Life As An "Aspirational" Cineaste

Not too long ago, there was a tiff between film critic Dan Kois and the New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott. Kois threw down the gauntlet with his article “Reaching for Culture That Remains Stubbornly Above My Grasp” in the May 1 issue of the New York Times Magazine. Kois posited that watching longer, “boring” films like Tartovsky’s Solaris or Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff is just intellectual heavy-lifting, comparing it to a child’s self-imposed vegetable consumption. (“It’s for my own good, right?”) 

Kois explains how he has tried and tried—watched and watched again these long, meditative films—but they don’t get through to him nor he to them. He has tired of the attempts. He questions himself: “…Am I actually moved [by Meek’s Cutoff]? Or am I responding to the rhythms of emotionally affecting cinema? Am I laughing because I get the jokes or because I know what jokes sound like?” He cannot help but suspect that his deep-seated appreciation of these films is borne out of a cultural expectation rather than the any intrinsic artfulness of the film itself. 

The two-pronged rebuttal to Kois was written by Dargis and Scott and published June 3. (I tweeted the article the day after it came out—thanks to someone who posted it on my Facebook wall.) Scott and Dargis’s article, “In Defense of the Slow and Boring,” took on Kois’s complaints.

Dargis argues that long films “take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing.” She points out that one’s “mind may wander…[but] it will come back [and] in wandering there can be revelation.” I’m surprised that she did not pick on Kois for his discussion of Meek’s Cutoff, in which Kois noted, “[the film] affected me viscerally, and I’ve found myself thinking about it over and over since.” Reichardt, it’s safe to say, did not have entertainment in mind when she was making the film. But I’d be willing to bet she was hoping to affect the audience in exactly the way she affected Kois—who “[thought] about it over and over” since seeing it.

[More recently, the three critics were featured in a roundtable discussion available here on nytimes.com, published in the June 17 issue of the Times. (You should read this—it’s fantastic.)]

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My concern in this discussion, however, boils down to the stack of DVDs sitting across the room from me. They are, in the word that Dan Kois uses frequently throughout the roundtable discussion, “aspirational” films. I’d like to watch them because…well…I feel as if I should. As someone who considers himself a young cineaste, I tell myself that it’s necessary to sit back and…*cough*…“enjoy” films like Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (both parts! gasp!), and Tartovsky’s Andrei Rublev (the same Tartovsky Kois finds problematic). 

And yet they sit across the room still unwatched. 

As much as I love A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, I must admit that I share some feelings with Dan Kois on this one. Knowing ahead of time that these films will be somewhat of a workout, it’s hard to want to sit down and watch one (and probably alone at that…good luck getting friends or family to watch one with me). Needless to say, I tell myself I’ll do it but usually end up returning them to the library unwatched.

Occasionally, I’ll sit back and watch one—Last Year at Marienbad (after hearing that Inception was similar to it…a misleading claim) or Tati’s Trafic (certainly not a “boring” film of the Kois strain and also one of the most entertaining films I’ve ever seen). But more often than not, I return the films without even a glimpse at them.

I wonder if, in the course of their discussion, these critics ever considered how the very nature of their job asks of them, even sometimes requires of them, to watch some of these films. Whether or not they liked it, one of the Times film critics was going to sit down in a theater and see Meek’s Cutoff. Another would see The Tree of Life. My point is that their profession inescapably revolves around films and seeing films. I don’t have that luxury. I have other things to do other than see these films—I’m never on assignment to sit down and watch them. Although sometimes I wish it were so. 

All I’m saying is that if you catch me returning Alexander Nevsky, just let it go—I’m no A.O. Scott.

Dylan As The Greatest Thief Of All?

While Bob Dylan has been known as the premier English-language songwriter of the last half century, most people aren’t as quick to acknowledge the overbearing importance his influences have had on his work. Dylan’s little-discussed first album is, after all, mostly folk and blues covers that Dylan learned in Greenwich Village. But when critics discuss Dylan’s music, they prefer to discuss the groundbreaking single “Like A Rolling Stone” and the barebones confessional album Blood on the Tracks. The tendency has been to see his covers album as a stepping-stone to his more mature work, rather than as a foundational base for everything Dylan has done since.

Dylan depends on a lot of this music—grabbing melody lines and lyrics and incorporating them into his own work. There’s something a little uncomfortable, I think, about admitting Dylan as…well…not a plagiarist…but an artist who “appropriates.” Not that his appropriations are ever a problem. Most of Dylan’s sources entered the public domain a long time ago. Some of his sources, in fact, have never been identified at all. When it comes to songs like “Girl from the North Country,” some might argue that the stand-alone Dylan credit should actually acknowledge input from a “Traditional” source as well. Parts of the melody and even the story of the lyrics are borrowed from the classic English folk song “Scarborough Fair.” (Simon and Garfunkel have recorded the most memorable version.)

But that example of borrowing only skims the surface. One of Dylan’s most famous compositions—“The Times Are a-Changin’”—is more or less a direct melodic borrowing from the Carter Family song “The Way-worn Traveller.” Dylan obviously wrote new lyrics and changed the tune from common time into 3/4. The trick that most people don’t see, however, is that this Carter Family song “The Way-worn Traveller” is itself a borrowing from an old gospel song “Palms of Victory.” That song can tentatively be traced back to Rev. John B. Matthias. But that’s tentative, so actually…oh well, you get the point.

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These musical genealogies are everywhere once you start looking for them. Dylan directly addresses this issue in the title of his album “Love and Theft”. It seems appropriate that in order to make a point about theft in popular culture Dylan himself is a thief; Dylan took the title from the scholar Eric Lott’s book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class about minstrel shows in the antebellum era.

This careful borrowing inevitably leads, argues Robert Christgau, to the realization that “all pop music is love and theft.” No musician out there can outrun his influences; Dylan poses that idea as an absurd notion. Dylan takes everything in and makes it uniquely his own. (For some examples of Dylan’s thefts, see this page here on Dylan’s album Modern Times.)

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In an interview with Robert Hillburn of the Los Angeles Times, Dylan stated:

“Well, you have to understand that I'm not a melodist… My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I'll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That's the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it's a proven fact that it'll help them relax. I don't meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I'll be playing Bob Nolan's ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I'm driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I'm talking back, but I'm not. I'm listening to a song in my head. At a certain point, some words will change and I'll start writing a song.”

Giving his two cents to the argument, Pete Seeger told how Woody Guthrie once admitted, “That guy stole that from me, but I steal from everybody.”

See more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms_of_Victory#cite_note-0

Tree Of Life: Malick Writes A Fine Poem

A few days ago I stumbled upon an old New Yorker article by Jonathan Franzen about his reading experiences with the famously difficult, postmodern novelist William Gaddis. Franzen theorized that a reader can treat a novel two ways: according to either the Status model or the Contract model. These models boil down to the distinction between Elitism vs. Populism, the distinction (for some) between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyer or Philip Glass and The Beatles. The Contract model asks the reader only to read the page; the Status model usually asks for substantially more than that. The Status model (think of any famously “difficult” novel [or piece of art or film or play, etc.]) mostly wants the reader to think.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in Malick's The Tree of Life; via amctheatres.com

Thought, of course, is not always something that the audience wants to do. This seems to particularly be the case with film. Somehow, we often seem programmed to expect film not to engage us in the same way we might expect Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett to engage us. Film seems to ask nothing of us other than just to sit and watch. Graham Clarke points out in his excellent book The Photograph that these expectations are probably born out of the historical associations with recording and documentation that we have placed on photography and film. But, I suspect, it is not only this that causes us trouble, but also the very fundamental nature of film itself—images from the real world set in motion.

The modern/postmodern side of this argument would revolve around the notion that life—the “real world”—is, in fact, nothing like the films we watch. Life is a complex, endlessly disorienting experience with new information flying at us every second of every day. Life has no plot and no easy-to-list cast of characters. And yet we understand life through plots—endless varieties of them. We make sense of life’s cacophony by arranging all these errant details into understandable movements of characters and situations. (We may not always know the motive, but we can sure supply it.) So when we sit down and watch a film, we usually expect that the director has done this job for us. 

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But some films want us to share part of that job. It’s not an indicator of lazy filmmaking, but it certainly can be. My most maddening experiences as a filmgoer have been when the director has all the right details but no sure method of putting them in place the right way. And, for whatever reason, he can’t just leave them be and expect the postmodern crowd to fall in love with it. The first example that comes to mind is Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. Crowe has all these fine little moments, snatches of conversation, picturesque images, but fails to adequately place them.

I must admit that this is an argument without end; please jump to the Comment section below if you’ve more to add. For instance, my current thesis seems to provide filmmakers with a pretty stark fork in the road: either plot it out or don’t bother. Of course, I don’t mean to make it so black and white. It would be better to suggest varying levels of “plotting” (at this point, I seem to be heading towards more of a how-to-arrange-the-story Russian Formalist argument, which is a just a pain) instead of this fork in the road methodology. To hell with it.

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Regardless of exactly where my argument ends up, Terrence Malick’s Tree Of Life is one of those films with no conventional plot or narrative. Over nearly two and a half hours, Malick portrays in vivid detail the childhood of Jack (Hunter McCracken) in suburban Texas. The characters have conversations, but none of them help us envision an organized plot. There are voiceovers (four of them), sometimes overlapping with one another, but they aren’t much help either.

You’ll notice that I’m painting a rather bleak portrait. So why is it, exactly, that we should care about this film?

For starters, it is beautiful. I don’t mean “touching” or “poignant” (although it is those as well), but “aesthetically pleasing.” More often than not, most audiences don’t pay attention to how a film looks. Some films look pretty awful. While you know a Western is a Western from the first shot, you can also probably tell whether it’s a John Ford film or any one of his countless imitators. Malick stands out from other filmmakers for the pure beauty of his imagery. We all knew that he was capable of shots of tremendous beauty (see an earlier post about Days of Heaven), but this film is exceptional. I have no doubt that in some circles it will be held as some of the most beautiful photography and cinematography work of all time. 

Chastain in the desert in The Tree of Life; via wordpress.com

But the images, of course, are more than images. They amount into the kind of details that I was discussing beforehand. Taking these details, Malick has fashioned himself a visual poem as opposed to a plotted film. Working with a labyrinth of repeating images and motifs—including windows, trees (duh), lawns, gardens, reflective skyscrapers, deserts, lights being turned off, and water—Malick has directed a poem as far as I’m concerned. But maybe “poem” isn’t quite strong enough. Walking out of the theater, the idea of the film being symphony also struck me. Although the film has no plot to speak of, it does have an underlying structure—moving back and forth from Jack’s childhood to Jack’s present (where he is played by Sean Penn in a striking minimalist performance) and even an interlude that shows the history of the Earth from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs.

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People had problems with this part. There were audible groans from the audience with every new image (an eclipse of the sun by the Earth, volcanoes running over with lava); people sighed when the opera music petered out and the voiceover of Mrs. O’Brien [Jessica Chastain] began again. I think it’s a given that a Big Bang interlude in any film would feel overwrought. But Malick’s inclusion of this “movement” served to shift Jack’s story out of suburban 1950s Texas and into a universal (read: literally universal) backdrop. Malick does no less than compare human life with the formation of the universe, in all its violence and chaos and even forgiveness (when one dinosaur steps on the head of another, but then lets it go). It may be somewhat of a head-trip—maybe even an ego-trip on the part of Malick, knowing that he could get away with it—but it finds a way to work.

The emotional weight of every moment afterward in the film felt full and tangible because of that wild juxtaposition. When Jack forgives his father (“It’s your house”) I stopped breathing. When Jack’s father half-admits failure, time grinds to a halt. And when Mrs. O’Brien’s voiceover reveals the films epiphany, I felt in awe. “Unless you love, your life will flash by.” How uniquely human that sentiment is.

At this point, I’m thinking that a second viewing would probably be both welcome and helpful. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, firstly, don’t expect a plot and, secondly, don’t be scared by such an absence. 

Lowry's Book Is Still "Giving" Back

The other day, inspired by a post on Yuri’s Bookswept blog (follow link or see Blog Roll below) in which she tagged the 1993 children’s book The Giver by Lois Lowry and added two images to a quote from the novel, I reread Lowry's novel. I remember Lowry’s book as one of the formative literary experiences of my childhood; I remember it as bold and daring and bothering to go places that children’s lit did not often go. I remembered it being somewhat sexually explicit (it is not—I think my hormones may have been playing games on me…this was sixth-grade or thereabouts...) and provocative in the same way that I would later find Atwood and Orwell.

But more than anything, I remember being frustrated by the ending; it was inconceivable to me that a book could not provide some solid ground for the reader to land on. I recall being tortured by the idea of not knowing what happened to Jonas and Gabriel. It took a long time for me to come around to the notion that maybe an ambiguous ending served the book far better than any other one. After all, Jonas’s escape from his seemingly utopian community represents the first real choice made by him in the story; this choice may level either success or failure onto both him and Gabriel, but at least it’s a choice—at least there is free will. In providing a happy ending (or a unhappy one), Lowry would negate the opportunity for the reader to make a choice. In a way, the ambiguity forces us to be free.

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Granted, this is a complicated reading of the text—not one that I arrived at as my sixth-grade self. Nor even, I might add, a reading that I arrived at until quite recently. Only upon rereading Lowry’s novel did all of this strike me. The novel has received boatloads of criticism over the years—some of it related to that ambiguous ending, but lots of it also dedicated to the subject matter. (I think any good vision of dystopia is bound to fight its fair share of battles in the challenged books area: 1984? Lord of the Flies? See more here.)

But many of the "let's-ban" complaints labelling it as a provocative work are baseless. Critics have claimed that it problematically displays hot buttons such as euthanasia and infanticide in a problematic light (actually, the protagonist is horrified when he discovers these practices), sexuality (the words “sex,” “puberty,” “romance” do not even appear—the word “love” is used in only a family-related context; there is nudity...but it's old people and the nudity is not described; the closest we get to a sexually-charged description is Jonas looking at the back of Fiona’s neck), and attitudes towards pain and suffering (did they miss the part where experience of such emotions lead to “wisdom”? They’re talking about the same “wisdom” the rest of us know, right?).

But the most cutting (and accurate) criticism is the criticism concerning the plausibility of Jonas’s world. I speak not, of course, as to whether or not this particular utopian community is possible, but rather as to whether the community stands up to tests of logic in terms of itself. The Wikipedia provides a helpful example by looking at the “Birthmothers” in the community, noting that if there are 50 new children each year and a Birthmother gives only three births over three years, then there ought to be 17 (all right…16.6…) Birthmothers designated each year. This, of course, is nowhere near the reality portrayed in the story. The government functions of the community also provide fodder for questions, as do the general life patterns of the community members. All in all, it’s probably a good thing that Lowry’s prose keeps its footing in Jonas’s point of view (limited third-person) and ignores these questions. She chooses to stick to her story.

So plausibility is a problem. But I didn’t catch those errant details as a child (I must admit to not seeing them during my most recent reading either) and I suspect that Lowry knows the problems exist, but does not see them as obstructing a child’s enjoyment of the story. They are slight details that fade into the background of the story relative to Jonas’s struggles.

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So why am I writing a review of a children’s book? I can only offer that it’s always nice looking back and realizing that experiences in my childhood are still worthy of admiration. This is not always true. We need to do no more than turn back to that childhood television show (and be sure to not let yourself be overwhelmed by nostalgia). I suspect that you’ll often see that it’s inane enough that you and your friends might have dreamed it up and filmed it together one Saturday afternoon (I overlook notable paucity of acting/writing/directing/cartooning skills, of course).

But some things hold up. Reread the first page of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. If you can put away your cloaks and wands (July 15 is coming!) and be unbiased readers for a moment, you’ll see that Rowling’s prose is a little clumsy and flat. (This example is not to say that Rowling’s prose did not greatly improve over the course of seven books—it did.)

Lowry’s prose, on the other hand, is flat as well, but it is not clumsy. Lowry has written a simple, understated novel that at least for me, has withstood the test of time. Has it done the same for you? If you’ve read it (or even if you’ve not), I’d recommend sitting down with this slim volume and giving it a go. At 180 pages of SEVERELY ENLARGED typesetting, it’ll take you no more than two hours. Don’t blame me if you ignore your daily regimen of Kafka short stories…it’s well worth it.

A Good Summer for Bon Iver

Fans of Bon Iver’s debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, may take a while to warm to Justin Vernon’s latest (sort of self-titled) release Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Vernon has more or less abandoned the folky, strumming charm of his first album; in this second album, the delicate balance of acoustic guitar and Vernon’s falsetto (think “Skinny Love”) have been thrown into a world full of sound. The prevailing metaphor would probably not a wall, but rather an ocean. Every song is enveloped by sound.

The closer “Beth/Rest” comes surprisingly close to sounding like ‘80s schlock—heavy synths and squeaky-clean guitar licks—but is reined in by the presence of Vernon’s careful singing. I’m hard pressed to call the album experimental; Vernon demonstrated a clear willingness to experiment with sound pre-Bon Iver—if in careful ways: playing with layered walls of his own voice (“The Wolves (Act I and II)”) and artful displays of hardcore Autotune use (“Woods”). It’s not that Bon Iver, Bon Iver represents Vernon’s more experimental side. It’s more like he’s being more playful, coyly suggesting that he’s far less of a folkie than we all imagined.

How to explain the newfound playfulness on this album? I’m always hesitant to apply genres to songs, but I fear it might help shed some light on my opinion. How do we deal with the opener “Perth” and the first minute or so of “Minnesota, WI”? My sense is that they represent Vernon dabbling with the sounds of post-rock in the vein of Explosions in the Sky. (But that would be a rather limiting classification; Explosions, of course, has no vocals and, more often than not, writes songs with more dynamism and “oomph” than your average Bon Iver tune.) “Holocene” recalls a the softer side of Viva La Vida-era Coldplay (“Reign of Love”). “Towers,” on the other hand, makes me think of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek with its rolling guitar figure.

Comparisons, I must admit, are a rather feeble way at getting to one’s point in a review. The bottom-line is that you should not expect this album to be For Emma, 2.0 (I’m sure this sentiment has already been aired elsewhere). What you can expect, however, is a songwriter (and producer) on the cusp of finding his sound, piecing together odds and ends to make a(n almost) cohesive album. The first half of the album (“through “Michicant”) is not flawless, but it is nearly so. It is odd and wonderful and new. The second half is where Vernon hits a bit of a wall. “Hinnom, TX” is problematic, as is “Wash.” The single “Calgary,” however, revives the album and the closer “Beth/Rest,” despite its odd production, provides a satisfying end. Does the instrumental “Lisbon, OH” need to be there? Probably not, but I’ll give Vernon a pass on that one. Is it named “Lisbon, OH” just to add another “Town, State” song to his catalogue? Probably…but I’ll give him a pass on that as well.

Amelie's Pragmatic Idealism

Recently, I stumbled upon an old Empire magazine article with a list of the “100 Best Films of World Cinema.” [First of all, there are issues with the denotation of “world cinema” in any kind of authoritative list. Purportedly catering to a more academic audience than the average film zine, this British magazine goes so far as to tag any film not in the English language as “world cinema.”] Empire nominated Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as #1—which seems like a sensible move—but made what seems to be a miscalculation in placing the French film Amelie at #2.

While the second slot in such a vaunted list of films is unlikely (other films include The Seventh Seal, 8 ½, and Metropolis), I must admit that Empire at least correctly identifies my own fascination with the film. By most accounts (including the sages Roger Ebert and Elvis Mitchell), the film is light-hearted—a romantic comedy—a fairty tale. Ascribe to it whatever genre or cheery description you will, but both Empire and I recognize that the film manages to be much more than that.

Empire’s blurb points out something that has bothered me about Amelie for some time, noting that the film “is a strange beast, a whimsical fairy tale that has more darkness under its skin than most usually want to admit…after all, Amelie [Audrey Tautou] engages in malicious practical jokes and stalking behavior in her attempt to help the other lonely souls of Paris—and herself.”

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Most of what Amelie’s ploys to help these other people do, indeed, rely on careful, even outrageous acts of deception. Her role as a “guardian angel” (I quote this term from the film despite its connotative danger) begins when she finds a tin box of childhood toys hidden behind a tile in her apartment bathroom. Determined to return the box to its rightful owner, she questions her neighbors and tracks down the former occupants of the apartment. Placing the box in a phone booth, she waits until the box’s owner is passing by and then calls the phone. Upon the discovery of the box, the man rejoices and tearfully reflects on his childhood (director Jean-Pierre Jeunet helpfully provides flashbacks). Amelie is already waiting in the bar next-door when the man enters. He sits down on a nearby stool and confesses to her that the discovery of the box has convinced him to reconnect with he estranged family. (See clip below)

It’s a lovely moment; most of the moments in the film are. But what the film doesn’t do is ask the question of what might have gone wrong. I don’t mean in the sense of: what if he didn’t find the box? I mean more along the lines of what if his childhood was one that he would rather not remember—what if it was a childhood full of depression or abuse? And that’s not even considering what might happen when this man goes and visits his estranged family. Neither Amelie nor we have the slightest idea of why they’re all estranged in the first place. Maybe there’s some terrible family drama that she has unknowingly stirred up.

Some of you may be wincing at my line of questioning; these appear, after all, questions that we should not ask about the film. But even if you’re convinced the film is merely a fairy tale, I don’t think you can write away Amelie’s actions as light-hearted or sweet. If anything, she exists in a mode of pragmatic idealism—believing not only that all people should be happy, but also that all people are capable of being such.

Amelie’s solution is the lie. The lie, in her mind, is the only avenue to happiness (or fulfillment). Are we content with that notion? And, in a line of questioning I’m sure you’ll enjoy even more, we might ask about the nature of the film itself in terms of a lie…Picasso is helpful: “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” 

Looking At Art Photography With Graham Clarke

Truthfully, I’m not really one for photography (despite that page link you see up above). I know very little about formal photography—most anything I could say would come out of my journalistic endeavors. I’ve always felt that I can identify a fine photo: good lighting…neat composition…good subject matter. But only in the context of a newspaper layout. I’ve never felt comfortable about identifying good “art” photography (or, for that matter, good paintings or sketches or sculptures).

That said, I just finished Graham Clarke’s The Photography—part of Oxford History of Art series. At the risk of sounding slightly hyperbolic, it was one of the most illuminating (no pun intended) books about the art world that I’ve ever read. Thankfully, the book isn’t Photos-for-Morons or some pseudo-intelligent garbage like that. Clarke does not skip out on the heavy stuff—there are easily half a dozen Roland Barthes quotes—and that lends the book an academic blueprint that’s relatively easy to follow. But importantly, he makes the analysis of art photography not only seem easy but seem attainable (for the average schmuck like me). I offer an example from Clarke’s book at length, that investigates the dichotomy between a denotative and a connotative approach:

“In discussing the photographic message, [Barthes] identifies two distinct factors in our relationships to the image. The first, what he calls the studium, is ‘a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment’, while the second, the punctum, is a ‘sting, spec, cut, little hole’. The difference is basic, for studium suggests a passive response to a photograph’s appeal; but punctum allows for the formation of a critical reading. A detail within the photograph will disturb the surface unity and stability, and, like a cut, begin the process of opening up that space to critical analysis. Once we have discovered our punctum we become, irredeemably, active readers of the scene.

A Family on their Lawn... by Diane Arbus; via google.com

Look at [this] Diane Arbus image, A Family on their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, New York (1969). One the surface this is an image of an average New York suburban middle-class American family, but once again, the more we look at it the more its meaning changes… Spacially, for example, the geometry of the image is crucial. The lawn takes up two-thirds of the photographic space and indicates precisely the sense of emptiness, sterility, and dislocation that pervades the image. Equally, the trees at the back have a looming presence that suggests a haunting otherness. Even at this level the atmosphere seems gloomy, empty, and depressing. A literal, physical configuration has given way to the beginnings of a compelling connotative register suggestive of a psychological and emotional inner space.

This is the setting for the figures in the image. The parents are separate and alone, and every detail of their figures and bearing adds to this sense of difference. The man is tense (rather than relaxed, as we might expect) and holds his head in his hand. His right hand looks to touch and make contact with his wife, but remains inert and separate. The mother also ‘relaxes’ but in a seemingly ‘fixed’ mode, just as she is dressed in a stereotypical bikini and wears make-up. Their separation is made obvious by the way in which the lounge chairs are presented formally to the camera, with the round table between them: a circular reminder of unity and wholeness, although the slatted lines imply a rigid familial and psychological geometry—a connotation further suggested by the solitary child who stares into a circular bathing pool. The boy plays alone and is turned away from his parents. The title itself ‘frames’ our terms of reference and guides us into the symbolic structure of the photographic message. Punctum follows punctum, so that each aspect resonates as part of a larger map of meaning, especially in relation to the associations implied by ‘family’, ‘Sunday’, and ‘lawn’. An image of family relaxation seems to have been inverted and emerges as a psychological study of estrangement and loneliness which, in its compulsive effect, speaks about a whole culture’s condition…”

Clarke continues by pointing out that Arbus’s photograph has opened up new ways to “play and question codes of meaning.” There is much more I would love to share with you about this fantastic book, but I will restrain myself. (Or possibly post more later this week…we’ll find out!)

How To Measure A Saxophonist: Kenny + Katy?

As the media lovingly remembers one saxophone player, another has managed to sneak quietly under the pop culture radar. The death of Clarence Clemons (coupled with his recent guest solo on Lady Gaga’s single “The Edge of Glory”) has more or less created a media frenzy about both his life and the role of the saxophone in popular music. Given the latter subject, it seems inescapably odd to me that Kenny G’s appearance in Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” went largely without comment in the mainstream media.

[I should point out that I watched both music videos more as a manner of cultural knowledge—keeping up with the times, if you will—rather than sheer enjoyment. I judge Perry, at best, to be ineffectual; Gaga, at least, has her own distinct pop sensibility…also, the “Composition” section in the “T.G.I.F.” Wikipedia article is frightening:

“‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’ is a dance-pop and pop rock song with a length of three minutes and fifty seconds. It is set in common time and has a moderate tempo of 126 beats per minute. It is written in the key of D♯ minor and Perry's vocals span one octave, from C♯4 to D♯5. It follows the chord progression B–G♯m7–D♯m7-C♯.”

Does this strike anyone else as painfully-over-the-top analysis?]

But going back to saxophones, Kenny G’s appearance, given the arc of his extraordinarily popular career, isn’t all that surprising. As far as the jazz world (i.e. the world with the largest saxophone population) is concerned, Kenny G is a cause for laughter…and maybe not a little jealousy. Despite the critical clobberings that have been handed to him over his five-decade career, Kenny G is still one of the best-selling solo artists of all time, with more than 75 million in record sales to his name. He is certainly the best-selling saxophonist of all time.

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So maybe the pairing of Kenny and Perry makes sense from a sales perspective. The truth is that I wouldn’t have given the solo a second thought if it hadn’t been the for the music video—showcasing that wild-haired man (sort of like Howard Stern without glasses?) standing on the roof of a house playing for a giant house party. In a now infamous blog rant, Pat Metheny, a noted jazz guitarist, supports my immediate feelings of indifference:

“i first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with jeff lorber when they opened a concert for my band. my impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like grover washington or david sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. he had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues- lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. but he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the keys moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again) . the other main thing i noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.” [original typesetting is in this emailese…sorry…but it sort of makes the unedited tone a little clearer]

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So obviously the critics and jazz musicians have some problems with Kenny. That much is obvious from Metheny’s rant. (Reading other writers’ comments on Metheny’s rant makes it seem as if he said what everyone else was pretty much aching to say.) The crux of the argument for Metheny centers on the desire to not judge Kenny G’s music on a playing field without the likes of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter.

But something must be said for Kenny’s ability to “elicit a powerful crowd reaction” by “connecting to the basest impulses of the…crowd.” Metheny, of course, contextualizes everything through the strong superlative “basest.” So suddenly Kenny’s performance is negligible because he connected to supposedly “base” impulses? As far as I’m aware, literal hordes of musicians and filmmakers and novelists and artists have made their livelihoods connecting to these “base” impulses. Would we deign to insult Hitchcock on the basis of “baseness”? “Oh that Psycho…you know, sort of…base? Why would you watch that crapola?” Of course not…

I don’t mean, however, for that brief rebuttal to serve as an end to this argument. Metheny’s arguments, I think, are not entirely wrong and certainly lead us down a path of interesting inquiry. Taking these new ideas about Kenny, we should approach the Katy Perry collaboration again. Critically, what can we do about it? Can we judge his ten-second (was it less?) solo in Perry’s song with the jazz greats? This kind of question is mere warm-up when compared to the meatier issue of pop/rock versus jazz or even blues versus jazz. Can you make a fair comparison between two (usually somewhat) distinct musical styles?

~

One detail that keeps popping up in these Clarence Clemons’s obituaries and remembrances is the struggle of how to classify his role in the saxophone world. As many have pointed out, Clemons emerged into mainstream music not through the jazz track but through rock ’n’ roll and the blues. So like Kenny G, Clemons operated essentially outside of the jazz world (I choose not to count smooth jazz as jazz). Would it be fair to hold up Clemons to Coltrane? Is it even possible? (The same issues as before!)

In a neat post on the arts blog of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rich Kienzle touches on another looming issue, broaching the importance of distinguishing between soloists and accompanists. Clemons, despite his solos with the E Street Band, was always Springsteen’s trusty sideman, never a true soloist. Kienzle jumps off of Scott Mervis’s obit write-up; Mervis notes, “He may not have been a Coltrane or a Rollins, but in the genre in which he played, you won't find a better sax solo or a better sax sound than the one that closes ‘Jungleland.’”

This distinction, in my mind, is a fair one. In his role as rock ’n’ roll sideman, Clemons was without peer. That does not mean he was a better player than the jazz greats or that we cannot compare them for disparity of genre—we cannot compare because their intrinsic roles were different. As for Kenny G? I think I’ll leave that one to Mr. Metheny.

See more:

Metheny's full rant: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/articles/arti0900_03.htm

Mervis's obituary for Clemons: http://blogs.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/arts-a-entertainment/pop-noise

Kienzle's follow-up: http://communityvoices.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/arts-entertainment-living/get-rhythm/29161-clarence-clemons-the-accompanist-as-virtuoso

NY Times obit (Jon Pareles): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/arts/music/clarence-clemons-much-more-than-springsteens-sideman.html

Escaping to Paris

To be honest, the trailer for Midnight in Paris made me a little worried. What it looked like: Owen Wilson spends the Paris daytime and evening with his fiancée Rachel McAdams only to embark on a series of wild escapades after midnight (without fiancée in tow). While the trailer depicted mostly mirth on the part of Wilson’s character and mere befuddlement on the part of McAdams, I assumed the worst for whenever Wilson’s secret world of the Parisian night collided with the stricter world of the Parisian day.

But this film is more like a fairy tale than a charged examination of the modern relationship. The film, as I discovered in reviews a few weeks ago, does not deal with life’s darker spots as I imagined it might. The glimpses of nights out of the town in the trailer still happened in the film as such…but they “happened” in the distant past of 1920s Paris among members of the Lost Generation rather than in the present day. That knowledge might not seem to change a whole lot until you meet Inez (McAdams) and realize what a horror she is (along with her parents). That and the film is so effortlessly charming and—in its way—playfully naïve. The dream of Gil Pender (Wilson) is, after all, one of nostalgia. Not a childhood nostalgia either—Bender yearns for the past of his artistic heroes. He freely admits that he would prefer Paris of the 1920s to the Paris of the modern day. The film grants his wish.

Gil Pender (Wilson) waits for midnight to strike; via mybestmediasearch.com

Allen does not deign to explain the mechanism of time travel (or fantasy) in the film. This oversight saves him from worlds (no pun intended) of trouble. I suspect that most other writers would feel pressed to provide at least the remotest shadow of a reason for space-time-continuum-distortion, but Allen gives us the bare minimum to work with: a particular street corner at midnight and an older car (with a famous art celebrity inside) is enough to gain access to the wormhole. (Or however you’d like to explain it…)

~

So in a charming way, Midnight in Paris functions a little more like a fantastic time machine than a film; it’s a pretext for Bender (and by extension, we assume, Allen himself) to travel back in time and meet his idols. The horde of personalities you meet includes the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, Buñuel, Dali, Stein, Eliot, and Cole Porter, among many others.

In that sense, I don’t think Midnight in Paris is all that different from some of Tim Burton’s work. The feeling I get watching Burton’s work (particularly Big Fish, but also Edward Scissorhands) is that the plot and the characters have all been almost artificially gathered around a bunch of key images and ideas. You can see this tendency in the “frozen-in-time” circus scene in Big Fish as Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) pushes away the tossed popcorn and when Edward Scissorhands starts giving haircuts. Allen, in much the same way, wanted to sneak back to Paris of the Roaring Twenties and witness a heated critique session between Stein and Picasso and hold a conversation with Dali (loosely) about rhinoceroses. (The plural is actually either “rhinoceros” or “rhinoceroses;” also…for that overwhelming group of potential zoologists in my readership…a group of rhinos is called a “crash.”)

~

This is all a polite way of saying that Allen’s film, boiled down to its basic ingredients, is a flight of fancy. The crux of the story, of course, is that Bender must learn not to bury himself in nostalgia and learn from the past while holding it at arm’s length. The solution, Allen teaches us, is not to treat Paris as a nostalgic fairy tale place but rather as a happy medium between the past and the world of Bender’s present—Hollywood and the empty world of cheap rewrites and awful fiancées.

via imdb.com

But what I found so curious about this film is that while Allen addresses the problem of escaping into the past, he notably makes no remark on the equally fascinating problem of escaping into art—something that should not be ignored, given Hemingway’s presence in the film. (I’m sure Papa would rather have me out hunting right now than glorying over his screen appearance.)

What Allen does provide in the film, however, is an obvious enemy of ours in the form of Paul Bates (Michael Sheen), the pretentious intellectual type that Allen has written into a number of his films. Bates fosters the closed-minded attitude of knowledge-of-art-for-knowledge’s-sake that the film openly despises (inspired by Rodin’s mistress, etc., etc.). In figuring how to deal with artistic escapism, I think we need to look at Bender’s experiences in the past. His forays into 1920s Paris are fascinating not only because these men and women were world-renowned artists, but because they were interesting people who led interesting lives. We need to keep the human element in sight even as the art seemingly surrounds us.

Finding Frank Turner...On Facebook

In the past few months, there has been more or less of a media blitz on Facebook—both support for and criticism of the social network company now valued by some upwards of $100 billion. Overwhelmingly, the criticism has taken shape around the ways in which Facebook has mutated personal relationships (think breaking up on Facebook—check out Ilana Gershon’s funny but poignant book The Break-Up 2.0 for more) and even, in extreme cases, ruined the lives of some (social networking addictions…sexual predators…exposed perversity (Congressman Weiner? Even though that’s Twitter…).  

But the danger that has not been so often addressed is the issue of how Facebook and social networking as a whole have the potential to revolutionize not only humanity but also humanity’s products. In his Commencement speech later adapted for publication in The New York Times as “Liking Is For Cowards. Go For What Hurts.”

Franzen’s broad focus in the way that technology is changing the ways in which we view interpersonal relationships, especially the ways in which these relationships are often mediated through technology. (Franzen maybe overemphasizes the point when he suggests that his bond for his BlackBerry has erotic undertones. He does helpfully note that products of recent years are often “sexy;” which, when you stop and think about it, makes no sense. Unless you have mechanophilia?)

But what stuck with me in Franzen’s address was his attention to the recent “transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice […] liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving.”

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This all seems rather alarming when you consider it in conjunction with Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a future Internet world where people travel to “personalized” websites that display clothing or films or music or articles or games that their friends or family have “liked.” Facebook, for lack of a better way to put it, is trying to supplant that one really annoying friend you have who always tells you what you have to listen to or watch or read. This person may sometimes be a pain in the ass, but more often than not they’re not so far off the mark.

So now Facebook wants that job. Facebook wants to tell you that your sister “liked” Taylor Swift three days ago, while you’re reading comedy articles on Cracked.com. Not that I myself would ever go out and buy one of her albums, but Facebook just thought I should keep that in mind. But maybe I’ll buy it for her for her birthday! What an idea!

You probably see where I’m going with this. It’s very much what worried Marx (among other cultural critics) more than a century ago: commodity fetishism. Once I see that Taylor Swift album online, it assumes a unique sense of subjectivity in my mind because it has the power to sway my sister. Granted, this is taking Marx’s capitalistic theory a little simplistically, but the example still stands. (Truthfully, I think Marx would argue that the mere existence of the album already points to its having been fetishized.) Zuckerberg, unlike Marx, sees no issues with this model; he sees it as the ideal consumer solution.

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Out of argumentative habit, I would normally beg to differ with Zuckerberg and shoot for a little less anthropomorphizing of my consumer products. But I’m helpless when I think of my recent habit on Facebook of following the little music artist tabs that appear (for me, anyway) on the right side column.

I’ve found more than a few interesting artists through this method, many of them on minor-league labels and still struggling through the songwriters’ circuit. Some of them have been very bad and some of them have been rather interesting. (Not many have been all that great.) My earlier post about the Tim Robbins album, in fact, had its genesis in one of the music ads on the side.

So far I have avoided clicking the “Like” button, but I’m not sure that conscious oversight carries any moral weight to it. By clicking on or even looking at the little ad, I’ve already signed myself up for Zuckerberg’s long-term plans. Facebook keeps track of the websites I visit; I’m sure they can figure out that I’m following their little ads.

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The point of this digressive post was originally just to share an artist I found with you. But that got me thinking about how I discovered the artist. I didn’t wander into a bar and hear him playing nor was the song playing in a clothing store or shopping mall or outdoor café or a friend’s car nor even did a friend hand me a list of bands to check out. I found him on the Internet—a uniquely lonely, if still gratifying, experience.

And post-discovery: who to share it with? how to share it? I shared it with my brother, of course, in the next room over. But how to share it with friends? I’d venture to say that you’ve already seized on the answer by now… But on top of posting it on Facebook, I also post it here. Am I being hypocritical in all this? Maybe…sort of? I have to admit that it’s really sort of a gray area. Anyway, here’s a song by Frank Turner, an English punk-rocker-turned-singer-songwriter. Enjoy! 

Unfinished Works And Why They're Worth It

An unfinished work is a funny thing. The whole time you’re reading it, a ghostly tone hangs over the entire text. It’s almost as if the author lingers there on the page, taking care to remind you that by the time you reach the end it won’t be the end he or she envisioned. In the book sense, it will be over. But, of course, the story hasn’t actually ended. The act of reading these incomplete works might seem, in some sense, empty gestures.

I remember back in high school when I took on the unlikely task of reading Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls—one of the most famous unfinished novels. After hundreds of pages of grueling (Not knowing any better, I chose to maintain my tenth-grade opinion; “grueling” is how I remember my reading of the book) scrambling around a not-so-nifty English translation from Gogol’s (ostensibly) nifty Russian, I arrived at the last page. Simultaneously, I experienced an incredulous anger at Gogol for lopping off the last sentence and a fall-down-on-my-knees variety of thankfulness that it was over. Even though I was glad the ordeal had ended, I could not help some hair-pulling at the thought that the story had been lost to history.

[Not only was the novel nowhere close to a conclusion, but Gogol couldn’t provide me with a clean sentence and a dot of black ink when it really mattered. Fudge sentences in the middle all you want, but don’t you dare kill the first or the last one. (I should point out that I feel differently about circular texts a la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which I have not read, but much admire for its neat composure in returning right to the first page.)]

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These reflections on my not-so-savory experience of an unpublished novel bring me to my latest experiences of not one…but two unpublished novels in the last week. One of the novels, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, about which I have already posted. The other is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon.

I doubt that this criticism will hold much water, but the only thing that truly seemed suspect about The Pale King was that it should have been longer. Already at 538 pages, that sounds like a bit of a fanboy’s complaint. But let’s take into account that Wallace’s previous novel—the behemoth Infinite Jest—weighed in at 1,079 pages with the sort of typeset that literally dwarfs the version of The Pale King currently in bookstores. The novel—complete in the grammatical sense (no hanging sentence)—seemed stylistically whole, but still read as if there might be more material lurking out there.

That said, there has already been much discussion in reviews about how this sense of incompletion and shortness may have been part of Wallace’s hand to begin with. Even Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime editor who compiled the drafts and notes into the final form of the novel, is not sure how much more there might have been to the novel had Wallace lived to see its completion. In the novel’s Editor’s Note, Pietsch notes, “the manuscript pages suggest that the did not intend for the novel to have a plot substantially beyond the chapters [in the final version].” On the other hand, Wallace’s widow Karen Green claims that she understood through Wallace himself that the novel was only a third of the way finished and that much more material might have been included.

Regardless of how much more there might have been to the novel, Wallace’s style subsumes the faults of the incomplete manuscript. “Of course he intended it more or less this way,” Wallace aficionados can comfortably claim. “That’s how he writes! It’s not supposed to obviously cohere or follow the established rules.”

There's the sense out there among most critics that Foster Wallace can do whatever he wants and get away with it. I agree with this sentiment.

~

My more recent experience with novelistic incompletion, however, lends me no illusion that the lack of “ending” may have been purposeful. Fitzgerald’s final novel is certainly incomplete and, while Wallace’s work may in some ways thrive by its non-totality, Fitzgerald’s work thereby suffers.

Almost by convention, I find myself comparing The Last Tycoon to Fitzgerald’s visionary magnum opus The Great Gatsby. I quoted the last paragraph of Gatsby in a post not too long ago; it would not be overstating the case to claim that reading his final, incomplete novel is like reading Gatsby and skipping not only that last paragraph, but skipping the moving dénouement before that and the ghastly car accident scene before that…and really, you get it…it’s quite incomplete. The novel can never escape from that sense the same way that The Pale King can.

None of this is to say that The Last Tycoon doesn’t have its highlights. For one, Fitzgerald creates a truly masterful character in Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer who figures as “the last tycoon,” notably his only “hero” character without a crippling weakness. Surrounding Stahr is a cast of quick-talking Hollywood types, including the ostensible narrator Cecilia Brady.

Any awkwardness the text suffers is due to this first-person narrator, who mixes her own narration rather cumbersomely with omniscient third-person narration to tell Stahr’s full story. It’s been theorized that Fitzgerald, given his success with that narrative formula in the past with Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, sought to recreate it with the characters of Brady and Stahr. [Although one might read Cecilia as an unreliable narrator in the vein of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, but I think that approach is neither entirely possible nor even that helpful—nor do I think Fitzgerald even ever had that thought.]

We are left with a work partially realized—filled with passages of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and characters who jump off the page just like in his masterwork Gatsby. Describing an editing room as Stahr reviews footage: “Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed—to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded.” In my opinion, that sentence is the equal of almost anything in Gatsby.

~

But after finishing these two novels, I couldn’t help but ask myself the inevitable question: Why read a work that hasn’t been finished? In some sense, I think it’s the desire for further knowledge, the desire to encounter an idea that would not find bloom in any other place. This, at least, is certainly the pleasure derived in reading Kafka’s works (mostly unpublished during his lifetime; he ordered them burned in his will, but they were saved by a friend). Many of his stories are unedited fragments, but that does not make their ideas any less valuable than his few published works. (And, in fact, Kafka’s unfinished works as a whole are probably more valuable than the finished work of most authors.)

In the same way, Wallace’s novel is worth being read because it tackles a subject most others entirely avoid: boredom. Wallace channels boredom in a subject for philosophical thought and inquiry throughout the novel in a manner unlike anyone I’ve read before.

And Fitzgerald? Unlike Gogol (and, at times, Foster Wallace), Fitzgerald was a barrel of monkeys every page. I find myself recommending the slender volume (less than 150 pages), despite its lack of an ending. It’s a quick read with a roster of engaging characters who do not once fail to amuse.