Authentically Anything
I read Lana Del Rey’s poetry book Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass one cold weekend in Marshall, North Carolina, almost as far from Los Angeles as you could get in the continental United States. It would take 33 hours of nonstop driving time in, say, a red convertible to drive from one to the other. The book is full of references, like all of Del Rey’s work; it wants you to be nostalgic, and to believe in the existence of a certain kind of California, or multiple kinds of Californias, none of which are likely to exist. The book is full of dreamy first-person realizations formatted as poems; when its author wasn’t making pronouncements about her own poetic nature, I found it pleasurable to read, like a diary that didn’t reveal too much. It features hand-corrected, typewritten pages, as if the reader were a trusted friend privy to the author’s first drafts. There are stains on some of the pages that one could infer to be tears, but that could just as well have been styled by a production team.
I don’t want to debate the authenticity of the artist, or the authenticity of this book. Del Rey, with her artist name and her panache for pastiche and liberally borrowing from across the American oeuvre, is an avatar for the country’s authenticity obsession; people smarter than me have written about this concept better than I could. Instead, I want to talk about authenticity itself, and why we value the authentic experience above all else, particularly when it comes to talking about place.
Is it fair to say that we all seek authentic experiences in some capacity? Inside our consumer experiences, or inside art, which is another kind of consumption. When people travel or relocate, they enter spaces they perceive to be authentic, like an invasive species, and then drain the spaces of their resources. California itself is a map so overlaid with people seeking authenticity that the “real” thing perhaps disappeared long ago. I’ve contributed to it, too. Once, my husband and I were camping in California. We had rented a Mustang convertible. It was a beautiful, impractical car for a camping trip, red and ostentatious among the camper vans and station wagons. We had no itinerary, so each day we picked a direction, and then drove as far as we could, to a destination out that way. One day we decided we would go to Calexico. I’m an immigrant, but I came here via plane, and had never seen an American border town. We drove up to the border crossing station, looked at it from the car, and then we turned around and drove away to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant on César Chávez Boulevard.
In Brooklyn, we had often eaten at a restaurant named after the city, a restaurant which serves Mexican food the way Americans are supposed to like it: lots of cheese, lots of sour cream, very little nuance. An imitation taken out of its context, then made into an adaptation, certain aspects turned way up, almost to levels of absurdity. I have enjoyed eating there many times, even knowing it was not an authentic experience, or anywhere close to it. Yet while we were in the city of Calexico, I also wanted to try to understand the origin of the reference. What did this place of exchange, politically charged, manipulated and molded into a symbol, used by whoever wants to use it for their purposes, and of course inhabited and alive, have to do with the restaurant? Not much. My meal was delicious, but eating in the city brought me no closer to understanding it; I was still a brief visitor, exchanging money for experiences. At best it allowed me a reference point of my own--something more real than never having stopped there at all. Something I could refer to later.
On our way down to Calexico, somewhere in the Coachella Valley, we had driven by a stretch of agribusiness farmland. We’d cruised slowly along access roads that flanked endless acres of greens meant for the plates of conscious consumers--perhaps people in other states whose authenticity is symbolized by their commitment to healthy eating. There was no other through traffic. I gawked at the flat and tender leaves that went on for miles. Why were we there? What was I looking for in a California vacation? We didn’t stop, or talk to anyone. We just drove by in our red Mustang, a flashy car that didn’t belong there either. I almost don’t want to tell you these stories, because they’re embarrassing in their impermanence, in their tourist arrogance.
Del Rey’s book is interspersed with two kinds of images. The first is Del Rey’s own photographs of California landscapes. There is no Malibu, no Hollywood sign; there’s just farmland, water towers, cranes, and other industrial equipment, all curiously devoid of people the same way my brief view of the acreage had been. When I first leafed through the book, I couldn’t help but think of that drive, and I wondered what Del Rey was trying to convey with the collection of images. That California is lonely for some people? That some part of her dwells in the industrial machinery of it, and not in the postcard fantasy? In her music, she repeatedly references the Hollywood sign, and Venice, and all the other immediate signifiers that people use to call up the metaphor of California. And there are plenty of these references in the text of the book, too: Mulholland, Sunset, LA personified as a young man casually vaping in bed. But with the juxtaposition of the images against the poems, she seems to want readers to know that the poems inhabit a different California than the songs do. In the songs, the speaker climbs up the H of the Hollywood sign, more metaphor than reality. In the poems, she drives to AA meetings in small towns, and visits a rock quarry that she compares to Bob Dylan. Which California is more real? In which can you live more authentically?
The second kind of photo present throughout the book is vintage stock photographs of people reading, their gazes turned down at their texts, inhabiting private worlds inaccessible to the viewer. These, to me, were meant to evoke the shots of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. The image is a Pinterest favorite for anyone who wants to convey that underneath, they’re deep and maybe even a little scholarly. Monroe, of course, is herself a California: overlaid with interpretation, with expectation, slowly taken over by her own image, succumbing to the pressure. The photos are sourced from a book called Voyagers, by Melissa Catanese, an artist who works with “found anonymous photographs from the early to mid-twentieth century”--the era that much of Del Rey’s work also references and romanticizes. Because the subjects are anonymous, and the photographs clearly old, the effect is sweet and hazy and unreal--something more in tune with the music rather than the poems.
We returned to the campground where we were staying, Indian Cove in Joshua Tree National Park. The next day in town, a local store owner told us that business had been booming ever since people from Los Angeles had “discovered” Joshua Tree and begun to spend time there. “They come for the weekend, and rent out entire houses,” he said. “They’re driving everything up.” I liked to hear this from him, because it made me think that he didn’t see me that way, even though we were there from New York and had originally come to Joshua Tree because I saw it in a dream. It thrills me whenever I’m in a place and someone thinks I’m from there and asks me for directions; even though I’m immediately exposed by my own unknowing, I like thinking that something about me conveys authenticity. Why is this a thing I find pleasurable?
Back to art and authenticity. I think when people seek authenticity from experiences with art, what they really want is for the artist to be equipped with the kind of credibility that makes them trustworthy guides into the world of the particular art they’re offering. It’s why people feel betrayed when a memoir is exaggerated, even if the memoir tells a good story. People feel betrayed when they’ve found themselves suddenly falling for something. Nobody likes to be duped into believing in an empty signifier, and that’s why there is delight in the authenticity reveal: That’s not even her real name. Authenticity comes from having roots in something, and if no roots are available to you, then a deep, sincere scholarship will do (like Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois album, a project so seemingly heartfelt that we accepted the absurd premise that he might produce one for each of the fifty states). When an artist attaches themselves to a place, we want to know what makes them think they can deserve to be its representative. But of course, as the disappointing track record of every elected public official will tell us, no one person can convey the interests of an entire place. Del Rey grew up in the Adirondacks. Is that the art we want from her? Maybe a Westchester concept album, filled with simmering Betty Draper rage. Maybe. But nobody wants upstate New York ski resort town art.
I’ve never in my life felt like I was authentically anything. I arrived here when I was ten, old enough and from a country socialist enough to feel weird about standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, and that’s all you need to know about my Americanness. But at the same time, I’m too American; as my friend who lives in Helsinki put it, “for a Finnish girl you talk a lot.” I’m not an authentic tech worker because my enthusiasms for good work aren’t driven by mission. And I’m not an authentic writer because I’m too comfortable: I like to have a day job and not scrabble together an income from freelance or teaching or some other noble pursuit that won’t love you back enough to give you the money you deserve. Maybe I’m an authentic wife, or an authentic mother, or learning to be both of those things. But those aren’t questions I’m interested in asking or answering at this moment.
I have never felt like I’ve had a right to any particular narrative, yet I still make art. I’m living now in the woods in Appalachia, and if I tell people this, they ask Are you from there or something? If I say that my family lives here, it seems to clarify something to them about my presence, even though my family moved here within the last ten years, too. Were I to make art about living here, it wouldn’t be the story that people think they want to read. That doesn’t mean that I won’t write about it.
I don’t think I need an artist to be authentically something in order for me to appreciate their work about it. The minimum that I need from art is cohesion and confidence—I need to believe that the work believes in itself. If you want to know, in my opinion, Del Rey’s poetry collection was coherent, though its confidence waxed and waned. No matter. It isn’t a stand-alone piece; it’s an addendum to a body of work about a place, and I read it as such; whether it succeeded or failed on its own is beyond this piece of writing. “Authentic” comes from the Greek autos, self, and hentes, doer. Follow only this tenet as your qualifier for art, or experience, and you end up in the company of chronic self-doers who believe in their own bullshit too hard. I don’t want that for any of us.
Niina Pollari is the author of the poetry collections Dead Horse (Birds, LLC 2015) and Path of Totality (Soft Skull, forthcoming). Find her on Twitter (@heartbarf) or niinapollari.com.
