Category: Criticism
There is a great deal of blog triumphalism, especially on the right side, that is utterly self-contradictory and and utterly concerned with the amplification of memes, etc. For all the (in general, but not in this specific circumstance) derision cast at the MainStream Media, the mainstream media is still the effective game in town.
I think of why blogs are important to me, and I think of Billmon at Whiskey Bar. I think of how sad it is that he's no longer blogging, and I remember the reasons he gave for leaving.
What made Billmon so important was his pronounced perspective and his distinct and eloquent voice. There is no one like him. And that's the promise of blogging.
Not to get rid of the George Wills and Howard Finemans of the world, or to even replace them, but to act as a bulwark, however small, of distinctiveness and individual human identity where notions of the world are otherwise received and homogenous.
Readers of Whiskey Bar, especially when comments were alive and well, felt like part of a community of individual human minds. It was stimulating and exciting and entirely unlike the world of opinion one finds on those execrable cable news roundtable shows.
I know I'm wired differently from other people, and probably have more time than most to dedicate to such things, but my feeling upon discovering that there was this world of smart people, good writers, and interesting thinkers was very positive.
American culture is both, more often than not, homogenous and also, more often than not, tailored toward underestimating the taste and capacities of its audience. The rightwingers will often say that it's evil liberals who are to blame for the bar being set so low. I cannot say it's the rightwingers' fault, in certainty, although the very fact that George Bush, a true dullard, the very fruit of the soft bigotry of our low expectations, is my president says something. The fact is that we have a culture that encourages in every way possible magical thinking, that, despite its self-conception, is not meritocratic an any substantial way.
I am convinced that blogs are part of the solution. There are minds that would otherwise go rusty from disuse, opinions that would go unchallenged, souls that would become ever decreasingly insensitive in its absence.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
RIP Artie Shaw
Category: Observations
I did not know the man's music, although I imagine my father has some stories.
I remark on this man's passing because it appears he had a significant and colorful life, and because there is something lovely and terrible in what this E Online obituary says about the man.
There must be something terrible in discovering, at the age of 44, that you have outlived your artistic peak, that you have begun walking in your own footsteps. And yet ending one's career on such a note is an ideal of sorts and one that many hold. Musicians in the rock genre are regularly chastized for continuing to record and perform well after they have hit the peak of their careers. It is even said, in some cases, to discredit their earlier work.
Part of this is the fickle and immature tendency of fans and critics alike to see artists as merely the facilitators of otherwise autonomous artworks, rather than, in any substantial sense, their creators. All art that's worth a damn is the product of commitment and energy and risk. This is what artists (although most who say so are defensive twits) respond to when they identify critics as parasites or carrion-eaters. Truly great criticism is perhaps an art in itself. I respect all good writing, and the job of separating wheat from chaff is important culturally and socially.
Again, there is something simultaneously quite brave and quite sad about Shaw's decision. My perspective as a young and inexperienced and naive artist is that Shaw made a deal with the long shadow of his own mortality a good fifty years before he came to die.
I understand that this is something that athletes experience perhaps much more intensely, and generally much sooner. I think of Olympic gymnasts or figure skaters who reach their peak before they are my age.
To recognize one's fragility and mortality is a terrible thing. People spend decades attempting to shield themselves from these truths, through distraction, intoxicants, plastic surgery and the other weapons of self-delusion. There is something about Artie Shaw's decision that bespeaks an integrity I can't help but respect.
Also: Contrary to the author of the obit, one does not read vociferously; I imagine voraciously was the word desired.
I did not know the man's music, although I imagine my father has some stories.
I remark on this man's passing because it appears he had a significant and colorful life, and because there is something lovely and terrible in what this E Online obituary says about the man.
But in 1954 he stopped playing the clarinet, claiming he could not achieve the level of artistry he desired.
As he explained to Reuters in a 1985 interview, "I am compulsive. I sought perfection. I was constantly miserable. I was seeking a constantly receding horizon. So I quit."
"It was like cutting off an arm that had gangrene. I had to cut it off to live. I'd be dead if I didn't stop. The better I got, the higher I aimed. People loved what I did, but I had grown past it. I got to the point where I was walking in my own footsteps."
There must be something terrible in discovering, at the age of 44, that you have outlived your artistic peak, that you have begun walking in your own footsteps. And yet ending one's career on such a note is an ideal of sorts and one that many hold. Musicians in the rock genre are regularly chastized for continuing to record and perform well after they have hit the peak of their careers. It is even said, in some cases, to discredit their earlier work.
Part of this is the fickle and immature tendency of fans and critics alike to see artists as merely the facilitators of otherwise autonomous artworks, rather than, in any substantial sense, their creators. All art that's worth a damn is the product of commitment and energy and risk. This is what artists (although most who say so are defensive twits) respond to when they identify critics as parasites or carrion-eaters. Truly great criticism is perhaps an art in itself. I respect all good writing, and the job of separating wheat from chaff is important culturally and socially.
Again, there is something simultaneously quite brave and quite sad about Shaw's decision. My perspective as a young and inexperienced and naive artist is that Shaw made a deal with the long shadow of his own mortality a good fifty years before he came to die.
I understand that this is something that athletes experience perhaps much more intensely, and generally much sooner. I think of Olympic gymnasts or figure skaters who reach their peak before they are my age.
To recognize one's fragility and mortality is a terrible thing. People spend decades attempting to shield themselves from these truths, through distraction, intoxicants, plastic surgery and the other weapons of self-delusion. There is something about Artie Shaw's decision that bespeaks an integrity I can't help but respect.
Also: Contrary to the author of the obit, one does not read vociferously; I imagine voraciously was the word desired.
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