Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom's 'Divers' and Kim Keever's Dioramas

Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 For those who may be unfamiliar with her work, Joanna Newsom is a composer, harpist, pianist, and singer-songwriter who has released four albums over the last thirteen years: The Milk–Eyed Mender (2004), Ys (2006), her triple album Have One On Me (2010), and most recently, Divers, released in 2015. Her music is deeply ambitious and mythic in its scope, and she considers every aspect of her albums, collaborating with other composers and with visual artists to create records that are greater than the sum of their parts. The title of Divers sums up this creative process, punning on ‘diverse’. Divers features various figures who dive through the air or into the depths of the sea, ultimately also treating this horizon between air and water as a divide in time, separating life and death (note the similarity of the words ‘dive’ and ‘die’). This is therefore a concept album, containing a sci-fi narrative in which Newsom leads an army of bird-soldiers against the forces of linear time. It is unabashedly fantastical, but for all of this surface complexity, the album’s underlying theme is large and familiar. Through her time-travelling narrative, Newsom seeks to come to terms with mortality. The ‘last’ song on the album, ‘Time, as a Symptom’, loops back into the first, creating a chiasmus or time-loop between birth and death, much like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which she also quotes from in the song’s lyrics, nodding to Joyce as an influence. Today I will discuss how the album art of Divers illuminates one of Newsom’s lessobvious themes. This record is saturated in references to war, colonialism, and American expansion into ‘wild’ frontiers, drawing on real-world conflicts, however much this history might be filtered through a mythic lens. First I will outline some affinities between Newsom’s work and that of Kim Keever, the artist who provides the photography for Divers, then I will explore the history of dioramas, and how this history fits into the political themes of the album. 1 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 The cover of Divers features a photograph by Kim Keever, titled Wildflowers 52i. When I first looked at this image, I assumed that it was a photograph of a painting, but in fact, the only paint here is the mist suffusing the scene. The landscape that you can see in the foreground is a model, placed in a tank of water, into which Keever drops paint, creating an imitation of clouds, which he photographs as the paint diffuses. It is a diorama: a double-view, in which the artist places objects in front of a painted backdrop to make a simulacrum of reality. The main difference between this work and a traditional diorama is that the paint permeates the scene, rather than only existing as a backdrop for the model. You can see how Keever’s dioramas are made by watching the music video for the title track ‘Divers’: in the video, Newsom is filmed standing behind Keever’s fish tank, as he drops paint into it to form volcanic clouds.1 Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport describe the earliest dioramas, featuring landscape backdrops lit and viewed by a live audience, as follows: Designed by Daguerre, instead of being static like the panoramas, the Diorama came alive. Light was directed onto it from various windows and skylights above that could be opened and shuttered mechanically to varying degrees. These shutters were slowly operated during the performance so that at first the light fell on the front surface of the painting revealing a daylight scene, but as the light slowly shifted to the rear of the painting, it would appear that day had become evening. The illusion was so extraordinary, so captivating that many people refused to believe that what they were seeing was a twodimensional surface rather than some magically conjured-up three-dimensional space.2 This conveys the theatricality of dioramas as a medium, with Daguerre staging changes in the light, deepening a two-dimensional backdrop using special effects to create the illusion of a third dimension. Newsom’s Divers complements this theme, as the album’s players try to go beyond a three-dimensional world and travel into four-dimensional space-time. Inside the record, Keever’s diorama photographs are held in a black sleeve, loosely, like a stack of slides, with each song’s lyrics printed on the back of a different image. The sleeve holds these photographs as an unbound booklet whose pages can be shuffled at will, which may be another way of challenging linear order within the form of the work. The pairing of each song with a different diorama suggests that each track imitates a landscape that the listener moves through. This album is an epic of sorts, following voyagers, imitating Homer’s Odyssey. Keever comments on the ‘timeless’ quality of his landscape dioramas: The adjective “catastrophic” is sometimes connected to my work because the question is asked, “what happened to the people?” Though any work I’ve made could be a place here on earth, I think of these panoramas as existing millions of years ago, today, or millions of years in the future. It has been suggested that the landscapes could be from another planet. The Hudson River School is most often associated with my work because of the idyllic quality and color of the vistas. A lot has been written about my work but my most favorite line was written by Kit White, “There were mountains, sunsets and ocean shores before there were eyes to see them.”3 This simultaneously ‘catastrophic’ and idyllic scenery sets the stage for Newsom’s music. In an interview with Tavi Gevinson, she states: ‘my album covers are portraits of the narrator of the 1 Joanna Newsom, ‘“Divers” (Official Video).’ Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, artwork by Kim Keever. Drag City, YouTube, 27 October 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48xlgXqQKLA> 2 Roger Watson & Helen Rappaport, Capturing the Light: A true story of genius, rivalry and the birth of photography (London: Pan Macmillan, 2014; first published 2013), p. 51. 3 Kim Keever, ‘Landscapes.’ Kim Keever’s website. <https://kimkeever.com/landscapes-3/> 2 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 record. The narrator of the record is me, usually, but a me with certain aspects really concentrated or exaggerated.’4 Does her choice of Keever’s Wildflowers diorama suggest that the narrator of Divers is the landscape itself? Or is she playing a godlike being, dwarfing the landscape, viewing it from outside time? In the music video for ‘Divers’, she appears to be a skygod of sorts, a presence akin to a Symbolist figure by Odilon Redon or Frida Kahlo. She describes discovering Kim Keever’s work with a jolt of nervous recognition: I first found him five or six years ago walking around in New York City. I saw one of his pieces hanging in a gallery and I dug it very hard […] I actually was really in love with two of his pieces. One was called “West 104K,” I believe. It’s the piece that, in the lyric booklet, is married to the song “Sapokanikan.” And then the other piece of his that I loved is Wildflowers […] it gave me this agitation, like a bee in my bonnet. Every time I looked at it, it was like I had four cups of coffee. I was very emotionally perturbed, not unhappy, just like the throes of falling in love or being really nervous or excited about something, and I didn’t know where in the house I could hang it, ’cause it’s not a feeling I want to feel for more than five minutes a day. […] As I started the process of writing the record, […] I realized that the motivating set of ideas and feelings pushing that writing were the same set of feelings and ideas that agitated me so much about this Keever piece. There was some connection in my mind between the two things that made me horrified and delighted in the same ways.5 What could be horrifying and delighting Joanna Newsom in this scene of wildflowers? Keever states that this diorama was inspired by ‘a nature special which talked about how flowering plants originated in China and did not migrate easily to the other continents because, at the time, some millions of years ago, the continents were splitting apart’: A botanist had stopped his car along a country road in China and pointed out about 150 species of flowering plants that only found their way to England and America through trade with China in the nineteenth century. I found the idea very poetic and inspiring. I think of the Wildflower series as that point in time, millions of years ago.6 Aside from its beauty, Wildflowers 52i might be agitating because it represents a point of division, as the continents were first parting, which is now unreachable.7 Keever’s statement also raises the possibility of travel, trade, and transmigration as one of Newsom’s preoccupations. Keever’s landscape dioramas have been compared to the Hudson River School, a midnineteenth-century art movement depicting the vast landscapes encountered by American pioneers, and Joe Flaherty writes that although Keever’s methods are unorthodox, his aesthetic aims are ‘closer to the Old Masters than anything on display at the Whitney Biennial’. Keever responds: ‘A good deal of modern art is anti-beauty. I am implying that beauty is now provocative in contemporary art though it always depends on how you handle it.’8 Newsom’s music is 4 Tavi Gevinson, ‘Stand Brave, Life-Liver: An Interview With Joanna Newsom.’ Rookie, 26 October 2015. <http://www.rookiemag.com/2015/10/joanna-newsom-interview/3/> 5 Ibid.. 6 Doron Davidson–Vidavski, ‘Behind the Artwork: Joanna Newsom’s Divers.’ The 405, 24 August 2015. <https://www.thefourohfive.com/music/article/behind-the-artwork-joanna-newsom-s-divers-144> 7 Newsom has spoken about the fact that Divers is a record preoccupied with duality and ‘twinning’: ‘If you look at the lyrics on Divers, there’s a lot of twinning, and there’s a lot of navigation of the border between the man and the woman, and the sea and shore.’ Stephen Carlick, ‘Joanna Newsom: The Harp Wants What It Wants.’ Exclaim!, 8 December 2015. <http://exclaim.ca/music/article/joanna_newsom-harp_wants_what_it_wants> 8 Joe Flaherty, ‘A Nasa Engineer Turned Artist Whose Canvas Is A Huge Fish Tank.’ Wired, 1 April 2014. < https://www.wired.com/2014/04/kim-keever/> 3 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 comparably innovative, while still drawing on past traditions: her unique voice is often considered provocative by new listeners, and she only felt able to begin singing after listening to folk voices which were not ‘classically beautiful’.9 She has been called modernist, but is also, in many respects, Romantic with a capital R: her preoccupation with transcendence and natural beauty might invite terms such as ‘visionary’. However, one of the recurring concerns of Divers is how the past might be misremembered in the present, tapping into a very contemporary reckoning with America’s history (what to make of all those Confederate statues?). The ornate quality of her work, that might feel antiquated or simply nostalgic, is always filtered through a distinctly modern perspective. Keever explains that he first began moving towards underwater dioramas by making tabletop models, but they ‘appeared to be on a planet without an atmosphere’. He realised that he could create ‘a landscape photograph with a more realistic defused light by submerging everything in a water filled aquarium’: what defuses the light in the atmosphere is mainly water vapor. […] So with my 2 feet of water from the front of the aquarium to the back of the aquarium, I must be capturing miles and miles of atmosphere in a compressed scale, […] I think the reason there is in otherworldly quality to my work is perhaps because most of us are familiar with dioramas, especially ones we might have seen as children in museums of natural history or in dollhouses for that matter. You could also think of the otherworldly quality of watching insects move around outside. We see these other worlds as children […] If the work is utopian and catastrophic at the same time, I am very pleased. Sometimes I look at great paintings in a museum and note the […] flaws in the work and imagine what a great painting it must have been at one time. I sometimes want people to look at my work and have that same feeling. A feeling that if only the surface was clear, there must be something very beautiful beneath it.10 This dense atmosphere pairs with the environment of Joanna Newsom’s songs, crowded with allusions and multiple meanings: she often seems to be referring to two or three phenomena in one concentrated word (for example, she coins ‘simulacreage’ to describe the tracts of space and time that her bird-pilots seek to colonise, combining simulacrum, acre, and age). The second song on the album, ‘Sapokanikan’, offers a compressed history of New York city, exploring what is hidden beneath the official monuments of Central Park: Beneath a Patch of Grass, her bones the old Dutch master hid, while, elsewhere, Tobias and the Angel disguised what the scholars surmise was a mother and kid (interred with other daughters, in dirt, in other potter’s fields). Above them, parades mark the passing of days through parks where pale colonnades arch 9 ‘I grew up with this classical mentality — you don't sing if you don't have a classically beautiful voice. Then I heard Texas Gladden in the Lomax archives, this grandmother who had a complex, textured voice. In symphonic music, the instruments have a wide range of timbres, but there's only a very narrow range of timbres allowed in the human voice. After hearing Texas Gladden, I gave myself permission to incorporate singing into what I was doing.’ Greg Kot, ‘Joanna Newsom: Conformity isn’t my thing.’ Chicago Tribune, 3 December 2015. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/ct-joanna-newsom-ott-1204-20151130-column.html> 10 Kirsten Anderson, ‘An Interview with Kim Keever.’ Hi Fructose, 2 November 2011. <http://hifructose.com/2011/11/02/an-interview-with-kim-keever/> 4 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 in marble and steel, where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your footfall (and the Cause that they died for) are lost in the idling birdcalls, and the records they left are cryptic at best lost in obsolescence: the text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal with any fluorescence where the Hand of the Master begins and ends.11 ‘Sapokanikan’ mourns the anonymous ‘20,000’ buried in ‘potter’s fields’ beneath Central Park, named after the Native American settlement that preceded modern New York. Newsom draws an analogy between ‘Old Master’ painters and the often patriarchal thrust of recorded history, as well as inviting a comparison between the hand of the artist and the hand of God. Beneath Van Gogh’s painting Patch of Grass (1887), x-ray imaging reveals an earlier painting of a peasant woman;12 Newsom links this to the dead layered beneath the city’s ‘marble and steel’. Her lyrics also reference the western front of the First World War alongside the ‘western front’ of the American ‘wild west’, placing soldiers and pioneers amid Native American settlements, in a vast assemblage of casualties. Another song that explores these themes is ‘Waltz of the 101st Lightborne’: I believed they had got what they came for; I believed our peril was done, on the eve of the last of the Great Wars after three we had narrowly won. (But the fourth, it was carelessly done.) I saw his ship in its whistling ascension, as they launched from the Capitol seat – swear I saw our mistake when the clouds draped like a flag, across the backs of the fleet of the Hundred-First Lightborne Elite. As the day is long, so the well runs dry, and we came to see Time is taller than Space is wide. And we bade goodbye to the Great Divide: found unlimited simulacreage to colonize!13 In these lyrics, the fourth ‘Great War’ is the war against time. Joanna Newsom states: The whole record is personal, but a lot of what is most personal is conveyed through pure fiction or, sometimes, even science fiction—literally sci-fi. With “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” I’m contrasting 11 Joanna Newsom, ‘Sapokanikan.’ Divers (Drag City, 2015). John von Radowitz, ‘X-rays reveal Van Gogh’s hidden portrait.’ The Guardian, 31 July 2008. <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/jul/31/2> 13 Joanna Newsom, ‘Waltz of the 101st Lightborne.’ Divers (Drag City, 2015). 12 5 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 this British Isles sea shanty with a narrative in which I’m talking about colonizing alternate iterations of the terrestrial position in the multiverse. Colonizing time sideways, front and back, traveling in four directions through time.14 It seems that the pilots of the 101st Lightborne, born of light or travelling by light, succeed in finding an ‘unlimited simulacreage’ of space-time to conquer. However, in the process, they unleash a terrible punishment, like Odysseus / Ulysses sailing towards Mount Olympus, being sucked into a whirlpool of time. The song seems to be narrated by the women left behind, who ask: ‘Have they drowned, in those windy highlands?’. ‘Highlands away, my John’, the song replies. While this drowning is held within a sci-fi framework, it invites parallels with the ‘Great Wars’ of the twentieth century, evoking George Santayana’s observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.15 It is peculiarly apt that the history of the diorama entwines with these ‘colonizing’ themes. Bridgitte Barclay notes that habitat dioramas – featuring taxidermy animals among plants in front of a painted background – ‘are generally credited to Carl Akeley, a taxidermist and expeditionist during the late 19th and early 20th centuries’: Around the turn of the 20th century, museum expeditions like Akeley’s hunted and killed a staggering number of animals around the world. For Americans, the timing of this newfound access to animals— transformed from wild and possibly dangerous, creatures to mummified curios—was especially poignant. The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, which debuted some of the first major habitat dioramas, was also the setting of Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration that the American West had been closed. Turner based his assessment on 1890 census reports that the frontier was largely settled. A settled West, he argued, negated the prevailing American identity, which depended on an untamed western frontier: “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West,” he argued. […] As Jon Mooallem points out in his book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, the U.S. used animals “to contemplate its own character” as a land of plenty, […] At the end of the 19th century, it became clear that American wildlife was dwindling and that “the story of American wildlife would become a story of an infinitely receding Eden.” Habitat dioramas, then, preserved something of this dwindling American mythos […] the taxidermy was critical, as a credible illusion required that the animals appear to be animate. The displays succeeded or failed based on the degree to which they recalled the idea of an American wild, an ecosystem to be both exploited and preserved.16 14 Alex Frank, ‘A Conversation With Joanna Newsom.’ FADER, 19 October 2015. <http://www.thefader.com/2015/10/19/joanna-newsom-divers-interview> 15 Matthew Caleb Flamm, ‘George Santayana (1863–1952).’ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A PeerReviewed Academic Resource. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/santayan/> It’s worth noting here that war is a repeated trope in Joanna Newsom’s work, and she has spoken of her awareness of the atomic bomb from early childhood: ‘My mom was a member of a group called I think doctors against nuclear disarmament [presumably means armament …and] they used to meet in our living room, and I was so little that I think that nobody thought that I was taking it in but I really was, terrified of nuclear war when I was a toddler […] when you’re that little you haven’t quite built up the defense to learn how to turn away from something that’s frightening, you know, you just look straight at it, like a little baby that doesn’t know how to blink in the bright light […] you’re just looking at these glaring horrors, and I think we learn a little bit how to meter them out and break them into doses that are considerable and don’t just paralyze you with fear and sadness.’ Marc Maron, Joanna Newsom Interview, WTF Podcast with Marc Maron #709, 23 May 2016, 79 mins in. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUHifIBK07Q&app=desktop> 16 Bridgitte Barclay, ‘Through the Plexiglass: A History of Museum Dioramas.’ The Atlantic, 14 October 2014. <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/taxidermy-animal-habitat-dioramas/410401/> 6 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 Museum dioramas thus transplant aspects of natural environments, much like the Chinese flowering plants that Kim Keever speaks of as the inspiration for his Wildflowers diorama, but the animals are of course stuffed, giving only the illusion of life.17 This display of a semi-illusory ‘wild America’, ‘an infinitely receding Eden’, also extends to romanticized portrayals of Native Americans in museum set-pieces. In Spectacle Culture and American Identity: 1815–1940, Susan Tenneriello writes of the inaccurate, idealized views of Native American culture in museum dioramas, ignoring genocidal attacks such as the Sand Creek Massacre (in which ‘two hundred or more women, children, and men’ were slaughtered) in favour of harmonious portrayals of tribal gatherings. ‘The static, aesthetic monuments of Indian “habitats,” amended to lifestyle reenactment, bump social histories against political narratives’, she argues.18 Whether by coincidence or intent, Newsom’s ‘Sapokanikan’ is founded in a similarly disjunctive awareness of America’s competing ‘social histories’ and ‘political narratives’, quoting from Horace Smith’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) alongside Percy Shelley’s more famous poem of the same name: We wonder,—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place – Horace Smith, ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) So we all raise a standard to which the wise and honest soul may repair; to which a hunter, a hundred years from now, may look, and despair, and see with wonder the tributes we have left to rust in the park: swearing that our hair stood on end, to see John Purroy Mitchel depart for the Western Front, where work might count.19 All exeunt! All go out! Await the hunter, to decipher the stone (and what lies under, now). The city is gone. – Joanna Newsom, ‘Sapokanikan’ (2015) Richard Difford argues that at its first conception, the diorama ‘was typical of the drive to master and control visual experience.’20 Nineteenth-century dioramas might depict the city in which 17 Newsom herself collects taxidermy – in the cover image of Have One On Me, she looks quite a lot like a diorama inhabitant, reclining among stuffed peacocks – and may well know something of this history. 18 Susan Tenneriello, Spectacle Culture and American Identity: 1815–1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 185–186. 19 John Purroy Mitchel, known as the ‘boy mayor’ of New York, died in 1918, in an air force training exercise, when he fell out of his plane due to an unfastened seatbelt. There is a memorial to him in Central Park. ‘ “My one wish,” he said, “is to get over to the Western front where I can do some work that will count.”’ ‘Mitchel Killed By Fall From Aero; Safety Belt Loose.’ New York Tribune, 7 July 1918. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1918-07-07/ed-1/seq-1.pdf> 7 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 they were displayed, which was ‘shut out in favour of the artificially simulated alternative’, manifesting ‘a desire to get above the street and see the city as a whole.’21 The city diorama allowed the viewer to exist beyond and a little above the scene, hypothesizing a god’s-eye-view. Stephen Christopher Quinn writes, of the habitat dioramas housed in the American Museum of Natural History, that ‘Time has stopped. Birds soar in suspended animation. Animals gaze in perpetual fixed attention. Clouds hover motionless in azure blue skies.’ The viewer is able to observe at leisure; all is ‘locked in an instant of time for our close examination and study.’22 However, rather than preserving the diorama itself as a monument, Keever’s dioramas rely on ephemeral movements of paint. The photograph becomes the lasting artefact of an instant of time, while the model is removed from the tank, so that he can start anew. He relies on the chance movement of the paint, rather than complete mastery of his medium, to achieve striking effects. As with Daguerre’s use of light to create a sensation of time passing, the model is subject to influences outside its fixed construction. Newsom also subverts the idea that the ‘actors’ of a diorama must be frozen in place: “Birds,” she tells me, are the inhabitants of the record, its players more than its subject. “They were all kind of acting out different roles, doing little soft shoes in one corner. They perform a few jobs that I need someone to perform. They embody poetically a railing against and even transcendence of what we perceive to be natural law. We’re earthbound, held here by gravity; they’re pushing up against that force. And they feel like messengers. They look at Earth from above. They look at the small comings and goings of people from above.”23 These bird players thematically embody the pilots, the ‘101st Lightborne Elite’, who try to break free of their mortal coil. Newsom takes creatures that we might expect to find immobilised in museum dioramas, and makes them key players in her mythic drama. The American Museum of Natural History, containing some of the most well known natural history dioramas in America, happens to be in New York, which is also one of the key locations in which Joanna Newsom conceived and set Divers. I do not know if this is due to 20 Richard Difford, ‘Infinite horizons: Le Corbusier, the Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau dioramas and the science of visual distance’, The Journal of Architecture 22.5: 825–853 (first published in The Journal of Architecture 14.3: 295–323), pp. 831–832. 21 Ibid., p. 834. 22 Stephen Christopher Quinn, Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Abrams, date not given), p. 8. 23 Julia Felsenthal, ‘Joanna Newsom on Divers, Her First Album in Five Years.’ Vogue, 23 October 2015. <https://www.vogue.com/article/joanna-newsom-divers-profile> 8 Wild Flowers: Joanna Newsom’s Divers and Kim Keever’s Dioramas Dr Rebecca Varley–Winter Paper for the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017 serendipity or artistic intent, but the Museum holds the Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds, a microcosm of winged species that appear to fly through the displays in arrested life. Many of the early bird specimens were collected during the First World War, and these dioramas are ‘so dedicated to preserving the Pacific as it was in the early twentieth century that a bullet-pierced American soldier’s helmet lies in the foreground of the Philippines diorama.’24 I cannot help speculating whether these exhibits were one of Joanna Newsom’s points of departure, as she reimagined the dead and lost of history as an army of transcendent birds. 24 Jonathan Meiburg, ‘Inside the American Museum of Natural History’s Hidden Masterpiece.’ The Appendix, 22 August 2013. <http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/7/inside-the-museum-of-natural-historys-hidden-masterpiece> 9