tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692772426628277592024-03-13T11:26:47.831-07:00The moderate contrarianThis blog will be maintained and written by Mitch Hampton, a lay philosopher, jazz pianist and composer, essayist, cinephile and humanist and aesthete. I am also a cultural scholar of the 1970s, student of arts and lettersdandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-35904362945961895342019-07-10T21:44:00.002-07:002019-07-10T21:44:53.376-07:00The Journey Of An Aesthete is here!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo by my producer <a href="http://www.grayceproductions.com/registry">Laurie Jill Strickland</a></td></tr>
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This post is the official announcement of my new podcast: Journey Of An Aesthete. Since there is a lot of me talking on the first episode I will keep my comments brief.<br />
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The perspective of my podcast is of all the arts and letters, what can be called the humanities more generally and above all, what it is to make something and the nature of the creative act. I hope to cover a lot of disciplines and medium, but usually from the creator's perspective. I believe this perspective is lacking today since usually there is a suspicious, interrogative tone to much writing on the arts today and I hope in however small a way to counteract this. Not that there won't be critics on my show, (and, of course, writers of non-fiction more generally) but this will be to look at criticism itself as a form of creation.<br />
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Here is a link to the first episode. It is available on <a href="https://www.breaker.audio/journey-of-an-aesthete-podcast">Breaker</a>, Google Podcasts, <a href="https://radiopublic.com/journey-of-an-aesthete-podcast-G4d4K7">RadioPublic</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7smqiHYcuBmlpKTk0qDkhV">Spotify</a>, and <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/anchor-podcasts/journey-of-an-aesthete-podcast">Stitcher</a><br />
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https://anchor.fm/mitch-hampton<br />
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I should give special thanks to the fine folks at <a href="http://anchor.fm/">Anchor.Fm</a> since they have invented a simple way to create a podcast like this one and for a minimum of technological hurdles, perfect for a semi-luddite and digital immigrant like myself. Laurie Jill Strickland is the producer/show creator without whom none of this would be even possible.<br />
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The first episode is appropriately titled Because, After All, One Must Begin...<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-77220164639205931782019-06-14T19:27:00.000-07:002019-06-14T20:51:31.599-07:00Journey of an Aesthete: New Project!<br />
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As much as I critique or flat our rail against many (though not all) contemporary things I am about to head into arguably that most contemporary medium of all: the world of podcasting. What is the podcast going to be about? In short it will be a comprehensive look at all that is artistic production and creativity, mainly from the point of view of those who make things: the authors of all of it, whether these be individuals, collectives, production companies and all the rest. My focus will be on my greatest love: aesthetics. An alternative to the psychological and political orientation of other programs I want to immerse the listener in the creative process as this is understood by those who make things.<br />
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I open my first show with a longish quote from <a href="http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/">Isaiah Berlin</a> on the need for pluralism, if only because pluralism is a natural and/or cultural fact of life, whether this or that government, regime recognizes this fact or not. Thus I want to feature aesthetics that are different from one another and in all sorts of ways, Hopefully I will talk to people in various mediums as well.<br />
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One of the things that makes this all possible is <a href="http://anchor.fm/">Anchor.fm</a>. Much like the thinking behind the original Apple company, it aims to make things "user friendly" for folks like myself who are as far from tech or computer mavens as you can imagine! Another big impetus behind the podcast will be my producer Laurie <a href="http://www.grayceproductions.com/registry">Jill Strickland http://www.grayceproductions.com/registry</a>. Strickland has done so many things from acting to producing and writing and as such is an ideal person to produce what I hope will be an aesthetically diverse show.<br />
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I recently came across a quote from <a href="http://hac.bard.edu/">Hannah Arendt</a>, another favorite thinker and writer of mine, alongside Isaiah Berlin (and in true Libra form, Berlin strongly disliked Arnedt - yet i love them both equally). It is one of the better statements i have read on this thing we call the arts:<br />
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"If one looks at objects in the world from the perspective of their durability, it is clear that artworks are superior to all other objects. Even after millennia they have the ability to shine for us, as they did on the day that brought them into the world." Hannah Arendt, <i>Culture and Politics</i></blockquote>
Look for the debut of this June 24th.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-83215265553284206182019-03-21T22:13:00.000-07:002019-03-22T08:31:02.954-07:001970s Film and Visual Culture: A Polemic on Art and the case of "commercial" entertainment<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Here is my blunt principle for all the writing I have done and will continue to do on works of art: the absolute gold standard for understanding and evaluating any work of art, from the lowliest commercial advertising illustration to the highest Henry Moore sculpture (or Chantal Akerman movie) is how we feel about its sight and sound, temporally, as we are experiencing it in "real" time. All other considerations i.e., cultural allusiveness, intertextuality, historical context, and retroactive reconstruction and the like, while at times important, are still secondary to the experience of the artwork as it is lived forwards in time. One technical word for my approach is that it is fundamentally <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/">phenomenological</a>. Another way of putting it is to say that I am an aesthete as this term is emblematic of this approach.</b></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>There is no such thing as realism or realistic art. All art is unrealistic. If you want proof of that think about a musical where people break into perfect, on pitch singing and dancing in the midst of a dramatic scene. People simply do not do this in daily life. (Thankfully, since the results would be decidedly off pitch were it to be common occurrence). If my statement is true, then so-called realistic or naturalistic art is simply another style going by the honorific "realistic", and not more accurate a representation of real life than any other style. What gets called realism is sometimes a good style or a bad one but a style all the same. And, truth be told, all art, even art that is not the best art, contains elements of profound reality and truth that we should recognize.</b></span></span></span></blockquote>
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One of the welcome results of the invention of youtube is that archival visual culture that had been as unavailable as to have been "out of print" for several decades (except in highly controlled and licensed formats as in televised syndication) is being posted by different channels and users. This is doubly important to me. Firstly, for a long period of time, from, say 1982 or so, well into the early 1990s, I was without a working television of my own. This meant the only television I was able to watch was only a few days out of the year at family gatherings. Secondly, as part of my long running project on the 1970s I have made it a point to see as many productions from the 1970s as is possible and that means, of course, made for t.v. movies. One of the additional things I have done is to watch productions into the middle 1980s, under the working hypothesis that a lot of this material, though 1980s in many respects would hold aesthetic holdovers in sensibility from the 1970s and my hypothesis was confirmed.<br />
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I had (re)visited Moxey's <i>Intimate Strangers</i> in an earlier 1970s blog post in a discussion aiming to include the made for t.v. movie <a href="http://here./">herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetics-of-1970s-cinema-and.htmlre.</a> I have been fortunate to watch many more productions. I shall start with some general comments on art in general and the historicity of commercial entertainment in particular.<br />
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I am a thorough relativist about historical styles. I do not accept any kind of progressivism in art history. I am not a relativist about quality as quality but I do not believe that the artwork of an earlier, forgotten or discarded period deserves to be treated as such at a later date. It is not the primitive, anachronistic relic of a less evolved era; it is simply an object reflecting an era that is wholly different from our own and in so many complex ways that are ultimately not amenable to any objective evaluation. Put a little more bluntly, works in the current Golden Age Of Television like <i>The Sopranos, Madmen, True Detective and The Wire</i> are not better or more sophisticated that the ones regarded as their inferior precursors. It is simply that they are made in a style that is accepted and acceptable in our current moment. One of the important reasons for this verdict of superiority is that these shows are at times superbly done, a large part of which is the stylistic effect of the long "serialized" form itself, above all what this long form means for the craft of acting as well as writing. On that account one could speak of a kind of aesthetic advantage but I still resist the notion of full stop Progress. Part of my reasoning is what I wrote in another context here:<br />
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<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">When a style or a mode becomes really big such that it overshadows all differing contenders, one of the things that happens is that the style in question begins to create around it an image of self evident superiority. This is almost always achieved through the enthusiasm of a large fan base, and I use the formulation of fan base in such a way that it includes both elite tastemakers in large and small media, say, critics, as much as masses of audiences. Elites and masses are united in enthusiasm for the style with the result that it is forgotten that what has occurred is a style at all but rather how a thing is simply supposed to be made, as if it were always thus. This is only compounded when everything gets made more or less the same way, when there is a single, dominant house style. Actually everything is some sort of style or another, all the way down, and for each style there is always a better and worse version on offer. But enthusiasm for any style creates an unconscious forgetting about style as style - instead of a style being seen as but one style among many,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the style can be taken for actual reality itself. When this happens there can occur a crisis in representation since people might forget that there is such a thing as a representation and that representation is quite distinct from, say, daily life. I believe we are in such a moment today. </span></b></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">typical print ad for t.v. movies</td></tr>
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The works I have been watching are from an era that is not much older than the current one (speaking as we are of thirty years rather than, say, fifty or sixty years) but the sensibility is far from a current one to be sure. But it <i>is </i>a sensibility to be sure, with its own modes of (re)presentation, mainly built around some very emotionally direct and I would say traditional notions of human nature in psychology and behavior. The two features that make them part of a 1970s sensibility is a commitment to bold expression of raw human emotion for its own sake, without the ordinary propriety of classical taste, a focus on asking questions rather than presenting fixed answers - what I have called a non-conceptualized sensibility. All these movies were made under the most compromised of contexts, dependent on the rigors of advertising and the commercial marketplace, and yet, because of all this they reflect rather accurately the era in which they were made; in a sense there was no way they could get away from the limits and conditions of their production and its history.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(OUR TOWN, 1977)</td></tr>
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Here is a rather short list of titles representing some of the<i> kinds</i> of movies I have in mind. These titles reflect my personal preferences rather than any particular canon, though there are a handful of titles on here that have become canonical through critical and public acclaim. The most recent pictures on here are from 1983/'84, - roughly the time that the 70s were all but over and the 80s were emerging as their own independent period. <br />
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The titles on here run quite a wide gamut. Some deal with the most serious social problems. One of the most common concerns some kind of substance abuse, often with an explicit and hopeful recovery narrative arc. Others deal with more general kinds of social oppression, like domestic violence or poverty. Some, by contrast, are light and witty comedies. But here too there is the emphasis on "getting things out in the open" and the comedy has a kind of frankness about it. These television movies are unified by an emphasis on human emotion, and though all are limited by the rules of television. they nevertheless all possess what I can only call fearlessness and integrity towards their subjects, even as they simultaneously use sensationalistic effects to rivet an audience. Another common stylistic device is the usage of extensive documentary techniques, in camera placement and lighting, especially location shooting in those works that take place in the present day. I will not review or comment on the individual films but I do believe all are worth your time.<br />
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1. A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED WOMAN (ABC Hy Averback, 1978)<br />
2. DUEL (ABC Steven Spielberg 1971)<br />
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3. DAWN PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE RUNAWAY (Randall Kleiser, 1976)</blockquote>
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4. DEATH OF RICHIE (NBC Paul Wendkos 1977)</blockquote>
5. A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT SNOW (John Korty 1980)<br />
6. DIARY OF A TEENAGE HITCHHIKER (1979 Ted Post)<br />
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7. THE INITIATION OF SARAH (ABC Robert Day 1978)<br />
8. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE (ABC Harvey Hart 1979)<br />
9. HELTER SKELTER (CBS Tom Gries 1976)<br />
10. GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES (CBS William Graham1980)<br />
11. LISTEN TO YOUR HEART (CBS Don Taylor 1983)<br />
12, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (CBS John Korty 1974)<br />
13. FALLEN ANGEL (CBS Robert Michael Lewis 1981)<br />
14. THE BOY WHO DRANK TOO MUCH (MTM Jerrold Freedman, 1980)<br />
15. MAKE ME AN OFFER (ABC Jerry Paris 1980)<br />
16. COCAINE: ONE MAN'S SEDUCTION (NBC 1983 Paul Wendkos)<br />
17. DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY (CBS Hal Needham 1980)<br />
18. LIKE MOM, LIKE ME (CBS Michael Pressman, 1978)<br />
19. THAT CERTAIN SUMMER (ABC Lamont Johnson, 1972)<br />
20. SPECIAL BULLETIN (NBC Edward Zwick 1983<br />
21. THE DAY AFTER (ABC Nicholas Meyer 1983)<br />
22. ELVIS (ABC John Carpenter 1979)<br />
23. A CASE OF RAPE (NBC Boris Sagal 1974)<br />
24. THE BURNING BED (ROBERT GREENWALD 1984)<br />
25. A QUESTION OF LOVE (ABC Jerry Thorpe 1978)<br />
26. OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder (George Schaefer 1977)<br />
27. THE AMAZING COSMIC AWARENESS OF DUFFY MOON (Larry Elikann 1976)<br />
28. BUT I DON'T WANT TO GET MARRIED (Jerry Paris, 1971)<br />
29. THE ROCKFORD FILES: BACKLASH OF THE HUNTER (NBC Richard Heffron, 1974)<br />
30. GET CHRISTIE LOVE (William Graham 1974)</blockquote>
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31. YOUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (CBS Steven Hilliard Stern 1979)<br />
32. HOTLINE (Jerry Jameson 1982)<br />
33. SYBIL (Daniel Petrie, 1976)<br />
34. THURSDAY'S GAME (Robert Moore 1974)<br />
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35. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1972)</blockquote>
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36. KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1971)</blockquote>
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37. GO ASK ALICE (John Korty 1973) </blockquote>
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38. INTIMATE STRANGERS (John Llewellyn Moxey 1978) </blockquote>
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39. HUSTLING (Joseph Sargent, 1975<br />
40. THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (Robert Day, 1978)<br />
41. THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE (ABC Randall Kleiser 1976)<br />
42. BRIAN'S SONG (Buzz Kulik 1971)</blockquote>
43. THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD (ABC Sam O'Steen 1981)<br />
44. THE GIRL WITH ESP (Gerald Mayer 1979)<br />
45. A SENSITIVE, PASSIONATE MAN (John Newland, 1977)<br />
46. WINNER TAKE ALL (Paul Bogart, 1975)<br />
47. THE EXECUTION OF PRIVATE SLOVIK (Lamont Johnson 1974)<br />
48. FRIENDLY FIRE (David Greene 1979)<br />
49. SARAH T. PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE ALCOHOLIC (Richard Donner, 1975)<br />
50. SINS OF THE PAST (ABC Peter Hunt 1984)<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-9337920268650586792019-01-08T19:15:00.000-08:002019-01-09T14:45:43.910-08:00A New Year's Note for 2019<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On these "pages" (!) I have railed against New Years wrap-ups - particularly when they are pleas for pity due to misfortune on the one hand, or medals and awards for hard won accomplishments (self improvement) on the other. That was before this phrase "virtue signaling" entered the lexicon (one of manifold vogue words or phrases to enter the 2000s). Now my problem with such public pronouncements is not that they are insincere or egotistic. On the contrary, I have no doubt that people are genuine in their motives and that they have virtues for which they should be proud, and I am inwardly most happy at the thought that there are individuals who have overcome the worst forms of privation or injustice and, when requested and appropriate, I might express my verdict publicly as well. Not only do I not hold it against anybody who aims to improve their life and hopefully succeed in doing so, but I made most happy at the thought, regardless of content or context. I am also one of those people that believe that other people actually have real beliefs and that those beliefs are rarely cynical covers for status seeking and so on. And if there is a cynical component it is also invariably accompanied by sincerity. I believe in belief, as it were.<br />
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None of the foregoing means in any way that one should go on about such matters at all times and to all people. Now there are some great exceptions to this. There are some issues that are, objectively speaking, always, already a federal case. But these are far fewer than we realize or the more civic minded among us would wish. Examples are serious crimes or violence to individuals or populations, natural disasters, the effects of climate change, But as a favorite philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/">Bernard Williams</a> pointed out, humans need a place or space for nonmoral values, things that fall outside the category of obligation. Part of the the problem in my case is how and when I was raised: I was taught not to advertise oneself and herald what one has accomplished. I guess it was seen as excessively immodest. For me the aesthetic downside of such flag waving and parading compromised whatever virtues the individual's story possessed for the reader or listener.<br />
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This past year has been marked by enormous change, change far greater than I am frankly as able to live with as I should like. For thirty plus years of my life I lived in one of the largest cities in the northeastern United States, and in the downtown city part. mind you, not any of the suburbs or exurbs. Now I find myself living in a culture, geography, even world, seemingly opposite in every way to that which I was not only accustomed but also innately loved. To say this has been a challenge would be an understatement. I believe it is also harder to do this at the age of fifty than, say, thirty or even forty. (For me, anyway). One of the bright moments is I have been most prolific. I am working on more than one instrumental large scale composition as well as work for small groups and solo piano. I also plan to go into the recording studio soon, and am looking into the possibilities of a podcast! Another bright location is I have found immense goodness, from both humans and nonhuman nature, where I now live.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyvzovO-NUmcw91Z8SDxBNrNYTG_2jKV1dggCC9DRJr4l5TWUyTitg4dAnjOEZt33awmZgF29nFUNVJogdFi3p3Bb0FG_47Y4bsuxn1IqZXRBG7LXAJ4GNbZh78Pe50O3DCZoOt7EQsL2/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-01-13+at+12.44.15+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="226" data-original-width="513" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyvzovO-NUmcw91Z8SDxBNrNYTG_2jKV1dggCC9DRJr4l5TWUyTitg4dAnjOEZt33awmZgF29nFUNVJogdFi3p3Bb0FG_47Y4bsuxn1IqZXRBG7LXAJ4GNbZh78Pe50O3DCZoOt7EQsL2/s320/Screen+Shot+2016-01-13+at+12.44.15+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nic Roeg's use of typical 1970s wallpaper - often found in dental offices</td></tr>
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Recently a favorite filmmaker, Nicholas Roeg, died and I was put in mind, when reflecting on my own experience of this world from the time I was first aware of being conscious, of his <i>The Man Who Fell To Earth</i>, in particular the opening sequence. Now I do not have the ability to do a shot by shot analysis of the whole thing but heaven knows it would be worth doing, so masterful a piece of filmmaking it is (like all of Roeg, in fact). While we are on the subject of Nicholas Roeg, here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote wayback in 1987 on his <i>Don't Look Now</i>, comparing the characters of the Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland characters:<br />
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Now I don't have the space to go into all of the intricacy that is Man Who Fell To Earth, but I want to concentrate on the opening sequence which in a sense depicts the falling to earth of a being from another society/planet/life - take your pick. (Indeed Roeg maintained that the movie was not science fiction proper but was a bout a person who was unusual and an extreme nonconformist, almost as if Roeg, like fellow genius, Andrei Tarkovsky, simply didn't buy the literalism of whole notion of genre and generic rules. <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #0a0a0a; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> David Bowie suggested much the same thing in an interview: "…it's assumed he's an alien from outer space, but it may not necessarily be true".</span></span></span><br />
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There are no documents of the opening screen online in their original form but here is one with an added soundtrack from David Bowie (not the original instrumental 1970s styled music which I consider actually appropriate to the scene).<a href="https://youtu.be/gY4FOSaSoDo">https://youtu.be/gY4FOSaSoDo</a><br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gY4FOSaSoDo" width="560"></iframe><br />
Thematically <i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i> is part of a very long line of artistic works that negotiate or think about the question of what it means to be an insider or outsider, Although Roeg was an English director this concern with the tension between the individual and the collective has also been important in American arts and letters from Nathaniel Hawthorne's <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> to Ralph Ellison's <i>Invisible Man</i>. The best world of art on this theme finally do not have all the answers. I mean narratively we know, see, and experience empathically the bowie figures descent into ruin and a kind of alcoholism, among other problems and it is made clear in no uncertain terms that the United States, or at least the United States of 1973 did this to him. That is less important than the feeling we get watching the film. In this film, like in all great films the feeling is what matters rather than the fact.<br />
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Now the thing to notice in this sequence is this man literally falls into earth - evidently into, at least initially, a more rural part of the United States. He appears to have trouble walking in the whole mass of soil and dirt and the slope of a mountain, but also seems guided in his walking by force not entirely his own. He is then is inundated with shocking and sudden stimuli of various kinds, not only unknown images what looks to be a poor family of some kind but a drunk man yelling things at Bowie and finally some kind of garish and loud amusement park figure in the shape of a smiley face. Overwhelmed, the Bowie figure collapses on a bench outside a small town antique store. We in the audience are placed in the same position as the protagonist through the visual telling of the sequence. This is a most important example of Roeg's cinematic style, a kind of associative cutting that is not about forward momentum or events inside linear time, but a (visually) poetic linking of one thing or group of things with another.<br />
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I mention this opening to suggest that in many (but not all) important ways, the world has appeared to the present fifty-one year old author as it does in the opening of this picture from 1974. That is, I am faced with a lot of stimuli and do not immediately form a conceptual system to integrate it into a narrative whole. This has both advantages as much as disadvantages. The feeling of being an outsider can be a function not of any complex emotional symbolism or ideas and ideals about how the world should work but a function of the shocking newness of the world's aesthetics which is on a level far before the complex emotions of ethical evaluation. Sometimes the world appears to you a plastic multicolored smiley face from an abandoned theme park and you have to find a way to move past it or get around it - if you aren't forced to laugh - all the while wondering where it came from and what it is doing there.<br />
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One of my favorite philosophers <a href="http://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Kateb-PoliticalTheory.pdf">George Kateb</a> has the concept of what he calls "positive alienation" where alienation is a source of independence of mind that is fruitful and possessed of wisdom rather than anything pejorative having to do with loneliness proper. Most recently I have become a partial sort of relativist, convinced that there is not an Archimedean point where we can evaluate an d master everything all at once, Now by relativist I am not referring to the inability to know or the inability to be wrong or right about proper conduct. I mean that much of human life comes down not to right and wrong which actually concern a small area of life, (though an area of life that has greatest emotional intensity for us as if it <i>were</i> all, rather than a small part, of life) but to things like fashion and preference rather than objectivity. And when I use the word fashion I mean something considerably sturdier and longer lasting than trend or fad, close to what the word culture used to mean. One of the problems in our current moment is that the bigness of our technological society and the need to integrate so many billions of people (or, rather, the belief that we ought to so integrate) is at odds with the differences among all those many people, differences that make integration not really attainable.<br />
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I close with another video, this one an excerpt from an experimental film on Roeg that I happened across.<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dP8ncgc3nG4" width="560"></iframe>dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-42233495499539488372018-12-04T20:00:00.000-08:002018-12-05T11:37:49.395-08:00Another Very Brief Note On Isaiah Berlin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have been enamored with the thought, writing, and even the oratory of Isaiah Berlin ever since I first discovered his work sometime in the early to middle 1990s, that I never tire of discovering newer things about him or finding new applications of his work to current events and everyday non-academic life.<br />
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I want to focus on a particular move he always makes which forms but one part of his general wisdom. What he always does is to start by having what appears to be this comprehensive gaze, looking at wide reaches of vast historical time and its accompanying thought, chiefly among these his analysis of the great Romantic revolution and how it basically upended the entirety of the traditional/ ancient, as well as classical worlds.<br />
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But Berlin's move is always to go as deep into what he is describing almost as the greatest lawyer for the defense would, and still further as someone living inside or even born into the world he is describing. <br />
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Isaiah Berlin will go deep into whatever it is and then he will reverse course, suddenly pull back and outwards and say something to the effect of "but of course this world or object I am examining is far from perfect, is not entirely correct and needs some kind of countervailing force or dissent".<br />
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This move forms the basis of Berlin's worldview, not only his pluralism, but an attitude towards being in the world. It is the attitude of one who wished to be seemingly a skeptic and believer at one and the same time. Some might see it as the mark of an essentially <i>moderate</i> or <i>centrist</i> cast of mind. But this is not exactly right. The word that comes closest is that much debated word <i>liberal</i>. It is very close to the cast of mind of yours truly.<br />
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A good example of Berlin's brilliance as orator can be found here:<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZACuuzyW5M8" width="560"></iframe><br />
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Unlike today's "thought leaders" Berlin was a genuine public intellectual. The thought leader today all too often advocates for a very specific case or cause, even an ideology. The public intellectual in Isaiah Berlin's sense sought to bring subjects into the widest public discourse with an aim at exploration and even genuine enjoyment.<br />
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The example I want to use is in his essay "The Sense Of Reality" which was delivered at Smith College in Northampton, in 1956. He takes a wonderfully long time discussing how some humans have noted that some things seem inevitable in a natural and/or mechanical sense, while still others take the contrary view that things seem not inevitable but rather unpredictable, as "artificially" willed into existence and predicated on contingency, even randomness. In short, how both contrary attitudes seem apparent at different times and in different reigning orders:<br />
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"Everyone, no doubt, believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond conscious human control. And when we describe this or that scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be realized in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These are of so many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot interfere, for example the solar system, or the general realm dealt with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the entities in question nor the laws which they obey." </blockquote>
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Berlin goes on at great length in this vein, even discussing the reaction against mechanistic or reductionist views, for example, the influence of Hegel as well as Darwin and Marx. He admits, and not with any diminution of respect, that we have much to learn from such developments. indeed in one passage he is unabashed in his passion for the greatness of certain minds in history:<br />
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"It is when one of these nerves is touched, nerves which lie so deep within us that it is in terms of them that we feel as we feel and think as we think, that we are conscious of those electric shocks that indicate that some genuinely profound insight has occurred. It is only when this unique, immediately recognizable, disturbing experience comes that we are in the presence of this peculiar and very rare form of genius, possessed by those who make us conscious of the most pervasive, least observed categories, those which lie closest to us and for that very reason escape description, however much our emotions, our curiosity, our industry, are mobilized to record the whole of what wee know." </blockquote>
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How different this is than the current view which would only interrogate with suspicion or dismiss with disparagement "great" minds from the past!<br />
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Berlin is describing the unparalleled excitement that comes with a kind of discovery or breakthrough with more customary and traditional ways of knowing, and a development that is inseparable from the "specialness" of certain minds who appear to make the breakthrough. Partisans of rationality and the Enlightenment are right to conclude from passages like these that Berlin is never entirely in "their" camp, however much he respected their tradition. Why Isaiah Berlin matters is that he refused, for the most part, to be solidly in any discernible camp, neither fully rationalist, nor fully romantic.<br />
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But then he goes on:<br />
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"For Marxists and, indeed, all those that social or individual life is wholly determined by laws at least in principle discoverable, men are weaker than they supposed in their pre-scientific pride; they are calculable and in principle capable of omniscience. but as we ordinarily think of ourselves, especially as historians or men of action - that is, when we are dealing with particular individuals and things and facts - we see a very different spectacle of men governed by few natural laws; falling into error, defeated, victims of one another, through ignorance not of laws, but largely of the results of human acts, those being most successful who possess (apart from such, which is perhaps indispensable) a combination of will-power and a capacity for non-scientific, non-generalizing assessments of specific situations <i>ad hoc</i>; which leads to a picture of men as free, sometimes strong, and largely ignorant that is the precise contrary of the scientific view of them as weak, determined and potentially omniscient." </blockquote>
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I love how he pairs omniscience and weakness here, contrary to usual habits which would have us think that the position of omniscience would usher in only maximum strength. But above all, as always, he says science alone is never enough. We live today in a world dominated by two views, one you could call religious (and/or spiritual) and the other scientific. Though the scientific and the spiritual are thought to be opposites (with the important exception of those who hold that both science and religion tell essentially the same story, or work and evolve in tandem) they both have a consensus and similarity that is less positive: in both there exists a rule bound sense of determination. A law is a law whiter given by a supernatural force or scientific proof or discovery and these appear to pronounce upon what is to be done. <br />
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The scientific view is the dominant one in our current epoch, for it claims to the fullest knowledge possible at any given time - which is considered to be something like a final argument. Indeed, science is so dominant that it is practically a requirement when any subject is broached in major media outlets, it seems <i>de rigueur</i> to always say "what the science has to say" on the given subject - whether we are discussing eating and nutrition, music appreciation and performance, or ethics and morality, and. of course, sexual behaviors. I am reminded of a recent podcast on dreams which was all about what science tells us dreams in fact actually are rather than what people have simply always thought about them since the latter might appear self evidently inadequate. This is a very different way of discussing dreams than as a source of both mystery and revelation, or as a mere entertainment to pass the time.<br />
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Another important thing to note about Isaiah Berlin is his influence on prominent and helpful minds who are currently active. Berlin's work never becomes dated and is applicable to real life situations rather than mere academic speculation or specialization. To name only two: <a href="https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/history/timothy-snyder-to-mark-isaiah-berlin-day-in-riga.a253014/">Timothy Snyder</a>, the political historian and commentator and contemporary philosopher <a href="http://appiah.net/">Kwame Anthony Appia</a><a href="http://appiah.net/">h</a> are both deeply influenced by Isaiah Berlin.<br />
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I think Berlin points to something that is neither science nor spirit exactly. It doesn't not contradict nor challenge these but does not wave the flag for them either. This "something else" of Berlin refuses systemization; it might refuse even definition, and Isaiah Berlin held it to be real. In much the same way that he though freedom itself was a real fact of human existence, and thus of reality. Yet the only way Berlin was able to conclude as he did was to pass through a great many views that had come before him and enter into such views with the greatest sympathy, even if the views in question were initially alien to him or at least not far from intuitive or self evident. To me, such a process or <i>style</i> of thought is itself one kind of wisdom.<br />
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http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-43008290747390776832018-10-03T21:39:00.000-07:002018-10-03T21:39:38.809-07:00Thinking About Consensus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"When does something truly become popular? And I don't mean 'popular' in the sense that it succeeds; I mean 'popular' in the sense that the specific thing's incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean 'popular' in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way <i>E.T.</i> was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties.<br />
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The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don't particularly care. You don't create a phenomenon like <i>E.T.</i> by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like <i>E.T.</i> by appealing to people who see one movie a year." Chuck Klosterman<br />
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"Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick." Steven Pinker<br />
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I though it was time to write something a little philosophical about 1970s popular culture. In truth I am never not being philosophical since I think philosophy is literally everything but in what follows I will be self consciously and purposively philosophical but using examples of 1970s popular culture.<br />
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At this period of time in the 20th century there were a very small number of public figures who represented some kind of center of social life. They were in essence metaphors for the average person. If you think of the centrality of television it appears that two men performed this function: Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson. These figures represented drama and comedy, respectively. People would look up to Walter Cronkite to tell them about the death toll in Vietnam or the scandals of Watergate which of course are subjects most dramatic and serious in nature. Then they would look to Johnny Carson for comic relief, who would make jokes or skits about alleged shortages of toilet paper, actual shortages of gas, or the weather. If you think about it, or just look at the data, practically all of America watched these two men. I would say that on a purely cultural, or as I would prefer to put it, aesthetic level, Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson kind of lead things at that time.<br />
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Because of this, both Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite could be considered geniuses of a sort when it came to performing or presenting in front of an audience. One, Cronkite, was a genius at delivering the news in such a way as to communicate with the widest array of cultures, political ideologies, ages. economic strata and so on. The other, Johnny Carson, was a genius at bringing laughter and entertainment more generally to the same breadth of diversity in his audiences. There were not very many other figures or shows commanding such national attention. More to the point, it took a very special kind of human being to perform such functions over so many decades and with such consistency - which is why when I use the word genius I am being quite literal.<br />
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In addition to central human figures there were shows: there were fall lineups for the television viewer and these lineups consisted of only enough shows needed to fill a five or six hour time frame, thus making the amount and duration of shows necessarily small. If you were an ABC person you would have <i>had</i> to watch <i>Eight Is Enough</i> and <i>Three's Company</i> and <i>Charlies Angels</i>, because these were the only shows fitted into the scheduled time slots.<br />
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Indeed, so centralized was the culture that even the characters on the t.v. shows would always refer to that one hugely popular cultural object outside of the fictionalized world of the show and mention the object by name. It was as if one company owned all the same objects. This was a kind of artistic product placement. Thus, on <i>Eight Is Enough</i> the members of the family made sure to mention that they were going to see <i>A Chorus Line</i> because that was the one big musical theatrical show of the period. It was as if everyone who did not live near New York, when they made their one trip to New York in their lifetime, chose <i>A Chorus Line </i>as <i>the</i> show to watch.<br />
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When Tommy Bradford, the aspiring musician in the family, mentions the rock that he loves he <i>has</i> to mention Peter Frampton, because millions of people listened to Peter Frampton. They even make sure that Tommy Bradford has a hairdo similar to Frampton's. Every little boy in America had a bowl haircut just like Adam Rich did on the same show. I had my hair styled the exact same way as did millions of boys. Such things like hairdos you wear and what bands you listen to are examples of a kind of artificially created consensus. Another word I like for them is Fashion, which is anything but superficial.<br />
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Now if you weren't an ABC person you had the choice of really only two other networks: NBC or CBS. Yes there was also PBS but that was a rarefied and special kind of programming and there was only one PBS. The choice of dozens of channels, hundreds of channels was out of the question at this time. Now each of these networks had a certain "house style." To name one example, in contrast to ABC, which was the most mainstream and commercial in house style, NBC was seen as having a more "liberal" house style, which is why <i>Saturday Night Live</i> would debut on that network.<br />
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There were no individualized computers where you could create your own playlists made of all the hundreds of thousands of things created by humans in the entire 20th century. There <i>were</i> radicals or nonconformists who refused to watch television, usually for political or religious reasons. But these were a.) small in number in comparison to the rest of the population and, b). tended to create their own centralized cultures involving favorite entertainment, like the <i>Whole Earth Review </i>or some homegrown Jesus magazine. Therefore, these countercultures had a center and a consensus.<br />
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Now it is important to understand that all of this was a consensus. The consensus contained various artificial constructions, erected to sort of hold society together so that it would not collapse into violence and privation. This centralized mode of keeping the peace was part of their function. It was a form of social cohesion - thus my analogy of America tuning into Johnny Carson at 11:30 in their bedrooms. If you are doing that you are quite limited in the amount of other activities you can do at the same time. This is what I mean by "consensus."<br />
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But it is also most important to realize that alongside the consensus there was the reality of how individuals really "felt in there hearts", and heartfelt feelings are always individual and anti-systematic. They may be dormant but they are still present. These innermost feelings were not captured precisely by the consensus culture. The consensus was a kind of crude approximation, sometimes false, sometimes true, but always missing the mark. Society went on like this for much of the 20th century which, if you think about it, is a really long time for one mode to reign.<br />
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One of the functions of high art or culture, as opposed to that which I am discussing here, is the creation and distillation of such innermost feeling into forms that best express them: like poems, novels, movies, painting and the like. These have their own traditions and practices but they are quite distinct to the historical, commercial consensus with which I am concerned in this post. One example of a countercultural art is of course the avant-garde. Yet an avant-garde too has its own internal consensus, one example being that there are notable names which tend to be few in number, like a Susan Sontag or Merce Cunningham. When we talk of the higher arts we are talking of a kind of subversion of consensus. Their inherent value is precisely not in "consensus" but in individuality. Even if their starting point is a genre which is rooted in a consensus they always refuse to stay there.<br />
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What I am saying is that the consensus was never ultimately real. There was the successful appearance of a consensus. In this sense the consensus could be thought of as an artwork, as any artwork is a creation of representation and not reality proper. This had the effect of hiding from ourselves our very real differences from one another.<br />
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What really happened when the Analog Age was destroyed and replaced by the current Digital Age in which we are ensconced was that we learned for the first time that there is never any such thing as a consensus. People are simply too damned different from one another for there to be one. They are so different in fact that attempts to form group identities around shared features break down invariably because the differences are always greater than the similarities, whether inside a group or between groups. The genius of liberal society is that it refuses to force the issue and instead manages or contains conflict. It creates space for people to pursue quite diverse projects without telling everybody what project to pursue. Anti-liberal societies, like the one in which we now in fact live, want to come up with a project and proceed to push it through wily-nily and believe in consensus in a religious and zealous way. All lack of consensus, when discovered, is seen as a kind of error or mistake, an immature development on the way to an eventual and hopeful consensus in the future.<br />
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If you decide to destroy the construction of an artificial consensus, which is what the handlers and inventors of the computer basically did, what you will be left with are constant teams of warring parties, or a motley collection of individuals who can never agree on any first principles. The realization of an interconnected world is the attempt to pursue consensus directly which as I said is impossible. The only result can be a maximum lack of consensus because humans were never meant to be inside each others' heads all of the time.<br />
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A society where we are all in each others' heads all of the time might inevitably lead to one in which we are at each others' throats too much of the time. Such is the realization of total transparency and interconnection. I do not say we are fated to stay or perish here. I do say that any discussion of what is to be done must start with this awareness of our Digital Age as an age and a system quite unlike others hitherto experienced and known. It is not all bad but it is also in no way inherently good or progressive.<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5tdqojA26E%3Ciframe%20width=%22560%22%20height=%22315%22%20src=%22https://www.youtube.com/embed/G5tdqojA26E%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20allow=%22autoplay;%20encrypted-media%22%20allowfullscreen%3E%3C/iframe%3E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5tdqojA26E<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G5tdqojA26E" width="560"></iframe></a>dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-70131104503792082072018-08-19T21:13:00.000-07:002018-08-21T21:30:12.018-07:00Representations of the 1970s in contemporary film and television, and some more words on Presentism.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I try to watch as many contemporary representations of the 1970 as I can: such representations are, in their own way, a form of costume drama. Of particular interest to me as of late are episodic series that are set in the 1970s.<br />
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Showtime's <i>I'm Dying Up Here</i>, and NetFlix's <i>Mindhunter</i> are two that are the most notable, or that I have been able to watch.<br />
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<i>Mindhunter</i> is a serial, episodic work created by David Fincher and Charlize Theron. Thus far there has been one season with another on the way. <i>I'm Dying Up Here </i>is also episodic and to date there have been only two seasons when there really should be more, if only for aesthetic, that is, narratological reasons, rather than commercial/qualitative reasons.<br />
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Every single work set in the past is usually committed to or another sort of presentism. Presentism is hard to define but you could say it is closely related to progressivism in a moral or political sense. That is, because presentism is a dominant view of our age - more than in ages past - and because there is in our current moment an enormous amount of artistic work set in the past, presentism is inevitable. The most presentist work in the contemporary period to have been set in the past was of course <i>MadMen</i>, which reads like an aesthetic treatise on the virtues of presentism. There is a debate and discussion to be had over whether presentism ought to be avoided or celebrated, and whether it even <i>can</i> be avoided.<br />
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I, for one, am generally against presentism, and believe it ought to be guarded against even if it is the most natural thing in the world, and, well, universal (if only because one must live in one's present). The presentism I have in mind with regard to works of representation sometimes takes the form of glaring anachronisms.<br />
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The first time I encountered a maddening form of anachronistic presentism was during the girls' bathroom scene in Linklater's masterpiece<i> Dazed And Confused</i> where the girls discuss something they call a "male pornographic fantasy" in the context of a discussion of the television show <i>Gilligan's Island -</i> using a jargon and a level of conceptual abstraction that reminded me more of a college media studies class in 1992 than the high school girl's bathroom Texas small town in 1976 where the picture is meant to take place. <br />
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The question of what concepts people did or did not have, what language they would have likely been able to use or would have been available to them to use (all of these series, for example, use catchphrases, vernacular, slang, jargon and vogue words which did not exist in the eras that are meant to be represented, though some are more "guilty" than others) is an under-examined question. In truth none of us can really know with exact certainty about some behaviors, interior feelings and concepts in the past. The only way we can know the exact sound and appearance of people in the past is through two visual mediums: fictional representations made in the past as performed by actors in dramatic art like films, and any documentary footage from the past showing non-actors going about their daily, untutored business. Aside from these what remains are written accounts which don't have the same exactitude as visual or verbal documents of an actual period of time.<br />
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But, setting this qualification aside, we can nevertheless get a partial sense of the past through all sorts of ways- both written and visual - and in ways that are more accurate than not. What presentism does is in some sense deny this altogether, in part because it has an ever present moral analysis of the past rather than a disinterested observation of it.<br />
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I have often argued that in the 1930s you could find people on the street who sounded and acted like Myrna Loy or William Powell did on the screen and in this sense their appearances on the screen should be considered realistic, however unreal a thing a Hollywood movie was (particularly at that time and in that genre) or how unordinary ("larger than life") those two movie stars of the time appeared. It is merely that nobody acts like William Powell or Myrna Loy <i>now</i>. This is the same case as if young women stopped sounding and acting like Zosia Mamet on <i>Girls </i>fifty years from now to such a degree that said future viewers, upon seeing the show for the first time, might claim that her onscreen behavior is unrealistic or unbelievable.<br />
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If you fast forward from 1992's <i>Dazed And Confused</i> to today's <i>Mindhunter,</i> I find an enormous amount of such anachronistic material in the casual conversation of the characters. Usually it takes the form of characters being too knowing about things rather than the unconscious figures they more likely were. Did people use the word "inappropriate" as synonym or code for grave moral offenses in 1977 as much as they do now? <i>I'm Dying Up Here</i> is particularly egregious in this regard. The character seem on the verge of saying "awesome" a lot of the time and beginning sentences with a slow"so": modes of speech and behavior that are utterly of 2017 and I would bet were nonexistent in 1973. Another verbal gesture, committed by one of the youngest characters in the story more than once, is a loud "Seriously!" belted out whenever she feels exasperation at another's action. This is a hallmark of contemporary, real-life speech. I seriously doubt it was "a thing" in 1974. All of the character use the word "fuck" all of the time too and that word's universality and frequency is very much a feature of the present moment.<br />
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Another notable example of a very good show that nevertheless exhibits some anachronisms is David Simon's and George Pelecanos' <i>The Deuce</i> on HBO. In the case of this series this historical inaccuracy occurs mainly terms of the sounds - the dictions, and cadences - of the millennial actors' voices, which are sounds no similarly aged person in 1972 ever would have made. This is but an effect of the fact that actors are of a generation who simply sound a certain way - the sounds you hear on<i> Girls</i> - and there is apparently no attempt to change this as is sometimes done in terms of geographical accents.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>I'm Dying up Here</i></td></tr>
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<i>I'm Dying Up Here</i> is also salvaged not only by its art direction, <a href="http://observer.com/2017/05/im-dying-up-here-costume-designer-jim-carrey-christie-wittenborn/">which has as much faithfulness to the 1970s as seems possible at this time,</a> but by the excellence of its acting, which reaches Cassavetes (!) styled levels of intensity, temporality and subtlety of meaning. The entire cast is so good but Melissa Leo, Ari Graynor, and Brad Garrett come to mind most immediately. There is a dramatic integrity and richness that overrides any of the presentism I mention. The writing is nowhere near as good as the acting, but like most episodic television, it really is the kind of quality writing that you would have found in the best studio narrative pictures from forty or fifty years ago but which the studios today seem hell bent on <i>not</i> delivering in any place outside of your home or your physical person.<br />
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It is important to recognize that the 1970s is innately and inherently interesting from a dramatic and representational point of view because the entire era was committed to the willful elimination of restraint and the maximization of expression of all kinds and at all costs.<br />
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This means that the 1970s is a very useful foundation for visual artists, including filmmakers. Put simply, it is never boring.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">opening credits, <i>The Deuce</i></td></tr>
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The 1970s itself was a gift the era gave to future posterity. For great contrast it is most instructive to compare those series set during the 1990s, which was an era inexplicably dedicated to a willful nondescriptness.<br />
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I agree with the theory that says that the 1990s were simply part of the 1980s rather than an independent period, and one of the founding ideas of the 1980s was this idea of recovering one's senses after the perceived excesses of the previous era, and getting back to some tradition of some kind. Now if this is your primary goal in life this has certain repercussions for how you will look to future generations and what you will be able to accomplish. If you make a dramatic production about, say, the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal, then it is incumbent upon you to represent the late 1990s which is, objectively speaking, a really dull project compared to representing, say, the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs match of 1973. In 1973 there was nobody in culture, least of all the people in the milieu of that event, dedicated in the slightest to being nondescript or generic. 1998, however, is the apotheosis of this long 1980s project of trying to make culture be a neutral backdrop to the ostensibly important matters of daily life. Nondescript style became the dominant religion of those years, and you can get a taste of this by looking at any mise en scene of a <i>Seinfeld</i> episode.<br />
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One of the many interesting things about the two shows is that they exhibit the differences between the early and later 1970s, differences that are considerable. Part of this is the enormous middle to late 1960s influence on the early part of the 1970s from which the much more commercial consensus culture of the late 70s was quite a departure. The earlier 1970s show is photographed in vivd, quite strong colors. The latter 1970s of <i>Mindhunter</i> is concerned with the cars the characters drive more than their fashions or architecture, but is photographed in a very dark, almost unlit fashion. <a href="https://jalopnik.com/netflixs-mindhunter-is-full-of-truly-great-cars-1819814519">Here is an entire blog post</a> dedicated to all of the various 1970s vehicles painstakingly represented in the show.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ensemble of <i>I'm Dying up Here</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holt McCallany, Anna Torv and Jonathan Groff in <i>Mindhunter</i></td></tr>
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<i>Mindhunter</i>, my last example, is the best of all that I have seen, at least from a filmmaking perspective. This depiction of FBI researchers in the year 1978, straddling the disciplines of law enforcement, psychology, science, as they attempt to comprehend and face the difficult evils of a most peculiar subset of criminals, is so valuable in its insight, in its aesthetic power, and as character driven drama, that it is one more example of the supremacy of episodic television in our current moment over other visual dramatic forms and that the project of cinema itself is very much in evidence. <i>Mindhunter</i> is very much a work in progress in that there has been but one season, but I believe that in its rigorous elimination of scenes of violence or action as classically understood in works in its (action or thriller) genre and in its complete focus on the attempt to understand human evil at a certain point in our history, it makes for some exemplary television.<br />
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What the supremacy of episodic television that you stream at home means is not something upon which I can fairly speculate. (It also raises the idea that we might be seeing a return of a certain kind of nineteenth century novelistic form - albeit in a new guise - that had been dormant for much of the 20th century. But that is a subject for literary historians and critics more than others).<br />
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I must admit that this might have little or nothing to do with the 1970s, though I do note that filmmakers are going back to the 1970s more now that was the case, say, a decade ago, and this interest in the 70s era means the 70s decade might have more to do with current aesthetic trends or currents than a perspective not informed by a sense of historical eras could comprehend as fully.<br />
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Of course all of the preceding will be of interest only if you accept that an older period can be represented or reconstructed with any degree of fidelity, and, moreover, that to do so is germane to the meaning of the dramatic representation as a whole. Also, the ability to accept these propositions varies with the work. <i>Mindhunter</i> is in so many ways a work <i>not</i> about the era in which it is set but about what are actually timeless matters - surprisingly so, in a pleasant way. <br />
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On the other hand, all film is visual and having to stare at people with certain kinds of clothes and hairdos getting in and out of certain kinds of cars and dwelling in certain kinds of buildings is not something you can underestimate - if only because you are forced to look at it for even basic comprehension. If for no other reason, that is why the question of period details might be as important as some arcane discussion about the prevalence of psychological damage general to the profession of comics or the history of forensic police work in late 20th century America. <br />
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And, finally, you also have to accept some manner of discontinuity between one period and another such that people really have marked differences from one age to the next, and there is not simply one unbroken, human story seamlessly linking the succeeding ages. If you lean, as I do, towards discontinuity, you will be less prone to presentism.<br />
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But as partisan of the discontinuity thesis as I am, I recognize too much discontinuity results in ethical incoherence and valuelessness. The list of human universals is many. (See Donald Brown on this point in his book<i> Human Universals</i>). But we should never lose our sense of alienation from the past so that we not simply turn it into another form of the present. I have always been inspired by the famous Carlo Ginzburg quote:<br />
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The historian's task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe, He must destroy our false sense of proximity to the past because they came from societies very different from our own. The more we discover about these peoples' 'mental universe' the more we should be socked by the cultural distance that separates us from them."</blockquote>
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It is hard to argue the same for the arts because a good deal of the arts is simplicity or explicitly embarked upon seeing similarities between things, empathy being but one, overemphasized, tool in this regard. In that sense presentism might be not unavoidable but necessary. But I do want to argue that at least some of the arts should be allied with Ginzburg's project in history. Not all movies and books should be the same in their sensibility though in an age as presentist as ours I should learn to expect or accept that this might be an area more for theory than practice.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-1172187442354120762018-06-11T17:35:00.000-07:002018-06-12T13:46:38.182-07:001970s Cinema: my introduction to a screening of BLUME IN LOVE<br />
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Mazursky calls his film <i>Blume In Love</i> and it must be said at the outset that 1970s cinema, and artistic production most generally, was preoccupied with questions of human emotion in all of its guises. If you are going to watch a 1970s movie you are going to have to, as the saying went then, "get in touch with your feelings". And further, really <i>feel</i> those feelings. You are never asked to actually <i>do</i> anything about them. That would be to create, say, "the" revolution, which, as Fassbinder famously said, "doesn't even belong on the screen".<br />
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What is important is that you know your feelings: the feelings of both your own and others, and that these feelings be allowed to "hang out." 1970s movies are like one really long consciousness raising session. A lot of stuff comes up and of course it isn't always pretty. Some of tonight's movie won't be pretty - it's surface beauty and sophisticated charm, of which there is also plenty, notwithstanding. The attitudes of the titular character towards women certainly can be as far from pretty as is imagined. But the important thing is he is trying. And he of course will get as good as he gives. But the bare expression of all is the end in and for itself.<br />
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It's more in the spirit of Lenny Bruce's plea to reflect on the truth of "what is" rather than "what should be." This is one of the reasons why movies that otherwise seem to have a quite diverse or opposite surface, or come in different genres, nevertheless will immerse you in a scene, or many scenes, where a sense of real time plays out, that are, in a word, durational.<br />
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This will happen in any kind of picture, even action ones. And this happens as much in, say, Hal Ashby's <i>The Last Detail</i>, as it does in a Jacque Rivette picture. You see it Andrei Tarkovsky as much as you do in Sidney Lumet. And not only in scenes with more than one character: this arresting of action (or, as I refer to it in my book, immersion in the moment) happens when it lets us sit with Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in <i>Klute</i> when she is by herself, or sit with Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe as he is waking up in bed in <i>Long Goodbye</i>, realizing that he must feed his cat, or sit with Walter Matthau as Coach Buttermaker in a car, possibly inebriated, in the opening of <i>Bad News Bears</i>.<br />
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Bertolt Brecht (and later Augusto Boal) had a chart where he said that in the classical or "Aristotelian" theater every scene happens to serve other scenes, a subsequent or following scene, but that in the epic theatre the scene plays for or serves itself. Or, as Sherman Alexie put it in another context, "Aristotle was not an Indian." And by immersion to which I oppose what I call classical condensation, I do not mean that what we are witnessing is necessarily more naturally absorbing; plenty of the highest edited acton pictures, which are the very essence of "condensation", could be called immersive in the sense of being riveting. I simply mean this quality of staying with the characters as they play out their lives in a present minded sense.<br />
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The reason for this in depth playing out of a scene, refusing cutting to a new one, is the conceit that in so doing the actors in the scene will reveal something of themselves and in turn reveal something of ourselves to ourselves. 1970s filmmaking is an aporetic art: it has many more questions than it has answers to, and the questions are some of the best ones you could ask. As in a Socratic dialogue these are the sort of questions that don't admit of easy definition. As in "what is justice"? Or, in tonight's case, "What is Love?" The search for the right question is always central, not any correct answer. 1970s cinema is as much an actors' cinema as it is a naturalistic photographer's cinema.<br />
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Of all the emotions, it is the nature of love that was the 1970s' great theme. What is love? When does it go right, and when does it go wrong? What is love for? It connects tonight's movie with others close in time period in particular Cassavetes' <i>Minnie And Moskowitz</i>, certainly Mazursky's <i>An Unmarried Woman</i>, only four years later from <i>Blume</i>, again another Cassavetes in <i>Woman Under The Influence</i>, Frank and Eleanor Perry's <i>Diary Of A Mad Housewife</i>,<i> Lovers And Other Strangers</i>, Sidney Furie's <i>Sheila Levine is Dead And Living In New York</i>. Of course in Jean Eustache's <i>La Maman et La Putain </i>where all of the characters never stop talking about love for all three plus hours. It haunts Kaufman's <i>Invasion Of The Body Snatchers</i> too: for an urgent fear of not having a genuine emotion, of losing your humanity, is a common theme in these pictures. For Cassavetes it reaches its ultimate expression in his <i>Love Streams</i>, a 1970s movie that simply happened to have physically a 1980s production/release date but is, as they say, stone 1970s spiritually. More recently, if you count the early 1980s as recent, Joan Micklin Silver (with help from Anne Beattie) tackles quite similar terrain as tonight's film in her <i>Chilly Scenes Of Winte</i>r. And most recently, I can't help but feel that some of that spirit is carried on in Lena Dunham's<i> Girls</i>.<br />
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<i>Blume In Love </i>in Mazursky's oeuvre could be seen as a spiritual sequel to his <i>Bob Carol Ted And Alice</i>, that earlier film also being all about love. Blume's philosophic, essayistic opening continues in a different vein the popular psychological therapy discourses and concerns of that earlier film. Notice in particular the snatches of people seemingly plucked from daily, real life in the opening, the interest in documenting and commentating on life as it is lived and found and in the locations one would have found in daily life. This is the strategy of using documentary techniques in a fictional context. <br />
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Getting more specific to Blume, all of Mazursky's considerable gifts are in fullest flower: the usage of a diverse range of colorful characters for maximum emotional effect, (Just putting together George Segal, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Anspach, and Paul Mazursky in an acting role is exhibit A), a constant sense of humor about life, no matter how bad things can get, a love for all human creatures wherever they find themselves, an unapologetic almost Capraesque, commitment to affective sentiment, (and not far off from the Renoir films they have been playing here). I<br />
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In short, a point of view that could only be called humanistic if that word can be freed from any ideological, spiritual or partisan specificity. I know of no filmmakers that can get to the heart of genuine human emotion between two people (<i>Harry And Tonto</i> is master class in that) any better than Mazursky and he has few peers in this regard. He made his pictures for people in the audience, not an imagined ideal audience, nor a great unwashed audience that he can preach to, but potentially, well, anybody. The photographer Vilmos Zsigmond, when asked what made pictures of the 1970s special, the context being a discussion of Mark Rydell's <i>Cinderella Liberty</i>, said they they tried to make movies by and for people, as if people actually mattered. I sincerely hope you experience at least some of that spirit tonight since that was certainly what they set out to do.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-7809398396782597462018-05-15T19:44:00.000-07:002018-05-17T20:05:46.756-07:00Sociology versus Aesthetics, or, the Fallacy of Consensus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In all of my blog posts over the years my sole concern has been aesthetics, especially as distinct from sociology. I should also add that when I use the word aesthetic I contend for it to include what ordinarily is considered "spiritual". Humans make works of art but they do not do so as they please and they do not simply get hit with so many objects that fall from the sky ready made. Such objects have to be built and it is often the most arduous job in the world. It is possible for humans to create essentially artificial objects set apart from what we ordinarily call the real world itself. The very fact that such an object is set apart - bracketed from reality - means that we should never treat it as the same as we would our daily life. A painting of the family next door is still never identical to the family next door. Neither is a photograph. For one thing it is an inanimate object. For another, the very act of making an object for the purposes of reflection should tell us that we are meant to reflect and not directly act.<br />
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The trouble of course is that art objects emerge from scenes comprised of a particular sociology. Though the sociology is essential to their creation it is always the least important part of that creation. To think otherwise is to commit to the fallacy of consensus. The assumption is that there is a single or singular reality to which a work must conform or pay allegiance. This is one of the ways we are in the grip of the myth of consensus (actually fallacy is the better term since there is some deepest truth in all myth - along, of course, with some falsehood).<br />
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Consensus says that we have to somehow come together on a set of issues and if we fail to come together then we are doomed to some kind of tragic societal or existential death. One can be forgiven for buying into this fallacy in the case of climate change where how we act, or not act, in the world might involve that kind of destruction.<br />
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But it is sheer madness to have this desire for consensus in all or even many areas of life. Humans are not chiefly consensual creatures for we happen to come in the form of singular embodied individuals. We do cooperate in the interest of survival, but our cooperative impulses are (thankfully!) thwarted at every turn by the force of individual personalities, the presence of which is regretted by mystics suspicious of the human ego, but the absence of which would mean a dehumanization that would spell a death in life, even if sold as some kind of transcendence. In speaking against cooperation in this way I don't mean to sound terrible. And I realize the force of some individual personalities can be a force for evil. But I am saying we should at least honor that fact that we <i>have</i> individual personalities and are not as of yet simply carbon copies of one another. Our choices are not between cooperation and competition. Our choices are between choosing a life in which our individuality is honored (which doesn't have to require competition) or a life in which only our identify as part of some larger group is what is honored.<br />
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Consensus is very bad for the arts. Every time a consensus has been enforced in the history of art, aside from the fact that the majority of the work in a single period has a sameness about it when viewed by future audiences, the result has been that superior work that doesn't exactly match the consensual style always gets ignored, if it is not destroyed outright. If it does survive, the formerly rejected work, upon reexamination many years later, now always seems to be reassigned the highest value. Upon such reconsideration people wonder aloud with an apparently sincere tone of regret how they could have been so wrong in the first place. The reason this happens is that in the sociological milieu of the work's original debut all anybody cared about was the work's correspondence to the consensus of the time. They did not care about more eternal values like curiosity, pleasure, or emotional and intellectual interest. The need for consensus will cause people to pan work that should have been praised and vice versa. (The same phenomenon can also cause work to be praised merely because it is in the dominant style of a period, when, upon disinterested examination, the work can be found to be not particularly valuable).<br />
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This is the only explanation for why Friedkin's masterpiece <i>Cruising,</i> to name but one of a great many examples - <i>Is<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_(film)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_(film)</a>htar</i> is another, as is <i><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2009/07/sex_on_the_desert.html">Zabriskie Point</a></i> - could have suffered it's original fate.<br />
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What happened in the reception of <i>Cruising</i> is that the consensus that held sway was whatever the male gay community at the time felt about that particular movie, and they imposed this consensus not only on their own viewing of the picture, (if they bothered to view it), but ultimately on how the rest of the world <i>had</i> to view it. Worst of all, they attempted to disrupt the film production itself by protesting the shoot and creating loud noises intending to destroy takes, in hopes that it would never have the opportunity to become a final film. Before a proper evaluation was even possible the very idea of the thing was an affront to their consensus; proof or evidence was quite beside the point. Thus, a highly intelligent investigation into the nature of sex and violence and, yes, gender in the narrative, cinematic form of a police procedural was mistakenly viewed as some kind of homophobic, horror/slasher picture.<br />
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This can happen in any art medium. In my own field of music a good example of an oppressive consensus was the wholesale rejection of certain kinds of tonal harmony in composition. For music to be considered relevant and therefore good, it had to use non-tonal elements or at the very least elements sufficiently dissonant so that they defied any associations with tonal implications. The plethora of bad serial or row music was but one result of that consensus. Bust as you can see here in this moment from a Leonard Bernstein lecture, not all of the leading figures in an artistic "scene" will be certain to agree as Bernstein here makes a case for a a certain tonal sense. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20width=%22560%22%20height=%22315%22%20src=%22https://www.youtube.com/embed/raSGRE7jrpA%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20allow=%22autoplay;%20encrypted-media%22%20allowfullscreen%3E%3C/iframe%3E"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/raSGRE7jrpA" width="560"></iframe></a><br />
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In a very real sense when it comes to how we evaluate any new work, we have all become like the detractors of <i>Cruising</i> when it originally came out. We are always vigilant and mindful of the threat that an artwork might challenge a consensus. We praise works that flatter the consensus in our heads and condemn works that inconvenience it, or even contradict it. What this means is, among other things, however exciting and relevant a work of art may be for us for today, it might lose such excitement and relevance for people in a certain future. This is a far greater sense of discontinuity than for a thing to be merely "dated." The reason for this is that we interpret aesthetic objects - that which is intended for aesthetic meaning and purposes - in moral/sociological ways. But to do this is to abandon the aesthetic sense altogether, an abandonment we will be the poorer for, whether we are consciously aware of this loss or not.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-17356711058639247332018-03-19T23:58:00.003-07:002018-03-20T08:20:15.145-07:00Thoughts on strong affect in art<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjReiHle854j6ftLVpk513KuJ2pBPdu9dQxDoBmPjdOtkkgmUVjIG84nd4wjO7kqi6CTAQZpiaJG2smhj4VW_oWNsEMCwrVRESNNwnH1xMeVe0slyZmTV4y47zVFXTg1yux3FZP1PtExXCj/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+1.46.53+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="1600" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjReiHle854j6ftLVpk513KuJ2pBPdu9dQxDoBmPjdOtkkgmUVjIG84nd4wjO7kqi6CTAQZpiaJG2smhj4VW_oWNsEMCwrVRESNNwnH1xMeVe0slyZmTV4y47zVFXTg1yux3FZP1PtExXCj/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+1.46.53+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET (Quine)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPK6hy-Txwu6ccJyIwkiWoCVUZe29YtHPJ_IO_jRmTbGE4RLjeDeKpSbXBrwpSD2vJI12h_jfwcAqSStd3qhHAca40xLrH0bIMuckmWoCG5to5faDsHiVl7GFKcmFhuCZ1NUbHVNJsJz8G/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+1.54.01+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="711" data-original-width="1600" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPK6hy-Txwu6ccJyIwkiWoCVUZe29YtHPJ_IO_jRmTbGE4RLjeDeKpSbXBrwpSD2vJI12h_jfwcAqSStd3qhHAca40xLrH0bIMuckmWoCG5to5faDsHiVl7GFKcmFhuCZ1NUbHVNJsJz8G/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+1.54.01+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">BIGGER THAN LIFE (Ray)</td></tr>
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I have often said that our crises of society might be more aesthetic in nature than the normal ways they are usually understood when they are referred to as moral, political, or, frankly, crudely sociological in nature. I was happy that philosopher Daniel Kaufman, on a favorite site with which he is associated, The Electric Agora, called the problem what it is, when he invoked the word and concept philistine.<a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2017/12/24/4307/">https://theelectricagora.com/2017/12/24/4307/</a> I wrote a piece in 2000 called The New Philistinism and, as Kaufman wisely clarifies in his piece, the situation has only worsened in the eighteen years since my 2000 piece.<br />
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I think the notion of the arts and letters being an essential and special way of understanding is one notion that is unpopular at the moment. People take what they consider the concerns of the real world to be what ultimately matters and if not the real world then the "spiritual" correlate of the real world which comprises of their particular faith and/or religion. But the idea of artificial works of representation being inherently interesting and interesting precisely to the degree to which they can be separated from sociology is an idea that is itself under represented and if thought of at all is immediately rejected. Above all, if the arts and letters are respected they are only respected to the degree with which they are seen to further certain causes in the real world.<br />
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I was reminded of this problem when, in taking a break from my usual study of 1970s visual culture, I went back and watched several masterpieces of Hollywood melodrama from the middle fifties through the sixties. One of the things that struck me was the emotional seriousness, the sheer <i>meaningfulness</i> of the mise en scene: the lighting, coloration and composition seemed the equal of any of the masterworks of representational painting. The actors too were doing things of an emotional depth on screen, bespeaking a complete fearlessness with regard to what they were trying to evoke. There is a sense of awe on the screen: awe from the creators in their creation and an attempt to evoke awe in the spectator, a complete lack of jadedness, laziness, or snark. If contemporary people laugh at such films now because they think them dated, politically inconvenient (note I do not say correct) or silly, I think the fall might reside in those contemporary people rather than in the films. The creators of such films were aesthetes and thought in aesthetic ways. I am thinking of films by people like Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Elia Kazan, Richard Quine, Joshua Logan and Vincent Minnelli, to name just a handful. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">PICNIC (Logan)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSRlMDGGCA15_Th-rWnicQrIv0xUUFaCM_Z2flTaCU6ffns7PT5EfwQo36rSNm4wzmklbmerjm_LL7UvbqO8gbYREkKAyc0BDjLcgV9Mo-tlNMCco_0g5wJ6tmRL41O4k-tCBctYLXrCo-/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+2.02.24+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="822" data-original-width="1600" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSRlMDGGCA15_Th-rWnicQrIv0xUUFaCM_Z2flTaCU6ffns7PT5EfwQo36rSNm4wzmklbmerjm_LL7UvbqO8gbYREkKAyc0BDjLcgV9Mo-tlNMCco_0g5wJ6tmRL41O4k-tCBctYLXrCo-/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+2.02.24+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">THE SANDPIPER (Minnelli)</td></tr>
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One characteristic of the films I have in mind is their emotional intensity. There is an enormous amount at stake for the characters and, quite in keeping with the nature of how cinema was envisioned by their creators, the films at every moment attempt to express such high stakes in every conceivable way possible with the tools at the time - again another striking similarity to painting. That is, the emotion is a matter of art direction and lighting and wardrobe as much as it is of acting.<br />
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Of course one of the reasons why this is the case with these films is that emotion is actually their main subject matter. However much outward action or plot there is in the films, their real theme is human interiority, or consciousness itself. And to make matters more interesting, because many attitudes and behaviors were forbidden for representation on the screen at the time in a literal form, filmmakers had to work extra hard to envision new ways of expression. It is not so much that the films are "Freudian" or "psychological" because, frankly, you who are in the in the audience will have to feel or undergo something internally simply by experiencing the films - whether you are versed in psychology or not, and maybe even whether you are particularly emotional or not. The films traffic in feelings in something like a raw state - that is, prior to any psychological theories. Now strong emotion in art is neither inherently good or bad, but it is simply a fact that works of strong emotion can only accomplish certain things that will be impossible if a work were to take a cooler approach. At the end of the day it might be a subjective affair indeed, the objective excellence of the works in question notwithstanding.<br />
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What I am talking about, of course, is style, rather than genre. ("The concept of genre is as cold as the tomb": Andrei Tarkovsky) The power is not merely the result of narrative structure or even milieu. To my way of thinking, <i>Rebel Without A Cause, Bigger Than Life, Strangers When We Meet, The Sandpiper and Johnny Guitar</i> have much more in common than not, even though the locales, ages, and periods of the stories couldn't be more dissimilar on the surface. Yet they feel like the same artistic project in that they have found a way to represent characters and their environments on film in such a way that every detail matters and is organized - compositionally - for maximum affect. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JOHNNY GUITAR (Ray)</td></tr>
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I think to look at the films in this way is to see that films like these are much closer to opera, dance and ballet than they are to either the theatre or the novel. If I am right then we have been wrong all along in trying to fit these films into categories normally associated with psychological realism or novelistic narration.<br />
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In fact - and in this way they are <i>really</i> like paintings or arias - the films are more interested in the emotional moment rather than only moving the plot forward.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpzUzXn5Gc5hHSPm7LfizeCWTul1LCsdTF2ECdO_PxU8nLyITiMKh7I25xtKM9KZpZOPutb1_GOvuIo4m-d9pD5V2Hvcxo6Mi6FadhwOXPW_KhU50_dk1uTvfLa-Bx-QveQCZbRuAYOBGg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+2.33.56+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="1047" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpzUzXn5Gc5hHSPm7LfizeCWTul1LCsdTF2ECdO_PxU8nLyITiMKh7I25xtKM9KZpZOPutb1_GOvuIo4m-d9pD5V2Hvcxo6Mi6FadhwOXPW_KhU50_dk1uTvfLa-Bx-QveQCZbRuAYOBGg/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-03-20+at+2.33.56+AM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">WRITTEN ON THE WIND (Sirk)</td></tr>
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This, then, is one virtue of strong emotion in a work of art like a movie. Strong emotion forces the action to be arrested for a time. It is an experience akin to religious or spiritual worship or contemplation. As we all know when somebody is in a sate of contemplation they aren't generally running around in the world in extroverted and busy tasks. (Of course that some spiritual masterworks of art are contemplative by virtue of turning down the dial on emotion, as in Mark Rothko, is a fact that only goes to show that there are, as it were, different kinds of religions.)<br />
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You can try to fit the films into such labels as realism but it not where their heart really is. They are radical expressions of states of feeling. The narrative course of the film or psychological categories (or diagnosis) of the film's characters are actually secondary. What matters is the emotional moment. In this sense these works of art of a staid and conservative Hollywood era are anything but. They are revolutionary in their romanticism, in their stubborn insistence on the virtue of authenticity and truth seeking - values that however overused and problematic they are in word, are as indispensable and inescapable in culture more generally in deed.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-22675840443452978442018-02-22T19:00:00.000-08:002018-02-23T14:01:12.795-08:00A particular, if not peculiar, form of Humanistic education<br />
My previous post was a look backward as I began a big move forward. I should like to go back to the beginning and discuss certain influences. Any kind of artist or critic has to have definite and definitive influences. These form the imaginative center and in practically all cases this is a psychological theme unique to the individual's identity. The world of the arts is the largest mansion conceivable. The doors are many; some of which are dead bolted, still others unabashedly unlocked, and ajar.<br />
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One of the things about art objects is that when you interact with them, if you are doing it correctly - and there are more or less correct or incorrect ways of interaction - the more correct mode of interaction will involve repetition, and ultimately be a form of education. Through memorizing the artwork, even if like I was, a child doing the work and not old enough to even comprehend it in its fullness, the art object will become a part of you. As a result, whether you intend this intimacy or not, by "memorizing" the object you will, learn, if only unconsciously, a lot of things about the arts in general since you are learning about certain patterns, or genres, or styles going back many years, centuries, epoch etc., thus learning about some of the oldest antecedents in an indirect fashion.<br />
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1967 being the year of my birth, and my father being a Beatles fan, meant that right out of the womb the record player was playing the Sgt Pepper album. If my earliest filmic memory was seeing <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> twice my earliest music memory was the Sgt Pepper album and, simultaneous with this, some Bach recordings. My parents told me that I would ask to hear Day In The Life over and over again, so fascinated I was by it as composition and the dissonant orchestral sonorities in that crescendo.<br />
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Last month I saw an original pressing of <i>Let It Be</i> at my shirtmakers' shop and my entire body was transported back to four years old or a few years after as I had not looked at the photos on the album cover since them. I remember, as I had always done, staring for great lengths of time at the photos of the musicians. I did this because I had I thought that my looking was a form of magic that would reveal to me how these songs I enjoyed so much were made, doubtless a cognitive error on my part, but one that revealed a curious hunger in the context of me being quite isolated for long periods of time - isolated not only from the musical instruments in question but also from relationships with others. I used to fantasize or wonder about how the music was made and the photos of Abbey Road Studios revealed many technical and technological devices and artifacts about which I was curious and had little or no understanding.<br />
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Around this time I discovered the <i>Guys And Dolls</i> original soundtrack. Whenever I found a song I really liked I learned how to manipulate the needle, carefully as to not scratch the record, but, more precociously, how to identify by the visual size of the groove formations, which songs were the ones I liked.<br />
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For some reason I was obsessed with Fugue For Tinhorns. Here is the same version to which I listened incessantly.<br />
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It was the incessant almost rhythm changes styled form and contrapuntal singing I loved so much, as much as the phrasing of the cast singers. Now you could say this is nothing special, simply a round. But you'd be wrong to say that, because Frank Loesser seems to have the perfect ear for just the right melodic sequence to choose. I was also learning about melody itself from some great ballads on that album, in particular "I'll Know".<br />
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A third record was one of the Bach Bradenberg Concertos. This one in particular I would repeat over and over.<br />
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The very first Miles Davis I heard was this soundtrack for a Louis Malle film.<br />
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This sparked a life long obsession with slow tempos as well as the blues tonalities. Curiously, the next Miles I would hear was not anything from this period, not <i>Kind of Blue,</i> but <i>In A Silent Way.</i> I was really at the mercy of what I could find in record stores and such stores were at the mercy of what was considered worthy of stocking from the past, what was reissued or not, and what was considered a sure or safe sale. Probably the kinds of groves and sounds on <i>In A Silent Way</i> were more popular than anything from the fifties or middle sixties at least in the Tampa, Florida where I spent most of the year, <br />
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I was not exposed to very much rock at this time aside from The Beatles. I remained ignorant of much of it. I was intensely interested in rhythm and blues and soul music however. Seeing The Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden might have been the initial stimulus. Then again there were some old Bessie Smith recordings that were in the house. The only exposure I got to rock was what was overheard at public venues or on the radio and I never really followed it in anything like a systematic way.<br />
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But you can't really escape rock. I was on this swim team and my coach kept calling me Frampton because my last name rhymed with Frampton. Actually my swim coach himself looked like Peter Frampton. "Hey Frampton do that lap again!" was a constant refrain. Not only would he call me Frampton but he would blare <i>Frampton Comes Alive</i> from loudspeakers and an 8 track coming from his elaborately designed van.<br />
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I actually had a girlfriend at this age (which I understand now is not considered age appropriate since I was child, though she was a child as well, a peer), and she was in love with Peter Frampton, and had a huge poster of him in her bedroom. Because I liked her mother's taste in music so much more and considered her, well, simply more attractive than the daughter, I would sort of hang around the mother more and find excuses to leave the daughter's room and go see the mom in the kitchen or living room, and listen to mom talk about Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, and gaze at this mom in her halter top, much to the chagrin of the daughter.<br />
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I believe listening to these particular musical styles was inculcating me into their ways and their methods. I think the best things you can have for inspiration by, or memorization of, things that are at least good in quality.<br />
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When I wasn't restricted to the basically lone experience of record listening I was enormously blessed to experience live artistic performances. One of the hallmarks of every Summer as a child were the several weeks or even months I would spend in New York City. Now this was a NYC Summer in the 1970s. Because of, among other things, my father's deep love for the theatre, I would see practically every production that was mounted in NYC and I mean everything - from Joseph Papp, to commercial Broadway fare to avant-garde off-Broadway fare as well as both musicals and dramatic plays.<br />
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For some reason seeing the original production of Bob Fosse's <i>Chicago</i> made the deepest impression on me. Part of it was Fosse's sensibility which seemed to have some spiritual connection with mine. That is, Fosse, like myself, was an aesthete. Everything for him was a matter of sensual form, no matter the particular content or medium.<br />
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A great part of my love for his original production of <i>Chicago</i> resided in two women: Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon as they appeared here. This is the closest thing to a documentation of the two of them as they appeared then as I have been able to find. <br />
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I was so taken with Rivera and Verdon that I had a poster of the two of them throughout my childhood over my bed. A video documentation by a cast member - courtesy of Candy Brown - gives you a sense of what the staging felt like:<br />
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The erotic in art has always been a matter of censorious contention in many audiences. This is a pity, for in Fosse we have someone who made the highest art of the erotic, albeit in mass popular forms like movies or musicals. He had no illusions about his subject matter and could be as morally stringent as a Sunday preacher (or Brecht) as in <i>Star 80</i>, <i>Sweet Charity</i> (or for that matter, <i>Chicago)</i> but he was not only a critic or satirist: he was also an unabashed entertainer, interested in the eternal pleasures of life. Work which is interested in such pleasures for their own sake - like the work of Jacque Demy or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/movies/radley-metzger-director-who-left-erotica-for-hard-core-dies-at-88.html">Radley Metzger</a> - will always have opponents and naysayers of various kinds. But it is all a question of style and not all styles are equally congenial to all populations, subcultures etc.<br />
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What do all of the above have in common, aside from their intrinsic excellence? You will note that they are examples of adult culture: that is, they were not specifically designed for a children's audience, and yet I was a child being exposed to such material. Most importantly, all of these works of culture are made by we humans: they are produced, designed, created. They are not simply found falling from the sky or laying on the ground. Things humans create are always set apart from the daily world even as they engage with that same daily world. The designed or created aspect has to do with imagination and representation: two categories that create much misunderstanding as to their ultimate purposes in life. Now imagination and representation have an abstraction from life even as they fully engage with life. They are fictions but have about them much truth and as such are partly nonfictional. It is human to reflect upon life rather than simply survive or suffer this life. I think what I have in mind in this particular post is the cumulative effect of certain reflections and what their uniqueness or aesthetic vastness might mean for a single human life and how it may develop in time.<br />
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An immense thank you to Candy Brown for posting her footage on youtube.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-13724489413568671562018-01-24T19:15:00.002-08:002018-01-25T11:24:45.363-08:00What I mean when I call myself an Aesthete - 2018 installationIt is a new year - 2018!<br />
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All new things are inextricably intertwined with the old, even the oldest things, however free that which is new wishes to be from the old.<br />
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Around fifteen years ago, right around the turn of the millennium, (remember the Y2K?), I underwent a transformation of sorts. It was unbidden or unwilled - or so it felt at the time. I tried to explain it then - as best as I could under the admittedly compromised circumstances - and I started using the word aesthete to categorize and conceptualize it. In truth, however many flaws we find in the notion of the category, whether we really like it or not, we all have to call ourselves something, and in most cases, many separable things at the same time.<br />
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As my interest in the 1970s is constant and ever rewarding, I am going to use Michael Ritchie's masterpiece <i>Semi-Tough</i> to illustrate. In this picture Ritchie has Bert Convy play a salvational spirituality/self improvement "guru" modeled after Werner Erhard. As part of the fictionalized and staged seminar meant to satirize workshops and movements of the kind in the 1970s, Bert Convy, playing the character of one Frederick Bismarck, puts on a skit demonstrating the difference between what is essentially meant to be a lower versus higher way of being in the world. To demonstrate the former Convy has an actor approach him with a cliched greeting that would be known to people in their daily lives: "Hi, how's the wife and kids?" The tone is breezy, perfunctory and the like. Convy then switches to the higher alternative. In the latter, when Convy greets the actor the two men gaze into each others' eyes seriously, even soulfully, and hold a firm handshake for longer than is usual. No false and evasive backslapping here. Explaining the difference, Convy remarks. "See in the second meeting I am really meeting somebody. I am meeting a <i>person</i>! Get it?" And as is always the case, both in 1970s movies as well as life, the crowd gathered in the auditorium erupts into enthusiastic applause at this demonstration. I deal with the issue of parades and crowds in 1970s artistic culture in general here <a href="http://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/notes-towards-aesthetics-of-1970s.html">http://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/notes-towards-aesthetics-of-1970s.html</a><br />
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Encapsulated in this one moment in time, in the year of 1977 is a joke riffing on a constant anxiety - in both the older, Modern and newer, Contemporary periods alike - the anxiety concerning what it is to even be a self. The concern, now contested and possibly quaint, is that in order to be properly human - authentic is still the main term most in use - one must not be like a machine or robot. The whole point of Ritchie's comedy is that one can be overtly concerned about being authentic and this can be a kind of dogma all it's own, equal to the false stuffiness or rigidity the real presentation or experience of self is meant to replace. The comedy resides in people overtly anxious about getting it right, as one might say today, in "overthinking."<br />
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About twenty years after the 70s, in what is to my mind one of the most important essays of the past twenty-odd years - the practically prophetic <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/nagel/papers/exposure.html">"Concealment and Exposure" </a>(written about a decade before the full takeover of the internet and social media) - philosopher Thomas Nagel is sharply critical of what he calls an "adolescent" American culture, in which people express too much of themselves and excessive modes of honesty and transparence undo the temperate modes of an earlier era, with its respect for privacy and belief in the goodness of a certain amount of opacity. Nagel's point is not all that different from Ritchie (and Walter Bernstein, Ring Lardner Jr and Dan Jenkins, the film's writers). If the point could be summarized, at the risk of a crude reduction, the question of there being a consensus for how we ought to behave or feel is always limited by the natural disagreements among individuals in any given society, as well as the fact that humans have a need for some matters about the self to be hidden for the sake of the peace. This is connected to notions of civility vis a vis the town square.<br />
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Yet in a real sense it is the object of Michael Ritchie's ridicule that has won the day: the older regime of reticence has been overthrown, and of course many intelligent observers are apt to say "thank goodness, it is about time", and the like. Self expression and exposure (and, increasingly, exposures by others if what is being exposed is, say, a crime) are seen as ultimate virtues and can be found around the clock and omnipresent, bound neither by geographical distance nor any coherent conception of public decorum.<br />
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What does any of this have to do with my chosen identity of "aesthete"?<br />
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Well on the most practical basis we do have to do something with all of that which is constantly churning inside of us. We can't keep it all to ourselves in raw form, nor can we exactly let it all out. Aesthetics is the practice of trying to make something of discipline out of what is inside of us, but in some kind of subtle or indirect fashion so that it is not direct reality. Only retroactively, by submitting what is inside of us to some kind of transformation or evaluation, can we get some kind of understanding or command of it all. You might think of this as a middle path between complete exposure on the one hand or concealment on the other. This is in fact what the Arts are all about. One of the best ways to manage the exteriorization of the interior is to invent forms that indirectly communicate the interior - stanzas and paragraphs, marks on a page or screen, acted performances, sounds on musical instruments and much more. Because the forms are in a real sense "make-believe" they cannot and should not have the same stakes as matters of direct reality. It is akin to how Hannah Arendt defined thinking itself and when I say than I am an aesthete I say that my interest is precisely in such production and not on doing anything directly about the world in an immediate way. You might say I am more interested in how things feel and appear and what this tells us about ourselves than in moving from point A to point B in a practical way. Even if you will insist that my crude division between practical action and imaginative feeling is invidious or false, I still come back to the notion that we have to call ourselves something, if not may things and it is the aesthetic realm to which I am chiefly dedicated, even if I happen to be living in a time uniquely inhospitable to such pursuits as the aesthetic, or better yet, precisely because I must live in a cultural environment so constituted.<br />
<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-24539899716017366542017-08-26T20:07:00.002-07:002017-08-26T20:09:14.092-07:00New "album" is out!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I came across an interesting bootleg of one of my musical heroes - Freddie Hubbard - during which, in one of his spoken introductions in between numbers, probably in frustration with a noisy audience, he said "I think we should let the music speak for itself." In general this has always been my position. It is one of the reasons that I devote so little of my life to reading theoretical musical scholarship and musicology and theory. I would much rather listen to the music of actual musicians and composers study the music itself to learn new ideas or retain old ones. The only reason I have written so much recently about my "hard listening" music series is that there is a self consciousness to my project and, above all, that my music is indebted to so many truly great musicians who continue to inspire me, almost too numerous to mention here in one sitting. Also, as my music is partly "conceptual", I have wanted to describe the stylistic elements of the musical languages that I love to use.<br />
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This is my second all solo piano album. A lot of work goes into such a thing. Not only is it a matter of the physical practice of the piano itself, but, even more, it is a matter of formal and conceptual work: much of the album is about structuring musical pieces, deciding how much to write out and how much to improvise, balancing the mood shifts both within one number and from one number to the next, and so on.<br />
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But equally, if not more importantly, an album like this is also the work of others. John Weston of <a href="http://www.futuraproductions.com/info.html">Futura Productions</a> is a perfect audio engineer and helped produce the album. I love working with him every chance that I can get.<br />
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I love the photography of Hannah Cohen <a href="https://www.hannahcohenphotography.com/">https://www.hannahcohenphotography.com</a> who took a photo that formed the basis of the cover. I have worked with her many times in the past and always with the best results. <a href="https://www.amandawilliamsgalvin.com/">Amanda Williams Galvin</a> is such a tasteful and individual art director and I was immensely happy with how she created the feel and look for the cover. Also included is a photo of me that is actually part of an ongoing/new art project concerning me and my love for the 1970s. The photo and the art project is by Laurie Jill Strickland, an artist who does so many things - writing, acting, producing, coaching, show creation, vocal arts, performance - that I would not know where to begin except to refer the reader to her truly beautiful site here. <a href="http://www.grayceproductions.com/">http://www.grayceproductions.com</a> I wanted to thank these people as much as possible since there would not be a recording without them.<br />
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I think I have said most of what I wanted to say about my music on other posts. I am most excited by the long piece that introduces the album, titled <i>Still Night Suite</i>. Like everything I do I start with one idea, in this case a previously composed Cole Porter classic, and seize the opportunity to do as much as I can with it. As always there is the interest in "time travel" and differing musical styles rub against each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes abrasively, but always with the aim of dramatic contrast between one emotion and mood and another. I like my music to <i>move</i> in more than one meaning of that word. I am partial to conscious anachronism. Although much of the music on this recording reflects my attachment to older musical styles there is at least one sense in which it is very much a creation of our 21st century: it is an entirely digital release. After all, we have to <i>live</i> in our own time even if we are not always exactly<i> of </i>that (current) time.<br />
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I hope you enjoy the music.<br />
<a href="https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/mitchhampton">https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/mitchhampton</a>dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-87110401958782306252017-05-28T10:57:00.000-07:002017-06-04T00:10:17.933-07:00Getting Personal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Over the next few months I am going to be making a most dramatic move. After about twenty-seven years in the big city on the East Coast I am moving to a much smaller town down South quite close to Asheville. One of the main reasons is economic. For those who might not know, from the time I was born until about two years ago ( I will be fifty in October), I was involved with a family business which shall remain nameless for the purposes of this piece. Unbeknownst to me, around the time of my father's death, many complications surrounding the condition and financial well being of this business emerged such that it was necessary to essentially sell it off to a large company that specializes in saving businesses in trouble.<br />
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Most unfortunately, a condition of that transfer was that I would no longer be in employment, even though I was one of the only people associated with the business who was there from the very beginning and at one time or another had done just about every job that had been associated with the business, including assembly line work in the factory, shipping, bookkeeping in the office, opening a couple of new accounts on the road, and attending industry conventions.<br />
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For a period of about thirty years I also wrote a regular arts and culture column that was associated with the business and interviewed a number of prominent figures including Jacques Barzun, James Ellroy, political activists, musicians of all kinds, and other kinds of artists. Many of the major artistic events of the later 1980s and through the 1990s were ones I reviewed or covered in some way. This newspaper was an opportunity for me to keep in touch with was going on culturally and gave me institutional support for my journalistic duties. The newspaper was canceled sometime in 2011. Speaking of the company as a whole, from what I understand, the company will go on but in an altered form and with a largely new group of people constituting it's staff and personnel.<br />
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For about fifteen years I had no knowledge of some of the problems present in the business as I had no authority in managing or running operations. My knowledge was restricted to matters such as how the product was selling (and it did have a steady and loyal following) and some changes in product design. An enormous amount of information was unknown to me, leaving me with the impression that things stood on far sturdier ground when the ground had actually been something like a sinking quicksand. Only over time was everything presented to me. There is a quite universal human interest in safeguarding people from bad news of any kind, or to avoid conflict. Also because I have not lived in the physical location of operations of the company itself for a few decades, I was not a part of the daily culture of the work environment and cannot in any way comment on the nature of that. One of the things about journalism of course is that you can send in articles from a destination far from the physical office and this was practically as true in the pre-internet days. And most of my musical projects were on the East Coast as well, for a time in the 90s, in Europe as well.<br />
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In 2015 I sold my home and tried to live life as a renter which, to put it in a most understated fashion, has not been easy, the rental market being quite overcrowded, volatile and unstable. From 1999 to 2015 I had lived in a two bedroom home in the greatest location in a thriving city. I was able to do my musical work anytime of the day or night, as I lived over a garage and thus shielded all my neighbors from the sound. For two decades I enjoyed this setup, thinking it would not end.<br />
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Currently I have found a place where I can do my musical and writing projects at far less cost and in relative peace and that place happens to be in another geography of these United States. If you must know I will be living alone as I have done for some thirty years. A lot of my decision making is based on the fact that I am not planning - for the short term anyway - to live with anybody. My traveling 1970s museum will be coming with me though it is much smaller than many would think. Most importantly of all, I will finally be reunited with the magnificent Steinway on which I leaned to play back in the late 1970s and early 80s and which, for various reasons I was separated from due to my decision to live on the East Coast and the inability to find a home to accommodate a grand. Happily, my mother preserved and saved the piano for me, keeping it in top condition. I have played pianos in Lincoln Center, and other places around the world and when I say this piano is one of the greatest I have ever touched I would not be in any sense exaggerating.<br />
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One of the first items of business for the new year, aside from finally creating a digital software score for my collaborative trombone and piano concertino with <a href="https://alhalljr.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/working-with-freddie-hubbard/">Sanifu Al Hall Jr.</a> I am very excited to do a double concerto with Hall. He is an extraordinary musician with not only full knowledge of music itself but also aspects of musical production, technology, and engineering. And of course the trombone is an instrument that can always use more utilization and the combination with piano, strings, brass and a popular rhythm section is a good idea.<br />
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But as that double concertino is already written my next quite big project is to write a second piano concerto for myself, a second concerto for improvised piano and orchestra. The last one I wrote was in 1997. I feel it is time for another one. I have already begun collecting themes for it. It will have many styles in it, a lot of which will be quite romantic as well and rhythmic, with lots of room for good old fashioned improvising over the all important changes. But more on that at another date.<br />
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The point of all of this biographical summary is for me to reflect on the nature of radical change in ones' life. I have been meaning to write a philosophically inclined post on the subject for close to a year now and I am taking this "life event" as an opportunity do put a few thoughts down on the nature of change.<br />
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Now one of the things we are constantly told in the contemporary or current epoch is that change is the only constant in life. One recurring meme (the word meme being of the more unfortunate of the new jargon that infests our life, whether it is imported from the humanities or the sciences) is this slogan, common in advertising, "it's what you do." Never before has there been such slavish conformity as during our current internet age. <br />
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One of the most profoundly anti-democratic events of the past thirty years is the fact that we replaced an entire way of life, based on things like telephones, retail stores to which we travelled to buy the things of life, and all the tiniest habits that we could call physical and three dimensional, with our current internet/computer based life. When being normative in my description I have called it the age of politicization and moralization (that is, a world of moral and emotional disapproval or praise of all human action and a division of the world into parties based on whether it is a like or a dislike). If I were being more descriptive I would call it the Age Of Simultaneity, an age whose main feature is that you can call up in seconds visual documentations or copies of every piece of visual or audible culture humans created for much of the twentieth century up to the present.<br />
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I call this decision anti-democratic because not once were the millions or billions of people really asked to reflect on whether any of this was a good idea, nor were they given an option to opt out. A few engineering geniuses simply decided we should live like this, mainly because it reflected their tastes or sensibilities, or specialized knowledge. There were no public forums of significance, except to announce what it was and how it was supposed to work, which by definition is not any kind of forum, and certainly no public deliberations about the pros and cons.<br />
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There was much serious critique among intellectuals, by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/13/sven-birkerts-struggle-to-concentrate-digital-age">Sven Birkerts</a>, <a href="http://www.jaronlanier.com/">Jaron Lanier,</a> and others, but this was never a public forum involving real-life decision making. We all sort of woke up one day and found we had to live this entirely new kind of life wherein we have to walk around looking at these portable objects all day, since it is has been decreed that these little objects are to be used for everything we do. I must say that though democracy is many times the right way to go, it is not always the best policy. That something is done in an anti-democratic fashion is not necessarily a case against the thing done. It seems to me, however, that when it comes to matters mandatory for social and private life, a little democracy might be in order.<br />
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One of the reasons for this enormous cultural revolution is that the form the revolution took was in keeping with some of the oldest intuitions of most of the world, particular religious traditions: that the world and all people in it are at bottom <i>one</i> and the physical manifestations of separation are unreal, backwards and exclusive and are to be overcome if we are to progress. In that sense the internet is a mass market, literalist form of the oldest perennial philosophy.<br />
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The problem with this of course is that we can't really know for sure if we are all one: it is just a mystical feeling that a lot of people have always had. Of course a scientist or mystic can prove to us that is the case, and in this sense we <i>are</i> one; physicist and mystic seem to converge on this. When I question the proposition of oneness what I mean is that we can't know for sure how we are supposed to live in consequence of the fact. Moreover, life consists of both oneness and separateness: our physical embodiment after all, siamese twins notwithstanding, is singular (and this is important even if physicality is one sense illusory in the sense certain religions assert).<br />
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We also can't be sure that the destruction of separation or distance of time and space is either necessary, salutary or vindicatory. And the ability to reproduce or recall every record of all the stuff humans have created in the past in an instant in the present raises many more issues than mere copyright. There are questions not only of monetization of course, which might be the most urgent, but also sanity, and possible limits in human psychology. If one is to invoke incipient AI, there is the additional question of the "Turing Test", labor competition, joblessness on a mass scale, and all the rest of it.<br />
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It is, in my mind anyway, highly more likely that we aren't one in a literal sense or can't achieve oneness, at least without a fight - the kind of fight that might make such achievement pyrrhic: our differences are significant and profound, maybe inevitable and permanent. Maybe humans need to be as separate from one another, if only to keep the peace, as together with one another. And there is the crucial issue of necessary difference. But it is important to note that we never had the debate or discussion of whether it was ever a good idea to have everything in one place as we now do. And as I said, if we were to have the debate, the bias would have always been towards anything that smacks of unity or togetherness, especially since so much of the evil of previous ages appears to us chiefly as a matter of false or malicious separation, a violation of our essential and underlying unity.<br />
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There was much talk, back in the anxiety filled 1990s, when talk of togetherness and community was just getting started, of how the once much needed "differentiation of spheres" had gone too far, resulting in the fragmentation and isolation of spheres and loss of some kind of integrated unity. It appears, however, that ever since we have gone as far as we can in the opposite direction. The values of opacity, of privacy, of exclusion and differentiation have been under the greatest assault. And we have to live with the result.<br />
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I digressed into all of this reflection upon technological change because the past two years have been years of wrenching change for me personally, all of it unforeseen and unbidden. (I will not get into public or political change which as we all know is as dramatic, volatile and unstable as you can get). That is, I want to make clear not only that not all change is the same but that change has differing and different meanings depending upon one's stage in life, one's numerical age, one's temperament, one's abilities, customs and a whole host of other quite individualized things. You simply can't make the word change into a synonym for a kind of normative account of progress.<br />
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I think the day as a society we begin to start from and with the individual, and the individualized profile, will be the day we begin to make collective decisions that allow for real diversity. Given current trends, concerned as they are with conceptualizing human life in terms of large groupings, that day appears far off. We could create a world that works for both the shy and anxious as well as the outgoing and domineering, while reigning in the negative side effects of anybody who goes to the farthest extreme, all the while with compassionate understanding of what are the inevitable temperament and leanings.<br />
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Music for me is one of the greatest of the arts, but all the arts share a family resemblance. One of the things I love about music is its abstraction. But that is but one of several possibilities, I think <i>any</i> art form, however troubling the content, especially if the content is troubling, if, to name a prominent example, it is representational about people in less than desirable circumstances, is a means for humans to create a big school for themselves. Art is really this big school, and in this sense no difference whatsoever than what used to go by the name of religion, where, by absorbing or experiencing the art object, you can reflect in a neutral space, a partially disinterested space, and try to figure things out. Whether you see art as a means for increasing knowledge or, in Andrei Tarkovsky's more rigorous, but possibly superior formulation, you see art as increasing preparedness for death and salvation of the soul, such differences of emphasis matter less than the sameness of all art in its almost religious necessity. Art and life are one in that art is an expression of what is going on in our life. Art and life are separate in that art is a time out from life and thus, a meditation upon life. <br />
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Well I have said enough I think for this post. Time to write some more music.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-37672098321320702172017-04-02T19:37:00.001-07:002017-04-03T17:32:51.683-07:00Notes on some new solo piano music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have been committing some new music for solo piano to recorded documentation. Eventually some of this will be a full album, a selection of which, Townsend Detective Agency, I covered in the previous post. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1gpavAsWCuU" width="560"></iframe><br />
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It is hard for me to write about my process and the final result. I really enjoy thinking about music in both musical and philosophical terms and I remain, thankfully, most passionate about it. But as far as translating that into nonmusical terms is concerned isn't always easy. The difficulty, if that is the correct formulation, consists in trying to clarify what was or is important in a particular musical project.<br />
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If I had to come up with a formula of my "hard listening" style it would go something like this: start with the formal and modern rigor of concert music, that is, longer forms. (I map out my scores with many sections. The instructions can be quite loose, involving improvisation, but the content for the improvisations can also be very strict.) Then, after the larger formal idea, I draw on an array of disparate languages from American popular music history. Finally I improvise over these frameworks much like an improviser taking choruses. But I always use lots of structure. Themes appear and reappear and develop. Speaking philosophically, I aim to create a kind of time travel in my artistic practice. My friend <a href="https://www.shoprevelrevel.com/about">Amanda Williams Galvin</a> spoke about coming to own one of her grandfather's button down shirts from many decades ago. My music is like that. I want the listener to be reminded of, say, a hit song that would have been playing on a radio at the time when the grandfather had originally put on the shirt, and then for the listener to be jolted to yet another time period, perhaps thirty or forty years later.<br />
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The result is to violate the ordinary, linear sense of time, and to call into question and subvert the one-to-one association of a particular music with the time of that music's creation or popularity. I am also interested in durational or "slow" filmmaking (Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Abbas Kiaorstami, Frederick Wiseman) and applying some of those ideas to music making. I agree with Miles Davis that art, music and life are all about style. <br />
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<a href="https://mitchhampton.bandcamp.com/track/mtm">https://mitchhampton.bandcamp.com/track/mtm</a><br />
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A good example is my MTM piece. The attitude of the piece is very much like a classical piano work for the concert or recital hall. (Indeed all of my music is like that in a way). It is a piece a pianist is to perform in a concert setting, But the content of the work is partly gleamed from some of the most commercial gestures and stock arrangements found in the writing of background music over many decades. Thus, some of this content is not from the concert hall at all, but from film and television. To make matters more complicated, I approach them the way a jazz improviser would, with that kind of freedom and interest in a richer color palette than you would ever find in most commercial music.<br />
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Finally, the piece changes styles radically in a short compression of time. One example of this is the use of jagged and repetitive lines in the opening only to be followed by resting chords with greatest possible contrast. I have developed my own system of doing this over many years. One of the ways I am able to do this is through that tonality system I ranted about on my previous post. My concept of tonality combines modality as well as traditional harmonic relations with the free tonality found in a lot of music of the 1960s and 70s. In this piece I use very opposed and separable languages. On the one hand there is the open and "minimalist" (I hate that word and its connotations since it tells us so little ultimately about what is being done) use of suspended chords or punctuated chords you found in a lot of Broadway, film and television writing in the 60s and 70s. On the other hand there are traditional stock figures of dense harmonic sequences. I use these things simply because I really like them. <br />
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Major influences for the particular projects are composers normally associated with what is considered commercial musicianship and arranging. I love the writing of <a href="http://patrickwilliamsmusic.com/">Patrick Williams</a> and Allyn Ferguson and Jack Elliott.<br />
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One inspiration for my recent work in general, not just <i>MTM,</i> was the score to a 1978 made for t.v. movie called <i>GUIDE TO THE MARRIED WOMAN</i>, by Ferguson and Elliott. Of particular note is a long credit sequence, featuring a both comic and bittersweet visual montage of the passing time of a couple's early married life. But the audio is essentially a mini jazz suite for studio orchestra, with lots of motivic development and top flight playing from Los Angeles players like Bud Shank and Bill Watrous.<br />
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Though the following clip is not from that particular film (which appears commercially unavailable), the clip shows what Ferguson was like in the studio - leading a recording of one of his own compositions for the great Freddie Hubbard. Notice above all, the harmonic language which is a once simple and relatively uncluttered, non busy, and yet still filled with color and dramatic interest. The harmonies are similar to the kinds I described above.<br />
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Stephen Sondheim, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Claus Ogerman are large influences. This is partly one of the reasons I utilize their languages. If I didn't like the languages I would not do it. It would be the greatest mistake for a listener to assume that I mean such references or influences as an ironic commentary or have any reservations about their work. Indeed, I consider these kind of writers of the highest caliber and believe it to be only a function of fashion and sociology that they are not taken more seriously. Now that is not to say that there aren't figures in the music that aren't "amusing" because they might feel or seem from a distant time but that is part of their charm and I purposely want to invoke similar feelings in my listeners.<br />
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And of course in keeping with my "hard listening" tag, these elements were critical in light or "easy listening" music in some earlier eras. I especially like to have very long sections with a minimum of harmonic change: again, a device that has been critical to so many forms of American popular music. Conversely, since one of my rules is that when I go in one particular direction for a time the music must therefore go in an opposite direction at a later time in the music, I always intersperse some colorful changes when before I have had stasis. It is built into the whole piece from the beginning. I believe it is rare for any composer to change styles like this. The exception would be a composer who makes such change itself into their style.<br />
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Since this piece is called MTM and is in memory of the late <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/arts/television/mary-tyler-moore-dead.html?_r=0">Mary Tyler Moore</a>, it also helps that some of this language would have been heard as the background to the projects in which she was employed as an actress. During this piece I also break into an earlier stride feeling in rhythm and I can never resist an opportunity to bring out some bebop things, or some of the things that I gleamed from my studies with Stanley Cowell so long age in the late 1980s: the conceptualization of the piano as an orchestral instrument and the necessity of treating it accordingly.<br />
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I remember when reading John Adams' memoir <i><a href="https://www.earbox.com/hallelujah-junction-solo-piano/">Hallelujah Junction</a>,</i> being very inspired and feeling a sense of vindication by my personal commitment to tonality. I consider him a masterful composer. My music is not designed to be free of such influences as if the absence of said influences made for a purer artistic music; rather it is designed to be full of such influences. But one quote that stuck with me from that book was his insistence that every composer must find their own language in which to work and stick with it or develop it. I took that to mean something like finding your calling. You have to choose the language and really commit to it and go all the way with it. I think it matters less what the language in question is, and matters more your love and faithfulness to that particular language when you write.<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-73931664041455429042016-08-10T18:40:00.001-07:002016-08-10T18:40:06.271-07:00Why Tonality? A Manifesto in Aphorisms<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20width=%22560%22%20height=%22315%22%20src=%22https://www.youtube.com/embed/1gpavAsWCuU%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20allowfullscreen%3E%3C/iframe%3E"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1gpavAsWCuU" width="560"></iframe></a><br />
Since I have developed a style of music that I call "hard listening" I have had to use "easy listening" figures and gestures to form the foundation of this music. That is the dialectic of the situation.<br />
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This past month I recorded some solo piano music: all but two are original compositions. Much of it is about half sheer spontaneity, half rigorous restraint. It is an enormous amount of work, creating music on solo piano, using the fullest range of the instrument, and consciously attempting to draw on a widest variety of American popular music, with references to high art classical music. It requires hours of practice of course, but it also requires spiritual meditation upon musicians who have come before me and to whom I am most indebted. I figure if the style and language they used was good enough for them; it is good enough for me, and I want to honor them and their styles somehow. Every note I play or compose is completely indebted to heroes or icons of the past who have come before me.<br />
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I am a modernist to the core. By modern I mean simply that my music is music that has something to do with the modern and contemporary world in a most general sense. What makes me modernist is that my music is for music's sake. Art for art's sake is very unfashionable now since we live in highly politicized times. My music is in the interest of no group in particular except for those groups of musicians to whom I am most indebted and continue to inspire and elevate. I create music not to save the world, to improve or elevate consciousness, to ferment political revolution, or to defend any status quo. My music has no messages other than the message that listening to music can be entertaining and a source of highest joy.<br />
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There is a lot of emotion in my music but it is not specificity. This is why music is the highest of the arts, this lack of specificity. It is a tragedy that contemporary musicians revel in music's attachment to the specificity of a cause, or a scene, or an identity. They are giving up one of the very things that makes music, well, musical. What makes me not a classicist is my ideal of liberation and freedom in the creation of music. Perhaps my aim is really close to Tarkovsky and I create music to prepare people for death. When people are getting ready to die you kind of want to have some kindness towards them. <br />
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My music is closer to David Raskin that to Pierre Boulez, which is why I am always slightly puzzled when I am linked with the so-called avant-garde. The avant-garde as a rule has not been very kind to me. Indeed a fellow pianist in the avant-garde camp actually walked out on a concert of mine. This after he had the audacity to ask me who the pianist was on a recording from Pandora. I told him Earl "Fatha" Hines and he was impressed that I knew this from just a few measures. (Just those octaves spoke for themselves.) But when my set started he and his entourage simply fled. But I have been most generous with the avant-garde, perhaps to a fault. That is what I have to deal with. Thus this manifesto.<br />
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I have studied and played avant-garde music. I took master classes with John Cage. But I believe you should follow what you love most. I ask myself, when I create music, would Cedar Walton have done this? Of course I have to reckon with the fact that I live in a world where lots of people would say Cedar who?<br />
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Recently on Tony Bennett's 90th Birthday I listened to the duos he created with Bill Evans. If somebody were to ask me "why tonality?" I would refer them to those recordings. All the fundamentals of music are there in that recording. It is like the perfect crystallization of what music is. Bill Evans plays a version of David Raskin's <i>The Bad And The Beautiful</i>. For me it all about the sound. It sounds good. There is nothing more to be said about it. That is basically what I hold up in front of me in everything that I do.<br />
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I can tell you that not too many composers (outside of film and television?) try and copy David Raskin. It just doesn't interest them in the slightest. And if they are classical composers I can tell you than none of the lines written by most composers sound anything like Bill Evans' lines. I kept waiting to hear a string section play those lines in symphony and I never heard them. I heard lots of highly chromatic lines that had a flattened effect, but you know Evans outlines seventh chords for crying out loud. He did this because it worked.<br />
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On the director's commentary for <i>Three Women</i>, Robert Altman commented on the "atonal" score for his picture. He was curious and bemused by this score. He said it wasn't really his thing even though he liked it for the film. In his own words. "Well I like Gershwin!" He delivered this line in a manner of defeated helplessness as if to say, "Gershwin wrote music that just makes me feel good and better than other things."<br />
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So when the song goes "I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?" it is a way of referring to a kind of common practice or consensus.<br />
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Really, in my music I am not trying to reinvent music, or overturn it, or overthrow it, or create some unprecedented music that nobody has ever heard before. Quite the opposite. I just want to get better and better at what others have done who came before me. The emotions I end up expressing are my own emotions, and the amount of improvisation I insist upon ensures that it is personal.<br />
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But the foundation is adamantly not my own. I am of the school of thought that says if something is not broke you don't fix it. I don't think any musical language has an expiration date on it. The whole idea that at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, you change your musical style like you discard a wardrobe of clothes that is no longer in vogue and change into a new suit of clothes that matches the mood of the new year is actually a complete misunderstanding of art. Artists can create new things but often those new things have deep, unconscious connection to very old things even if the connection is wanting to destroy that old thing in an agonistic way akin to Bloom's "anxiety of influence." That is it is an irony. The attempt to demolish something in the past chains you nevertheless to that same past. But the past is still here with us, it isn't past, because all the arts involve an awareness that time in the usual sense is an illusion.<br />
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Indeed, I want my music to remind people of things they have heard a million times somewhere but can't quite place it. I want it to be familiar somehow to them. I want to make the past alive, the distant past too, not just the recent past. I want my music to make people feel as if they've traveled in time in a cyclical, rather than linear direction. I want the the 1970s to become the 1930s, to become the 1890s, then forward to today and around again. To do this I use lots of cliches. I use every musical cliche in the book and run them into the ground. Sometimes I use these cliches and then transcend and transform them so that the cliche is left behind and something else emerges in place of cliche. But what emerges is also not entirely original. This is why my music is tonal.<br />
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In the terms of Adorno's binary, contra Adorno, I chose Stravinsky over Schoenberg. I made this choice sometime in my teens and I have never looked back. I was punished severely for it I must say.<br />
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I make only two demands on my listener, and this really is the hard part of hard listening. The first is for the listener to relinquish all attachment they may have to musical styles and gestures of, oh, the past twenty or thirty years. You are going to hear things older than that, maybe not much older. It might be 1975, it might be 1955, but you won't hear much 1995 or '85. I am sorry about that. As an artist you have to know your limitations. The second demand is that listeners accept the kind of temporal demands you get in classical music, that is, lengths longer than the usual size of popular music.<br />
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Pauline Kael: "If art isn't entertainment then what is it? Punishment?"<br />
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Yet I am <i>so</i> <i>not</i> the populist. There are so many things wrong with populism. For one thing, you place yourself at the mercy of the populace. I sincerely hope the populace enjoys my music. The fact that at one time my style of music was the popular music gives me hope. But every artist has to live and work in their time, alas and alack.<br />
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I don't want to define what tonality is. I mean the avant-garde crowd tried to come up with a word - pantonality - to try and conceptualize <i>all</i> music as tonal. This is either overreaching or disingenuous. But all forms of tonal music - and the virtue of tonality is the widest diversity of styles found therein - have some kind of hierarchy of pitches. They are organized based on the sonorous qualities of thirds and perfect intervals and so on. You can do anything you like after that, but that is the root, as it were. It is what unites Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, Beethoven, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, The Beatles, Bobby Short. All of these names are doing their own form of that. Without a kind of tonality their considerable achievements would not have been conceivable.<br />
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I will break from tonality, for color. I will do this a lot or a little depending on the emotional makeup of the music, but it always comes back to some kind of tonal center in the end.<br />
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I close with a quote from George W. S. Trowe: "you can't help who you love."<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-75976765520798837782015-08-29T22:24:00.001-07:002015-08-30T10:37:08.756-07:00A New Installment Concerning 1970s Cinema Aesthetics Part Two: A Love Letter to The Last Detail <br />
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<b><span style="color: blue;"><i>The Last Detail</i> is a film that was created in 1974 and reflects a time in filmmaking art where the heavier cameras would be placed in the thick of real experience, in this case documenting the actual locations in which the figures would have travelled were they in life rather than in art. We are forced to witness the not always pleasant physical in<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">stitutions that were created to contain large numbers of people: military bases, city train stations and bus terminals, drab diners and banal bars, public bathrooms, cheap sandwhich and pretzel stands, skating rinks, whorehouses housed in the greater Boston area, student/hippie apartments, the cheapest motel - with barely functional cots for beds, and finally, a woodsy park area in the snowy cold Winter, with no people except the three principals - all three of whom seem ill clad for such Winter, shivering in their military issue pea coats and open necked sailor’s uniforms. All of these environments are photographed in the most direct fashion possible, head on, so as to emphasize the brutalist designs of the era. This is a utilitarian and austere presentation, with just enough light needed to make everything out and no more, and the full force of the characters’ behaviors - their souls really - exposed to take center and stand out in relief. </span></span></b></blockquote>
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<span style="color: red;">(note the environments such as bar and streets locations)</span></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue;">Were the picture done today, even if the same locations were used, the cameras would be as light as is possible and everything would shake just a bit - the vogue now for practically a couple of decades - and quite possibly we wouldn’t get the same feel for either character or environment. Films today actually get too close (for my taste) to the figures and move around them and into them, whether it is the work of the Dardenne Brothers or last year's <i>Whiplash</i>, and this strategy of excessive closeness, whatever its virtues, (and make no mistake: the Dardenne Brothers are fine filmmakers but there is still room for criticism vis a vis the issues I am raising which are general and technological rather than individual) is a strategy that enables us to make emotional attachments without really seeing fully what is front of us. There is an attempt to go directly inside without the consideration of the overall frame. <i>It is a kind of advocacy or special pleading masked as observational documentary. </i></span></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><b>I have called 1970s cinema (and this includes both mainstream so-called commercial productions and independent or so-called avant-garde productions) a cinema that tries to stay free from conceptions. Direct expressions of the actors’ emotions and direct presentation of the environments in which they move always comes first. People do things and we have to be faced with them. We might be amused, horrified, entertained, but we will have to live through things as they are presented to us without the sweeping summaries and conceptualized condensations that have come into all of the arts of the past thirty odd years. If the characters are what we could call today sexist, or immature or macho, and perhaps they are, they are in a way that is true to the selves represented, without the safety of having theories or conclusions about it. There is a palpable humanity present. One way people often have of describing this is naturalism and authenticity etc. but those are the wrong way of talking about this because the effect I am trying to describe is found in both the most fantastic and artificial of contents as well as the most "realistic". We need a way of talking about this aesthetic that accounts for this constancy across the spectrum.</b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><span style="color: #141823;"> </span><b><span style="color: blue;">Hal Ashby, Michael Chapman, Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, Otis Young and the rest LOVE</span></b></span><b><span style="color: blue;"><i style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"> </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">their people and their ugly, florescent lit locations and want us to give them a fair hearing, as a form of witness. It is one of the reasons for "Badass" Buddusky’s unrestrained joy in performing for us and performing to get the young, green and perhaps slow Randy Quaid to accept and learn from Nicholson's performance, to be truly alive and present to the moment. 1970s film tells the audience that we and the world matters: it doesn’t want to explain and analyze. It wants to present it all to us and we are along for the ride or not. If we go on the ride we will leave behind our judgements and assumptions and learn to find the world interesting as it is, in itself.</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">It is interesting to compare Robert Altman in this regard. Robert Altman is absolutely merciless in his criticism of many things in society yet his absolute fidelity to what he chooses to photograph works agains his own intelligent skepticism and the joy of the human comedy as a sight of wonder and fascination is the final criteria rather than any melioristic ambitions or theoretical explanations. The love of observation is there in Altman as it is in the far more generous and forgiving Hal Ashby. Curiosity is at a premium. It was as if the filmmakers were discovering the world for the first time, even given the long history that preceded them, so great was their commitment to the stylistic practice I am trying to describe here.</span></b></span></div>
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dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-49906147627444523462015-07-27T22:42:00.001-07:002019-01-06T09:58:07.991-08:00Aesthetics of 1970s Cinema<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It has been quite a while, too long in my book since I have written on 1970s aesthetics. In so doing I should like to restate and reflect upon my two categories of condensation and immersion. In the culture of the 1970s, otherwise ordinary, middle class people began to explore most intensely and with an ethic of thoroughness all sorts of aspects of heretofore unexamined daily life. This could take the form of expressive therapies.<br />
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Among authors and cultural producers of all kinds - from lowly television directors to an Ingmar Bergman or an Andrei Tarkovsky, from Neil Simon to Sam Shepard - this took the form of a rigorous examination of certain themes of existence with a heightened sense of urgency. One of the ways I describe this is immersion: a preference for the experiential moment over a linear game plan or deadline. Over and over again, in all sorts of ways, in 1970s films the creation of representation is given over to such moments. That they seem to stick out in an audience's mind is seen as a value rather than an excess. This is in large part an extension of philosophic romanticism more generally, which means it has roots in the 19th century and also in American radicalism, particularly the ideas of Emerson, Thoreau, the first feminist and civl rights leaders, the poets, the jazz musicians, the folk and rock musicians and many more.<br />
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One of the reasons why so many road pictures were made is that they are by nature episodic and inherently critical of the classical Aristotelianism that is one part of what I mean by "condensation." Think about <i>Two Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, Ed Pincus' Diary, Jon Jost's Last Chants For A Slow Dance,</i> Barbara Loden's <i>Wanda</i>, <i>Vanishing Point</i>, Peckinpah's <i>Convoy, Corvette Summer, The Last Detail</i>. Now on this list are high art, practically avant-garde pictures, lowbrow mainstream fare, and pictures in between. I don't want to make the claim that in this rather disparate group of pictures there are not classical things that happen to characters i.e. that there are not conflicts that are resolved in some way. Scenes do appear for reasons of linear development and all the pictures listed have an overall structural integrity.<br />
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Yet - and this is crucial - in each and every single case there is the sense that such linear development is secondary to the moments. This is the episodic nature of the material. One of the things an episodic style can do is to create a sense of observational distance. We have to face change in and over time in such a way that we are forced to deal with difference. There is not the comfort of the unity supplied by stasis in location. By breaking from one scene or episode to another we are forced to relate to what we experience as a moment. This is quite similar to literature in which description is carried to fullest expression. This is in Proust of course who was the master of such prose style, but in a more modest and popularized form you even see it in John Updike who was greatly influenced by Proust. The complicated syntax of Henry James is yet another example. By heightening the syntax with the sort of subordinate clauses you get in Henry James, a real disruption of ordinary ways of representing human psychology occurs. The reader has to yield to the sentences on the page and make meaning with them. Henry James is an immensely immersive writer. He is also a disliked by many readers for this very reason.<br />
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Lets talk of immersion for a moment. It is sometimes best to use a very populist, almost "commercial" example. There is no better example of this than Paul Mazursky's film <i>Harry and Tonto</i>.<br />
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It is an interesting picture because it violates about every textbook rule of classical cinema storytelling. Story seems to surrender to episode. Harry meets colorful character after colorful character, various family members, drifters, hitchhikers. gurus, health food fanatics, hookers, even an old girlfriend who know appears to have a serious case of dementia and is in a nursing home. But what is the <i>point </i>of all of these meetings? We learn more about Harry, I suppose, and we get a real time capsule and documents of the times of the 1970s but mainly we feel various things about these episodes, our emotions accumulate and eventually the picture ends. The experience of the picture is not the result of a condensation that "telegraphs" us into a point not even an overall point about what aging is or isn't - one of the ostensible themes of the picture!<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aPZ87LqYzlM" width="420"></iframe><br />
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Now one of the things that is really interesting about this picture, and I'm going to go and say something quite radical here, is that the net effect and result of this picture seems to me so much more deeply valuable, affecting, humane, meaningful, than all of the perfectly plotted, high stakes, much more psychologically intricate and subtle, high publicized and critically praised pictures of the past thirty years. Indeed it is as if all of the rigor of, say <i>The Matrix</i>, <i>Inception</i>, <i>The Usual Suspects</i> etc., feels almost juvenile in their cleverness when compared with the sheer momentary focus on the "regular folks" we meet in a picture like <i>Harry and Tonto. </i><br />
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When I use the term immersion I mean that the material of the moment, for example in a shot, is the main focus of interest rather than a scene or a shot existing for another.<br />
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When I use condensation I mean that the material generated by the editing of shots and/or a forward momentum of linear action is the main focus of interest. Of course you can have both and neither is inherently more valuable than the other. In the 1970s immersion is exploited and explored for the maximum stylistic effects such a mode can achieve. It is also important to clarify that it is not a question of a character driven or narrative driven presentation. Many character driven pictures are completely condensed in style (most current biopics are completely condensed in fact. The one exception I can think of is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSr14SM61bk">Saint Laurent</a> which is so utterly immersive it feels like it was made in the 1970s).<br />
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Or take<i> Melvin And Howard</i> by Jonathan Demme, which seems far more interested in all of Melvin Dummar's escapades as a working man, his problems in his relationships with his ex wife, the details of the town in which he lives and works etc. than in the dramatic suspense of whether he will get the monetary gift from Howard Hughes which is the starting point for the entire picture. (The opening scene with Jason Robards as Howard Hughes and Paul LeMat is itself an example of an archetypal 1970s episode, where the frank, emotional interaction of the actors becomes the entire point. "Real" and Natural" are the usual ways of describing it but I think immersion gets at this better because it avoids the value laden confusion that comes with the talk of being realistic, and as I have said before none of it is realistic).<br />
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Indeed Demme goes out of his way to deemphasize the narrative thrust of the entire picture - the question of the Hughes will - and instead focus on colorful details along the way: for example, the weird strip club where one stripper has an arm in a cast and happily chats with the other stripper next to her while they work (one of the strippers- the one with both working arms is Melvin's wife, played by Mary Steenburgen), that is, until Melvin shows up to interrupt her show. Now in one sense the scene accomplishes the goal of dramatic conflict and forward momentum but you just know that Demme is much more interested in the club, the patrons, the fact one stripper has an arm in a cast, the texture of the whole thing, than in either psychology or plot as either of these are normally understood. There is even a comic <i>Benny Hill</i> type of episode where Dummar is the milkman and is being seduced by a woman at home, all the while accompanied by some kind of bass heavy background music that sounds a blend of bluegrass and disco It seems there for the comic color of it. I seriously doubt that if the picture were done today such a montage would even be included, unless there were a narrative consequence to it.<br />
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Demme wants the human comedy (the aesthetic details) to override other considerations (the state of Dummar's marriage, whether stripping is right or wrong, considerations that would obsess other directors more "condensed" than Demme). A perfect example is the outrageously comic and over the top performance by Dabney Coleman who plays a judge, in a courtroom wherein he warns Dummar that if Dummar is not telling the truth "I will have your hide." The fact that the judge talks as he does and looks as he does, especially with the well known Coleman mustache, <i>is </i>the point, not the suspenseful meaning of the scene. (Will Dummar get in trouble? Will he get his money?) It is an opportunity for a comic detail. Dabney Coleman's warning/summation is accompanied by a 360 degree shot of this court, one of the most ugly 1970s courtrooms you will ever see, and Demme makes sure that we really have to witness this court and Dabney's colorful presentation in it.<br />
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I mean it is very different that most suspenseful courtroom scenes, it is an anti-courtroom scene, almost a parodic comment upon the whole notion of "courtroom drama", because Dabney Coleman's delivery and that court itself seem to upstage the narrative thrust of the whole picture. It as if Demme is more interested in the fact that a judge would talk in such a way in a courtroom than in the overall function of the scene in a linear sense.<br />
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Melvin Dummar himself is a remarkably limited and problematic character, and it is of course in the nature of 1970s aesthetics to consider such a character worthy of the utmost consideration, and Demme does everything he can to present him to us with a sense of love and observational detachment. Demme as a director has little or no interest in doing anything to him or with him, or having him grow or develop in ways those characters around him might prefer. Demme wants us merely to look at him and deal with him as he is. We learn that Melvin Dummar is a dreamer and bad with money, and that his wife is hurt and disappointed by this but it plays out in such an observational fashion. Nothing is telegraphed. Demme spends an inordinate amount of time on a company party and a lot of time is spent documenting the garish and kitschy variety shows and contests of the period, in particular a game show. It is as if Demme, (and in this he is spiritually kin to Michael Ritchie, Robert Altman and John Cassevettes) seems to value documenting a time and a place rather than representing a traditional psychological narrative.<br />
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This is what I mean by momentary "color" overtaking some lasting conclusion. Now according to the rules of Demme's game we do have a really well written script, (by Bo Goldman) but the writing plays by different rules than the more condensed kind of script. The script is interested in the observation of particular<i> </i>people in a particular time rather than narrative complexity. It is also interesting to note that as the 1970s ended Demme changed his style into a more condensed one. Think of <i>Silence Of The Lambs </i>or <i>Philadelphia</i> which are emblems of condensation, all forward momentum and high stakes conflict from start to finish. (Only in <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Getting_Married">Rachel Getting Married</a> </i>does he use a more immersive style akin to what I have been describing as a 1970s mode. It feels very much like a 1970s movie set in our current moment).<br />
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The question of how to film a scene and how different directors have done so is one of the most important questions in any kind of cinema studies. This is so for a very good reason: the decisive criteria in deciphering, understanding, and ultimately evaluating any work of art is how the work of art feels to us in linear time, that is, as we experience it. I use feeling here in the widest sense to account for thoughts instigated, moods set and so on. I believe this experience trumps any kind of retroactive or analytic reconstruction of it at a later date.<br />
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This is is why surface can be so important. Everything from how characters look to how they talk to one another, to how much environment dominates or recedes, to the lighting and colors and so on is all we really have to go on. Just as Henry James' unusual syntax is ultimately most important about his writing since it is what we have to actually read on the page, so too is Paul Marzursky's and Jonathan Demme's use of certain types of characters (humble ones immersed in the quotidian, to name but one quality), and use of certain types of environments and locations (ones shared by a wide, cross section of humanity and reflecting the tastes and budgets one would find, usually reflecting institutional or mass produced criteria) of ultimate importance about their pictures because it is what we have to look at on the screen. It would behoove critics and historians to turn their attentions more to these concerns than the more speculative and theoretical approaches that often take us so far away from the page and screen. While context might help, might further be necessary, it is insufficient if we are taken away from the sensuous experience of the work of art itself, whatever it may be.<br />
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<br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-26571516387180065722015-05-20T20:22:00.004-07:002015-05-21T01:21:51.306-07:00An Interview With Andrew Hartman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As both wild eyed mystics and sober historians appear to agree, one of the only constant things is change. In recent decades, folks seem to be more interested in history than ever before. While in the opinion of the present author this "history mania", if that is the correct formulation, takes the often debased forms of cheap historical docudramas, fetishistic reenactments of this or that major historical event, pet revisionist theories, and pathographies replacing hagiographies, there is still a great need for the professional historian as "public intellectual".<br />
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The need is perhaps the greatest now: Americans struggle to make sense of some of the overwhelming changes that have remade the United States, especially since the revolutions of the 1960s and the battle over ideas that is often called "the culture Wars" of both the 1980s and 1990s.<br />
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The best example of such an historian I can think of is Andrew Hartman. He has written a new history of some of these changes: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Soul-America-History-Culture/dp/022625450X">A War For The Soul Of America: A History Of The Culture Wars.</a> Whether it is called the Left or Right, or Red State-Blue State polarization, "culture war" is not as new as we might initially think; neither is it as powerful a force now as it once was.<br />
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I had the good fortune to ask Professor Hartman, who teaches at Illinois State University, some questions about those decades, and about his must read new book, and politics and history in general.<br />
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Mitch Hampton (MH)<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">: As
I prepared to discuss the many issues you raise in this marvelous work of
American history I happened to gaze at this month’s Vanity Fair, and, looking
inside, reluctantly passing the Sofia Vegara article, I come across a name
straight out of your book: Dinesh DeSouza, who was evidently in some kind of
financial legal trouble, even doing time. Also there is a piece on another
Bloom - Harold - and his defense of a traditional artistic canon. Some of the
issues raised are still with us. I understand that you conclude in the book
that the “culture wars” are “history,” about a periodization involving
something that occurred in the 80s and 90s, and therefore is in at least one
sense past. What are your thoughts on the world the culture wars made, the
legacy of those years? What strikes you as anachronistic and what strikes you
as still relevant?</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Andrew Hartman (AH): As you
know the bulk of my book is about the years between the 1960s and 1990s and I
like to think my historical argument for that period is well documented. I only
step onto thin ice in my brief and intentionally provocative conclusion where I
argue that my book gives the culture wars a history—because they <i>are</i> history. There are two ways to think
about the culture wars as history. On the one hand to say the culture wars are
history is merely an indication that it is due time that historians make sense
of the cultural conflicts of the 80s and 90s as history, as something from the
past that matters to our contemporary understanding of ourselves.</span><!--EndFragment-->
</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>On the other hand to
call the culture wars history is to say something about them being of a past
world, not our world. And indeed I argue in my conclusion that the logic of the
culture wars has been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course. I will use
two examples to illustrate this point.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">First, religious
conservatives are more hesitant to conflate their values with national values.
Whereas Jerry Falwell argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s that homosexuality
was not only a sin but an affront to the values that animated the nation—he
spoke on behalf of America as he imagined it when he criticized the gay rights
movement—few major conservative figures are inclined to do this today. Rather,
religious conservatives have sought to create autonomous zones wherein they
might live out their religious and cultural values free from intervention from
a secular federal government. This is the underlying logic of Indiana’s recent
attempt to create a zone of “religious freedom” that would allow private
citizens to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Such separatism also
undergirds the approach that many conservatives take to public schooling.
Millions of them have abandoned the battlefield of educational and curricular
politics in favor of sending their children to private Christian day schools or
even more commonly they have taken to homeschooling their children. They may
have dreams of retaking the national culture one day, but few people in the
mainstream take such dreams seriously. The secular left largely won these culture
wars.</span></b><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">Second, think about
one of the major fronts in the culture wars: the struggle over the canon, or
the university humanities curriculum. Those battles are now </span>rather
remarkable artifacts of a history that feels increasingly distant. Whether Stanford
University ought to assign John Locke or the anticolonial theorist Frantz
Fanon, a debate that played out on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Wall Street Journal</i> editorial page in 1988, would be nonsensical in today’s
neoliberal climate marked by budget cuts and other austerity measures. Now
Locke and Fanon find themselves for the first time on the same side—and it’s
looking more and more like the losing one. On the winning side? Well, to take
but one example, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winning</i>, General
Electric CEO Jack Welch’s breezy management book, which is widely read in
American business schools. Sadly, even <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-language: JA;">the almighty Western canon, revised to reflect a
multicultural society or not, seems feeble up against <i>Winning</i> and the
cult of business. Conservative defenders of the humanities are voices in the
wilderness. The philistines are on the march.</span></span></b><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;">MH: As a moderate reading your book I find myself as frustrated with some
of the Left as I am with the Right. It was </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">particularly</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"> odd to see the Right resurrecting points of view that were the laughing stock of jokes in the early 60s like the movie <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>. Any thoughts on that? </span><!--EndFragment-->
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">AH: There is no doubt that the culture wars had a polarizing effect. I
would say that this was partly structural—increasingly the left and right had
their own institutions and constituencies to speak to and on behalf and thus
there was less of a felt need to convince the unconvinced, which is the logic underlying
moderation. But polarization was also historically grounded in what I call the
dialectic of sixties liberation. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Pre-sixties American culture was stultifying to those who did not live
within its norms, and as such the New Left movements against normative America
seemed immoderate. In response, the forces of reaction framed their defense of
the old order in equally intemperate terms. But I caution against nostalgia for
moderation because rarely has American political and cultural history been defined
by what we might call moderate rhetoric—the United States is not Canada!
Second, the postwar age of consensus might only seem moderate in retrospect
because the spectrum of political and cultural possibilities was so narrow.</span></b></blockquote>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">MH: I was struck in
reading this book at the philistinism and lack of culture to the whole lot of
the Right in the 80s and 90s. It appears that the Left had the better minds and
the better prose. Do you think some of the hostility could be a kind of
unconscious jealousy at the intellectual powers of some for those figures? I
can't imagine Lynne Cheney being unaffected by a basic realization that she
just isn't as deep a thinker along the lines of a Fred Jameson or Joan Scott,
for example. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGTr1VLRObKy0tBdQ41lly0vSeba38FXRmmEO1tZzlFVqe4JhP5E2le67V0h-chKj5d2AcTbUwSALcxGUeA2VMhnLlT0M2Le6EeCXfM9BoYERyMVwv90V1Rlc-83EA7G7f9FrBlMTk0ATU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.28.29+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGTr1VLRObKy0tBdQ41lly0vSeba38FXRmmEO1tZzlFVqe4JhP5E2le67V0h-chKj5d2AcTbUwSALcxGUeA2VMhnLlT0M2Le6EeCXfM9BoYERyMVwv90V1Rlc-83EA7G7f9FrBlMTk0ATU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.28.29+PM.png" /></a></div>
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(Photo of notable historian Joan Scott)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgypz5506xguVKKrD_b2hwoXg-y06uRIQfyjIXY3zSk-eZjNECjI9uLqASTk2Ca-KMuF0XZUv1HJUundVBtXPoyQkWle3MwRlWpcsb2l8mA73nBVJ87sNL2Msv1wZO56tc_hz9vq3a4OfgS/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-21+at+4.05.23+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgypz5506xguVKKrD_b2hwoXg-y06uRIQfyjIXY3zSk-eZjNECjI9uLqASTk2Ca-KMuF0XZUv1HJUundVBtXPoyQkWle3MwRlWpcsb2l8mA73nBVJ87sNL2Msv1wZO56tc_hz9vq3a4OfgS/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-05-21+at+4.05.23+AM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
(Photo of Fred Jameson, Notable Marxist critic)</div>
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<b><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">AH: Actually, as I
indicated above, conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s were more about “culture”
than they are now. </span>William Bennett, who served in the Reagan
administration as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and then
as Secretary of Education, <span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">argued that every
American should have an education grounded in the humanities, specifically, the
Western Canon. He wanted all Americans to read Socrates and Shakespeare.
Compare that to someone like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who apparently
thinks an education based in the humanities is a luxury good that American
taxpayers should not have to fund. Many conservative critics, those like Alan
Bloom and Roger Kimball, were quite learned in a very classical way and I doubt
they were motivated by intellectual insecurities about philistinism. In fact
they likely believed their left-wing counterparts were the philistines for
thinking the canon could be revised to include more recent works by women and
minorities—works that conservatives believed had not stood the tests of time
and tradition. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>That said you are
correct that, more generally, conservative culture warriors often appeared to
be hostile to higher learning, especially if such learning threatened those
values they held dear. It has perhaps been this way for a long time since
universities have been the great engines of secularization since the late 19<sup>th</sup>
century. </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">MH: In general you
have an uncanny empathy and sympathy for all of the minds you cover in this
book. You seem to get inside the minds of all the different interest groups and
make their feelings and thoughts come alive for the reader, making this history
book read like a novel. You also are able to focus on what was at stake for all
of the principles and principals involved. Is this gift you have simply part of
what it is to be an historian and where do you think this deft skill comes from
in your own experience and in your scholarship? I'd imagine teaching a lot of
conservative students, say, could be one experience that could strengthen that.
Putting experience aside, you just might have this gift of empathy and it is a
mysterious thing. Not all writers of history have it however.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>AH: Well, thank you
for the generous compliment! </b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>"Although I am on the left, and have always been on
the left, I try my best to empathize with those whom I write about. Nothing
bothers me more than the tendency among American historians, most of whom are
on the left, to not take our illiberal or conservative or reactionary
historical subjects seriously as thinking human beings whose ideas had a
certain logic to them. Richard Hofstadter was a brilliant historian and gifted
writer—I still love reading him—but his dismissal of conservatives as
psychopaths will forever count against him.</b><o:p><b> </b></o:p><b>How did I learn how
to become empathetic? I did grow up among a lot of conservatives, and continue
to have a lot of conservative friends and students. But more important is
historical imagination, which I take seriously. As historians we have to
imagine worlds different from our own—worlds both utopian and dystopian; worlds
as they were understood even by people we find disreputable."</b></span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDuR4E5DzYTPZR9XZiE9UJ2lVQpGX6afwsgzcZ-JlozMeX9iUftmcBywkvWemLCzxMKMFfFzTevlc5gTq6xrXx09wGDd45s29cLqoAM8ELrctMvmqHpxo6b-w0f66mlbYphg4VGZ-j5z-E/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-21+at+4.09.14+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDuR4E5DzYTPZR9XZiE9UJ2lVQpGX6afwsgzcZ-JlozMeX9iUftmcBywkvWemLCzxMKMFfFzTevlc5gTq6xrXx09wGDd45s29cLqoAM8ELrctMvmqHpxo6b-w0f66mlbYphg4VGZ-j5z-E/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-05-21+at+4.09.14+AM.png" width="226" /></a></div>
(pictures above: historian Richard Hofstadter, author of <i>Anti-Intellectualism In American Life</i> and <i>Age of Reform</i><span style="mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">MH: One of the things that struck me most about this story and made it a
sad one for me (and again, this might be an effect of me being hopelessly,
helplessly moderate) is how extreme and partisan those years were. It seems
there were so few moderates. Everybody was always working for the team and have
this loyalty to the team and the side, even if the team got out of hand or
appeared to cross some kind of line. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">The Left seemed to be stuck in a kind of Marxist tradition - in a kind of
anti-liberal or illiberalism, however new their ideas may have been and however
critical they may have been of orthodox Marxism. The Right seemed completely
unwilling to depart from the most patriotic and propagandistic mindset and
unwilling to concede to the empirical discoveries that challenged an a priori
American greatness and just kept digging in more. </span>Certainly the Right
wing continues to be quite extreme in tone and style.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>AH: Everyone in the culture
wars does indeed take an illiberal approach, in tone if not in content, to
political discourse. In part this is because the postwar consensus was grounded
in a narrow, stripped-down version of liberalism such that when both the left
and right attacked the center they attacked liberalism. An early right-wing
culture warrior like William Buckley, Jr hated the postwar liberal consensus
nearly as much as any given New Left activist, although Buckley hated the world
that came after the sixties had shattered the consensus even more! (For a
brilliant analysis of this I recommend Kevin Schultz’s great new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Buckley-Mailer-Difficult-Friendship-Sixties/dp/0393088715">Buckley and Mailer: The Brilliant Friendshipthat Shaped the Sixties.</a>) That the right continues to take an extreme tone
speaks to the fact that American culture has indeed changed in ways they find
disagreeable.</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>MH: Could you say
further on the issue of current capitalism and culture? Is a world where
everybody watches Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite more congenial to economic
equality? What is your opinion, if you have read it, of Benn Michaels’ <i>The Trouble With Identity</i>? <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">AH: You pose one of those
classic chicken-egg questions: is a common culture a prerequisite of a society
committed to some degree of economic equality? Indeed in my conclusion I pose
similar such questions. Perhaps the conservatism of mid-twentieth-</span>century American
culture is what made possible the New Deal? Can we have cultural revolution and
social democracy? It seems unlikely, which is a sad conclusion for me to make
because I would like both and see both as necessary if justice is the goal. The
New Deal and its concomitant culture (“Judeo-Christian America”) were hostile
to the aspirations of millions of Americans: some women, gays and lesbians,
racial minorities (especially African Americans). But on the other hand,
growing economic inequality has undercut such aspirations with as much force as
anything else. So, yes, I have read Benn Michaels and am sympathetic to the
class-based analysis that identity politics empowers neoliberalism. But it’s
not as simple as merely shutting down identity politics.</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">MH: Why do you think the neoconservatives turned so far to the Right?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">AH: To understand the early neoconservatives (Kristol and Podhoretz of the
late 1960s and early 1970s) I think it’s important to downplay their attitudes
about the state and American foreign policy and instead to emphasize domestic
political culture in relation to the many movements of the New Left. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDsrfV8E86J7wKtH7qp0gCKRzLWRq16-gX-viPN1uHGhztnm4aCeDUQCBxQDVlTG618Cu5STUFM9bUYdCiqnSwzSE8Yn2oBgfjAn1A0MtKv6VQMBjFIEarFY_eWJNU7U-327NVkdP6vwhC/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.18.35+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDsrfV8E86J7wKtH7qp0gCKRzLWRq16-gX-viPN1uHGhztnm4aCeDUQCBxQDVlTG618Cu5STUFM9bUYdCiqnSwzSE8Yn2oBgfjAn1A0MtKv6VQMBjFIEarFY_eWJNU7U-327NVkdP6vwhC/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.18.35+PM.png" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwKQHhdcJgmt0jIlf3uWsmyJobXakpI_pkrwlgqgXs5nO5bevM_GcFOXoa0L7BCnTmC2cfcc2c8nuBd93VAVhFwE7_FvMbh1X4rB0dtfXchA8e8lYkFLjVZHmeL3XzdwFEHz4QsSuQKP7/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.19.00+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwKQHhdcJgmt0jIlf3uWsmyJobXakpI_pkrwlgqgXs5nO5bevM_GcFOXoa0L7BCnTmC2cfcc2c8nuBd93VAVhFwE7_FvMbh1X4rB0dtfXchA8e8lYkFLjVZHmeL3XzdwFEHz4QsSuQKP7/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-20+at+11.19.00+PM.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">(Norman Podheretz, Irving Kristol)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">The
neocons had by then come to terms with the America of the liberal consensus.
They really, really liked it, in large part because it had been so good to them
and it made so much sense to them. It seemed like the ideal form of meritocracy
that hard-working bright Jews from working-class backgrounds could thrive </span>in. So when Black
Power activists and feminists and others critiqued the American meritocratic
consensus as a façade the neocons went further and further to the right in
their defense of traditional American values. Eventually this played on the
world scene as well but originally it was more about affirmative action and
student unrest and crime and feminism.</div>
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MH: I know I wrote
earlier that the intellectual quality was low in Right Wing writing as compared
to the Left. One might consider these figures an exception. Yet even the
neoconservatives seemed to fall into a kind of dumbing down. Were they simply
desperate to appear populist and in touch with common folks? I mean if you
compare some of these writers' early output it is quite intellectually
challenging and then in the late 70s and 80s some of them end up writing sort
of hokey hymns to America. I know this is my own opinion but was this trend
another expression of the war model? Once the neoconservatives joined a
particular team they had to pay on that team and make common cause with a Schlafly?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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AH: I think you are
right to spot a certain dumbed down quality to later neoconservative writings.
They joined the larger conservative movement and became spokespeople for that
movement, which was often crudely anti-intellectual. Even more than the
devolution of any one writer, we can detect right-wing declension through the
generations. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were highly original thinkers.
Their sons Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz often seem like party hacks. I mean
Bill Kristol shilled for Sarah Palin! This speaks to something that n<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=569277242662827759" name="_GoBack"></a>eeds further exploration: the decline of the conservative
intellectual.<o:p></o:p></div>
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MH: What is your vision of intellectual history? What are its promises and special skills? Where do you see it going?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">AH: <b>My favorite history to read, research, and write about is Big Ideas. What were the major animating ideas that motivated people to do the things they did, especially in terms of political behavior. But the great thing about intellectual history right now is its capaciousness. It is vibrant in terms of close readings of philosophical discourse, in terms of the history of sensibilities, in terms of political culture, etc. Intellectual history is alive and well and this is never more evident than when I click on the <a href="http://s-usih.org/">Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH) Blog</a> or attend the annual S-USIH Conference (disclaimer: I’m actively involved in both endeavors). It’s a great time to be an intellectual historian! (Now if only there were good tenure-track jobs for all of the great intellectual historians I know.</b></span></blockquote>
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dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-76238859517733971062015-03-24T00:15:00.001-07:002015-03-25T19:58:14.590-07:00More Childhood Memories From the 1970s: the mysteries of human character<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0W3tJB-fsVx7N2baIZhJW5VSrJTtGioQpw6P8Gm15hQ1QfTz5oE3tYbF8bNIiUSuchQXtaQBV1b_CzeNgkMAN3iT9YA_PZNjlTDhyphenhyphenGkbiqm5ZE1q3w-V77rr7YIlLPhAKoY9SaGUopjMt/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-12-17+at+1.10.52+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0W3tJB-fsVx7N2baIZhJW5VSrJTtGioQpw6P8Gm15hQ1QfTz5oE3tYbF8bNIiUSuchQXtaQBV1b_CzeNgkMAN3iT9YA_PZNjlTDhyphenhyphenGkbiqm5ZE1q3w-V77rr7YIlLPhAKoY9SaGUopjMt/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-12-17+at+1.10.52+AM.png" /></a></div>
My dad in 1977!<br />
<br />
I have been thinking about the word moderate and moderation, in reference to the title of my blog. I have also been thinking about writing down some more events from my childhood and adolescence.<br />
<br />
It has been far too long - I believe a couple of years in fact - since I wrote in prose form concerning personal matters. There is so much from my childhood and adolescence to pick and, if possible, explore that there is always the question of what my "sensory system" (as one of the ways in which I describe my peculiar temperament) will recall out of the steaming flux.<br />
<a href="http://automotivemileposts.com/thunderbirdmileposts70s.html">http://automotivemileposts.com/thunderbirdmileposts70s.html</a><br />
<br />
One of my fondest memories of being with my father is the opportunity to ride around the city of Tampa in a wide bodied red Thunderbird convertible, with sort of bucket seats, a little shag on the floor and a white vinyl top. My favorite part of the convertible was the 8 TRACK and I would create my own mix tapes with music that obsessed me and which I tried in earnest to study and absorb. As one example of a mix tape, one would open with a Bach <i>Bradenburg Concerto</i>, continue with Duke Ellington's <i>Such Sweet Thunder</i>, then a selection of Billy Cobham's <i>Stratus </i>album and finish with some solo piano of Bud Powell. The selections and order reflected my musical interests. And then there were the commercially preset releases of EARTH WIND AND FIRE, Chuck Mangione, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan and Randy Newman.<br />
<br />
I even loved how the songs would be interrupted abruptly with that violating, screeching sound, because of some technological limitation that couldn't accommodate pieces of music over a certain duration. Rather than being frustrated with this clearly awful design for music production or distribution, I would laugh about it for its very absurdity, though others around me would not laugh and usually just complain about it ruining the proper flow of the music. I think it is very possible that these ruinous interruptions, disrespectful of the musical artists, to say the least, had an unconscious influence on my own collage styled sense of nonlinear historical and musical time in my own compositions. I think I knew I had an odd sense of humor at this early stage of life.<br />
<br />
These were some unsurpassed happy moments from my childhood.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3PMMGvmnCSE" width="420"></iframe><br />
<br />
But there were things far less happy in my childhood and they do somehow connect with the T-BIRD. Another notable thing about the car was the curious man who sold it to my father. This man was initially a colorful, or "flashy" character to me. He was a used car salesman and the price for this Thunderbird was as low as was possible in those days.<br />
<br />
But when he was not working he would come over to the family house, sometimes unannounced and in a state of visible intoxication, swearing graphically and asking rude questions about political or religious matters. My mother always had a very kind way of setting him on his way, usually by calling his wife and asking for her to come get him, yet again.<br />
<br />
Mr. Anderson was sort of a figure out of a Michael Ritchie movie. I am thinking of Bruce Dern's Big Bob Freelander character in <i>SMILE. </i>He even wore similar powder blue leisure styled dacron suits, but with wild Quiana prints all over the elephant collared shirts underneath the suits, and the gold chains. Unlike the Big Bob Freelander character, Anderson could be mean, perhaps even sinister.<br />
<br />
The last thing I heard about this salesman Mr. Anderson was that he was so incensed and offended by a particular episode of the <i>Phil Donahue Show</i> that he took a semi-automatic rifle and shot out the t.v. set. Immediately after he called the local affiliate and complained that Phil Donahue was an unAmerican communist and that he considered an act of treason for any television station to bring such a host in to the rooms of ordinary and decent Americans.<br />
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<br />
<br />
Shortly after this incident his wife filed for divorce and both people left Tampa, leaving nothing but a For Sale Sign hanging over his used car lot. I really liked Mr. Anderson until I heard about him shooting up that t.v. set. From my point of view he was that flashy salesman who sold my father a really cool car, or something to that effect. It was in the light of new information that I had to reconsider who or what this man <i>really</i> was. This revisionist information was a kind of external sensation - involving destroyed televisions, abused wives, screaming and yelling and the like.<br />
<br />
There was something simply wild about Anderson. His form of right-wing excess was and is so common in this country. It was around me all of the time and I grew so completely used to it. It was the most shocking thing in the world to come back East and meet people who were not rabid like that in their passions. I had no idea there was this moderation because I saw so little of it. People who seemed urbane and laid back. It was not their Liberalism, if that is the correct formulation, that made them different. It was the fact that they did not make a federal case out of everything, or if if they did, it seemed under some kind of rational control. I craved that in my life, as a stay against the instability and volatility I encountered so often in Florida. Today when I read news about this or that extremist conservative movement or politician I am often reminded about these days. Perhaps I was seeing the birth of today's world.<br />
<br />
A lot of understanding people really comes from aesthetic signs from the outside. This is what Oscar Wilde really meant when he said that it is only the superficial people who do not judge by appearances. Appearances might include modes of dress, eye movements. body language, speech of course, and patterns of outward behavior over a period of time.<br />
<br />
It takes an enormous amount of volatility in feeling, reaction, however you choose to label it and with whatever psychological jargon of the moment, to take a gun and shoot at your t.v. set. Lest you think this was the sole province of a macho male like Mr. Anderson, the girls and women I met in Tampa had a similar volatility, usually about different things and expressed in different styles. If you got any of the religious ones started on a subject dear to their heart: the evils of Abortion for example, (being a common one), you would get screamed at about the issue as if your very own survival depended on whether you believed whatever the party line was.<br />
<br />
I remember in particular one woman ranting for an entire hour about the evils of a man who dared to be bare chested in public on the side of a road, and how this man was a symptom of all that was rotten and evil in America. This was during some kind of field trip in the de rigueur wide bodied Buick station wagon with that damned wood panelling on the side. Now the car moved so fast that I don't remember seeing the man at all but I had to hear about him and what he symbolized for the hour. And the woman doing the ranting was the Liberal person in town: she was the head of a high school drama department!<br />
<br />
And as I have written about in these personal series before, the behavior of children in some of my Floridian milieu was simply anti-scocial. Or maybe simply a-social. I really couldn't say. One kid threw me overboard in a canoe, causing me to come near death from drowning, only to be rescued by one of the counselors.<br />
<br />
Another kid would grab and grope at the intimate anatomy of any girl who happened to be in the vicinity, sometimes in the most vile and aggressive of fashions. He would cause pain and then laugh about it, exposing a mouth with a couple of missing teeth and the worst case of acne you'd ever see and then grab at the crotch of his LEVIS Toughskins. My one attempt to correct him - by essentially beating him up so that he would cease his predations, the only time I ever hit anybody - got <i>me</i> suspended! Amazingly the school took his side. I did hurt the kid and he had to be taken home that day and well, it practically went to Juvenile Court, or so that was the threat.<br />
<br />
I saw kids physically attack their own parents and teachers, throw tantrums of all kinds. Indecent exposure was common, and in a most public fashion, particular with a couple of kids who were severely mentally disturbed. (One myth or cultural assumption of the"free schools" at that time was that you should just throw all sorts of kids in one room together to teach them, under some notion of radical egalitarianism).<br />
<br />
One time a man beat his own son in front of me and some neighborhood kids in his trailer park home and we would all sort of watch, only too happy that we were not his children and outside the scope of his wrath. Oddly we never thought to report it or intervene. There was talk that he was taken away by the city and locked up for a very long time and that trailer was vacated.<br />
<br />
<br />
Coming home, the home of my own mother and father, was always a kind of shelter from the outside world, since my home seemed relatively calm and supportive by contrast. For these I am eternally grateful to my parents, yet I did realize much later that my own parents had little in common and lived for thirty years in conditions of undiscussed and silent unhappiness in their marriage. And regularly the outside world would intrude and it was never pretty, from religiously fundamentalist relatives, people peddling miracle cures and snake oil of all kinds and many other things that I couldn't begin to five a coherent description but involved lots of matching jumpsuits or jogging suits and sales of dubious motivational self-help books for one cause or another, whether religious or secular.<br />
<br />
From the earliest age I had no idea of or illusion about natural, human innocence or any notion of the kind. Human evil and untrustworthiness seemed as much integral to the human animal as any highly touted and advertised kindness.<br />
<br />
And the fare at the movie theaters worked in harmony with how life appeared in "reality":<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Q2khyuC6Ac" width="420"></iframe><br />
As a result, to this very day, I look askance at human emotion. I recognize that it is often more valuable than thinking, and it sets human souls and spirits upward unto the heights of joy. I could not be a musician or at least the kind that I am without my feelings. Yet emotion just as often sends people crashing downward in a manner that brings everybody in the surrounding environment down with them. I think that many people have the deepest need to impose their beliefs, in essence how they alone experience the world, unto others, utterly blind to the profound differences between us as if by the act of such imposition they will feel less alone or convert others to their system. Having unusual and nonconformist feelings I learned long ago to never hope for such things. Oh I will talk your ear off about my interests, passions, etc. but I don't ever really mean to impose or convert. If there is agreement or harmony I take that as a pleasant surprise or happy accident, in the fashionable formulation of the moment. I am reminded of the George Ramsay quote about which I learned from psychologist Steven Reiss:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The same difference of feeling and dullness of imagination explain what has often been observed: that one half of mankind pass their lives in wondering at the pursuit of others. Not being able to feel or to fancy the pleasure derived from sources other than their own, they consider the rest of the world as little better than fools, who follow empty baubles. They hug themselves as the only wise, while in truth they are only narrow-minded."</blockquote>
<br />
It seems that if people remembered this more than they do the world would vastly improve overnight. It is all part of this myth of consensus, and "getting to yes" and all of that earnest cheerleading that infects everything from TED talks, to current science, to, hell, how we even understand works of art. But that takes us a little further afield for my current purposes and will have to wait for a more appropriate time and place.<br />
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dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-15007549329136592492015-03-12T22:52:00.000-07:002015-03-13T10:03:34.569-07:00Thank YOU L.D. Burnett and S-USIH<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is photo of historian Norbert Elias.<br />
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My previous post was a profile of historian Bruce Schulman. It seems that history has been on my mind a lot lately. At another stage of my life, some twenty years ago, I was politically active. While I might have been as contrarian then as I am today I was not moderate by any measure of that word.<br />
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In the past fifteen years I have become politically inactive, almost quietist and contemplative, and in ways that it would be most inconvenient to describe in this post. Yet my intellectual interests have not only remained as strong as in the past but have only grown stronger which could be connected to my contemplative turn. (Ironically the world around me has become the most activistic in decades, with high profile, hot button issues all over the map; I am constantly reminded of my youth). It is not only my politics that have changed, but my priorities more generally.<br />
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What hasn't changed is my discomfort with technicalities. I am about the least technophile a person you could come across and still find on the internet. But one must live in one's world and so here we are and here I am.<br />
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One of the best sites I have come across on the net is <a href="http://s-usih.org/">S USIH</a>. I suppose the point of view on the site would be described as Left/Liberal, I guess reflecting the political orientation of many historians. But what really interests me about the site is the high level of discourse. It seems so rare to find such discourse. It is both a joy and a challenge to read this blog. Joyous in that the highest level of engagement with humanity's course is exhibited on this blog. But also challenging in that I am reminded often of what I have left behind, where my current viewpoints might differ from those I held in the past, and challenging, above all, by how much <i>more there is for me to learn</i>. I suspect I will only be done when my mind dies, to say nothing about possible future lifetimes.<br />
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When I found out that one of its members, one L. D. Burnett, was a good writer and was working on an important PhD thesis I just knew that I had to give her some archival materials from the days of my political activities. I sense in Burnett's work something really special and brilliant. I saw a kinship between elements in her familial background and mine. In my particular case, my grandparents on my father's side were rural people, originally from Kentucky before they finally settled in Indiana. Some of them did foundry work. My father used to tell stories of Woody Guthrie coming over to the house to play labor songs during a particular strike in Kentucky.<br />
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Also like Burnett I have a deep love for literature and the English language, though unlike her I chose to go get a music degree rather than an English degree. And so I decided to send her some material that definitely connects to such issues, some of which she exhibits on her blog.<br />
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She then thanked me in a lovely post where you can see some copies of the material I sent her. The title of her highly recommended blog is <i><a href="http://savedbyhistory.blogspot.com/2015/03/thank-you-reader.html">Saved By History</a></i> and I like to think that it is meant sincerely: that somebody being saved by something like history is not unlike being saved by music or literature and I can relate.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6Ptrc2cWRxU" width="420"></iframe>dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-82578061211580547202015-01-16T20:38:00.000-08:002015-01-17T09:56:19.410-08:00Historian Bruce Schulman and the 1970s<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Everybody who knows me and this peculiar blog knows that among my many aesthetic passions, alongside music and the many arts, can be found the decade of the 1970s.<br />
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When it comes to the 1970s, there was one person who was the first to take it seriously, to rescue the decade's boomer centric relegation to middle child status - or worse - the person who wrote <i>the</i> book on the seventies, indeed called it <i>The Seventies:</i> Bruce Schulman. Since then 1970s historiography has certainly expanded, even exploded. Not only is there a new book by Thomas Borstelmann, which blatantly recapitulates many of Schulman's original ideas, but in a turgid and humorless prose style, but there is also Jefferson Cowie's much better <i>Staying Alive</i>, and a few others. My own personal favorite after Schulman's is <a href="http://www.thomashine.com/the_great_funk__falling_apart_and_coming_together__on_a_shag_rug__in_the_seventi_63436.htm">Thomas Hine's </a><i><a href="http://www.thomashine.com/the_great_funk__falling_apart_and_coming_together__on_a_shag_rug__in_the_seventi_63436.htm">The Great Funk</a>.</i> Hine's book is unique in that it tries to make sense of the aesthetic exceptionalism of that decade - its flouting of decades old restraints in design and manners. Since Schulman's book perhaps there have been many others too numerous to name. I've read practically all of them.<br />
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But Schulman was there first. This makes Schulman an original, an innovator in history, in my book. Time and again I see his original insight -s about the "Southernization" of American politics and culture or the shift to a local, self-help kind of culture after the loss of trust in or even existence of larger institutions and universalistic aims pop up all over the place. Daniel Rodgers took a rather theory oriented, more academic approach in his <i>Age Of Fracture</i>. Rodgers book is certainly deep intellectual history and it is mightily impressive and learned - indeed it was one of the most important non-fiction books of the past few years, but it is a different kind of book in its intention than Shculman's. Schulman's book is actually the kind of book that serves as the best popular history, not unlike some of Arthur Schlesinger's books from the fifties and sixties, say, or a Howard Zinn or Jill Lepore (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-Wonder-Woman/dp/0385354045">whose new book on the history of Wonder Woman is a must read</a> if I may add a plug) This makes Bruce Schulman, though not a household name, a public intellectual of sorts. He writes the kind of clear and entertaining prose that too many historians shy away from out of a mistaken belief that it is less valid or serious. Here he is giving his take on the meaning of Martin Luther King's famous speech.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DudbST7i3o4" width="560"></iframe><br />
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In this all too brief sample of Schulman discussing the meaning of Martin Luther King, we see that Schulman's work on the 1970s is marked by a moral seriousness. When he talks about popular culture as he does at length in <i>The Seventies</i>, it always for some very good reasons, and not as an honorific to the popular status of the works he reviews.<br />
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Back in 2003 when I discovered his book I did a lengthy interview with him. It was interesting to revisit that article, a scanned excerpt of which is found below.<br />
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This is the only copy that exists of that. For a good twenty-five years I was a staff writer for a really decent periodical called <i>Organica</i> which is now sadly defunct. They gave me a lot of freedom, and used that freedom to spread the word about Schulman's new and exciting thesis about the centrality of the 1970s to subsequent decades. This is the shift to a "symbolic politics" and an increase in a decentralized ethic, and an abandonment of larger civic purpose and larger institutions.<br />
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Of course there is the "lighter" side of the decade, if that is the word for it.<br />
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Here is an excerpt from that page, if you cannot make it out from the picture.<br />
"It seems ludicrous to us today but if you look at Gentleman's Quarterly or Esquire, all of top highest end designers were proud of the polyester. They wold say '100% Quiana. It was the chief selling point in ads, not just for the leisure suits. but especially for their most conservative and refined business suits."<br />
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If there is anything that perfectly illustrates this feature of the decade it is this ad I came across most recently. Now if there is any fabric that epitomizes the virtues of natural fibers it is tweed, specifically wool, yet here is Johnny Carson modeling his line of tweed and proud as a peacock of the fact that it is a synthetic tweed.<br />
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Of course after the obligatory design elements are scrutinized the decade resonate even today in all sorts of ways. Schulman teaches at Boston University and we had the opportunity to have a reunion of sorts at the close of 2014. The foremost matter on my mind was how his students have changed over the years.<br />
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"One of the new things is that what you used to be able to rely on (students knowing) you can no longer rely on. They can be very smart and sharp and analyze texts well but you can't assume knowledge."<br />
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"Sometimes I will show something with absolutely no introduction and no identifying information. For example the famous <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/04/04/a-flag-a-busing-fight-and-a-famous-photograph">Stanley Forman busing photo from 1976.</a> And the results are interesting."<br />
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To this day Schulman's text continues to regularly sell 1,500 to 2000 copies which is encouraging. One thing of which I am proud was giving Schulman the idea of using the overlooked, underrated comedy <i>How To Beat The High Cost Of Living</i> as an example of the economic situation of the 1970s in popular culture.<br />
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Another new insight I learned from Schulman is one concerning sensibility, a matter that should definitely interest the fine folks over at the Society For U. S. Intellectual History http://s-usih.org/.<br />
This concerns the emotional manic-depressive character of the 1970s. Too many films that are set in the those times are only manic and miss the depressive aspect. I think for Schulman <i>Boogie Nights</i> and <i>The Ice Storm</i> were exemplary in this regard and last year's hit, <i>American Hustle</i> only hit the manic mark. Manic depression is an interesting way of looking at a sensibility, not as a scientifically proven diagnosis but as a metaphor.<br />
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These days Schulman's research has him going back to even earlier periods of historical time the years from 1896 to 1929, his contribution to the <i>Oxford History Of The United States</i>. Schulman expresses great curiosity and even a sense of awe at what he is learning, things he did not already know.<br />
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That is the best thing about the life of the mind. It is a joy that it is never boring and never done, and there is always more to learn.<br />
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Above all I have Bruce Schulman to thank for introducing me to Richard Hofstadter way back in 2003. He was kind enough to lend me <i>Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.</i> That too is a book that never seems to be out of date.<br />
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My only regret is that the film Selma had been released when we had our early fall reunion, if only so I could get Bruce Schulman, an L.B.J. scholar and author of an important text on Johnson, to respond to that newsworthy current release.<br />
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Next time.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-60304633374171754702014-10-08T00:01:00.000-07:002015-03-02T14:22:48.880-08:00New "Album" Hard Listening and Easy Listening<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: EffraStdLight, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: EffraStdLight, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 27px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">"I sit at the piano and write at the piano. I will freely improvise for an hour or two, to try and get this stuff out of my system. I'm writing a piece right now that has an orchestral feeling to it, with bursts of sound and energy. When I compose a piece it has to have a few elements to it. It has to be beautiful whatever that word may mean to you. Part of what that means is that it might have to be ugly in places, in order to be beautiful. I look to develop enough contrast. I also think in terms of color and texture, and will often write a piece of music where I will stay on one chord to develop it and really violate that chord. I'll take that chord and play it inside and out, then throw a pop thing in there, or something Elton John did. i'll do it consciously in a way to irk or disturb the listener who isn't expecting it. Or maybe I'll bring you to 1933 with Harlem style piano. I like breaking down boundaries and making a single piece of music feel like it has the whole history of music within it. I want people to be reminded of what musicians have done in the past. So it's almost a way of honoring the past. My goal is not to reinvent the wheel but rather for the music to be interesting and exciting and reflect the past. I think we as humans have to understand that we humans make and create stuff. We could debate about whether what we make is the Sistine Chapel or some junk, but what's most important is that humans create things." </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222;">(from bdcwire interview, Mitch Hampton)</span></span></span><br />
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My last post was on that most important of themes Love, last February, on Valentine's Day.<br />
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You might be tempted to ask what I have been doing over the spring and summer. Well mostly I have been working on my music. After months of deblogging I am back to do a little promotion and little philosophic reflection.<br />
<a href="http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/">http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/</a><br />
Now when that great of an amount of time has gone by, especially given the rapid rate of change you could worry about all of the newness that you would feel pressured to reflect, assuming that it could even be processed.<br />
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Luckily I am back to discuss music, in particular the release this month, on October 14th of my first solo recording work in, well, over fifteen years. It is called <a href="http://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv5975/">Hard Listening,</a> I suppose to reflect the influence of Easy Listening. I am most happy with it. Not only are all of the pieces original, they were all recorded on the most beautiful piano I could ever hope to find, and for the most part were done in a single take, "live" with no digital manipulation.<br />
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There were so many inspirations for this particular album. The oldest and most important inspiration was studying with the great pianist and composer Stanley Cowell, at New England Conservatory of Music. he taught me so many things, chief among them was the truth that though a pianist should be a good ensemble player and comp in a rhythm section, the central focus should be on a pianist's ability to be a complete solo pianist. Doubtless this conviction was in part inspired by the fact that the greatest pianist of them all, Art Tatum, played on Cowell's family piano when Cowell was still a child, in Ohio.<br />
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Cowell would have his students come in and prepare any piece of music as if that piece of music were meant to be written and performed by the piano alone, regardless of the original material. He wanted to hear good bass, and the full orchestral range of the piano and all registers. I cannot underestimate the spiritual and aesthetic value of studying under a master like him. It was the kind of experience for the ages, like a real apprenticeship from an older world. Here was a musician that could and would go from something as funky and "contemporary" as this:<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z_Hf-ucQkrA" width="560"></iframe><br />
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to this:<br />
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Maybe my so-called extreme eclecticism is similar.<br />
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One inspiration for <i>Hard Listening</i> were those album covers from the past.<br />
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Another inspiration was an obscure indie film by <a href="http://www.hofstra.edu/Faculty/fac_profiles.cfm?id=290">Pamela Corkey</a> called <i>Easy Listening</i>.<br />
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The other inspiration was the fact that I consider a lot of what is called easy listening music to be good or enjoyable music and was curious about it being considered dated or irrelevant and also curious about why it was demoted or rejected by so many people.<br />
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I almost want to write an essay called the Myth Of Relevance.<br />
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The most recent inspiration was from rewatching the movie <i>Lifeguard</i> from 1977, about which I wrote on this very blog a few season ago here<a href="http://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html">http://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html</a> One scene depicted a woman bringing a man home and her worrying that her female singer-songwriter album with a pensive and mellow piano and guitar would offend her date's presumably more masculine tastes.<br />
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<b>She says, "if you don't like that kind of music I can put something else on". </b>It was very effective that this was Anne Archer delivering the line.<br />
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My heart and brain reeled. Kind of music. Something else on. Appropriate music. Good music. Bad music. Cool music and uncool music. Music for "getting it on." Easy listening music. Mellow music, Art music. THAT kind of music. What does this all mean?<br />
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I'm a trained musician and I have played just about every kind of music you can think of. I don't like all of it, much of it is not even my favorite. Little of the music I like as much as the music of my mentor Stanley Cowell. I am not as eclectic as this album might have you guess. But I can't but help respond to the world's music and find in it a limitless fount.<br />
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I do have preferences. I would really rather listen to any <i>Soul Train</i> show from the 1970s that practically the whole corpus of "classic" rock. I really find the trumpet and flugelhorn of Freddie Hubbard more inspirational to me than many pianists. I would rather listen to Duke Ellington than Brahms. I would rather listen to Patrick Williams' television scores than most contemporary concert music! Influence is a mysterious thing. <br />
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I agree with Miles Davis that art and life are "all about style." Styles are made up of little gestures or details.<br />
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For example the late and very great Bobby Short had a habit of punctuating in between the musical phrases he sung these wild upward arpeggios on the piano. Even more remarkably, he would often hit or slap the top C key of the keyboard as part of these arpeggios, seemingly in indifference to whatever the key of the song was.<br />
In a similar vein, the pianist Bill Evans would start a solo portion of a piece with the most glowing and radiant statement of the dominant of the key, usually with added extensions, really usually what some call a sus chord of some kind. It set the tone, the stage for the piece, it always struck me as like a plant and the sun meeting in sympathetic harmony. Both of these ideas were the initial inspiration for the very first piece on the recording, <i>The Royal Blue Trickle</i>. Yet I doubt anybody listening is going to think necessarily of either Bill Evans or Bobby Short even though both, in so many ways, are guiding spirits behind this whole recording.<br />
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I grew up watching <i>Soul Train</i> every Saturday so that would have to be a spirit or a soul guide on this album as much or more than anything else especially as Don Cornelius passed away recently.<br />
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As a result of such inquiry, forms of pop made their way in, but on my own personal terms. Yes you might hear rock in here but I hope the articulation will be more Cedar Walton than Steve Winwood. (Nothing against Steve Winwood).<br />
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Even though I have some sympathy for Stravinsky's hyperbolic claim that music doesn't express things, especially in a contemporary climate in which tendentious and irresponsible musical scholars try to claim that there is a spirit of sexual pathology or masculinist flaws in something as wonderfully abstract as Beethoven, I nevertheless wanted to make a philosophical argument but in musical language, in the most abstract musical form no less, music without words: piano alone. Music might not have the specificity of narrative representation but it is the most highly expressive art of which I am aware perhaps because of the very absence of such specificity.<br />
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Thus, when I write and perform a twelve minute work called <i>Feminist Singer-Songwriter Without Words</i> it <i>is</i> a nod to Mendelssohn's <i>Songs Without Words, </i>a musical interpretation of the story of women's liberation in the Berlioz programmatic mode, a way for me to "wrestle" with cliched folk material about which I have some ambivalence, a way to celebrate political feelings that I endorse, and a way to embrace "Americana", folk rock, and 1970s culture more generally - all at once. I asked myself - philosophically, conceptually, rhetorically - if I didn't have any words and I were a woman in the mid to late1970s and wanted to do something instrumental and though unconstrained by any particular stylistic restrictions but still acknowledged my love for Bob Dylan and Carole King and Elton John like a lot of my peers, and by some fluke I got assigned to write a "classical" piece of music for some feminist anniversary of some kind, what would the resulting music sound like? This imagined hypothetical though experiment of a woman would be confronting many things at once: love for the identity and meaning of a certain music, need to stretch and expand out of an alleged comfort zone, the need to communicate as well to a wider public than her sisters in the revolution.<br />
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Except there is a catch. That piece doesn't end like that. Now the way I would write it is to take the end result I just described and hand it over to Charles Ives or maybe through some ideas of Bill Evans. I like to go out once and a while and I do like dramatic contrast. As much as I experiment on this album with trance-like ostinatos and repetitions, I do have to deliver some contrast. Music for me is a very delicate matter; the end result may have a rough texture at times, but it has to be right, and I might spend a long time indeed to get it to where I am satisfied.<br />
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A lot of my love for things has very little and at times frankly nothing to do with all of the things surrounding that thing that I love, all of that <i>context</i> that academics and now popular audiences go on so much about. That is why, in the end, when I hear a Patrick Williams or Henry Mancini piece it matters not in the least that it was intended to accompany this or that banal or forgotten television show because I find the music to be itself so good. I am using my ears to hear what was created and am not interested in having my attention distracted unduly by all of the stuff surrounding this musical creation. The world needs both a Patrick Williams and Gustav Mahler. It needs both a Pedro Coasta and Sam Peckinpah. It matters not whether we call it high or low or popular or unpopular, but whether in some way, in the most generous sense, it moves us.<br />
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I do hope everybody enjoys the music on this album as much as I enjoyed making it, I even enjoyed writing about it on here, which is a rare thing for me.<br />
<a href="http://<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UrnUQwJYjkI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UrnUQwJYjkI" width="420"></iframe></a><br />dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-21909717595767739952014-02-15T23:03:00.000-08:002014-02-15T23:03:15.614-08:00On Love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since this is Valentine's Day I should like to attempt to make an inquiry into what Love is. Everybody knows that Love takes different forms; some of which may be the most exalted, say, the love for God, the love for a loving and supportive family, if that is your good fortune, and the love between committed partners who have genuinely decided to share their lives with one another for the "long haul", as they used to say. Of course, I should mention that there is an earthy, lusty side of love that is often less exalted, though a constant and ineradicable drive of its own and making claims upon us in a all sorts of pleasurable, painful, mischievous and benign ways. Yet all of these different things are associated with the single word love: the choice of having a single word may be a truthful expression of some underlying or overriding unity or, conversely, it may be a "reductionist" denial of separate needs.<br />
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The picture you have before you is the very first Valentine's card I received, in response to the first of such cards I ever sent. I can say now, and did say then (much to the chagrin and even consternation of this young girl, for we were both children, though precocious children) that I "loved" this girl.<br />
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Note that in the card she made it a point to admit that she received other valentines, in spite of mine being her favorite, and that, though she was learning to play the flute, also made it a point to thank me for drawing an electric guitar. Drawing the electric guitar was my own dim and stunted attempt to acknowledge her, and the world's, love for rock&roll, a love I did not share; I had though this took some imaginative comprehension and sympathy on my part. Yet note also that she mentioned that I left out her instrument which was the flute, which she in turn drew in the form of a self portrait. She clearly wanted my picture of a rock band, which was what I thought it was, to perhaps resemble Jethro Tull rather than the Rolling Stones or Kiss. In my overemphasis on the importance of rock, as it seemed to me the world was drenched in guitars, in oversight I left out the very instrument she was learning to play. This omission was innocent on my part but she certainly took notice and it was significant for her. Though we were friends for a while after that our lives took very different paths. She haunted me as we both grew older, though I played the smallest role in her consciousness.<br />
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As a freshman in high school I took the initiative to ask her out on a "real date", though we would not have used such a formulation. It was our first of such dates and was to be our last. I remember that she picked me up in a car, as she was a couple of years older than me, and I was not yet driving. When she was a child she a "Waltons" and hippie style of dress, with lots of overalls and plaid flannel shirts (and this in the Florida climate!) and lovely, naturally curly hair. This was the style of her mother. Yet now, a few years later she had remade herself into a very Glam sort of New Wave girl. This was appropriate because our date movie was the movie <i>Valley Girl.</i> She was very similar to Cyndi Lauper and had hoop earrings and a loud magenta dress and three inch heels. I was simultaneously confused that somebody could undergo what I mistakenly took to be a fundamental personality change and was incredibly aroused by this change. In the parking lot, after the movie, I took hold of her and planted a kiss on her mouth, the very first intentional kiss I ever had or gave. She pushed me away and said some thing about not wanting me in "that way" in a language that was as incomprehensible to me as Farsi. This response was not what any boy or girl who had such feeling and initiative would ever expect or want. Awkward is a word that might not fully express this event, though that would be a good start.<br />
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There is is much that can go wrong in Love, so much potential for misunderstanding. Practically all of love, including the non-romantic familial and friendship kinds, is constantly plagued by a rarely considered, though innately challenging fact; that it must involve the contact, the meeting, and , alas, the the opposition of two utterly singular, thoroughly independent, free and separate <i>wills</i>. These two wills are always, already pursuing projects of all kinds - whether personal plans or public work. These pursuits of one of the two wills may or may not involve the other, and in fact might have been developed prior to the very meeting of both wills. There may be a difference of taste, maybe profound and radical. however much is held in common there will always be two selves attempting to interact with, deal with, even simply understand one another. These two wills must constantly negotiate, take the other into account, now with grace, now with power or aggression, now with ignorance or inattention, now with mutuality, now with something that feels like full union and integration, though even in this latter, the underlying or overriding separateness of two whole selves is always a constant, however much union is achieved.<br />
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This last fact, our sense and experience of ourselves as self regarding and freely choosing actors and agents is actually one of the most important and valuable parts of being human. Indeed, the revolutions which eventually brought about our highly imperfect, flawed democracies were precisely predicated upon this individualized humanity as I have been describing it here. We are not part of some undifferentiated mass of people, without our own private wills, nor should we be. Yet our very embodies sense of having and needing boundaries and pursuing what interests us alone often conflicts with ideas and ideals of love. Perhaps all humans are ever striving to accommodate both the freedom and dignity of separateness (Kant's "dare to use your own reason", "declaration of independence") of what is mine alone, with the opposing need and claim of merging and sharing.<br />
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This then might be a good provisional and working definition then of love: this difference or working through the problem of such difference is itself what Love is: a dialogue or relationship between two differing claims upon our humanity: to honor what is private and what is shared and hold the two in some kind of balance. In conclusion, this very process is what we could give the name Love.dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-39471558758709336422014-01-02T16:33:00.003-08:002014-01-08T13:59:47.067-08:00New Year Resolutions and Vintage Self-Help/inspirational/motivational Literature and Ephemera<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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They say (or used to say) that a picture is worth a thousand words. This peculiar post promises to be heavy on pictures to look at and light on words to read.<br />
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As 2014 arrived I had thought it would be an excellent idea to write an essay on trends in self help or self improvement. I had also wanted to write a philosophic critique of what I call moralist exhibitionism (which is not the same as narcissism), a long-term trend only increased by the internet and social media. This trend and now way of life is one in which large masses of people flaunt their virtue and personal life-changing stories, their moral political activism, their fights and struggles against The Man, their dietary and nutritional (newfound) discipline, beliefs and practices, their success at having overcome vices and privations against great hardships and obstacles, their battle against Patriarchy and, if they are a right-winger of some stripe, what the secrets are to becoming that prosperous CEO or entrepreneur or how to take down that pesky activist government that conspires to take your prosperity away. But that longish piece will wait for another day. All of these exhortations and pronouncements are commonplace these days and are simply so many effects of a culture of teams and group identities, rather than individuals, and "oversharing", rather than reserve, in short a culture that values "intimacy" (I leave aside the question of whether it is in fact a genuine intimacy or not), at the expense of older values like distance and privacy.<br />
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Partly as a side effect of being a lay 1970s scholar, I have amassed quite a collection of ephemera and literature documenting the emergence of various popular psychologies, religious sects and self-help movements. In this all too brief and rushed post I will display but a few of these. Hopefully more will follow at a later date.<br />
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As you can see a lot of the presumptions and beliefs contained within these have now become mainstreamed and common sense (or nonsense), ideas about individual agency and power, for example, or how even the universe itself works. The first example is a classic and foundational text of the genre, Harris' <i>I'm O.K.-You're O.K</i>. Note the heavy, sometimes turgid jargon. One of the curious things about the language is its mixture of vernacular slang and scientific sounding technical jargon. They even use graphs. Graphs give the aura of being more realistic and authoritative, making you feel as if you were back in school, albeit probably a private, alternative school.<br />
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The<i> Handbook To higher Consciousness</i> appears to be associated with a particular religious/spiritual sect, having been published in 1975 by The Living Love Center. I have not yet done research on this particular group but I surely will and get back to you dear reader.<br />
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Even Born-Again Christians got in on the act, borrowing the tone and style of secular self-help as in this curious example:<br />
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Presumably it was now not enough to love or Praise Jesus, one must now "hang loose" with Him. Had this book been written a few years later it might have even spoken of "getting down with Jesus". This was published in 1973 and, though a thin volume, the author rambles on about how so many Christians are too uptight, serious and "heavy" about their faith and should simply relax and let Jesus do His thing, in short, to hang loose. In other words, with the emphasis on easing up and letting go, this is very much a Christianity for the 70s. The tone and even the content at times resembles a Women's Liberation tract, not in the sense of moral critique of existing or traditional society but in the intimate, candid and relational nature of the approach. The subject of women's self help or inspirational writing merits volumes of study and appraisal.<br />
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Hunter writes: "As a new Christian, I was so afraid that everybody would think I was religious that even thought the thirst had begun in my life for the living water, I still didn't want people to know about my avid reading of The Bible. So each Saturday morning I carefully covered my Bible with Playboy magazine because i wanted everyone to think I was a real 'swinger'."<br />
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At the opposite extreme from this nice and friendly, almost innocuously banal Christian example is one of my more dated and outrageous finds: an example of a pro-drug, indeed pro-Cocaine book! The illustrations alone are worth the price of the $1.50 I spent on this. I hasten to add that one theme in this book is how the authorities are all wrong about drugs, how safe cocaine is when used responsibly. Literature like this is truly captive to its time.<br />
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This page tells you how to snort cocaine, complete with an illustration.<br />
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I can't imagine anything being produced or published like this today. Doubtless much of what we currently regard as truthful, or appropriate, or timeless is as much captive to current transient fashion. I wonder what current mores will be found as dubious by future generations. One thing I'll bet though is that, whatever is in today that dies out, it won't appear as embarrassing or even shameful, as extreme as <i>The Pleasures Of Cocaine</i>.</div>
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There were satirists and critics of all of this while it was going on. My personal favorite is the masterful novel of Marin County called <i>Serial</i>, by Cyra McFadden. I feature here the back cover of my first edition if only because it mixes together all of the buzzwords, catch-phrases, jargon, neologisms period. Some of this has lasted to now, some of it is undeniably dated, all of it evidence of the American, or perhaps human quest for inner development tied to group identities of various kinds.</div>
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I love the phrase "Martha who cannot Get Behind ironing boards". Note the capitalization here and throughout. One of the brilliant stylistic and rhetorical strategies of McFadden is to have an omniscient voice speak in the insular language of this world, written totally straight and without any explanation as in this sample. Indeed, this book was originally serialized in the <i>Pacific Sun</i>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDclFySFm9a2_VlUByzFRyTv1uS5zKF7EoQGn6xlR4T979ts7A3opdzRD2LyvRGcQ6osRW8p66C0Ke3CNdX2R1S5BEHgSku9vnGarl6veZBXzCAwqv36wZFTDkZPq6rT5QwAT9sapLD3K-/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-12-13+at+7.55.50+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDclFySFm9a2_VlUByzFRyTv1uS5zKF7EoQGn6xlR4T979ts7A3opdzRD2LyvRGcQ6osRW8p66C0Ke3CNdX2R1S5BEHgSku9vnGarl6veZBXzCAwqv36wZFTDkZPq6rT5QwAT9sapLD3K-/s320/Screen+shot+2012-12-13+at+7.55.50+PM.png" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV6TMffWga8dSc1hPzq_X0hLOJ8-FmAz4i995xSI1qkFf-yyu0_l_1GunkVjxUwzUjuj16Gb2TCdhrVkXgqos5XyJW3E4fKi1cFUhTtVwFfkJax6T1jgZ9qq6w0nCNt3-ILcu-BlsG28vS/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-12-13+at+7.50.31+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV6TMffWga8dSc1hPzq_X0hLOJ8-FmAz4i995xSI1qkFf-yyu0_l_1GunkVjxUwzUjuj16Gb2TCdhrVkXgqos5XyJW3E4fKi1cFUhTtVwFfkJax6T1jgZ9qq6w0nCNt3-ILcu-BlsG28vS/s320/Screen+shot+2012-12-13+at+7.50.31+PM.png" height="320" width="242" /></a></div>
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This book was made into an interesting but now forgotten film starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld. It has always irritated me that Armistead Maupin's <i>Tales Of The City</i> got such love and acclaim rather than <i>The Serial.</i> Part of the reason could be Maupin's commercial instinct to flatter the reader. McFadden flatters nobody. In my view it is as great a work of social satire as other more well known works: on a par with the current George Saunders or even the late Stanley Elkin.</div>
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And here is one comic author's answer to the "I'm o.k., you're o.k" mantra.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiS6iuzQJhDSabzaAwILRY3ZumOob4HvW1CAzv4xXf1dQhHwsNKEMp1wXLhLaTD8bqHGec3W1bBOXtFC4s9VKa-c5bU9P5ZuZq1guOy0BfoMXoPa4tH-kc5VZFgdIFtXwOBxHi-JGv6rli/s1600/Screen+shot+2013-10-15+at+3.08.21+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiS6iuzQJhDSabzaAwILRY3ZumOob4HvW1CAzv4xXf1dQhHwsNKEMp1wXLhLaTD8bqHGec3W1bBOXtFC4s9VKa-c5bU9P5ZuZq1guOy0BfoMXoPa4tH-kc5VZFgdIFtXwOBxHi-JGv6rli/s320/Screen+shot+2013-10-15+at+3.08.21+AM.png" height="320" width="207" /></a></div>
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I don't want to go into a long analysis of all of this. I don't want to condemn it and I don't want to praise it. None of the things I have excerpted here are trivial detritus from a bygone age. All of it is interesting. It ought to be important to students of American Studies and History to be sure. But it also should be of continuing interest artistically and aesthetically. Part of the reason is that so much of what we now take to be common sense or take for granted has roots in the period represented here. Another reason is that just as much of what I have excerpted here has been rejected. That is, we should reflect on why we have rejected what we have. Were they right and we wrong? Were they wrong and we, if not right, then, more evolved? How can we tell or know? To me all of it is all one great example of an American form of emergent, evolving Romanticism; the breaking free of the old strictures of traditional society, an expansion of the individual, the expression of a Democratic sensibility. Detractors of these things, those of an older bent, will call it individualism or narcissism, but they are perhaps revealing more about themselves than about the objects of their diagnosis. That is, they do not want the hazards of this Democratic Romanticism. They fear the bad taste, the outlier Cult, the chaos that may result. I have some sympathy for their fears, but I would never want to live in a society that doesn't at least partly allow such a wild flowering of what philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "inner tropical luxuriance" of human beings. Interestingly, we now have the technological means for such creative output but the net result is less interesting, more conformist people. It is as if the flattening and abundance of all those voices renders all of it so much white noise and none of it very conspicuous.</div>
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To me, any kind of dogma is problematic, no matter how virtuous the intention. A lot of the stuff here has a cult-like feeling about it. Some of it does sound like common sense. Some of it is sentimental in the worst sense. But all of it was actually produced and made and eventually consumed. That fact alone should be a marvel to us. One thing is sure: the human comedy is never boring and, hopefully, will continue, so long as we have some modicum of a so-called civilization.</div>
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Happy New Year</div>
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dandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.com6