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.

On the Uses and Abuses Of Labels in Art

I have spoken very little about the musical arts in this blog, this in spite of (or because of) that music is one of my main projects and endeavors. I don't intend to speak about the specificity of music in this particular installment except as as means to, in this case, reflect upon the meaning of categories in our lives and art.

Partly due to the good work radio interviewer and archivist Jake Feinberg has done through his own show in Tucson at KJLL, where he has been conducting invaluable oral histories and interviews with jazz greats (with an emphasis on the 1970s), it was brought to my attention that the great saxophonist Gary Bartz has strong objections to the use of the word jazz to describe his own musical career.

To paraphrase Bartz, calling his music jazz acts as a narrow box into which he is imprisoned, and moreover the word jazz itself has a history of derogation and even racism attached to it. Bartz, of course is not the only major figure in jazz history to have problems with the word. Some have suggested the word African-American classical music as an alternative. Even further, greats like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie have wanted to describe music in terms of whether or not it was good music. Pianist Bill Evans, on the other hand, when asked about the jazz label claimed to be only too proud to use the J word.

One of the best books I have ever read on jazz music is a book called Jazz Styles by Mark Gridley. It doesn't get too hung up on the word jazz, but, in the words of Dizzy Gillespie himself, it "hits the nail on the head" and attempts to make a close reading of how jazz styles actually function, how they work on the audience, and, in the spirit of "reverse engineering" (See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on film) show how the music is put together to create those effects. The issue then is not so much whether a form of jazz is a cool West Coast form or fusion form, but deeper issues concerning the very materials of which music is intimately made.

(A brief digression from literature):

It is not just in jazz but in any art form where there is confusion over what matters. For example, in no place in the course of Middlemarch is there actually a real distinct person named Dorothea Brooke. (Yes, I just said that.) The effect, (shall we dare say illusion?) of such a person is created through assertions on the part of a traditional narrator and parts of her internal feelings and thoughts when reported to the reader, and above all, the mixture of those classes of sentences with those that are applied to those with other names. You might laugh and say this is too basic a matter to discuss. Of course the words and sentences create in us a consistent sense that there is a solid person called Dorothea Brooke and we would be fools to not want to let go of the illusion. Clearly there is a person explained to us in the novel is there not?

Well, yes and no.

But actually how that basic of a matter is handled has a great deal to do with why some of us consider George Eliot a genius and not a mere writer of genre.

Nor is there really a Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Rather Darcy is actually a semiotic function of the need to be contrasted and then alternately and eventually paired with the equally unreal Mrs. Bennett. (And he is a semiotic function of her).

This point is what all ideological critics miss. You need to create drama if your aim is for there to be drama present at all, and the notion of positive or negative role models is secondary to the semiotic function of Mr. Darcey and Mrs. Bennett: chiefly, what their presence will do to each other and the book as a whole. By definition what one possesses, the other must lack, and so on. It is a little like roles in family system theory in modern psychology and much less like psychoanalysis with its deep appraisal of a discrete bundle of complexes known as character. But to think of them as having fully individuated psychologies in the modern sense, outside of their relational or semiotic function as tools to create behaviors, events and emotions in the reader, would be to not in some way fully understand Pride And Prejudice.

And to reduce such effects to an abstraction called "the romance" or "historical novel" is also to miss what is unique in how an Austen or an Eliot makes over and expands upon the crudeness of "genre".

More contemporary artists will make as their subject a most conflicted, even convoluted self who at times appears to not need other selves, (Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, Beckett) or even dismantle the realistic illusion of self. But nevertheless the tools will remain the same: stylistic effects (say by having an uninterrupted monologue with little contrast against which to work).

Rather, the use of certain sentences and paragraphs carefully orchestrated by the writer, creates in the reader an impression of such a discreet and distinct category or personhood. But actually it is the syntax and the style that does this. More interesting writers, to my mind, tend to call into question such arrangements, either through defamiliarization techniques, through experiments in tracing consciousness, but that comes much later in literary history. But it is all a kind of trick or effect.

And, even more astonishingly, it is a trick that ends up revealing some of the most natural and authentic truths about the human condition, truths that would be otherwise completely inacessible if the methods were not so artificial. This is why art is often described as a lie that tells the truth.

When people recoil from my statement that a character driven approach to dramatic art is little better than a plot driven one, that both are less important than attention to style, when they insist upon a reality based interpretation, one that argues from plausibility and belief ("is it true to life or not"?) rather than my preferred stylistic model ("HOW does the work itself work upon us and what can it tell us about anything) what they fail to see is that from my viewpoint it is all a structural hall of mirrors. This color interacts with that color. (In painting). This behavior needs to happen for that reaction over there. (Drama). This note for the other note. (In music). I do think all art works this way whatever the mode or style. But debating that is, again, best left for another entry.

back to Jazz and other things:

If anyone would know the dangers of labels and even genres in how music and arts is discussed it surely is Gary Bartz. Bartz, you see, had a major role in the very Miles Davis period that divided jazz purists from the more open minded. To this day there are many, and not always of the oldest generation, who talk of Miles Davis' so-called jazz rock fusion (another terrible label), and his usage of non swinging groove rhythms like funk and rock as if it were one great mistake, as if the greatness of Davis rests in some essentialistic purity that resides somewhere between the late fifties and mid sixties alone. Here is Bartz in a brief excerpt showing him at work with Miles Davis in that revolutionary period in jazz and reflecting upon that time.

Martin Williams, though otherwise a notable prose stylist in jazz writing, helped fuel this anti - rock or funk groove sentiment when he argued in an essay that when jazz improvisors play over even eighth note pulses some special quality is lost in the leading line. This becomes even more ludicrous when one considers the long history of Latin influenced jazz, even predating the growth of rock, and that music , in all of its varieties is not a swung music in the swing or bebop tradition sense.

As Bartz pointed out there is a practical and benign, indeed helpful way to understand labels. Record stores and then later video stores (with their terrible categories like Western, Romance and so on. I'll get to in a minute why I have problems with such taxonomies) help the human brain to organize reality into distinct emotional states, narrations, patterns and moods, to recognize the importance of certain stylistic patterns and effects. Indeed all art is but the organization of stylistic effects. Given my cognitive neo-formalist tendencies (ask me about that at a later blog) and my general aestheticism, surely I would appreciate the basic need for how the old record store was set up.

But this raises the problem of minds, our own and others. If the stylistic effects are as crucial as I say they are, then the use of the label is a kind of crude reductionism that deflects attention away from interest and surprise, and, frankly, the specialness of certain kinds of mental powers.

The most extreme and sublime form of criticism of genre as a way of understanding any art surely comes from Andrei Tarkovsky, in his own way the anti- Northrop Frye. I quote at length from Sculpting In Time:

"The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated. He is unadulterated hyperbole; and above all he stuns us at every moment of his screen existence with the truth of the hero's behavior. In the most absurd situation Chaplin is completely natural; and that is why he is funny. His hero seems not to notice the hyperbolized world around him, nor its weird logic. Chaplin is such a classic, so complete in himself, that he might have died three hundred years ago".

In many views Tarkovsky is being hyperbolic himself. After all, there is that need to organize categories in record shops. We need to see how Chaplin is similar to Buster Keaton or the vaudeville that came before them.

Yet we also need to see the specialness of individual souls as well. And it is precisely where the art lies in what happens AFTER the initial structure of a genre has already been established and something new is done with it.

AN EXAMPLE FROM MY LIFE:

A couple of decades ago when I was in graduate school at the New England Conservatory Of Music, I found myself involved in a class concerning the history of American music or United States musical history. Given my love for the work of Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters ensemble in the 1970s, I decided to engage in a genuine CLOSE READING of his classic Chameleon. That is, I would give it the same attention I would any work of art. At one point in the piece the music radically changes color within the funk context, all by a subtle change in the underlying harmony and beat, to accompany the Fender Rhodes solo. The music grows quiet while not letting up on the funk feeling. I felt this was as important as any moment in, say, classical chamber music. The following example illustrates the moment in performance:

After I was done with my oral presentation my instructor, a fidgety theory bound politico always on the search for ideology everywhere and seemingly without much of an aesthetic sense asked in a tone of irritation:

"But Mr. Hampton is this really GENUINE Jazz? Did he sell out? Is it a sell out? What do you think? You have only talked about the music and its emotional effects on the listener."

"But Mr. Humphreys", I retorted, "if that is not what music or any art is essentially about then I have nothing else to say to you. I leave the question of its popularity or unpopularity or what to call it to sociologist."

"It is rather monotonous and repetitive", Humphreys argued.

"No more so that Ravel's Bolero or Steven Reich. Repetition is as important part of art as surprise, is it not? By having repetition prior to the solo, that change for the piano solo has all the more dramatic meaning, meaning that would be denied had what had come before been filled with variations. And so on."

I received a C that day, I believe. Someone else did their oral on Bob Dylan and received an A, yammering on and on about the fighting between electric and acoustic advocates at Newport folk. Little was said about either Dylan's poetry, (the one quality in Dylan I should think most worthy of our attentions!) nor his crude form of melodic folk. Much was said about the deep cultural meanings of using electronic guitar and the cultures of folk and rock traditions and riots in art history like the response to Stravinsky's Le Sacre.

Maybe more than a little boomeritis was involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomeritis

The mania for labels appears to march on in all of the writing on the arts. But maybe like Tarkosvsky we can someday learn to appreciate the mind, the author (and, of course, in the case of, say, studio filmmaking minds) behind a text. Not as psychology or biography but as individual expressions of a moment in time.