short stories, “Her Body and Other Parties” Machado’s narratives become important representations in literary fiction for women and give voice to female empowerment and sexuality.

  The collection is a startling and provocative look at the violence inflicted upon the bodies of women and arrives during a cultural storm surrounding issues of gender, identity and self.

  “I think that this book helped me sort of answer questions about how do I exist in the world as a woman, as a fat person, as a queer person?” Machado said. “How do I occupy my own space and like how do I give myself that space and how do I take that space?”

  “By writing (these) stories I managed to get at some kind of thesis, and I think that’s really going to help me as an artist, as a thinker move forward in my work,” she continued.

  Machado is not afraid to take back that space and to re-imagine traditional representations of women and sexuality in literature.

  “It’s often men — straight men — who get to write that way and usually women themselves are demeaned and reduced in a way that’s not interesting or sexy. So, I decided that I wanted to write stories with women — queer women — having sex and just living their lives,” she said. “The sex sometimes being great and sometimes being okay and sometimes being bad, but being a lot of things at once.”

  Machado is unabashed about her work’s voice and is not concerned if it does not speak to a majority demographic.

  “If you’re like missing stuff … a joke you don’t understand or a space you don’t quite occupy, that’s OK,” she said. “You just have to learn to be comfortable with not knowing everything and not having everything be for you.“

  Machado was inspired by the works of author Kelly Link. The “Magic For Beginners” author was instrumental in “rearranging (Machado’s) DNA” as a writer by breaking genre boundaries.

  “The writing that I most love is that it moves very freely between these categories and defies these easy boxes,” Machado says. “There’s something so freeing about that and I remember returning to my work that I was working on at the time and suddenly having a sense of how I wanted to write my stories.”

  Machado also has an uncanny ability to tell her stories in a hyper-visual way.

  “Actually I was a photography major in college, so I’m very visual,” she said. “I’m a very visual thinker and I feel like a lot of times the way my mind categorizes things and observes things is very physical, very concrete. So, I think that’s just the way my brain works.”

  Her visual writing style makes it unsurprising that the book is in development for an upcoming anthology series.

  In addition to gender and sexuality, Machado also explores issues of race in her writing, but it’s an area that has been challenging for her.

  “I am a non-white woman who presents as white, so my own relationship with race is something that I think about a lot. I’m interested in writing about it, but I want to do it right,” she said.

  She discovered this recently while fleshing out a new story.

  “I had written a huge chunk of it and then suddenly I realized that the protagonist was not white and I realized that when I looked at the story that I had written, there was a space the story had left for this question for her identity and the ambiguity of her identity,” she said. “It’s like my subconscious had written it in there even before I knew that’s what the story was about.”

  However, Machado confronts this challenge head-on with her typical fearlessness: “What you’re afraid of as a writer is sort of a good place to aim for. When you do that, you realize something. Your brain is telling you something. If you’re afraid to go for something then you should definitely dive into it because that’s where all the interesting stuff is going to be happening.”

• Jonathan Lethem Calls Talking Heads' 'Fear Of Music' 'The Right Album At The Right Time'

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  Sometimes timing is everything.

  That was certainly the case for award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem when it came to the release of Talking Heads’ third album, “Fear of Music,” in August 1979. He writes about his love affair with that album in a book with the same title: “Fear of Music.” It’s part of the 33-and-1/3 series of short books about music.

  Lethem told WPR’s “BETA” that he was perfectly ready to hear this record.

  “The cover of the album was really dark and forbidding and I brought it home. This thing was just so made for my personal version of an alienated, you know, jangly nervous, New York kid that I wanted to just take it into my body,” Lethem said.

  The tricky point-of-view in the albums’ lyrics was one of the things that captivated Lethem.

  “You don’t really know who the speaker is or what matters to them but they’re so full of attitude — this kind of thorny, alienated, self-loathing irony,” Lethem said. “And I thought, ‘Well, this is an attractive stance to wear out into the world.’ For me then, it seemed like it was the right way to deal with being 14 years old in the late ’70s in New York City.”

  Lethem continued, “I felt so at odds with everybody and everything and the city felt very dangerous but also enticing. And the album seemed to create an image of a powerful response to being disempowered that I wanted to make my own.”

  The first single to be released from “Fear of Music” was “Life During Wartime.” Lethem admires the “sturdy versatility” of this song.

  “What’s great about a metaphor like ‘Life During Wartime’ is it’s so fundamental that you can kind of identify with it on a literal level or all sorts of other allegorical levels. Who isn’t having a war? Like every morning, getting up and getting a coffee and getting my teeth brushed, that’s life during wartime,” he said.

  “On the other hand, the story seems to portray a very extreme condition — people dealing with cities melting down and they’re on the run and they’ve got weapons. And there’s no authority and they’re having to discard their life of comfort,” Lethem said. “You could think of this as an adolescent in high school. You could think of this as an apocalyptic environment like Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ or anything in between. It was versatile, it was there to be made your own.”

  One of Lethem’s favorite songs from “Fear of Music” is the final one, “Drugs.”

  “It’s transfixing,” he said. “On that song, more than anything else on the record, the next record by Talking Heads is sort of predicted and projected, which is to say it’s got an atmospheric, mysterious, sonic quality to it that, above all, your body’s having a response to it before your mind is.”

  It’s been well over 30 years since “Fear of Music” was released.

  After the passage of so much time, Lethem admits that he does hear the album in a different way these days.

  “Ironically, I hear ‘Fear of Music’ much more on traditional terms now than I could have at the time,” he said. “At the time, it seemed to me that Talking Heads had just invented this out of whole cloth and it made the rest of recorded music look silly. It was like, here’s the future and forget the rest. Now I hear it and I think a lot about the stuff that led up to it for these individual musicians and just for the tradition.”

• One More Mission, One More Line: Revelations Of Mixing Video Games And Cocaine

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  Tom Bissell didn’t regard Niko Bellic as a friend.

  They weren’t close, like friends who lament bad fantasy football picks over a pint of beer at a local bar.

  For one thing, Niko was pixelated, forever stuck as the lead character in the jagged world of Grand Theft Auto IV, but somehow, the sin-drenched reality he could never escape resonated with Bissell, who controlled Niko’s every move.

  “Niko was not my friend, but I felt for him, deeply,” Bissell wrote in an article published in The Guardian. “He was clearly having a hard go of it and did not always understand why. He was in a new place that did not make a lot of sense. He was trying, he was doing his best, but he was falling into habits and ways of being that did not reflect his best self.”

  Bissell “met” Niko — the playable protagonist of Rockstar North’s 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV — the same night he was re-introduced to cocaine. A friend told Bissell he wanted to celebrate GTA IV’s release with an “extra sweetener.”

  The combination of cocaine and video games spurred a four-year binge.

  “I played through Grand Theft Auto IV again and again after that,” Bissell wrote. “The game was faster and more beautiful while I was on cocaine, and breaking laws seemed even more seductive. Niko and I were outlaws, alone as all outlaws are alone, but deludedly content with our freedom and our power.”

  The freedom of jumping, slashing, car-thieving single-player games intertwined with the chaos of his life, but offered an addictive escape from it, too.

  “Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure,” Bissell wrote.

  Bissell is the author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,” in which he explores the grip and the art of video games and the rushing tide of future developments.

  But in the book published in 2011, he also explains the monopolizing frenzy of cocaine that seduced his dark side, propelling him into a fantastical world that urged just one more mission.

  Like his obsession with video games, Bissell’s experimentation with cocaine eventually turned into an obsession similar to video games. The fixations entwined, birthed from the moment Bissell picked up his copy of GTA IV.

  It would be a few years of abusing the drug before Bissell freed himself from it, and while that period coincided with hours-long gameplay sessions, he doesn’t regret the experience of playing, nor the memories it created.

  “What have games given me? Experiences,” he writes. “Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something.”

  Bissell continued, “Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.”

• Musician Thomas Dolby Blinded Us With Ringtones

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  Internet obsessive Ernie Smith is on a mission to find the fascinating parts of the most tedious topics. Smith writes about the most obscure and unexpected topics he can find and shares his discoveries with his subscribers through his twice-weekly newsletter, Tedium. He’s covered everything from corduroy to walkie talkies to those stringy bits on bananas that you don’t even know there’s a name for — “phloem bundles.”

  Smith recently told WPR’s “BETA” about the evolution of the cell phone ringtone. One of the things that he finds most interesting about cell phones is that they can be customized in a way traditional landline phones cannot.

  “In the ’50s and ’60s, AT&T got really up in arms if anybody tried to do things with the phone system that they hadn’t approved. One of the devices a vendor came up with is this thing called the Carterfone. And it would basically connect the phone system to a radio system.”

  The invention of the Carterfone led to the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling in 1968 that equipment not made by Bell Telephone Company, which evolved into AT&T in 1885, could be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not damage the system.

  The ruling, commonly known as “The Carterfone” decision, made it possible for other third-party companies to offer long-distance communication service. It also paved the way for the use of devices that created novelty ringtones.

  In the early 1980s, a British musician named Thomas Morgan Robertson was working on an album called “The Golden Age of Wireless.” You might know Robertson by his stage name, Thomas Dolby. Dolby was the man behind the 1982 hit song, “She Blinded Me with Science.”

  So how did Dolby go from blinding us with science to blinding us with polyphonic ringtones?

  “One of the things that he actually helped produce with the company that he launched in the ’90s called Beatnik was this ability to create polyphonic ringtones, or multi-toned ringtones, through the use of software,” Smith said. “While this could be done through hardware, which you could obviously see, for example, if you used like a Casio or Yamaha keyboard during the era. This was actually designed so that you could recreate the sounds on a web page or such. It turned out that all the companies that Dolby worked with during this time were the kind of companies that were destined to fail due to the crash of the tech industry around the year 2000.”

  “The one company that he still had as a client through Beatnik that didn’t actually fail was this company called Nokia. And Nokia basically was looking for a solution to improve the quality of its ringtones because it was competing with other firms that were adding in chips to create very elaborate ringtones. But Nokia, trying to save money, was looking for a software solution to this problem and therefore they had Beatnik, they had Thomas Dolby’s company to work with,” Smith continued.

  Nokia had already created its famous ringtone, but their work with Dolby’s company led to the creation of a polyphonic version of Nokia’s ringtone. All of the major cell phone companies of the pre-smartphone era licensed Beatnik’s software.

  So Dolby not only was responsible for one of the major ’80s hits, he also played an important part in making Nokia’s ringtone the world’s most popular ringtone back in the day.