He ain't dead, he's just asleep

Not long after my last post, Obama was reelected.  I try not to write much about politics here, at least outside of the cultural topics I started this blog as a place to write about.  But anybody who reads this has noticed by now that I'm an unabashed liberal, and that I've been growing more and more depressed with the state of my country for the last few years.  My whole adult life, really, things have been getting worse.  Anyway.  I honestly didn't think Obama would get reelected.  But he did.  And for a while the gravity of that, the grace of it, made my various little blogging ideas seem pretty paltry in comparison.  So I just shut up.  Not a bad thing to do now and then.

Then the busy time of the term hit me, and it was just too exhausting to think about posting.  And now it's been an even month since I posted.  Which is a couple of blog-lifetimes in Internet time.  I'm aware I may have killed it.

But whatever.  I don't feel like pulling the plug yet.  I started this blog so I'd have a place to write about the things I don't write about in my day job, because I enjoy writing.  Nothing more.  And I still feel that way, so here goes.

*

Probably not a good idea to let the first post back be so negative, but.  I'm a loyal reader of Andrew Sullivan.  But, like most liberals who read him (and really:  mostly only liberals read him), he annoys me about as often as he enlightens me.  And lately one of the things that's been annoying me most is the crap he posts about literature on weekends.  (Actually, of course, it's his blogserfs who post it, not him.  But it's his sensibility, he assures us, so it's him I call senseless.)

Like this.  I mean, the idea is iffy to begin with - a kind of pretentious that only The New Yorker can really aspire to - I find it snarky at worst and unhelpful at best to assert, with no hint of uncertainty, that the endings of all these great novels are "inartistic."  (And what about the uninterrogated assumptions behind that insidious em-dash separating "inartistic" from "a betrayal" - is the equivalence there so self-evident?)  There's the germ of an interesting theme there, the question of endings, but what's interesting about it can't be gotten at through self-satisfied judgments like "lame" or "shockingly bad."  It might be get-at-able through actual literary analysis - what was the author trying to do?  What did her audiences/editors/critics expect?  What assumptions do my reactions proceed from, and might they not be faulty?

Like I say, the article Sullivan is linking to is bad enough.  But there's something naggingly annoying in how Sullivan ('s gnomes) blithely link to it, nutting the pithiest grafs, with no comment, no reaction.  I mean, I guess that's the aggregator principle:  like the Daily Beast's brain-dead motto has it, "read this skip that," just sluice the words through your brain with "no attempt," as Dylan put it, "to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means."

Arrgghh. 

Daniel Mendelsohn on criticism

I don't have much to say about this article, except that you should read it:  Daniel Mendelsohn's spirited defense of the professional critic.  He has some nice thumbnail ideas on what makes a good critic, and what critics should do, and the place of critics in the current media environment.

For example.  Writing about the critics he read as a boy, he says:

I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week, was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments.

Yeah.  That's it.  I felt that too, as a young reader.  And that's what I aim for now, as a blogger.  (Don't bother telling me that I seldom achieve it!)  Later he says:

What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically—which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period. 

Yeah.  That's it.  The best criticism is an exercise in thinking, and therefore a lesson in thinking.

Unfortunately he ends his meditations with a couple of overly-facile statements.  Like so many people writing for pay, he Mendelsohn seems to harbor disdain for those who haven't Made It like him.  Apropos of some current contretemps about criticism, he concludes that

...I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put...  Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

Yeah, but.  First of all there's a "no true Scotsman" kind of thing going on here.  Even before the advent of the Internet, a lot of the people practicing criticism would have failed to live up to his "true critic" standards, right?  Obviously it's not amateur vs. professional (i.e., do you get paid to do it) that determines the "true critic."  It's all the things he's detailed over the course of his article (passion, knowledge, taste, etc.).  Print-based professional journalistic critics have no monopoly on those things.  Certainly the internet has loosed a lot of idiots to drool on the keys, but it has also given voice to a lot of people who have passions, knowledge, tastes that could never have qualified for mainstream media patronage.  If criticism is a thing worth doing (as he's convinced us it is), then surely it's worth doing well - it's possible to do it well, and therefore it's possible to do it badly.  And when it's done badly, why shouldn't we sit in judgment?  Why should critics be immune to criticism?  And yet he says they should be.  Hmm.

Everything is not a (or an) remix

Freddie deBoer is back, and I didn't even know I missed him, but Lord, I think I did. Not only is he just about the Only True Liberal (I'll let you poke around on his blog for that one), but he's also a borderline disaffected academic humanist. Unabashed support for unions and unapologetically intelligent cultural criticism. Tally ho.

Like today's screed, about how "everything is not a remix." He takes a lot of good swipes at a lot of good targets, and I'll let you discover most of them for yourself. One of the less obvious, despite the title, is the insecurity of the aging intellectual who knows perfectly damn well that there's nothing really new about "remixes" or "mashups" as manifestations of intertextuality, but who goes along with the techno-utopian claims on their behalf made by the young, for fear of looking superannuated. 'Cause there's nothing worse, in 2011, than looking like a cranky old man, I guess.

Life is complicated. Human beings are complicated. To understand them takes work, and time. (Even pop culture is complicated - it seems to be deBoer's blind spot in this article, but hey: we all have our synchronic idiocies.) But we don't want to know that anymore.

Edward Docx, genre fiction, literary fiction

I just got back from Powell's and Kinokuniya in Portland with a sackful of books that include both James Church and Terry Eagleton, the Tale of the Heike and a new manga, and I find that I'm late to the party, as usual, I see. (Or is it that I'm crashing? I can never tell.) Edward Docx (who seems to be a British novelist, rather than a file I can't open with my old version of Office) fired a broadside against genre fiction last week in the Guardian.

He seems to have two main gripes about it. First is that it's badly written. I tend to agree with him about Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, his two main whipping-boys. At the same time, I heartily agree with Laura Miller at Salon, who notes that cliché-ridden writing is not necessarily a drawback for some readers in some situations. Drawing on C.S. Lewis, Miller is defending accessible prose and those who read it- kind of echoing B.R. Myers' famous assault on the Cult of the Sentence from a decade ago. The gist is that not every reader is always, or even ever, up for prose that, sentence by sentence, tortures itself in an effort to avoid cliché. It's work to read, and some of us just like to read for pleasure.

I agree with Miller, but in fact I don't think she goes quite far enough: she's still buying into the same dichotomy that Docx is setting up, that "serviceable" prose, prose that "flows," that's easily readable, is artistically inferior - she just seems to be saying, lay off those who think that. They know what they like.

I'd go farther: I hold that sentence-smithing is only part of what goes into novel-writing. What goes into a novel? Sentences - syntax and grammar and style - of course, but also story - pacing and plot construction and character. And, beneath all that, there's the possibility, at least, of subtext, theme, ideas.

And none of these things presupposes skill at the others. Anybody who's read an academic book knows that you can have deep ideas but still be unable to express them in beautiful sentences. And anybody who's read Larsson or Brown knows that you can have a story that works for the reader without beautiful sentences. Likewise, one could point to any number of high-lit novels that prove you can have ideas and style without having to pay any attention to the mechanics of storytelling, or even the need to have a story to tell.

Why can't we recognize that since novels involve a lot of different skills, it's possible for novels to have different kinds of excellence? To say that Larsson and Brown are lousy sentence-writers but still manage to write interesting novels is to put the emphasis in the wrong place. They're not good sentence-writers, but they are excellent storytellers. There's real skill there. And the appreciation of skill is a large part of the apprehension of art, no?

In short, to say these novels are badly written, and to have that charge mean what Docx means, is to oversimplify what's involved in writing a novel. They are extremely well-written, I'd say - and the purely workmanlike nature of their sentences is part of that, allowing the reader to follow the plot (and whatever ideas the authors may have embedded in the plot) without getting hung up on individual word choices.

Docx's second point - and I'll admit that this is a pretty ballsy claim to make in 2010 - is that genre fiction is inherently inferior to non-genre, self-consciously literary fiction:

...even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. ...If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

I happen to think he's wrong, but I'm going to argue this point not by example but by analogy. Recently I was teaching an 18th-century Japanese comic book that was parodying popular sermonizing, using the metaphor of the kite. Ah, yes, the kite metaphor: I had this explained to me in Sunday School. You've seen kites high in the sky, straining against their tethers. They look for all the world like they're trying to get free and fly away into the ether, but are restrained by the string. The string looks like bondage. But in fact it's only the string that allows them to fly - cut the string, and the kite falls to the earth pretty quickly. Rules (the sermon goes) are like this - they may appear to be restrictions on freedom, but in fact they're the only things that allow us any freedom at all.

In the comic book in question, the parody came in when the author took this basically common-sensical metaphor and elaborated it beyond all believability, driving the point home with mock-pedantry for thirty pages. Very funny stuff. But at the same time it does make you think about the central metaphor, and how it is pretty common-sensical. (A mixture of parodic and sincere didacticism was this author's hallmark.)

And that's how I look at genre fiction. To Docx, the conventions of genre fiction look like rules that curtail the novelist's freedom and limit his/her potential. Certainly it may work that way for some writers - conventions can certainly be a crutch - but not all of them. For some writers conventions are the kite strings that allow them to soar - rules that spur creativity, or focus it, rather than kill it. To say that genre constraints interfere with the novelist's ability to write a good novel is like saying that Shakespeare might have been a great poet if he hadn't been constricted by the rules of the sonnet form.

Contemporary American literature: MFA vs. NYC

Note to self: if you ever get interested, even slightly, in the contemporary American literary scene, Chad Harbach is at Slate to tell you all about it. It's a long-ass article, and full of that trademark Slate snark, but even if only half of it is true, it explains a lot about what you've inadvertently absorbed about modern lit without really understanding: the place of New York, the place of not-New York, the importance of Raymond Carver. It's good enough to almost make you feel guilty about not having read anybody mentioned in the article except Nabokov, Faulkner, Carver, Pynchon, Auster, O'Brien, and Diaz. Remember that feeling.

Bill Wyman, but not that Bill Wyman, imagines Mick Jagger responding to Keith Richards

There's a rock journalist named Bill Wyman who's not, and I repeat not, the same person as the one-time Rolling Stones bassist. Over at Slate, he's written a piece on Keith Richards's memoir - you may have heard he published one. He does it from the coy perspective, fictionalized, of Mick Jagger stating his own case.

It's a little snarky about the Stones' later work, not to mention inaccurate (if they avoid their '80s albums in concert so assiduously then why were two songs from Undercover featured on Shine A Light?). But overall it's an excellent corrective to the Keef-mythologizing (which I love, by the way) that marks absolutely all writing on the Rolling Stones. Like, Keef may have been the genius in the Stones, but it fell to Mick to be the adult. What would you have done?

I won't even quote from it. It has to be read in its entirety.

New York Magazine taxidermizes the hipster

I've been known to fulminate about hipsters in these pages from time to time. Or link to other writers' more eloquent fulminations. But of course I realize that my scorn for the type partially arises from jealousy - I was never as cool as that, even in my prime - and partially stems from a frustrated ignorance - I am Mr. Jones, and I don't know entirely what's going on there. I thought I could intuit it, and I disliked what I intuited, but kind of also hated myself for judging so harshly, but kind of also took that self-hatred out on the hipsters... (None of which means that hipsters aren't a plague on our cities: just that the whole hipster-baiting thing is kind of a waste of energy, and I regret it. As Hunter wrote, "ain't no time to hate.")

Mark Greif has a long (five clicks!) article on New York Magazine's website right now called "What Was the Hipster?" It's kind of humorous, what with the artifacts-under-glass tone and all - it's not devoid of hipster room-full-of-mirrors irony itself - but I think it's a fundamentally serious attempt to understand this subculture as a subculture. It's a fascinating read, but what I want to know is, is it accurate? It squares with what little I know about the evolution of oppositional and elite-consumerist youth cultures over the last twenty years; and it seems to account convincingly for the most readily observable features of the hipster's behavior. But maybe I'm just happy because it tends to confirm my preconceptions.

It's really worth a read.

Gallagher lost it

I found this link through Andrew Sullivan, detailing how Gallagher ('80s comic, smashed fruit on stage with a sledgehammer) has become not only a show-biz has-been (no surprise), but also a right-wing hatemonger of alarming proportions. It's sad, but more than that it's horrifying.

Was Gallagher like that back in the day? I remember quite vividly watching a number of his cable specials. (The author has it wrong, by the way: Comedy Central wasn't around in the '80s. Gallagher became known to kids like us through Showtime specials.) (We didn't have Showtime. I watched them at friends' houses.) But I don't remember the jokes: I just remember the watermelon-smashing.

And unlike the author of the otherwise-excellent article, I'm not too hip to admit that the watermelon-smashing was brilliant comedy. It had on me something of the same impact (pun...not exactly intended, but foreseen) that my elders describe Lenny Bruce as having on them. In the violent yet harmless act of smashing fruit on stage (best when done under strobe lights), Gallagher revealed something about our attraction to, even need for, mindless destruction; he said something about destruction as a form of creativity; and he provided a deeply cathartic and gloriously transgressive moment for those of us who, for better or worse, were growing up in an increasingly repressive (of everything except greed) America.

It was perhaps inevitable that it devolved into schtick. Lenny Bruce would have, too, had he lived. And it was inevitable that the idea would be stolen - in the interview Gallagher gripes about Letterman stealing it, but Letterman only steals from the best: it was a compliment. (My favorite iteration of it on Letterman was dropping a bathtub full of chocolate pudding from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theatre, then following it with bowling balls.)

So Gallagher had his moment. What I don't remember (and I'm not sure I have the heart to search youtube enough to find out) is: was he this much of a racist, homophobic asshole back then, too?

Honesty from Jim Emerson

I haven't been blogging too much lately; really, it hasn't been that I lost interest, just that I've been busy, and some of the things I've been reading/seeing/listening to have been rather long in getting through, so I didn't necessarily have anything to blog about. Just finished The Pickwick Papers, for example, which took me over a month to get through; I'll try to blog it sometime this week, but that sort of explains why I haven't written about books lately...

Anyway, it may seem that I've lost interest once I link to the wonderful essay Jim Emerson has up on his Scanners film blog right now. I don't read a lot of film blogs (and there are a lot of film blogs); I found Emerson's through Ebert's website, and it pretty much fixes me for film commentary beyond simple movie reviews. So I say this without a lot of knowledge to back it up, but I don't think you'll find too many people on the internets writing about culture on a professional level (far above mine) who have the courage to admit what he's almost admitting
here, which is that there can come a point when, no matter how much you love a thing, there can come a point when you lose interest in it; more precisely, when you realize that your love for the thing doesn't necessarily mean you have to be enthusiastic about every new development in the thing.

He's talking about movies (mostly: he has a nice paragraph about music). Here's how he puts it:

So, I guess I can imagine reaching a point when I just say, "Forget it. I'd rather concentrate my energies studying and (re-)discovering great movies that already exist than keep expecting to find something satisfying in next week's mainstream theatrical releases just because they're 'new' products" -- whatever "mainstream" means, if anything, in our increasingly balkanized, niche-ified pop culture landscape. I recognize that, in the late 20th and early 21st century, the chances of me discovering what I'd consider to be a genuinely "new," compelling movie at the multiplex have grown mighty slim.

If you can make generalizations (and I know: you can't) about something as hydraheaded as the internets, it seems to me that the culture commentary thereon is overwhelmingly oriented toward the new. As he seems to be recognizing in his essay, to be interested in film on the internet seems to automatically entail being interested in new films.

But what if you're not? I don't have the heart to read all the comments on Emerson's post, but I can well imagine readers of a certain bent seeing his as the complaint of a cranky old fart (most of Emerson's commenters are fanatically loyal, so I doubt they'll say this), or of an aesthetically complacent, intellectually borderline-incurious traditionalist. None of which he is, of course...

I'm trying to figure out exactly what it is that strikes such a chord in me about this essay. Part of it, I think, is the recognition that as you get old you sometimes lose interest in the new. I almost think it's inevitable. It hasn't happened to me with films - most of my favorite directors are still in their primes, and a lot of my favorite films are from the last twenty years, and if I don't get out to the theater much, I do try to put new things in the Netflix queue when they look interesting, and a fair amount of recent films look interesting to me.

But a cursory reading of this blog should make it clear that it has happened to me with music. I, quite obviously, love music. I mean, I loooooovvvvvvvvveeeeeeee music. Willie Dixon once said, "I never said I was a millionaire, I said I've spent more money than a millionaire" - and I've spent it all on music. But I can't even remember the last new artist I liked well enough to buy a whole CD of (and I still consume most of my music in CD format). The odd Idol post aside, music is essentially over for me.

Why? Reasons both personal and, I begin to suspect, universal. The personal was an unintended separation from contemporary pop at a key time in my youth. I spent two years on a religious mission from age 20 to 22, in a foreign country and under a regime of rules that precluded listening to any non-religious music. I was never solely focused on the present - I developed my fetish for '60s hippie bands as a high school student in the Reagan era - but I was as intensely engaged with new music as most teenagers are right up until this point. Then for two years I dropped out of touch, and missed everything. This was from 1990 to 1992, the beginning of grunge.

This meant that I essentially missed out on the biggest rock development of my generation, and my engagement with contemporary music has never been the same. I tried to play catch-up for a while, but I never really recovered - I felt alienated from most alternative rock in the '90s. Meanwhile, hip hop never appealed to me much, and the one new musical development in the '90s that really did it for me, acid jazz, proved to be mostly a dance-music fad rather than a real revolution. By the time the '00s arrived I'd essentially given up trying to keep up with new music.

For a long time I wrestled with myself over this; I still feel a little guilt over not trying to engage with new music. Not only is there the anxiety over appearing to be an old fart (happens to all of us, both the aging and the anxiety over it), but there's the knowledge that lots of people I know and respect seem to find a great deal to love in new music. But then, almost all those people are much younger than me...

That's where the possibly-universal comes into it. I still pay attention just enough to know what some of the trends are, and what some people see in them (but not enough attention to name names accurately, so I won't), but it's still not enough to actually motivate me to invest in new music. Because a lot of it seems to be retreading stuff I've already been through. Rock music, I realized long ago, is essentially about youth and rebellion, which means that every couple of decades it has to eat itself, kill its parents, forget its past, which of course means it's doomed to repeat it, or if you want to put it more optimistically it's always free to make its own mistakes. So a lot of the gestures in rock I've seen before (and when they seemed fresh to me they were already repetitious to my parents' generation). I can appreciate them, but I don't feel compelled to join them.

And I think this is bound to happen as you get older. You realize, from your own experience, that there really isn't all that much new under the sun, and that in some cases youth is best left to the young. In some fields this isn't a problem; in rock music it is, because the revolutionary
impulse at the heart of rock (and this is true of pop, too, although for a different reason: in pop it's because, after all, presentism is the defining characteristic of pop) means that rock critics skew young (even Christgau, who I confess I never liked, lost his gig in the aughts). If you're a rock fan, you get old, and you either decide that new rock isn't as good as what came before and you get dismissed as an old fart, or you keep trying to stay current and look like an idiot and get dismissed as an old fart anyway.

Of course, none of this matters: unless you have to do this for a living, you should just listen to what you like, and as for people's opinions, it's like Jerry Garcia used to say: fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. But no matter how much we may admire him, few of us can actually be as devil-may-care as the Friend of the Devil himself; I for one will admit that I don't want to get stale, stuck in a rut, old, and that's why I had such anxiety for so long about having given up on new music.

But the thing is, I never gave up on discovering music. And this is an important point in Emerson's essay, too. Like the man says, it doesn't matter how old it is, if you haven't heard it it's new to you. I'm constantly discovering new music - it just happens to be anywhere from thirty to ninety years old most of the time.

I strongly believe that's a valid approach. In other words, I don't criticize those who give up on new music (etc.), but I also think that if you give up discovering new music you're giving up on growing, at least in that particular area. That's why I don't just give up and listen to nothing but Dylan and the Dead - I could probably do that and be happy, but I wouldn't respect myself. So I buy a Lee Morgan cd, and I discover "Mr. Kenyatta," and it makes me glad.

What I don't understand, actually, is why this isn't a more common stance. If I could shift the subtopic to movies for a minute, one of the nice things about living in Cambridge/Somerville was that we had the Brattle right there, a fantastic revival house showing classic movies all the time. I mean, if you cared about movies at all it was heaven to be able to see things like Apocalypse Now, Zabriskie Point, Seven Samurai, Casablanca, and all the rest on the big screen, especially if you were too young to have caught them when they were first in release. And yet the Brattle is always hurting for money. I just can't understand how a major American metro area can support up to a half dozen multiplexes but not a single revival screen.

Why aren't more people interested in old art, is the question. Why does Wikipedia contain more pages about The National than about Sidney Bechet?

...No real point to all this that I've written, obviously. I'm in Japan right now, which always makes me introspective because it's been the site and catalyst for so much of my adulthood; and I'm also jet-lagged, which makes it harder than normal to put two thoughts together coherently. But, if anyone was curious, maybe this post explains why this blog is so scatter-shot. Or maybe it just demonstrates it...

I'll try to write something about something soon. Probably Pickwick.

Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994)

My family has a tradition at New Year of opening the door at midnight to let the old year out and the new year in. I have no idea where this tradition comes from, but we did it when I was a kid. Later, when I became a starry-eyed romantic mystic youth, I expanded on this and used to take a walk in the backyard at midnight, gazing up through the frigid air at the stars or the moon and thinking about the Tennyson poem (which was a hymn in our church) and the line "the year is dying in the night." This caught my imagination somehow, and I found myself thinking about the moment when one year turned into the next as a sort of reality, out there to be grasped if only I could. For several years of this I was convinced that I could feel, in the dark of a midwinter's night, that (say) 1987 had definitively changed into 1988, and that Things Were Different Now.

Now, of course, I realize how pathetic (in the ordinary sense as well as the fallacious one) it was to think that something arbitrary like the calendar could make itself felt in the natural world. But it seemed real enough to me at the time.

The Wikipedia page for Pulp Fiction is one of the things that makes you realize what a fantastic piece of work Wikipedia is. Not only is it informative about the film, it's a great summary of the discourse on the film, which quickly took on a life of its own as the film came to be considered (in Wikipedia's words) "a prime example of postmodern film."

Remember when things were considered "postmodern"? Good times.

Yeah. I spent a lot of time in grad school in 2000 and 2001 trying to figure out what postmodernism is. Now I just don't think there's any such thing. The whole discourse reminds me of what I used to do at New Year: it's people sure that Something's Changing, and desperate to make sure that they're not left behind. Maybe they're sick of the modern world and can't wait for it to pass away and for all things to be made new again, or maybe they're defensive about the achievements of high modernism even as they come crashing down around us, and want to label the age so they can vilify it. Whichever, the term "postmodern," it seems to me, doesn't describe anything but the critic's state of mind (mind you, I'd never say this in polite company, and I can't defend it theoretically: it's just a hunch I have, or maybe a touch of indigestion).

I think what did it for me was reading Tristram Shandy and some Santô Kyôden and realizing that pretty much every quality critics point to in something like Pulp Fiction as postmodern, as uniquely characterizing the cultural moment of that film's production, can be found in lots of premodern or early-modern texts. Self-reflexivity, metatextuality, playful engagement with the detritus of pop culture - none of this was new in 1994, or 1894, or 1794. This kind of thing is part of comedy. Humor will always try to break rules and shock.

Pulp Fiction is a comedy.

(Among other things.)

(This is the pivot point.)

Not that I'm trying to minimize the film's impact or importance, the way it instantly and almost single-handedly transformed global culture (I won't even qualify that with the adjective "popular"). It really is one of the defining moments of the '90s, and that's clearer than ever now that the '90s are history.

And it holds up. One of the less salacious effects of the movie was that for about five years we were deluged with really crappy movies about hit-men and small-time crooks, but even now that the trend has passed, Pulp Fiction still works: Travolta and Jackson's chemistry is as combustible as it ever was, able to start fires in every frame, and their cool is still cool enough to put them all out without breaking a sweat. It's not my personal fave of QT's, but it might still be, objectively speaking (if such a thing is possible), his best, and the one that will still be studied and remembered fifty years from now.

What strikes me watching it again now, having written my series of lame-ass posts on QT's ouevre, is that this - and, I now realize, Reservoir Dogs - are movies about men. Starting with Jackie Brown and going right up through his most recent work, Tarantino's work has been all about constructing female heroism, exploring various permutations (realistic and fantastic) of powerful women. But his first two films were about men - men interacting with other men in various ways, conditioned by power and emotion and even (perhaps mostly) sexuality. Partly it's about coming up with a new definition of male cool - and I am, and always was, as susceptible to this as any other viewer, falling in love with Brother Keitel, especially, at first sight. But I think it's more than that. There's a consistent (across these two films) interest in the dynamics of male partnership, how trust is built or lost between pairs or trios of men, how communication is effected or stymied, how work is done or not done. Distant echoes of the shackled criminals in Branded to Kill, of course, but also of innumerable buddy movies.

This interest in homosociality doesn't disappear entirely after Pulp Fiction; there are elements of it in Jackie Brown (Ordell and Louis) and Inglourious Basterds (the Basterds, of course). But it's drastically downplayed in favor of an examination of female strength and (in some cases) female-female relationships (the Bride and Vernita; Zoe and her friends). Take for example the Basterds themselves: as a group of soldiers there's an obvious opportunity to explore the relationships between them (the whole band of brothers idea), but as much as we get a sense of how they fight, we don't get much of a sense of how they relate to each other as men. It's just not what the film is interested in.

Slate on kabuki, or, "I don't think that word means what you think it does"

Slate's Jon Lackman takes up one of my pet peeves, Americans' insistence on using the term "kabuki" to describe ritualized behavior (as if actors in Western drama don't follow scripts) (of course there is some improvisation in Western theater - but guess what, there is in kabuki, too).

He writes:

Of course, pundits don't care about the real thing. They use Kabuki precisely because they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word's true meaning, and they can use it purely on the level of insinuation. They deploy Kabuki because:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible.

He's right: the way US pundits use this word is indefensible. They're simply parading their ignorance.

I don't have much to add except that kabuki is really an amazing theatrical tradition, and I wish more people associated the word with that rather than with political behavior.

Bonus: if you're one of my local Oregon readers (do I have any?), you can go see kabuki, in English, from April 16 to May 2 in Salem at Willamette University, or May 2 in Portland. Here's the info.

My #@%*$ Generation

Keith Phipps writes, setting up his reassessment of Easy Rider:

Released on July 14, 1969, between the Stonewall riots and the Apollo 11 moon landing, Easy Rider became an unexpected success and, like Woodstock, a touchstone for a generation. Not my generation, though. Before seeing it, I'd imagined Easy Rider as one of those you-had-to-be-there '60s clichés that so irritated those of us who came of age in the '80s—something to be slipped into that-was-then montages between footage of Vietnam and the '68 Democratic Convention.

Film enthusiasts my age had warned me to expect a film with long, often dull, experimental patches and stoner vagaries. When I finally got around to watching Easy Rider, I discovered those warnings weren't entirely unfounded. But I also discovered a more complex and sour movie than the one I'd imagined. More an elegy for a generation that never got where it wanted to go than a celebration of that generation's superiority, it pits hopefulness against resignation and sets the battle on a lovingly photographed stretch of the United States.

Now that's annoying.

First, if you've ever actually seen the film, you're thinking: duh. That's the whole fucking point of Easy Rider: these guys honestly, deeply love America, and they can't figure out why America doesn't love them back. Why does Phipps sound like he thinks he's the first viewer ever to see that?

Second, he's a self-professed film enthusiast, but not only has he never seen Easy Rider, he seems proud of the fact. Pardon me while I gag myself with a spoon. That's such typical '80s-generation idiocy.

I say this as an '80s kid myself. Graduated from high school in 1987, the first (hardly the last) Summer of Nostalgia for the Summer of Love. First learned of the '60s through the very same self-laudatory Boomer clip montages Phipps did. Luckily, though, my parents sat out the '60s, so I never had any Freudian issues with the art of their generation like so many of my cohort did. Sure I found/find Boomer narcissism annoying, that assumption they tend to make that they invented pop culture, but I didn't have to, you know, kill the father in order to listen to his Doors albums or watch Woodstock.

Which is good, because Boomer narcissism aside, there's a lot of great art to be discovered in the '60s and '70s. As there is - and this is my real point - in any era. I don't take anybody to task for liking the culture of their generation and never moving beyond it, but once you take on yourself the mantle of "film enthusiast," or whatever - once you decide you're interested in art/culture for its own sake, in understanding it and contextualizing it and appreciating it and knowing it (in every sense including, perhaps foremost, the Biblical) - then you have no business allowing Oedipal issues to blind you to the good stuff.

Any critic, any lover of art, will have loves and hates, or areas of greater and lesser knowledge. But no critic has any business basing his/her judgments on something he/she "imagines" to be true about a piece of art. That's just ignorance. Sure, we all have our blind spots. But we shouldn't be proud of them.

Ebert on snark

Here. He's writing apropos of this year's Oscars (about which I respectfully disagree with him), but his remarks on snark have a much wider application.

Ron Rosenbaum on Billy Joel

I read this today. Ron Rosenbaum excoriating Billy Joel for two pages on Slate. I'm not intending to turn this blog into a running commentary on what other people say about art; I'd rather just concentrate on art itself. But Mr. Rosenbaum did catch me with his lead paragraph:

This may seem an odd moment to bring up the subject of Billy Joel. But the recent death of the painter Andrew Wyeth revived a long-standing debate over whether his art is respectable or merely sentimental schlock. (Say it: good or bad?) It got me to thinking about the question of value in art and whether there are any absolute standards for judging it. It indicates the question is still alive, not relegated to irrelevance by relativism.

Interesting questions, and he's right that Mr. Wyeth's death is a good occasion to think about them. For the record, I like Mr. Wyeth well enough; not enough to leap to his defense here, but well enough.

Which is, funnily enough, how I feel about Billy Joel. Mr. Rosenbaum spends the rest of his article trashing Mr. Joel to prove that there are, or at least can be, absolute standards for judging art. It's an interesting exercise, and at least Mr. Rosenbaum is game enough to define his standards. His objections to Mr. Joel's work boil down, he says, to this:

It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

Fair enough. And I'll resist the temptation to write that Mr. Rosenbaum is himself indulging in unearned contempt; I like his work on Shakespeare, so I'll allow he's earned the right to show some contempt, if that's what he feels like doing.

On the other hand, I think he's being a little disingenuous when he tries to locate the problem entirely within Mr. Joel. He as much as admits it later when he writes that

Billy's from my 'hood, mid-Long Island—Hicksville, to be precise (I'm from Bay Shore)—so I'm sensitive to his abuse of our common roots. Once I wrote something about the curse of being from the Guyland. In it I said something heartfelt: New Jersey may have a rep as a toxic dump for mob victims to fester in, but at least it brought forth Bruce Springsteen. The ultimate Guyland humiliation is to be repped to the world by Billy Joel. So I feel entitled to be cruel—

Follow Mr. Rosenbaum's link to his article about Long Island. You'll find this juicy paragraph:

I say "we" because, while I was born in Manhattan and have lived most of the latter half of my life here, I grew up on Long Island, and I'm resigned to the fact that in some essential, irrevocable way I'll always be a Long Islander. Resigned to the fact that, whenever I tell someone my hometown was Bay Shore, I feel compelled to add, pre-emptively, "Yes, that's right, that's the home of Katie Beers's dungeon." Resigned to the fact that every mush-mouthed hayseed in America feels he has the right to say, condescendingly, "Oh, you're from Long Island, you mean Lawn Guyland" -- as if everyone there spoke that way and he was establishing a Henry Higgins-like sophistication by comparison.

Now I think we're getting to the point. Mr. Rosenbaum's contempt for Mr. Joel is that of the the native son ashamed of his hometown, combined with the Manhattanite's contempt for every place that's not Manhattan. (If you call everybody from elsewhere a "mush-mouthed hayseed," how can you criticize them for calling you a "Lawn Guylander"?)

All of this is perhaps a roundabout, although hopefully not unduly ad hominem, way of saying that, like Mr. Rosenbaum, I've often wondered if we can't find some sort of absolute standard for judging art. I've annoyed many a professor and not a few students in my time by insisting we talk about this very question.

Lately, though, I've become an agnostic about the question, because I haven't encountered any absolute standards that aren't pretty easily exposed as motivated by something else. Like Mr. Rosenbaum's Manhattanitis.

I've learned to settle for simply trying to articulate why I like what I like, rather than trying to prove that it is, objectively, good. All I ask (I think; I may prove myself a hypocrite on this) of any other critic is an honest articulation of taste.

Like: everything Mr. Rosenbaum says about Mr. Joel may be true. But I still think Mr. Joel was a pretty gifted or canny crafter of pop/rock records. Songs like "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" or "Don't Ask Me Why," or a dozen other records I could name off the top of my head, boast nicely worked-out melodies, well-constructed verse/chorus/bridge sequences, effective arrangements that usually opt for solid musicianship rather than production tricks, lyrics that if they lack Dylanesque profundity manage to evoke something beyond simple lust. In addition to which, Mr. Joel could be a compelling performer: I've always found Songs From The Attic to be an exemplary live album, making the case that some artists should record everything live, as energy usually trumps precision.

Do I love Mr. Joel as much as I do Dylan? Not on your life. But I don't hate him, and I think I have pretty sound reasons for not hating him. I also think Mr. Rosenbaum has sound, well-articulated reasons for hating him: but I don't think they constitute an aesthetic absolute.

EDIT: One of the commenters on Mr. Rosenbaum's essay reminds us that Slate's own Jody Rosen wrote about Billy Joel a few years ago. Mr. Rosen's take doesn't have the philosophical hook of wondering if we can find aesthetic absolutes, but it is a lot fairer and (this is the important part) more perceptive in its treatment of Mr. Joel's strengths and weaknesses as an artist.

Heather Havrilesky!!

I don't watch Battlestar Galactica, so I didn't pay much attention to anything past the third paragraph of this column. But Heather Havrilesky is one of those Salon columnists (King Kaufman is the other) who are worth reading regularly even if you don't give a damn about the subject, because they're good, funny, insightful writers.

And the first three paragraphs of the column I just linked to - well, I want to carve them in stone and set them into the wall of my own personal Shrine To People Who Hate Hipsters As Much As I Do. Brilliant stuff.

P.S. If you get addicted to King Kaufman, you might like his buddy Paul Lukas, who runs Uni Watch. Again, fascinating even if you don't have the slightest interest in sports. You can read Lukas entirely as a history of popular design in the U.S.

Josiah McElheny: Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism

Saw this sculpture/installation today at the MFA. The photo on the MFA website doesn't do it justice; there's a better photo of it here.

First of all, it's a beautiful piece. Entrancing is the word I'd choose. What it is is: a bunch of vases made of some highly reflective material lined up along the four sides of a glass-fronted box. The glass you see through is actually a two-way mirror: we can see in but the vases can't see out, so to speak. They get their reflection, and then reflect that back, infinitely. Behind the vases are more mirrors - the center of the box is another box, mirrored on the outside. The effect is of these vases infinitely reflected and infinitely reflecting. The lighting is soft white light, not overpowering - the thing doesn't shine inside so much as glow, and that glow diminishes with every reflection until the vases are just marching away into a sort of ethereal half-light.

The piece itself is just beautiful, in a really unexpected, haunting way. Then you read the card on the wall telling you about it. The artist is Josiah McElheny: you can read a little more about him here. The title of the piece is "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernisms." A little tendentious, but okay.

But here's the text:

"Deploying the most sophisticated and virtuoso glass-working techniques combined with a conceptual rigor, McElheny creates sculptures and installations that explore crucial moments in the development of modernity, its visual and theoretical undercurrents. Over the past four years, McElheny has produced a series of works based on a conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and designer/architect Buckminster Fuller that took place in 1929 during which they discussed a world of form without shadow; totally reflective forms inhabiting a totally reflective environment that would be totally self-enclosed - the perfect utopian environment. 'Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism' presents the viewer with a seemingly infinite repetition of reflections of modernist design (decanters, vases, boxes, and bottles based on designs from Scandinavia, Italy, the former Czechoslovakia, and Austria from c. 1910 -1990) that attempts to depict the capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable, that everything can be remanufactured endlessly without regard to era, geography, or culture. McElheny has stated that he aims to explore how "the act of looking at a reflective object could be connected to the mental act of reflecting on an idea."

Starts out nicely. I was interested to learn that the tendentious title wasn't pulled out of a hat, or an overheated graduate seminar, and finding out that he was inspired by this utopian idea of Noguchi and Fuller's made me see the work in a new light - opened it up for me.

But then we get to the "capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable" business, and suddenly I want to heave (that's a sophisticated art-criticism term, by the way).

First of all, does capitalism really believe that? Maybe; it's arguable, at least.

Regardless of that, though, suddenly the wall text is telling me that I should see this beautiful sculpture as a critique of this or that or the other thing, a satire, a political statement.

I don't mind seeing art as any or all of those things. But if this piece is a critique of capitalism, it fails miserably, because the world inside this mirrored box is beautiful, just as beautiful as Noguchi and Fuller probably imagined it would be. It's a utopia of gracious forms, completely self-contained, completely peaceful. Nothing dystopian about it. (And really, nothing capitalist, either.)

So either the art is lame, because it fails to do what it tries to do, or the wall text is lame. Guess which one I'd side with. And most of all, this part of the wall text is unnecessary. It doesn't open the work up at all: it closes it down, by trying to control how we feel about it.

Ebert on critics

I've taken over a month off from this blog (longer than I spent doing it), because of a major move. You may have noticed that the Tanuki has been writing as if the word "here" referred to Japan. From now on, he'll be writing as if the word "here" referred to the U.S.

As if.

I've got lots of ideas for blog entries stored up, but they're kind of logjammed at the moment, and all that's coming through is a little trickle of water, with maybe some wood chips or debris floating in it...

Anyway, you may remember a little aside I wrote about my attitudes, Then and Now, toward critics. Roger Ebert, whose work I've valued for a long time, just posted a new essay defending what critics do. Highly recommended.

(Although, I'm not as optimistic as he is about Rissient's dictum that "It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons." Maybe Rissient was simply trying to tell us, as Ebert suggests, that "the unexamined life is not worth living;" but I have no doubt that a lot of the people who live by Rissient's words, if not the man himself, do have a bit of the cultural snob in them. If Rissient really meant what Ebert wants to think he meant, wouldn't he have just said "one must like it for a reason"?)