One of Calvino’s later works, Under the Jaguar Sun aims to do the thing that’s hardest for the writer: touch the reader’s senses.

Books have a distancing effect: to read one, we imagine ourselves out of our bodies, and into the scene depicted on the page. Under the Jaguar Sun wants to short-circuit us back into our meatsacks using specifically-written stories about taste, smell, and sound. Not sight and touch, notably. Calvino never completed those. In an afterword, his wife urges us to think of the three written stories, and forget the two unwritten ones. (In any case, there are more than five senses).

The first story in the cycle is “taste”, or Sotto il sole giaguaro. A pair of tourists explore Mexican locales such as Tepoztlán and Monte Alban, eating local cuisine such as chiles en nogada and guajolote con mole poblano while reflecting on the history of the region. Conflicting flavors are used to symbolize religious and political strife, as well as possibly their own sexual tension. Calvino focuses on the exterior state of the characters: we’re meant to infer things from Olivia’s flaring nostrils, or the pause of her lips. Soon the narrator isn’t staring at his partner’s eyes, but at her teeth.

He suspects that she may want to eat him, driving fangs through the softness of his skin, as a jaguar might. His mind fills with bloody images: cut-out hearts, and blood steaming upon temple altars. I wonder if there are things not said: and that food is a distraction for something unspeakable about their relationship.

The prose of William Weaver’s translation is itself a bit too rich at times, evoking those terrible cooking blogs (“…somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender”). I could have done with less of that, but I was relieved that the characters can’t remember if cilantro is the same thing as coriander.

Eating is described as an act of travel. You are digesting a country and its history—and if that history is a bloody one, what effect will eating have on you? Calvino (through his narrator) scorns the poor imitations of “regional” food found in big restaurants, which he considers as fake as stage dressing on a movie set. But Mexico isn’t what it once was. The narrator imagines the hot, ancient land that Cortez once walked through…but that place doesn’t doesn’t exist anymore. He’s just summarizing ruins, inventorying echoes of echoes. He prizes “real” food because that’s the only form of reality available to him.

Un re in ascolto is the next story, themed upon “hearing”. It’s a lot of fun, much better than the first, with some great writing and the same twisted fairytale quality of Marcel Schwob. It also reminded me of the Truman Show.

A king sits upon a throne, a virtual prisoner. His crown is uncomfortable but he cannot move his head to adjust it. His scepter is heavy but it must never leave his hand. His throne doubles as a bedpan so he can relieve himself without ever being out of sight of his adoring subjects. In short, he might as well be made of glass. He’s inactive, defunct, just a monarch-object who exists to sit and be admired by the court until his death.

Which might come sooner rather than later. Despite existing under such pitiless, endless love, the king knows he is surrounded by enemies. Whether he’s right or merely paranoid doesn’t matter to us. He’s convinced that men are plotting and scheming in court: the palace is full of his spies, but they cannot catch everyone, and although reams of surveillance and interrogation are piled at his feet, there is too much of it to read.

With his eyes useless, he relies on hearing. The king learns to enjoy the sound of the wind blowing along the corridors; the sound of the guards slamming rifle butts in salute on the battlements. And soon, beyond the baldaquin of his hollow coffin-throne, the king hears a woman singing a love song…

It’s a good one—maybe a great one—about paranoia and suspicion and obsession. It made me feel closed-in and itchy. Uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown? No, it’s the ears beneath the crown that are the trouble. They keep complicating things.

Lastly comes Il nome, il naso, or “smell”. It’s a wild, decadent romp, braiding together three separate stories and letting strange things happen from their union. We get the perspectives of a wild beast, a French decadent rather like Huysmans’ Jean des Esseintes, and a drug-addicted musician. They are united by search for sensation, which is most potent in the form of olfaction.

It’s the shortest but also the messiest of the stories, and I can’t say I understood much of it. But that might be entirely appropriate: smell is the most fragile and easily overwhelmed of the senses, for me. The eyes see endlessly, the ears hear endlessly, and both touch and taste . But scents, however, quickly go dead. I’m not sure that I’d want to live in a world where the nose is king, but that’s the point of the story, we once did. And maybe there’s something latent there, hidden in our DNA and ready to become manifest.

This is an intimate and voluptous volume, and the fact that it’s incomplete reveals something important about senses: they often go away. A single lesion in the brain might take one (or more) of them away, silencing a world of meaning. In this book, we are blind and anaphiac. Sometimes we understand. Sometimes we grope in confusion.

It’s worth reading if you can find it cheap, and it encapsules much of what made Calvino great as a writer. It sets fires in the mind, and opens the imagination to worlds and words beyond, barely glimpsed off the margins of the page.

Living dolls are an ancient fascination. They are storied in every place that has stories, and sung about wherever there are songs. Pygmalion’s ivory bride; Hephaestus’s automata; Hidari Jingorō’s statues; the golems of Prague; Pinocchio; Sir Cliff…we seem fascinated by the idea of soul-sculpting, of lacing gears together so finely that sparks glimmer at the isthmus of the teeth.

Maybe the creation of life—actual life—is the ultimate goal of art. Mona Lisa’s smile is fake. Stare at it, and soon all you see is that it’s odd and uncanny. Leonardo da Vinci was a master, but in the end, he was stuck imitating life, and the reflection of the moon on the water will never be the moon. His Mona Lisa smiles because she has to. Imagine a painting that smiles because it wants to. No artist has succeeded at making a piece of artwork that actually lives. Unless God is an artist: according to Genesis, he formed us out of dust from the ground, so in a way, we’re his dolls.

But is it possible for a toy to live, while still remaining a toy? The point of toys is that they’re not alive: they’re a blank slate you fill with your personality and desire. Researchers at the Kibale National Park have observed adolescent chimps using sticks as toys, but the males use them as weapons or tools, while female chimps cradle them like babies. Toys are just shadows and reflections of their owners. The idea of a living, talking, thinking toy, with a will of its own, is a weird one. Maybe a horrible one.

Richard Williams’ Raggedy Anne and Andy: A Musical Adventure is an animated film from 1977. Toys are preparing for their owner Marcella’s seventh birthday when a pirate captain breaks out of a snowglobe and kidnaps Marcella’s birthday present, a bisque doll named Babette. A loyal Raggedy Anne doll goes on an adventure to save her.

The film was a box office bomb, and ended up as airtime filler on CBS and the Disney Channel. It has a thin plot, and relies on beautiful animation and Joe Raposo’s music to carry it. Like all movies about living toys, it has existential implications. The toys in the movie conspire to make the life of children wonderful—that’s basically all that motivates them. Are they slaves? Do they have free will? Do they have the ability to judge? To hate?

The toys in Raggedy Anne and Andy exhibit Nietzsche’s slave morality. They are fully subservient to Marcella, not because she’s nice or worthy, but because of what they are and who she is. But they seem to possess awareness and introspection. Raggedy Andy is ashamed that he’s owned by a girl. The Twin Pennies are curious about what life is like outside the playroom. Most disturbingly, Raggedy Anne feels pain and discomfort at Marcella’s rough playing—the first thing she does is complain that she’s popped half her stitches. However, they seem to be at peace with their place in the universe. They can’t imagine freedom. The only characters who rebel are Babette and Captain Contagious, the villains.

The movie is charming, and lavishly animated by 1970s standards (until the production ran out of money—believe me, you’ll notice when this happens.) Of special note are Tissa David’s sensitive Raggedy Anne, Art Babbitt’s Grecian-tragic Camel With Wrinkly Knees (with each of his humps embodying a different personality), Emery Watkins’ voracious sucrose ocean Greedy, and the typical brilliance displayed in Richard Williams’ “No Girl’s Toy” sequence.

But it’s shamelessly schmaltzy, and feels decades older than 1977. I’d always assumed Raggedy Anne dolls were based off Anne of Green Gables (red hair + freckles), but this is not true. This is a movie based on a doll patented in 1915, and then a children’s book written in 1918, and you really feel those years. Raposo’s music is straight out of Tin Pan Alley.

The film was (possibly) funded by the CIA. It was distributed by the ITT Corporation, a shady manufacturing conglomerate with ties to the US executive branch: their involvement in Augusto Pinochet’s coup is now well-established. This was around the time the CIA was waging a so-called Cultural Cold War, which involved promoting “American” forms of art such as Broadway musicals. The source of funding was apparently an open secret among the film’s production team. Here’s a second or third hand story shared by Steve Stanchfield (by way of Garrett Gilchrist):

(Not speculation at all). Talked with Dick [Williams]. A friend had visited him and talked about how the CIA had funded the film. When I was talking with Dick about Emery [Hawkins] being fired, I asked if that was the CIA. Dick’s hands went in the air and he said loudly “those were the guys!!” and started to tell a story. His wife quickly came over and said “we’re not going to talk about that right now”. Later, while I was at the national archives searching for Private Snafu materials, I made a request to see material related to the CIA, ITT and Raggedy Ann and Andy. The freedom of information act is a wonderful thing. ITT was in trouble in GB and the states for being a front for the CIA. This led to the assassination of a candidate in South America, leaving egg on the face of ITT. They produced some childen’s programing to show they are a solid company with family values (and, of course, that idea is as ham-handed as it sounds). The programs were the Big Blue Marble and the animated feature Raggedy Ann and Andy. Raggedy Ann was to be released, at the latest, in the summer of 1976, in time for the big celebrations for the Bi-Centennial of the US. ITT bought Bobbs-Merrill for this purpose. Once the film was finished, they sold the Raggedy Ann film for $10 to Bobbs-Merrill and, somehow, allowed their assets to be sold back to itself. It is now owned by Random House. This is public record, and there’s many, many pages (thousands). I’ve just seen a handful.

If the ITT Corporation was indeed a spinnerette for taxpayer money, this could imply that part of the film belongs to the US public—ie, it’s public domain. As a pundit joked when obscenity charges were brought against a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of a flaccid penis, it probably won’t stand up in court, but I definitely feel less guilty than usual about giving this film the Captain Contagious treatment, if you know what I mean.

I’ve watched it once, and may watch it again. I maybe I won’t. Raggedy Anne and Andy is pleasant, but it’s not an unsung masterpiece.

The pacing is terrible. The film larded down by musical numbers—we get SEVEN songs before the first vestiges of plot emerge. It’s a “Musical Adventure” with MUSICAL in all caps and (adventure) in tiny-sized font. The small story is episodic. Raggedy Anne and Andy make a new friend, get into trouble, escape somehow, then repeat. Again and again. 

But the movie’s flaws—the leisurely pace and incidental storytelling—do capture what it’s like to be a child, cooped up indoors on a rainy day, playing with your toys and making up adventures for them in your head. Or rather, what it once was like to be a child.

What would a kid born in a year starting with “201” think of this film? Would it provoke wonder? Or would it simply seem as an alien relic, undecodable and indecipherable? When I see children today, I am struck by how few of them still play with toys. Instead of Raggedy Anne, their hands are wrapped around a glowing shard of magic glass. It sings to them, enchants them, dreams for them, hurtles them algorithmically into an adulthood they’re not prepared for. Young girls are memorizing rules on how to diet and dress and say correct words and have correct thoughts. Their brothers watch aspirational lifestyle videos by a bald sex predator. The past depicted seems strange, but that’s not true: the world of 1977 is set in stone, remaining the same forever. We’re the ones who are strange. If there’s any character that represents today’s society, it’s the Greedy.

This movie will look like footage of a remote jungle tribe someday. Maybe that day has come already. It depicts a world and lifestyle foreign to us, a past that has come unraveled like Raggedy Anne’s stitches. For this reason alone, it’s worth watching—or at least, knowing about.

One thing I find fascinating about hip hop is that it lets you become the biggest musician in the world while releasing basically no music.

Isis Naija Gaston exploded in August 2022 with “Munch”, a 1:44 minute long track. Since then, a year has passed; an eternity in Social Media Time (read Wikipedia’s page of 2022 internet memes and marvel at how they already seem covered in the dust of ages—remember Morbius? The Liz Truss lettuce?). In those fourteen months, hip hop’s hottest new star has managed to release a single EP, titled Like..? It has a runtime of 13:08.

By way of comparison, from August 1968 to August 1969 James Brown released seven studio albums, plus a live album, totaling just under five hours of music. Is that unfair? Yes, but what’s staring me in the face here is that Ice Spice has become the “crown princess of Bronx drill” (Richdork Media’s words, not mine) off the back of less than half an hour of music.

She appears to be speedrunning (slowrunning?) the career of Cardi B, a woman described by Wikipedia as “one of the most commercially successful female rappers of her generation” and whose total recorded output over eight years consists of one album and three mixtapes. You can put a positive spin on this, or a negative spin. The positive: young rappers are at the cutting edge of a changing musical business, embracing a social media-driven world where “albums” and “physical media” are increasingly less relevant.

The negative spin is that maybe music isn’t very important to these people. That they view it as a hook to hang a brand on. Whatever value “Munch” has as a song—with its rapid shuffling hi-hats over deep smears of bass, and Ice’s cotton-batting soft voice—it has far more as a vehicle to get Ice out in the public eye, so we can notice and respond to her swagger, her style, her physicality. Some people want to be celebrity rappers. Others want to be celebrities who are rappers. There’s a big difference.

In How Brands Become Icons, marketing expert Douglas Holt lays out his theory that brands aren’t built on products, they’re built on spectacles. A successful musician doesn’t make good music (lots of people do that and nobody listens to it) but instead transforms their music into something bigger than itself: a splashy, attention-grabbing event. That’s what a lot of rappers amount to. Event merchants. They aspire to create as much hype as possible with as little music as possible. They are tiny pebbles that cause tsunami-like waves.

An “event” can be anything. It might be a hit song. It might also be a feud with another rapper, a shooting, a car accident, an overdose, or a death. Anything that bleeds, anything that makes it impossible to look away. The album cover of We Can’t Be Stopped by The Geto Boys shows rapper Bushwick Bill being wheeled out of hospital (an odd promotional choice: he’d been injured by a firearm while attempting to murder his girlfriend). In his review of 50 Cent’s The Massacre, Alexis Petridis noted that the album seemed to be banking on Fiddy’s reputation for violence. Your success in this game depends on how well you can deliver a drip-feed of exciting “events” to your audience without crossing a line and ending up dead.

And that’s how we get to the situation today: the average rapper’s Wikipedia page has a two line discography and then 3000 words on their Arrests/Legal Issues/Controversies/Sexual Assault Allegations. It’s not that they’re good boys who went down the wrong path. The wrong path was the point. That’s the product we’re paying for: shock and outrage. No beat goes as as hard as a bullet.

But here’s where Ice breaks the mould, because she’s mostly notable for not being controversial in any way. Raised in a comfortable middle-class family, she has no gang affiliations and no criminal record. Maybe this is another sign of hip hop becoming gentrified. More likely, the industry is sick of building up new talent only to have them die face-down in a puddle of Xanax vomit two years later.

Is Like..? any good? Glad you asked. Not really. It’s an EP of songs written around Tiktok and Spotify playlists. Each track is a tiny, self-contained manifesto on who Ice Spice is, demonstrating her strengths and flow. She’s getting paid! Guys are hitting up her ‘Gram! She’s from the Bronx! Each song is a miniature “intro” event, designed to be the first song you’ve ever heard by her.

The trouble is, after 5 or so tracks, we already know who Ice Spice is. We don’t need to meet her, over and over. Ice’s lyrics are limited. We see no signs that she’s a born storyteller, or has a perspective, a sense of humor, or any other quality that might be desirable in a rapper.

If this shit’s drill, I need Novocaine. The constant “Grrah’s!” and “Raggh!’s” get annoying. Nearly every song is produced in the same mannered, sterile way. Indeed, it’s probably smart that Ice hasn’t yet released an album. Her strengths (energy and steel-cool confidence) stop being interesting after a few minutes, and her weaknesses (her voice) become impossible to ignore. Ice’s intonation is petal-soft. As soon as the beat does anything other than “soft bass and hi-hats” she gets stomped to oblivion. The music has to stay kiddie wading pool shallow, or she drowns in it.

I’m old enough to remember arcades. They had games that seemed compulsively addictive, and always left you wanting more…but as soon as you bought them for home console, you were bored of them instantly. Ice Spice seems to be the rap version of that.

In the end, she just feels too well-behaved in the end. Like a rap robot, with some of the mannerisms of the real thing but none of the essence. Not that I like the essence, in any event. I’m probably just not a rap person.

(Also, Like..? sounds like a file designed to annoy Unix sysadmins. You wanna throw some asterisks and slashes in there, too? Maybe a “rm -rf /” while we’re in business?)