Zoo Music Girls

Anwyn Crawford in the latest Overland calling the naked truth on Emperor Nick Cave:

It’s his transformation into an antipodean Elvis Costello – growing old, mild and respectably bourgeois along with his audience – that really makes me mad. Not because I believe that Cave has sold out or betrayed his musical talent – he had precious little to begin with – but because the deference paid to him and to his work grows in inverse proportion to its increasing mediocrity, to its juvenile silliness and self-parody. Witness Grinderman, a mid-life crisis thinly disguised as a Bad Seeds side project, with ‘No Pussy Blues’ or, even more crudely, ‘Go Tell the Women’, which loudly complains: ‘All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the morning/ And maybe a bit more in the evening.’ Consensual rape, eh? Happy thought, indeed

.

After being excited by the Birthday Party in the early 1980s, I've found nearly all of Cave's subsequent product, repetitively lifeless. Cave's literary reputation seems to have drawn on his musical one, and what's particularly valuable in Crawford's critique is that it interprets Cave's oeuvre across the forms he works in, so that his musical cachet is not permitted to bolster his literary and screenwriting ones. It takes adroit writing to kick out all three legs of this tripod. Crawford's flattening of the romantic myth built up around Cave--Hamlet pow pow pow--king hits Cave's misogyny.

There's actually something happening here. Something at stake. Devastating.

****Postscript****

A letter in response to Crawford's essay has opened up a debate--of sorts--on Overland's new blog.

Reading through the essay again and now the replies to it, I think that while there is indeed a polemical edge to the essay, what excites me about it is that it opens up ways of talking about aesthetics and meaning--in this case pop music and the gendered, sex-murderous ways of dealing with certain desires--that is so rare in Australian textuality. It's ironic that Fotis Kapetorpoulos' letter attacks Crawford on the basis of what he argues is disavowal of Cave's Duende, his ineffable and unparalleled expressions of Eros. Ironic, as his critique reduces her arguments to a litany of pathological, sociological essences: puritanical, anglo, middle-class, 1980s undergraduate . . . You are thin-skinned, I am sensitive. You have a sociologically overdetermined response to great art, I have transcended my sociological constraints and just experience genius/art . . .

What I think is happening, then, is that Crawford has disaggregated elements of form and content in what is a repeated motif in Cave's oeuvre: his transcendence or, perhaps better, his transports of abjection out of the traps and murk of desire are constantly--boringly, repetitively--figured and formed through the sex-murder of the desired girls that pass through his songs. Cave's fixation is boring. More importantly, his modes of expressing this resolution of this strain of desire are not universal but just one way of aesthetically and ethically dealing with it and, as Crawford cogently argues, this formal and lyrical resolution is misogynist and repetitively dull.

The Birthday Party were dangerous, but Cave's art has become safe. The horror has become a stale cliche. Whether ironically intended or not, Cave's misogynist representations are also fixations that are stuck in a rut, his un-repressions long since thrilling.

Or, as Poetix puts it:

[T]he problem isn’t really to do with whether the enjoyment (or the discomfort) is sincere or not, but to do with whether the interplay between enjoyment and discomfort is managed creatively or has been allowed to become just another well-established masturbatory routine.

****One more thing****

To use a verbotten 80s undergraduate term, the primary intertext of Anwyn's critique is Peter Conrad's consecrating profile-essay on Cave in The Monthly. In other words, it's important, although not essential, to situate Crawford's critique both in the con-text of Conrad's hagiographic review of Cave's artistic production and in the broader network of literary journals and magazines, in which the role of The Monthly in relation to Overland becomes important.

In short, Overland is the literary journal with greatest claim to being on the Left in Australia. It's Communist Party of Australia roots have kept the journal close to aspects of the radical nationalist project that was strong in the 1950s and 60s. The Monthly, on the other hand, started as a quality--read glossy ads for sports watches and sleek cars--left-leaning magazine which featured long-essays aimed at a tertiary educated, well-off audience who were interested in areas of political and social life that permitted a complex, finely written analysis to enter into. As the Howard-era drew to a close, the magazine increasingly became a partisan organ, guided, it seemed, by former Conservative Right Wing Cold War-rior Robert Manne's vision of a more morally correct Australian liberalism. This project has seen Manne's voice and vision come to align the magazine with Opposition leader then Prime Minister Rudd's rhetoric and ideology, publishing Rudd's essay in praise of the German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in which Rudd sought to set out his form of Christian-based social justice as a contrast to the Howard Government's dalliances with evangelical churches like Hillsong, with its prosperity gospel, and, more importantly, publishing Rudd's analysis of Neoliberalism and the Global Financial Crisis.

Rudd-Manne's analysis of Neoliberalism irks, not least because it is conducted with pious moralisms that operate within the circuitry of social-liberalism. How much a magazine of the left can The Monthly be when its central argument about the last 30 years of Neoliberalism is that there should really have been more government regulation of financial and other markets. Guy Rundle argues, in the same Overland as Crawford's essay, that Rudd's Neoliberalism seeks to shape the conduct of our everyday lives because his Government really has no interest in the transformation of society. In other words Rudd's Government is intensifying Neoliberal governmentalities. The Monthly can and will never make this sort of argument explicitly because its political essays are constrained by a social-liberalism that precludes any analysis of how market rationalities form the self and society. Instead, under the guidance of Manne (and Rudd), such analysis sees the self and society as protected from and outside of markets. Firmly regulate some of the markets, to a limited extent, and Neoliberalism is kept at bay. Nevermind that the exhortations to social entrepreneurialism and individual flexibility, just to name two Neoliberal techniques, continue unabated under Rudd.

Anyway, to see such a magazine engage in firming Cave's literary reputation is an index of how his artistic cachet has become, in Anwyn's words, middlebrow. What is at stake, then, is both the relationship of Cave's ethics to his aesthetics from a Left perspective, and practices of Left critique itself. What Anwyn has done is to perform a rigorous critique of one of the central motifs in Cave's work from both an aesthetic and feminist perspective. In so doing she has fundamentally challenged the Left-basis of--what Pierre Bourdieu calls--the symbolic capital that The Monthly and Peter Conrad claimed for Cave.

****Two more points****

Trawling the web, it appears that Crawford's reaction to Peter Conrad's consecration of Cave in The Monthly was preceded by this spray a few months back, coming from ABC radio host and former sax player with the Models (Birthday Party alumni), James Valentine. Valentine writes:

I get Nick Cave. He’s a writer, a songwriter, a hustler and a self pimper. He’s fine. He’s out there hacking away trying to pay his mortage and live an interesting life with a book advance and some song royalties. He gets asked to do this that and the other and why should he say no? He’s gotta eat. If people want to put him on the cover of the magazine and they think it will sell, why would Nick complain.
But can I just say – I’ve never heard anything he’s done that I’ve wanted to hear again. His novel was crap. His film The Proposition was OK. I’m yet to read his new book , but I’ve certainly read a lot about it already.
Such a slim body of work for so much reporting and critical comment. This is because of the very nature of his work and persona. It appeals directly to the kind of person who becomes a rock critic. art commentator, a commissioning editor.
This is because he possess that mysterious quality which was so potent in the mid seventies and eighties; credibility.
Credibility was everything back then. Credibility sought by all and granted only to a few meant that your every utterance had meaning. To be credible had nothing to do with actual ability. One had to wear only black, have only a rudimentary grasp of music and songwriting, and write tunes of great angst.
It helped if you’d experienced great angst but in Nick’s case it was enough to do a good impression of great angst. For true credibility, you had to take drugs. And the bad ones, not just a reggae cigarette in the band room.
These songs, excreable listening to most, were lauded by his followers as the most compelling utterances ever, and of course if you didn’t like them, it was because you were shallow and Nick was too much for you.
So compelling as though that may have been to the door bitches, the writers for the street papers, the JJJ set, the RRR set, I think now as we age we could apply some different criteria.
What’s he actually done?
Not that much.
Is it any good?
Not really.
Nick seems to me to be a one trick pony. He discovered early on that if you shove Jesus and the bible into your work, it makes it sound deep. Just say the word Jesus, or Elijah or Gethsemane and it sets off a whirlpool of meaning for people and you’re work is done.
His obscenity is too constant to be anything but adolescent. He has no range, he only brays.

And, finally. I was thinking of a similar Australian artist, from the same era and punk milieu, who had taken a more interesting path. I'm sure there are quite a few candidates, but Dave Graney is in many ways a more Australian figure than Cave, and a more literary one, too. Graney is a wry, larrikin version of a post-punk storyteller, a yarn-spinning bullshit artist, who has always worked at an angle to postmodern culture through gentle satire-homage of 70s and 80s suburban fantasies of cool hipsterdom. Graney, in some ways, is like Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens: actually treasured by more people because he is accessible and engaged. Unlike Cave, who presents his product as expression wrought from his soul, Graney takes his schtick seriously.

Reviewing the reviewer: Delia Falconer on James Wood

Novelist, essayist and reviewer Delia Falconer has a generous, incisive and, er, critical review of US uber-critic James Wood's How Fiction Works in last month's Australian Literary Review here.

In light of the recent !!death of literary criticism!! meme circulating through the internets Falconer's review questions the work that 'the real' does for Wood and the seemingly static and heavyhanded grasp this ground has in mapping modernities that are experienced as fragmented, discontinuous, or as proliferating mises en abyme (the period formerly known as post-modern):

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to "wake up" a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema), Wood could only read this new "genre" as a kind of perversity or, worse, a showing off. (He has chastised DeLillo elsewhere for turning the novelist into "a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry".)

This episode exposed a fundamental weakness of Wood's criticism: the fetish status it accords to the "real". It is clear, reading Wood's wider oeuvre, that he has a deep-rooted impatience with books that go outside a certain psychological verisimilitude; nor does he care for writing that usurps the critic's job by incorporating elements of commentary into a more self-conscious narration. Instead Wood places the naturalistic realist writing of Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert at the centre of his pantheon; writing in which the authorial presence never breaks the tranquil surface of the book.

Falconer's seems to be a Walter Benjamin rather than Georg Lukacs based reading of the dialetic between cultural (literary in this case) form and historical change. Lukacs mourned the victory of modernist form over 'life' in his writings on the historical novel, and was antipathetic to Brecht's estrangement techniques. Benjamin sought to align historical experience with cultural forms that were responsive to changes in technology and modernity. Wood would appear more on the side of Lukacs than Benjamin in Falconer's estimation.

One question arising out of this death of literary criticism meme is whether or not literary criticism should seek to model its evaluative criteria on the affectiveness of the reading experience in promoting a moral-emotional thinking that rings with truth, or seek to model these criteria more on how effectively the form mediates such content whereby both form and content are affectively and sociologically alive to the milieux of the novel's circulation. Falconer and indeed James Ley, I would suggest, tend toward the second method.

Pavlov's Cat has praised Ley as one of the best practitioners of the art of fiction reviewing at the moment. Falconer's often more meta-critical reviews operate in a different space to Ley's although both inflect their criticism and reviews through a Benjamin-esque knowledge of the historical instantiations of forms of novelistic realism. As Peter Osborne in The Politics of Time argues,

In Benjamin . . . we have the beginnings of an account of the temporalization of history as cultural form. This enables us to concretize our previous depiction of historical time (the temporalization of history by the anticipation of a timeless end, a historical death), in terms of a series of culturally specific representations of ends constituting history in a variety of different ways - as ethics (Levinas), tradition (Gadamer), chronology (historicism) or modernity(Heidegger and Benjamin), respectively. Furthermore, insofar as these forms are themselves the products of historically specific practices, they are possible objects of transformative practice. We are thus able to begin to give a more concrete meaning to the idea of a politics of time. A politics of time is a politics which takes the temporal structures of social practices as the specific objects of its transformative (or preservative) intent.

Ley's ABR essay on the politics of guilt in Andrew McGahan's fiction uses Leavisite and New Critical close-reading techniques to turn the finely grained registering of the emotional imprint of McGahan's novels on the reader toward a consideration of how this affective-moral level of the novels is re-figured by the narrative forms in which it is presented:

The essence of McGahan’s art is narrative. His recent novels have turned towards genre in part because of his skill at shaping them at a macro level; they seem familiar because they are so solidly and traditionally constructed. Significantly, the move toward genre is also a move toward self-consciousness: the moment of recognition when a narrative is exposed as a purposeful, self-contained structure with its own internal logic that works to shut out conflicting viewpoints. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín once remarked upon the similarity between his nation’s history and a work of sentimental fiction, ‘full of love stories with ill-fated lovers dying with a smile’. There are times, he argued, when ‘the crucial moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth-century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is broken by the society he lives in’. The point of his observation is that once this generic quality has been recognised, it opens up the possibility of transcendence: it becomes possible to understand history in other, more realistic and nuanced ways; it becomes possible to see how history is not like a sentimental fiction. This is part of the motivation behind The White Earth’s attempt to incorporate some of the prominent themes in recent Australian history within the overarching framework of a gothic narrative. The novel wants to make us aware of these ideas’ generic qualities, the manner in which certain ways of perceiving are perpetuated, and how this influences the shape of contemporary public debate.

This is an insightful and elegantly expressed argument about the politics of literary form. Ley manoeuvres his close-reading of the emotional tenor of McGahan's oeuvre into an argument about the politics of narrative genre. This is less self-consciously theoretically informed than Falconer's reviews, and the argument here insinuates itself more because of a voice that moves at a slower pace over less texts (one effect of close-reading)which buttresses the assuredness of any judgements. I like both reviewers for different reasons. Ley for the intimacy of the voice, Falconer for the movement between a theoretical and close-reading focus.

Anyone who witnessed Peter Fitzsimmon's contribution to the ABC First Tuesday Book Club last night and was reminded of the debates about the historical-ness of historical fiction that Kate Grenville's The Secret River roused would find essays by both Ley and Falconer on this subject instructive. [Falconer's essay 'Historical novels' is in Eureka Street 13.2 (March 2003) and reprinted in the Black Ink. Best Australian Essays 2003 anthology. Ley's is here: "When the Past isn't Past: a Role for Fiction in Australia's History Wars" .]

However, Ley's voice doesn't always persuade by insinuation. Sometimes the snark must be let loose. Here's a choice cut - harsh but fair - from early in the same piece on McGahan's fiction:

Writing politicised literature can be a treacherous business. It is not the first task of a work of prose fiction to act as a vehicle for a narrow political message. Novels that attempt this are regularly disfigured by their sense of moral self-importance. Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars (1998), for example, is so distorted by its politics that it develops, absurdly, into a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, in which a naïve young man discovers that he is right about everything. There is a strong tendency in a work that takes sides in some specific political controversy for it to leach the humanity from those characters who represent the unfavoured viewpoint, and to paint them as fools and knaves. Even the best-intentioned narrative inevitably warps reality to conform to its agenda to some extent, but when this is crudely done it stifles the dissonance that is the lifeblood of fiction. The novel shrinks into itself, starts to believe in the imperviousness of its own rhetoric, and ends up being effective only if it tells you exactly what you want to hear. This renders its fictional qualities redundant: Perlman wrote a novel, but everything he had to say might have been adequately expressed in a terse letter to the editor of The Age.

Ouch!

But the point, though sharp, is well made: Perlman's novel (love the personification of the text here by Ley) is disabled by the politics of its form. My critical readings of Three Dollars run along a similar track to Ley's although I spend a lot more time unpacking the anti-Bildungsroman structure of the text.

My main criticism of Perlman's debut novel is that its adoption of a social liberal and Liberal-Leavisite moral-aesthetic position on the ascendance of neoliberal governmentalities is a nostalgic, and thereby reactionary, response to what it mis-diagnoses as classical liberalism. While there are some wonderful moments in the novel, not least the parody of bureaucratic managerialism and the infiltration of the lanaguage of finance capital - all ordinaries - into everyday life, it is its politics of form, and thereby of time, that blunt any claim it has to critical force. And this formal failure is also one of cultural-historical form: the neoliberal reality that we live with, and that Perlman's novel responds to, can't simply be fought back from the ramparts of civilised heroism, as this monstrous ideology is not purely out there, perpetrated by fascist corporations, immoral merchants and their philistine lackeys.
The new liberalism is how we conduct ourselves; it is part of our freedom - it is formative and forming. It is the dominant mode of Bildungs. Novelists who grapple, formally, with this 'reality' are therefore closer to the truth than those that abject our own complicities in this formation.

Falconer and Ley, I think, help us to better see this changing reality and truth. And even Perlman too through the effort and courage to attempt a literary fictional critique of economic rationalism.

Simulacra: Gordon Brown and Peter Costello

Mark 'k-punk' Fisher brilliant, as usual, in seaming the political and the cultural together in what is a book review framing an analysis of the simulacrum that is British PM Gordon Brown's media vector.



If comparision of Australia's PM - Kevin Rudd - to Tony Blair in terms of empty (in the Australian MSN read empty as 'symbolic') spin-meister has any grip, then who might k-punk's portrait of Brown compare to in Australian federal politics? Oddly this line from Fisher resonates with Peter Costello's step-back from the opposition leader crown on election night, after defeat of the government in which he had been treasurer for more than eleven years:

The role he seems most fitted to play – glowering just off centre stage, plotting behind the scenes – brought with it the rich, heady jouissance of resentment. Brown could relish this jouissance only while his official goal was thwarted; just as he could exert power without holding it, the shadow of the man without a shadow, the black dog forever at the hollow man’s heels, supping on every misstep and mishap.
But now Brown has exactly what he always wanted,and what could be worse than that? The melancholy that follows from finally achieving what that he has coveted all those years, from at last having his newly manicured fingers on the holy grail for the sake of which he has spent thirty years constructing a new identity and a new set of values, must be profound. Especially when the grail so quickly become a poisoned chalice.

What Brown is might well have been what a Costello Prime Minister could have been.

Costello's memoirs could reveal something of this emotional portrait: although it seems unlikely that Costello was pursued by the Black Dog of depression, or that he glowered when next to John Howard. Costello had a different affective register to that which k-punk paints for Brown. But Costello's affective relationship to Prime Ministerial power, when it was within his reach, is what resonates.

His memoir should make for interesting reading, although the suggestion from one wag in the oz blogosphere that it be titled Almost Whatever it Takes probably won't make the shortlist.

Gordon Ramsay - Kung Fu** man?

I love reality TV shows. The current fascination in our household is for Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares: USA and UK versions. These two shows share the makeover convention of the reality TV genre, but if there is a game show element in these formats it's the 'this is as real as it gets' competition that is the market in restaurant-trading.

How do you win? Survive. Accumulate.

But how do you survive and accumulate?

As influxus, commenting on a post at sOmetim3s, writes:

I’m thinking about the Ramsay tv franchise Kitchen Nightmares and the operation of its foodie show status in spreading violent meritocracy, military-style discipline and property-makes-right to the scale of small restaurants.

Ramsay has been called a celebrity change-management consultant in a recent review of his US version of Kitchen Nightmares in The Age. Exactly. Having trouble managing? Let Gordon and his (hidden) team give you a make-over, sort out where the (pyschological or physical) blocks are in your enterprise and make it make money for you. Modernize. Flexibilize. Believe. Win.


Ramsay's neoliberalizing of the scloretic practices of restaurants, like Bonapartes in Silsden, West Yorkshire, is presented in the form of a compressed change-management master-class shown on TV. In order to unblock the barriers to success, Gordon sets out to shock chefs, floor managers, owners with stunts and volleys of vulgarity. One effect of these interventions is to humble and humilate those who work in these places. This is part of the perverse pleasure of watching the show. And yet after the Ramsay-fication of Bonapartes, for example, these media vectors of humilation into the Restaurant's owners and staff didn't dissipate. After Ramsay's salutary humbling there is a danger that others in the local community might jump on the vector and follow Ramsay's lead: after all one lesson from Kitchen Nightmares is that to survive in the lean & modish market-place of floggin' food, you can never get above your customers or too up yourself. If anger unblocks the energy of enterprise then the byproduct of humilation is what consume.

In the song Rise, PIL's John Lydon sang 'Anger is an energy'. This post-punk anthem continues a theme and method that Lydon began his punk career with: that anger is means of negating an unlivable situation. And from such a negation new possibilities might emerge. Ramsay too uses anger to beak-down people and systems to first negate then to re-form the psyches of these broken-down people, and their systems, with the techniques of neoliberal rationality. (see Wendy Brown here - pdf)

Ramsay tears down pride, sloth, and nostalgia and in this space inserts a realism about profiting from restaurant trading. So, in place of Chef-pride we get simple, cheap, local cuisine, quickly prepared and simple to serve; for sloth we get efficiency motivation, and flexibility; and for nostalgia, Ramsay modernizes - often through a physical renovation, nearly always through a menu reduction and alteration, and by often changing the restaurant's name.

Is this a spiritual exercise?

A strange question for a TV show that is viewed in-between advertisements for shirts, cars, other TV shows . . . Yet, Ramsay's motivational visits to ailing restaurants are both times for healing and for imparting the wisdom of the way. But mostly I think that Ramsay's is a spiritual practice because of the meme at the end of the British shows: the lights in the Restaurant are still on, it's night and the last guests are filtering out. Ramsay might talk to that spot just to the left of camera, a last minute piece of motivational-reportage, on the pavement. The camera pulls back, Ramsay's back is to us, as he pulls his jacket collar up and walks off, as if once more out into the desert or the urban jungle: walking the lone path of the way.





Gordon Ramsay, Kung Fu man?







Will the road rise with Ramsay? What happens to all the model citizens that Gordon hot-wires? Is there something beyond restaurant-neoliberalism? Is my fascination with these shows healthy?

RISE
(Lydon/Laswell)

I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong

I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be black
I could be white
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be white
I could be black

Your time has come
Your second skin
The cost so high
The gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie

May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you

I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be right

I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be black
I could be white
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be black
I could be white
They put a hot wire to my head
Cos of the things I did and said
They made these feelings go away
Model citizen in every way

Jam & Jerusalem

After firstly ignoring Jennifer Saunders' half hour television show - Jam and Jerusalem - because it lacked a laugh track and obvious traces of Saunders-style satire and whimsy (how shallow am I?!), I now find it satisfying.

My initial responses to this show were, surprisingly, in line with what has been the critique, if you can call it that, from Melbourne's Fairfax broadsheet - The Age's - Green Guide. The Green Guide's weekly mixture of review, schedule, new media advertising and information in the form of a lift-out, usually does very nicely for me and Significant Other. Marieke Hardy's colour-pieces are nearly always slanted skewerings of some vapid and valid target in the culture, and Hardy does a wry and arch line in self-deprecation. But we read it mainly for the reviews of free-to-air TV shows and there is often cause to be shat-off with these.

Hardy aside and back to Jam & Jerusalem, it was twice dismissed as sub-standard because Dawn French was both underutilised and there were not enough zinger-funny lines! Another review (not online but in the GG last week) began by rueing the failure of J & J to realise the comedic heights it should, but ends cheering it on because Dawn French's Rosie takes centre stage in the episode under review, and being

the show's major drawcard [reminds us] that this brand of comedy might be a taste worth acquiring

All of which raises the questions: is J & J actually more situation than comedy (as in sit-com), or even more drama than comedy (dramedy)? Why is J & J being reviewed as a failed comedy? How could it not fail if comedy is being measured on the gag-meter?

J & J, successfully I think, celebrates a form of 'village' female community. I live in a sort of village, and I don't think I'm nostalgic for a Sea-Change style community from the perspective of the metropolis (eg BallykissAngel, Hamish McBeth and so on and so forth . . . ). In other words the show affirms community through an ensemble; albeit one led by 'elders' of the Woman's Guild of Clatterford, St Mary. Yes, Dawn French is funny - and as the multiple-personality character of Rosie manages to voice the harsh-truths of a village-idiot-savant. But French's Rosie is part of the ensemble and is not the sole reason for the show's charm.

So, this Village-idiot recommends having a look at J & J. It's gentle portrayal of Guild-life is sorta uplifting. Oh yeah, Jennifer Saunder's upper-middle-class Caroline Martin is a (mild) scream.