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)

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

Thoughts on strong affect in art

STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET (Quine)

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Ray)

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.https://theelectricagora.com/2017/12/24/4307/ 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.

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.

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 meaningfulness 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.

PICNIC (Logan)

THE SANDPIPER (Minnelli)

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.

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.

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, Rebel Without A Cause, Bigger Than Life, Strangers When We Meet, The Sandpiper and Johnny Guitar 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.

JOHNNY GUITAR (Ray)

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.

In fact - and in this way they are really like paintings or arias - the films are more interested in the emotional moment rather than only moving the plot forward.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND (Sirk)

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.)

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.

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.

Book Review: HOLLYWOOD INCOHERENT: Narration in Seventies Cinema by Todd Berliner

I have a belief that reviewing and, moreover, criticism ought to be in part a dispassionate affair: that there ought to be in it more objectivity of appraisal and comprehension than the subjectivity of enthusiasm and censure. There are times of course when a special case and exception can be made, where subjectivity must, by definition, lead and flourish. Given that the subjects of Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent are cinema and the 1970s, two topics dear to this author's heart, and, given that the approach and style of the book is an aesthetic one rather than a theory addled or ideological one, upon completing this book it appears at times as if the book had been written with this reviewer alone in Berliner's mind.

Hollywood Incoherent is a much welcome and needed addition to the growing body of both 1970s and cinema scholarship. One of the virtues of it is that it puts style at the center, rather than political ideologies, identities and historical and cultural significance. In many ways Berliner (and to be fair, others must be mentioned in this regard, namely, Susan Sontag, Ray Carney, David Bordwell and a few others) is attempting to return criticism to a position somewhat close to the aesthetic and artistic concerns that had been dominant in the decades prior to the Theory revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Berliner is unafraid of theory and uses it when necessary. Indeed his book takes the time to define David Bordwell's concept of "parametric narration", rather than assuming knowledge on the part of the reader, and also makes a good case for why such a concept is perfectly valid in understanding general trends in 1970s studio and independent filmmaking. Still, in the end, Berliner follows in the matter and manner of "close reading", which concerns how objects in the movies create the effect they do, and what the implications are of such effects on the emotions of audiences.

Two concepts that Berliner introduces that are helpful are those of "incoherence" and "perversity". These words are redefined not as negative states of personal or collective organization or psychology, but rather, positive states of works of art. Perversity is taken from critic Stephen Booth to mean in Booth's words, (in Booth's Precious Nonsense), "a usually gratuitous and potentially distracting and counterproductive extra system of coherence that rivals the narrative, polemic, or other ideationally essential organization of the work". One of the themes that crops up in practically every film made in the 1970s is this evenhanded and observational quality that is the effect of a certain disunity regarding closure concerning the morality or psychology of the characters on the screen and the causality and temporality of visual events as they unfold. In Berliner's words:

"Although all narrative films employ a degree of perversity (without turns there is no narrative), the relatively prevalent, pointed, and superfluous narrative perversities in seventies cinema do more than delay satisfaction and narrative resolution: The preclude the definitive and satisfying resolutions characteristic of more normative Hollywood movies."

Even in the case of ostensibly lower brow fare like The Exorcist, there is the same effect at work as in other higher quality films of the same period and this effect has cognitive value for spectators: "I propose that spectators leave The Exorcist having had an experience more cognitively eventful than the film's shocks, thrills, and thematic substance can account for".

Whatever one may think of The Exorcist as a film, Berliner's account of its specifically 1970s characteristics is consistently interesting.

Following in the steps of David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, and, to go back even further, Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, Berliner raises the question of style as opposed to meaning as a critical category. In a chapter of a close reading of Taxi Driver, for example, Berliner shows how stylistic effects can be as valuable as and different from meaning, as a way of comprehending a work of art. Moreover Berliner defends his case very well, especially given the weight of certain traditions in thinking "meaning" the key to art's purpose. In Berliner's book, each film is analyzed with exacting scrutiny, neither abandoning the text for dubious historical or sociological claims, nor viewing the films in isolation from the cultural context in which they were made.

Many of the big commercial films are discussed in this volume, specifically those prior to the Star Wars phenomenon that arguably ushers in the 1980s. There is a subtle reading of The French Connection as a violation of police genre norms.

One of the most valuable parts of the book is the chapter on John Cassavetes. Ray Carney has been and is the undisputed scholarly expert on Cassavetes' oeuvre. Berliner adds his voice to the discussion with a perceptive essay on real life dialogue and scripted and aesthetic dialogue and how the differences between the two are negotiated by a modernist master like John Cassavetes. The one chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. Noting the dilemma that any artist faces in confronting on the one hand the false and artificial effects of "trying" to be "realistic" and, on the other, the prison of traditional and classical conventions in representation, Cassavetes hit upon a brilliant third solution.

"Cassavetes' dialogue, more than conventional, tightly scripted dialogue, prevents spectators from easily distinguishing his actors' improvisations from the improvisations of Cassavete's characters, who, like the actors playing them, appear to be composing their lines as they are speaking".

Though Berliner is aware of dimension of authorship and refers to the hand of directors and writers (and no hand is more authorial than Cassavetes), he is always keen to note that 1970s cinema is a continuum, that the films in the period all share similar features, some more than others, and that they have a certain family resemblance, that, though they do influence current cinema - (Berliner notes Eastwood's Unforgiven and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia as being particularly seventies in feeling) - they are unique in being rather unlike anything to have come before or since the 1970s.

If there is anything to the concept of a 1970s aesthetic in film and if it can be understood to have coherence, then Todd Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent is a useful introduction to such a concept.

There is much here for fans of both 1970s scholarship and cinema studies in general. In my view, Berliner's book deserves a rightful place alongside previous classics of 1970s scholarship like Bruce Schulman' The Seventies and Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. As a work of film criticism it is a welcome corrective to the excesses of theory found in other film studies. More constructively, it is a good application of the "cognitive neo-formalism" of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. It succeeds in applying the ideas humanely, staying lose to the films in discussion, and being faithful to art as having a value more than that of mere utility.

Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner, University Of Texas Press, 2010

Brief Propositions on Qualities and the Subjective/Objective Distinction

Inspired above all by an all too brief conversational encounter, with one of the most brilliant minds I have had the good fortune to encounter, I am moved to set down some brief and explicit propositions on what is objective and subjective about taste in things and culture.

As Mark Edmundson remarks in his glorious - and notorious - piece in Harper's Magazine in 1997, "On The Uses Of A Liberal Education," a course at Columbia University used to ask the following two questions to its students of literature.

One: What book did you most dislike in the course? Two: What intellectual or characterological flaws in you does that dislike point to?

Looked at in the form of this question, some things in life are objective, they are in fact so good - so meaningful and valuable and so on - that resistance to these things, in this case books, are subjective failures to grasp objective value. I heartily endorse the question and cannot believe it would or should be seen as tyrannical or elitist, if we were to ask it of students today. At the very least we would get some deep self reflection, at least among those students with enough humility, or lack of entitlement, to approach the question with honesty. Of course I still leave open the question and possibility that such a pedagogy may well be problematic, (perhaps for reasons of psychology), though I do admire it in these lines.

Thus my first proposition is that some things have objective value and that this value is intrinsic. Moreover this value is finite and unevenly distributed. Appraising and evaluating such value is a matter of entering into the text at hand with at least a partially open mind, heart, perhaps even soul and spirit, while we are at it.

This first proposition is complicated by my second proposition. This is the doctrine of pluralism, whereby the differences in kind between one value and another, and, in the case of the arts, one style and another, can be so great that we are left with no Archimedean vantage point from which to choose among them, thus left to what would seem to be taste, mood, personal proclivity, inborn temperament, learned experience. In a word, subjectivity.

A lot of complications and tensions in life are a negotiation between the first two propositions.

My third proposition is that works of art have two dimensions, many times in conflict with one another, (but not always in conflict).

One dimension is immediate pleasure, or structural entertainment. That is, a quality of supporting, aiding, and reinforcing certain likes that are universal among the world's peoples. These would include things like jokes, interest in and sympathy for other people's stories and motivations, both triumphs and pleasures, pain and woes. Certain delight in this regard is formal pleasure, an excitement at watching a couple dance or love one another in representation, an excitement at reading for a plot that is suspenseful, and an attraction to art that is manipulative of our capacities for fears, longing, or shared passions. Much music, dance, and certain visual arts operate purely at this level. There are many gradations of quality in what, for lack of a better word, I call entertainment. Some entertainments are most excellent, so excellent, in fact, that they incorporate my second dimension.

This second dimension is that art can be a form of knowledge, much as physics is or other non artistic fields are. (Ray Carney and John Dewey have written about this second dimension rather well. It is borrowed from them.) In undergoing this form of knowledge we undergo an experience that will always hurt a bit (since being knowledge, there is some effort involved that is not chiefly pleasurable. Though for those with higher than average curiosity this experiencing of knowledge can itself be pleasurable in an entertaining sense. It is to this second aspect of "art as a form of knowledge" that Columbia University's question to the students was addressed.

Fourth proposition: since art can be a form of knowledge, ignorance of this knowledge is tantamount to real objective losses for those who express ignorance or resistance to works containing that knowledge. When many young people today tell me, much to my astonishment and dismay, that they dislike Emily Dickinson and prefer a more contemporary or "relevant" poem, they are actually robbing themselves of wisdom. The reason for this is that works of art are most particular. The line and meter and rhyme is set precisely in this way and not another, and the meaning cannot be found in the summary or plot of it. There are actual bits of knowledge contained in a Dickinson poem that cannot be gleamed in any other poem, however close the ideas might be to Dickinson's poetry. Moreover, they cannot be gotten in any other way than in her particular lines, stanzas, and overall formal strategies.

To not read Dickinson on grounds of personal taste, while understandable because humans do not always have the taste that would lead them to pursue things of higher than average value, is to exercise a mistaken reason. Whether on grounds of individual choice, individual sovereignty, or even cultural identity or priority, that failure to read Dickinson is to miss the greatest opportunity for undergoing rather specific kinds of knowledge. Nobody else can quite do the same thing for you, not even another poet - when we consider at least only those things which only Dickinson possesses. (This is not to claim that Dickinson is the greatest poet, but rather to claim that for the things she and only she does well you will profit from them. If you want something more nakedly erotic or frank with edgy attitude you can read Frederick Seidel. Seidel's qualities are important qualities too, but they are also perhaps overvalued at this particular historical moment.)

Since works containing the knowledge can only be gleamed from undergoing the experience of the works in question and cannot be fully comprehended in any translated or summarized form, (say in the form of propositional points taken from the work), works containing such knowledge are essential since the specific styles and choices of the work are what make such knowledge possible.

All the following leads to my fifth and final proposition. This is that quality in art has at the very least an objective component. It was created and exists in the world for others to see or read it. And by experiencing its effects one can gain or grow from it, not unlike physical exercise for the body. This quality of knowledge can be akin to a spiritual value, irreplaceable and integral.

These five propositions might culminate in QED.

But we have a confusion over the word taste. In one meaning it is a descriptive term for what somebody is liable to like or dislike. In another meaning it is a moral term indicating that certain tastes are at the very least more worthy of pursuit than others. We say that there is objectively good and bad taste, on the one hand, and on the other, talk of a plurality of tastes, my taste as opposed to someone else's taste, and how "it is all good".

Moreover there is always a subjective dimension to reality. This subjectivity is not all of reality as certain New Age mystics and Idealists claim. Neither is it unreal and this subjectivity does always, already influence the reality we share.

This sense of there being something or someone on the inside that feels, or experiences, or senses in a most special and irreducible way is one of the few things in life of which we can be sure, and yet, ironically is also one of the things to always be subject to perpetual incredulity, dismissal, and skepticism, especially among the scientific community.

I shall use myself as a particularly curious, if not peculiar example. I have written before on this blog about the domain of things that are above average. Things that I don't dislike and don't love yet I think have some merit. It is not common that I love something. I may have many likes but I really do reserve the sentiment of love for special things: for Tarkovsky and Antonioni movies, for Proust, for Fred Astaire, and for the late Freddie Hubbard.

Here is the trick to all of this talk of values and merit. Those names I mentioned are all objectively valuable, in part for reasons having to do with my five propositions. Yet there is a way of regarding them that is purely subjective. We may not unanimously love them or recognize them as supreme for purely subjective reasons, having to do with our personal sense of values and how we like to spend our time. The same is true, of course for our dislikes and our hates. We might hate something unworthy of our hatred, indeed, that we, like the examples of those who reject Emily Dickinson, hate to our own diminution. But we may well have no choice given our experiences, and how our brains are wired, and so on.

There is also the very real distinction between kinds of value. There is the irreducible value to simple pleasures, or what may be called craft or entertainment, as there is the irreducible value to spiritual growth and knowledge. The two may coincide, but not always.

It seems to me that it is only in setting down these matters in a clear form as I have here, can we being to have a fruitful discussion about these questions of quality. Above all, I hope to create better questions the next time around.