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.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Trauma, Chaos, and drawing
Category: Observations
I have drawn from a very young age. As an artist, it's my default medium. There are artists who see the world artistically through photography or film or clay or corten steel- may way is through drawing.
This is why I am ostensibly a printmaker at my current institution: because intaglio is uniquely suited to my approach to drawing.
Drawing for me has done many things, but I think it has been most important in the way it allows me a control over the world that is often otherwise not in my possession. This is a confession of sorts. There is something both profoundly human and somewhat pathetic about using one's art to solve one's problems. And the desire for control is at times a less than commendable motive.
I'm thinking about this because I'm remembering how, in my life, drawing has, in the presence of crisis or trauma or chaos, functioned and not functioned to my selfish ends.
I'm recalling a drawing class that I took in undergrad that, occuring as it did in the midst of personal chaos, of newish fears and considerations of my own mortality and fragility - the typical post-adolescent recognition that the sense of invincibility one earlier felt was an illusion (something I had utterly grasped intellectually, but that does not do it) (the admixture of the traditional fears and a small medical crisis exaggerated these out of their due proportion, I say retrospectively). For some reason, our primary lesson, to, in a fashion both modernist and self-consciously Eastern, let go of our desire for control over the drawing-as-result-of-a-process, rather than liberating me, led me into greater internal conflict. The result was a discomfort with drawing that would be take quite a while to overcome.
I also remember my temporary incapacity to draw following September 11th. The Thursday following the attacks, I told my teacher that I would be far below 100%, and unlikely to have enough focus to produce good work. For some reason that remains obscure to me he asked why. (September 11th may have been a far-off and, because I was not connected to any of those killed, abstract trauma, its awesome horror, spectacular amplification, and my simple empathy made it a trauma indeed) Drawing had not served me in the immediate term to fit my mind to the ugly edges of the world. Yet in the coming weeks, that event and the war in Afghanistan would lead me into a rather ambitious and personally significant drawing that, if not succeeding in ordering my world, served its purpose.
At the moment I am weathering a familial circumstance which frightens me and gives me trauma as I define it. (That is, I consider trauma to be any circumstance that redefines the self or the world outside of the self in ways that the two cannot be easily or immediately reconciled) On a certain level I have not confronted my direst fears head on. I have at no point in time conceived of the world in which my loved one is passed away. There is something about the leaden sense of death that has pervaded this entire Christmas season that makes this ideation almost unnecessary.
The fact is that a consistent discipline of drawing has both provided me with the pleasure necessary to see the greater circumstance beyond the lens of doom, and it has also served as a channel for these emotions and others in this time of multiple discomforts, longings, and losses.
This finally takes me to the advice that I gave to a good friend who is dealing with a terrible loss. I suggested to be aware of the ways in which grief and loss can make the act of drawing an act that does not serve intended ends. And yet I sit here recognizing that drawing in the midst of loss or crisis can provide meaning and liberation. I am myself and cannot speak definitively on this subject, one's pain is one's own and one's methods to cope are perhaps as unknowable, but I know that for myself drawing can do what discussion sometimes cannot: anchor us in unsettled seas.
I have drawn from a very young age. As an artist, it's my default medium. There are artists who see the world artistically through photography or film or clay or corten steel- may way is through drawing.
This is why I am ostensibly a printmaker at my current institution: because intaglio is uniquely suited to my approach to drawing.
Drawing for me has done many things, but I think it has been most important in the way it allows me a control over the world that is often otherwise not in my possession. This is a confession of sorts. There is something both profoundly human and somewhat pathetic about using one's art to solve one's problems. And the desire for control is at times a less than commendable motive.
I'm thinking about this because I'm remembering how, in my life, drawing has, in the presence of crisis or trauma or chaos, functioned and not functioned to my selfish ends.
I'm recalling a drawing class that I took in undergrad that, occuring as it did in the midst of personal chaos, of newish fears and considerations of my own mortality and fragility - the typical post-adolescent recognition that the sense of invincibility one earlier felt was an illusion (something I had utterly grasped intellectually, but that does not do it) (the admixture of the traditional fears and a small medical crisis exaggerated these out of their due proportion, I say retrospectively). For some reason, our primary lesson, to, in a fashion both modernist and self-consciously Eastern, let go of our desire for control over the drawing-as-result-of-a-process, rather than liberating me, led me into greater internal conflict. The result was a discomfort with drawing that would be take quite a while to overcome.
I also remember my temporary incapacity to draw following September 11th. The Thursday following the attacks, I told my teacher that I would be far below 100%, and unlikely to have enough focus to produce good work. For some reason that remains obscure to me he asked why. (September 11th may have been a far-off and, because I was not connected to any of those killed, abstract trauma, its awesome horror, spectacular amplification, and my simple empathy made it a trauma indeed) Drawing had not served me in the immediate term to fit my mind to the ugly edges of the world. Yet in the coming weeks, that event and the war in Afghanistan would lead me into a rather ambitious and personally significant drawing that, if not succeeding in ordering my world, served its purpose.
At the moment I am weathering a familial circumstance which frightens me and gives me trauma as I define it. (That is, I consider trauma to be any circumstance that redefines the self or the world outside of the self in ways that the two cannot be easily or immediately reconciled) On a certain level I have not confronted my direst fears head on. I have at no point in time conceived of the world in which my loved one is passed away. There is something about the leaden sense of death that has pervaded this entire Christmas season that makes this ideation almost unnecessary.
The fact is that a consistent discipline of drawing has both provided me with the pleasure necessary to see the greater circumstance beyond the lens of doom, and it has also served as a channel for these emotions and others in this time of multiple discomforts, longings, and losses.
This finally takes me to the advice that I gave to a good friend who is dealing with a terrible loss. I suggested to be aware of the ways in which grief and loss can make the act of drawing an act that does not serve intended ends. And yet I sit here recognizing that drawing in the midst of loss or crisis can provide meaning and liberation. I am myself and cannot speak definitively on this subject, one's pain is one's own and one's methods to cope are perhaps as unknowable, but I know that for myself drawing can do what discussion sometimes cannot: anchor us in unsettled seas.
Friday, December 03, 2004
Poem
Category: Literary Excursions
This comes directly from a dream I had last night-
I could hear his basso voice
As we walked through the hall into the courtyard.
We sat against the greyed sky
And as I was about to speak
His voice rose again.
Every time I talk to you, I said,
There's someone singing,
'You're a mean one, Mister Grinch.'
I don't know exactly what it means, although I gather it comes from anxiety about being understood.
This is probably some hippy idea that has been expressed so many times I should be embarrassed, but it strikes me that poetry is a more reasonable way to present dreams than prose, because prose, at least in the English-speaking world, speaks through a logic that is far less compatible with dream logic than poetry.
This comes directly from a dream I had last night-
I could hear his basso voice
As we walked through the hall into the courtyard.
We sat against the greyed sky
And as I was about to speak
His voice rose again.
Every time I talk to you, I said,
There's someone singing,
'You're a mean one, Mister Grinch.'
I don't know exactly what it means, although I gather it comes from anxiety about being understood.
This is probably some hippy idea that has been expressed so many times I should be embarrassed, but it strikes me that poetry is a more reasonable way to present dreams than prose, because prose, at least in the English-speaking world, speaks through a logic that is far less compatible with dream logic than poetry.
William Zabka, etc.
Category: Observations, Art In Progress
There's always a danger in using pop culture references. For a great number of people of roughly my generation, use of pop culture references can reduce to gesture, and not always particalarly admirable gesture at that. It is not exactly universal although nor is it at all uncommon to find that people roughly my age, people brought up like their parents in front of the television, use references to Goonies or Neverending Story or Thundercats or the like to generate nostalgia and to suck some sort of cool from these images.
Which is a way of introducing something I found while researching CS Lewis Jr., something that rather sophisticatedly combines pop culture reference and postmodern fiction technique. Oh, and it's also pretty hilarious.
Rather simply, Patton Oswalt (the writer, one of my favorite standup comedians) treats 4 characters across 4 different films (all but one played by William Zabka) as one coherent entity.
Which brought me to a certain concept, for my own artmaking.The costume is an element deployed frequently in films that talk about growing up. Whatever its intentions, and it's fair, I think, to gather that Scout's ham costume in To Kill a Mockingbird is used with far different intentions from those found in Karate Kid, the use of costume creates absurdities around the idea of identity, and well played absurdities are often memorable.
In The Karate Kid, a halloween party is the occasion for Daniel-san to attempt retribution toward Johnny Lawrence, to connect with Elizabeth Shue, to get his ass beat, and to be saved by Mister Miyagi. This is a critical part of the film, but whenever I watch it, all that I can see are those Cobra Kai bastards in their skeleton costumes. There is something simultaneously obvious and true about having Daniel's antagonists portrayed as a gang of fake dead bodies.
As I don't think I have disclosed, I have a currently fictional band called Owl. I was trying to think through costumes beside the obvious (ya know, owl costumes), and I was thinking that dressing the band as those skeletons would be really compelling. Skeleton costumes may speak directly to that pretty famous clip in a pretty famous film, but they don't speak exclusively to that. I was a skeleton for holloween when I was a youngster- it's an image that isn't necessarily specific, but is intensified through the specific.
Also, skeletons embody to the adolescent and heavy metal tendency to dwell on childish caricatures of death, on the grotesque and the implausibly gory. It's hard to pinpoint why this is, but there is a culture on display in Megadeth posters and Friday the 13th movies and perhaps even in Rob Zombie that desires to dwell on a cartoonish vision of violence and death, not exactly out of a nihilism, but because of a childish recognition/denial of one's own mortality. The skeleton costumes speak to this, but in an aggressively juvenile way I find fantastic.
There's always a danger in using pop culture references. For a great number of people of roughly my generation, use of pop culture references can reduce to gesture, and not always particalarly admirable gesture at that. It is not exactly universal although nor is it at all uncommon to find that people roughly my age, people brought up like their parents in front of the television, use references to Goonies or Neverending Story or Thundercats or the like to generate nostalgia and to suck some sort of cool from these images.
Which is a way of introducing something I found while researching CS Lewis Jr., something that rather sophisticatedly combines pop culture reference and postmodern fiction technique. Oh, and it's also pretty hilarious.
Rather simply, Patton Oswalt (the writer, one of my favorite standup comedians) treats 4 characters across 4 different films (all but one played by William Zabka) as one coherent entity.
Which brought me to a certain concept, for my own artmaking.The costume is an element deployed frequently in films that talk about growing up. Whatever its intentions, and it's fair, I think, to gather that Scout's ham costume in To Kill a Mockingbird is used with far different intentions from those found in Karate Kid, the use of costume creates absurdities around the idea of identity, and well played absurdities are often memorable.
In The Karate Kid, a halloween party is the occasion for Daniel-san to attempt retribution toward Johnny Lawrence, to connect with Elizabeth Shue, to get his ass beat, and to be saved by Mister Miyagi. This is a critical part of the film, but whenever I watch it, all that I can see are those Cobra Kai bastards in their skeleton costumes. There is something simultaneously obvious and true about having Daniel's antagonists portrayed as a gang of fake dead bodies.
As I don't think I have disclosed, I have a currently fictional band called Owl. I was trying to think through costumes beside the obvious (ya know, owl costumes), and I was thinking that dressing the band as those skeletons would be really compelling. Skeleton costumes may speak directly to that pretty famous clip in a pretty famous film, but they don't speak exclusively to that. I was a skeleton for holloween when I was a youngster- it's an image that isn't necessarily specific, but is intensified through the specific.
Also, skeletons embody to the adolescent and heavy metal tendency to dwell on childish caricatures of death, on the grotesque and the implausibly gory. It's hard to pinpoint why this is, but there is a culture on display in Megadeth posters and Friday the 13th movies and perhaps even in Rob Zombie that desires to dwell on a cartoonish vision of violence and death, not exactly out of a nihilism, but because of a childish recognition/denial of one's own mortality. The skeleton costumes speak to this, but in an aggressively juvenile way I find fantastic.
Monday, November 29, 2004
The Wire
Category: Criticism
I'll try to be brief, because that is not my tendency. The HBO series The Wire demonstrates yet again that HBO consistently produces exceptional shows. It is now in its third season and remains compelling in a way that network TV police procedurals fail to even approach.
What is perhaps most unique about this series is its naturalism in character development. Characters like Frank Sobotka, McNulty, D'Angelo Barksdale, Kima, and Omar (and this comes in part from the mini-series-like continuity of each season) have a realness, a mundaneness, and a credibility that leads one to imagine their existences outside the narrative. Also, the format of the series means that narrative events carry their own time rather than conforming to an explicit resolve-in-60 minutes contrivance.
The fantastic thing about the police procedural aspect of this series is that we get a vivid sense of the density and irritating bureaucracy involved, but the series is written with an almost wonkish enthusiasm that leaves us fascinated rather than bored. The police procedural aspects of, say, CSI or L&O: CI are frequently rather fanciful. Criminal Intent in particular resembles a murder mystery show more than anything else.
I imagine the reasons are largely economic, but I wonder why it is that HBO series' tend to be so radically different and radically better than their network equivalents. There is a conviction and apparent artistic integrity to HBO's shows that is refreshing in a television landscape in which so much seems rote.
I'll try to be brief, because that is not my tendency. The HBO series The Wire demonstrates yet again that HBO consistently produces exceptional shows. It is now in its third season and remains compelling in a way that network TV police procedurals fail to even approach.
What is perhaps most unique about this series is its naturalism in character development. Characters like Frank Sobotka, McNulty, D'Angelo Barksdale, Kima, and Omar (and this comes in part from the mini-series-like continuity of each season) have a realness, a mundaneness, and a credibility that leads one to imagine their existences outside the narrative. Also, the format of the series means that narrative events carry their own time rather than conforming to an explicit resolve-in-60 minutes contrivance.
The fantastic thing about the police procedural aspect of this series is that we get a vivid sense of the density and irritating bureaucracy involved, but the series is written with an almost wonkish enthusiasm that leaves us fascinated rather than bored. The police procedural aspects of, say, CSI or L&O: CI are frequently rather fanciful. Criminal Intent in particular resembles a murder mystery show more than anything else.
I imagine the reasons are largely economic, but I wonder why it is that HBO series' tend to be so radically different and radically better than their network equivalents. There is a conviction and apparent artistic integrity to HBO's shows that is refreshing in a television landscape in which so much seems rote.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
"Mostly Dead
Category: Art In Progress
I will begin work on a film that involves copywrighted material, captures from video/dvd. The gist is this:
Gather together the most significant and compelling shots and moments from two films: Ghost, starring Tony Goldwyn and Vincent Schiavelli, and The Princess Bride, starring Chris Sarandon and Mel Smith.
{Which, check this out- Ghost was directed by Jerry Zucker of Top Secret and the Naked Gun movies fame. Also, interesting if not quite so compelling thing vis TPB... screenwriter William Goldman also had a hand in Last Action Hero}
The collection of clips will be assembled together, respecting neither the chronology of each film or any overt sense of narrative coherence. Nevertheless, I will attempt to tie the clips into some sort of unity using a scripted voiceover which I myself will perform.
I am aiming toward the attitudes that each source film displays toward the semi-dead. I also intend to wring emotional intensity out of each. As such, clips to be included will include Prince Humperdink's sadistic torture of Wesley and Carl Bruner's expression of abject terror when he discovers that the $4 million in blood money is gone.
Expected running time is between 8 and 18 minutes, to throw out a random range.
Despite the fact that this project, were it to be of a commercial nature, would violate certain copyrights, I will use this blog post as published demonstration that I hold all rights to this idea. However, I endorse any other artmaker's video mashup on this (meaning the borderlines of life and death) or a similar subject.
I will begin work on a film that involves copywrighted material, captures from video/dvd. The gist is this:
Gather together the most significant and compelling shots and moments from two films: Ghost, starring Tony Goldwyn and Vincent Schiavelli, and The Princess Bride, starring Chris Sarandon and Mel Smith.
{Which, check this out- Ghost was directed by Jerry Zucker of Top Secret and the Naked Gun movies fame. Also, interesting if not quite so compelling thing vis TPB... screenwriter William Goldman also had a hand in Last Action Hero}
The collection of clips will be assembled together, respecting neither the chronology of each film or any overt sense of narrative coherence. Nevertheless, I will attempt to tie the clips into some sort of unity using a scripted voiceover which I myself will perform.
I am aiming toward the attitudes that each source film displays toward the semi-dead. I also intend to wring emotional intensity out of each. As such, clips to be included will include Prince Humperdink's sadistic torture of Wesley and Carl Bruner's expression of abject terror when he discovers that the $4 million in blood money is gone.
Expected running time is between 8 and 18 minutes, to throw out a random range.
Despite the fact that this project, were it to be of a commercial nature, would violate certain copyrights, I will use this blog post as published demonstration that I hold all rights to this idea. However, I endorse any other artmaker's video mashup on this (meaning the borderlines of life and death) or a similar subject.
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