The Manic of Maus
At his worst, musician John Maus had a lot to say.
Second only to this Post-Modern Analysis of Waluigi being the logical end-game of capitalism, this manic correspondence of musician John Maus is perhaps the strangest read I’ve found online. Claims of the homoeroticism of Nintendo’s anti-hero are enough to alert even the most disillusioned collegiate drone. And this sort of nonsense is nice — a trivial escape from reality.
The appeal of Musician John Maus, though, is not found in gaffing at sheer nonsense. It’s rather in his admitted faults. In his baroque attempts at understanding. In his honest confusion one can find comfort. In his regret in compulsively messaging an unrequited love — with a combination of childish appropriations of beauty and philosophical doctrines. In his leaking of every one of those messages online. In writing a lackadaisical description of nearby birds alongside an inspection of certain truth. In these honesties and idiosyncrasies Maus is utterly human.
Maus’s correspondence (via the Wayback Machine) begins with a confession of loneliness. He says that, when a baboon is isolated, a “deactivation of regions associated with reward and empathy” occurs, and stress hormones catalyze. He feels similarly. His stance on certain truth is next: “that whatever certain ways may be, they are also through the process of their being claimed as such” is but a clip of the logical entanglement. Next up is a real bummer of a theory that time seems to accelerate as we age because we have fewer novel experiences. It’s clear the man has had plenty of time to — as he puts it — stare at atoms.
Next comes a legendary series or rants, concerning ‘pre-tonal triadic harmony’ and ‘sonic reality’ and pretty much everything ever. I will spare the general public from these inane circlings, bar this small glimpse to set the mood:
…where, more-and-more, human beings define and distinguish themselves through consumption, but this is a banality!! to even point out, isn’t it?, I guess I am so out of touch I thought this was something we all took for granted, that is what the whole book things was about, you know?, I just wanted to apologize that I was talking about “the books I like,” so I apologized for it, the facebook-dna thing didn’t make any sense out of context either, if you can believe it, I was taking issue with Agamben’s whole reading of the bioplotical as the locus where power is most evident today, saying that facebook doesn’t have our genetic codes on it was to suggest that it isn’t our fingerprints and DNA that power is interested in so much today as in our ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes,’ predictive analytics, the societies of control, not Alex Jone’s style reptilians or whatever, the bad faith which refuses to…
We call this the ‘I wrote this the night before it was due’. We could extend the rant in either direction, learning the negatives of commercialism, explicit functional relationships— you know, standard interview gaffes. Neat little kernels of insight emit from the heap as well:
…I reject this idea I sometimes seem to hear that there are stupid people, there are no stupid people, there are material conditions, structural injustices, and so on, I guess there are Police, and zones of madness opened by the State of our situation which can turn even human beings into mindless greedy killing machines, and their are trolls as I mention above, but trolls are usually cool if you reach out to them from the heart, here and now, in this zone, human beings don’t have /fans/, they don’t have /little monsters/, they have friends and potential friends, and so it is always my duty to try and apologize to other human beings when they claim to have been upset by something I have said, to try and own up to my part…
Then the love letters. There are so many. They start honest enough, with this-is-how-my-day-wents like “I stayed in a Holiday Inn with that perfect hotel-smell…bedtime.” Personal admissions like “It has been a little bit since I sat across from somebody and really talked with them and was seen by them.” are made as well.
A [no reply] following the messages then becomes more regular. Maus’s messages become more scarce, more manic. Some contain commonalities of unrequited love — “why don’t you talk with me anymore” makes an appearance, as do ponderings on where he went wrong. Others are more harrowing. Fruitless plights of hopelessness and loneliness, of eventual acceptance.
The girl was not wrong in ending correspondence. She and Maus met at a concert, spoke for hours, and traveled onward. For one, the attraction persisted. For the other, it faded with distance. It hurts and it happens.
Maus is not perpetually lost. His songs often reassure. Their bare lyrics juxtapose the maddening theoreticals that define his interviews. They are an escape.
Maus speaks on this in mentioning Jacques Attali’s quote:
A great musical work is always a model of amorous relations, a model of relations with one another
He then compares the music of Panda Bear to a hug from the man himself. The music of Gary War to a firm pat. The music of Ariel Pink to a gentle caressing of anxieties. Escapism need not be depraved.
Loneliness is a staple of John Maus’s music. His most popular song, Hey Moon, is a ballad to the moon — it makes him feel at home wherever, a friend when he is alone at night. It is also the only song where he sings with another person. Perhaps he was right about the whole baboon thing.
Some of us have tried to escape loneliness in living cosmically, in plight between chemical and psychedelic bliss. Others of us, like Maus, have hidden from our friends, family, and feelings in the abstraction of academia. Either way, we hide from reality.
Hey Moon is from Maus’s Album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. The Album Title is a quote from French Philosopher Alain Badiou on how we censor our thoughts and feelings from others with draconian haste. We are constantly speaking and showing, but our content is but a caricature.
In finding people to share this caricature with we find purpose and psychological grounding.
In finding people to share our true self with we find close friends and lovers, bliss and comfort.
In this honesty, we truly emerge.
