1970s Film and Visual Culture: A Polemic on Art and the case of "commercial" entertainment

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 phenomenological. Another way of putting it is to say that I am an aesthete as this term is emblematic of this approach.

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.

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.

I had (re)visited Moxey's Intimate Strangers in an earlier 1970s blog post in a discussion aiming to include the made for t.v. movie herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetics-of-1970s-cinema-and.htmlre. 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.

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 The Sopranos, Madmen, True Detective and The Wire 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:

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, 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.

typical print ad for t.v. movies

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 is 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.

(OUR TOWN, 1977)

Here is a rather short list of titles representing  some of the kinds 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.

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.

          1. A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED WOMAN (ABC Hy Averback, 1978)
           2. DUEL (ABC Steven Spielberg 1971)

3. DAWN PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE RUNAWAY (Randall Kleiser, 1976)

 4. DEATH OF RICHIE (NBC Paul Wendkos 1977)

           5. A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT SNOW (John Korty 1980)
           6. DIARY OF A TEENAGE HITCHHIKER (1979 Ted Post)

7. THE INITIATION OF SARAH (ABC Robert Day 1978)
8. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE (ABC Harvey Hart 1979)
9. HELTER SKELTER (CBS Tom Gries 1976)
10. GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES (CBS William Graham1980)
11. LISTEN TO YOUR HEART (CBS Don Taylor 1983)
12, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (CBS John Korty 1974)
13. FALLEN ANGEL (CBS Robert Michael Lewis 1981)
14. THE BOY WHO DRANK TOO MUCH (MTM Jerrold Freedman, 1980)
15. MAKE ME AN OFFER (ABC Jerry Paris 1980)
16. COCAINE: ONE MAN'S SEDUCTION (NBC 1983 Paul Wendkos)
17. DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY (CBS Hal Needham 1980)
18. LIKE MOM, LIKE ME (CBS Michael Pressman, 1978)
19. THAT CERTAIN SUMMER (ABC Lamont Johnson, 1972)
20. SPECIAL BULLETIN (NBC Edward Zwick 1983
21. THE DAY AFTER (ABC Nicholas Meyer 1983)
22. ELVIS (ABC John Carpenter 1979)
23. A CASE OF RAPE (NBC Boris Sagal 1974)
24. THE BURNING BED (ROBERT GREENWALD 1984)
25. A QUESTION OF LOVE (ABC Jerry Thorpe 1978)
26. OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder (George Schaefer 1977)
27. THE AMAZING COSMIC AWARENESS OF DUFFY MOON (Larry Elikann 1976)
 28. BUT I DON'T WANT TO GET MARRIED (Jerry Paris, 1971)
29. THE ROCKFORD FILES: BACKLASH OF THE HUNTER (NBC Richard Heffron, 1974)
30. GET CHRISTIE LOVE (William Graham 1974)

           31. YOUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (CBS Steven Hilliard Stern 1979)
          32. HOTLINE (Jerry Jameson 1982)
          33. SYBIL (Daniel Petrie, 1976)
           34. THURSDAY'S GAME (Robert Moore 1974)

35. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1972)

36. KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (ABC John Llewellyn Moxey 1971)

37. GO ASK ALICE (John Korty 1973)

38. INTIMATE STRANGERS (John Llewellyn Moxey 1978) 

39. HUSTLING (Joseph Sargent, 1975
40. THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (Robert Day, 1978)
41. THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE (ABC Randall Kleiser 1976)
42. BRIAN'S SONG (Buzz Kulik 1971)

          43. THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD (ABC Sam O'Steen 1981)
          44. THE GIRL WITH ESP (Gerald Mayer 1979)
          45. A SENSITIVE, PASSIONATE MAN (John Newland, 1977)
          46. WINNER TAKE ALL (Paul Bogart, 1975)
          47. THE EXECUTION OF PRIVATE SLOVIK (Lamont Johnson 1974)
          48. FRIENDLY FIRE (David Greene 1979)
          49. SARAH T. PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE ALCOHOLIC (Richard Donner, 1975)
          50. SINS OF THE PAST (ABC Peter Hunt 1984)

A New Year's Note for 2019

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.

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 Bernard Williams 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.

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.

Nic Roeg's use of typical 1970s wallpaper - often found in dental offices

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 The Man Who Fell To Earth, 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 Don't Look Now, comparing the characters of the Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland characters:

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.  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".

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).https://youtu.be/gY4FOSaSoDo

Thematically The Man Who Fell to Earth 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 The Scarlet Letter to Ralph Ellison's  Invisible Man.  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.


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.

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.

One of my favorite philosophers George Kateb 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 were 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.

I close with another video,  this one an excerpt from an experimental film on Roeg that I happened across.

Thinking About Consensus

"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 E.T. was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties.

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 E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year." Chuck Klosterman

"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

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.

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.

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.

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 had to watch Eight Is Enough and Three's Company and Charlies Angels, because these were the only shows fitted into the scheduled time slots.

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 Eight Is Enough the members of the family made sure to mention that they were going to see A Chorus Line 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 A Chorus Line as the show to watch.

When Tommy Bradford, the aspiring musician in the family, mentions the rock that he loves he has 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.

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 Saturday Night Live would debut on that network.

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 were 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 Whole Earth Review or some homegrown Jesus magazine. Therefore, these countercultures had a center and a consensus.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5tdqojA26E

Representations of the 1970s in contemporary film and television, and some more words on Presentism.

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.

Showtime's I'm Dying Up Here,  and NetFlix's Mindhunter are two that are the most notable, or that I have been able to watch.

Mindhunter 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'm Dying Up Here 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.

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 MadMen, 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 can be avoided.

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.

The first time I encountered a maddening form of anachronistic presentism was during the girls' bathroom scene in Linklater's masterpiece Dazed And Confused where the girls discuss something they call a "male pornographic fantasy" in the context of a discussion of the television show Gilligan's Island - 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.

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.

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.

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 now. This is the same case as if young women stopped sounding and acting like Zosia Mamet on Girls 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.

If you fast forward from 1992's Dazed And Confused to today's Mindhunter, 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'm Dying Up Here 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.

Another notable example of a very good show that nevertheless exhibits some anachronisms is David Simon's and George Pelecanos' The Deuce 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 Girls - and there is apparently no attempt to change this as is sometimes done in terms of geographical accents.

I'm Dying up Here

I'm Dying Up Here is also salvaged not only by its art direction, which has as much faithfulness to the 1970s as seems possible at this time, 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 not delivering in any place outside of your home or your physical person.

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.

This means that the 1970s is a very useful foundation for visual artists, including filmmakers. Put simply, it is never boring.

opening credits, The Deuce

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.

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 Seinfeld episode.

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 Mindhunter is concerned with the cars the characters drive more than their fashions or architecture, but is photographed in a very dark, almost unlit fashion. Here is an entire blog post dedicated to all of the various 1970s vehicles painstakingly represented in the show.

Ensemble of I'm Dying up Here

Holt McCallany, Anna Torv and Jonathan Groff in Mindhunter

Mindhunter, 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. Mindhunter 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.

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).

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.

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. Mindhunter is in so many ways a work not about the era in which it is set but about what are actually timeless matters - surprisingly so, in a pleasant way.

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.

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.

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 Human Universals). 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:

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."

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.

New "album" is out!

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.

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.

But equally, if not more importantly, an album like this is also the work of others. John Weston of Futura Productions is a perfect audio engineer and helped produce the album. I love working with him every chance that I can get.

I love the photography of Hannah Cohen https://www.hannahcohenphotography.com 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. Amanda Williams Galvin 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. http://www.grayceproductions.com I wanted to thank these people as much as possible since there would not be a recording without them.

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 Still Night Suite. 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 move 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 live in our own time even if we are not always exactly of that (current) time.

I hope you enjoy the music.
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/mitchhampton

Historian Bruce Schulman and the 1970s

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.

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 the book on the seventies, indeed called it The Seventies: 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 Staying Alive, and a few others. My own personal favorite after Schulman's is Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. 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.

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 Age Of Fracture. 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 (whose new book on the history of Wonder Woman is a must read 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.

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 The Seventies, it always for some very good reasons, and not as an honorific to the popular status of the works he reviews.

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.

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 Organica 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.

Of course there is the "lighter" side of the decade, if that is the word for it.

Here is an excerpt from that page, if you cannot make it out from the picture.
"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."

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.

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.

"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."

"Sometimes I will show something with absolutely no introduction and no identifying information. For example the famous Stanley Forman busing photo from 1976. And the results are interesting."

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 How To Beat The High Cost Of Living as an example of the economic situation of the 1970s in popular culture.


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/.
 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 Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm were exemplary in this regard and last year's hit, American Hustle 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.

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 Oxford History Of The United States. Schulman expresses great curiosity and even a sense of awe at what he is learning, things he did not already know.

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.

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 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. That too is a book that never seems to be out of date.

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.

Next time.

New "Album" Hard Listening and Easy Listening

"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." (from bdcwire interview, Mitch Hampton)

My last post was on that most important of themes Love, last February, on Valentine's Day.

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.
http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/
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.

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 Hard Listening, 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.

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.

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:

 to this:

Maybe my so-called extreme eclecticism is similar.

One inspiration for Hard Listening were those album covers from the past.

Another inspiration was an obscure indie film by Pamela Corkey called Easy Listening.

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.

I almost want to write an essay called the Myth Of Relevance.

The most recent inspiration was from rewatching the movie Lifeguard from 1977, about which I wrote on this very blog a few season ago herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html 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.

She says, "if you don't like that kind of music I can put something else on". It was very effective that this was Anne Archer delivering the line.

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?

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.

I do have preferences. I would really rather listen to any Soul Train 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.

I agree with Miles Davis that art and life are "all about style." Styles are made up of little gestures or details.

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.
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, The Royal Blue Trickle. 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.

I grew up watching Soul Train 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.



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).



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.

Thus, when I write and perform a twelve minute work called Feminist Singer-Songwriter Without Words it is a nod to Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, 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.

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.

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 context 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.

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.