Everyone's a modernist (26 Jan 2012)

Irving Howe's 1967 Commentary essay "The Culture of Modernism" (here's a gated link for all you Commentary subscribers in the audience) is the sort of thing I usually don't have much time for: a lot of fretting about nomenclature (what is modernism?), a preoccupation with literature qua literature, some contempt for the contemporary generation's aesthetic shortcomings masquerading as concern for the future of humanism, and so on — the Great Critics doing Criticism. But I found it interesting that much of what Howe argues modernists were striving for is what internet culture, in the eyes of its boosters anyway, has achieved. Howe writes, "Modernism keeps approaching — sometimes even penetrating — the limits of solipsism, the view expressed by the German poet Gottfried Benn when he writes that 'there is no outer reality, there is only human consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new worlds out of its own creativity.' " That sounds a lot like a paean to virtuality, to humans freed from biological constraints to exist as pure (digital) expression. When critics say online sociality is solipsistic, they don't recognize that we must "penetrate" solipsism to reach some sort of apotheosis of intersubjectivity. The modernists paved the way, responding to cultural sterility (their "end of history") with unremitting commitment to innovation for its own sake. Howe cites Lukács (though it may as well have been Schumpeter), claiming that modernists are "committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and re-creation." It actually sounds a bit like neoliberal economics.

Later, Howe declares that:

In modernist literature, one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and the limiting assumption of rationality. Mind comes to be seen as an enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. There is a hunger to break past the bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture, toward a form of absolute personal speech, a literature deprived of ceremony and stripped to revelation.

That sort of sounds like a status update or a tweet, or a Tumblr reblog — all of which espouse expediency as a kind of sincerity. The accelerated nature of online discourse, in social media especially, lays a privileged claim to the real. The participation in the group mind of social networks allows one to move beyond the limits of individual rationality (and the outdated depth psychology that depended on it); the abolishment of privacy online permits us to discard "bourgeois proprieties."

So maybe when you sign up for Facebook, you automatically become Samuel Beckett. Social media makes modernists of us all. They democratize the "genius" of modernism and make its "terrible freedom" and the smashing the humbug of bourgeois order everyone's prerogative. We can all document the self in a spirit of uncompromising full disclosure to deal with the "problem of belief" and the crisis of authenticity in the absence of transcendental truths and radically innovate with language and form. That is, we can build our personal brands on Facebook and tweet all day in LOLspeak.

Basically what aggrieved the modernists in Howe's view — the crisis of identity and truth; the ceaseless striving for real expression — is what we now tend to celebrate as fun and freedom. Much as management consultants represent precarious work conditions as liberating free agency, the modernist crises of the subject are fun opportunities for self-expression, like some of the postmoderninsts insisted. Howe seems to conclude that the modernists were a bunch of nihilists who end up tormented by their achievements: "The lean youth has grown heavy; he chokes with the approval of the world he had dismissed; he cannot find the pure air of neglect." That is, in their search for the genuine, modernists sought the "right to be forgotten" but failed. They ended up being liked too much. It will be different for us. We have forfeited that right in advance and tally the likes up to keep score in the grand game that selfhood has become. In our world, we celebrate the quantified self. To have measured out one's life with coffee spoons is an unmitigated triumph.

Mediation and midlife-crisis movies (14 April 2011)

Perhaps in anticipation of an incipient midlife crisis, I recently watched John Sayles's 1980 film Return of the Secaucus 7 and then The Big Chill (1983), one of the "what happened to us, we used to be so cool!" movies that came in its wake. Though the films are similarly structured -- they both focus on a weekend-long reunion of baby-boomer friends during which they drink a lot, play sports, hookup illicitly and indulge in nostalgic reveries -- they are entirely different in tone.

Sayles's film is loose and subtle, populated with nonactors and aiming for a kind of organic naturalism, whereas The Big Chill is full of histrionic Hollywood stars and ham-fisted thematic exposition. (Early on, Jeff Goldblum has a phone conversation in which he basically explains what the movie is supposed to be about. Very meta.) The acting in Secaucus 7 is not particularly convincing in a conventional sense, but the stiltedness starts to connote authenticity and becomes a kind of transparency. In The Big Chill the acting is anything but transparent, and its badness can't be ignored, especially since they seem to be trying so hard. (What is with Kevin Kline's Southern accent? And when Jobeth Williams makes a pass at Tom Berenger, is she supposed to come across as campy? And is there anything more contrived than the "dance" sequence in the kitchen?)

Secaucus 7 has a timeless indie-ness about it, but it also comes very distinctly from a pre-mediated age. (One telling scene has characters stuck on the highway, wrangling with an actual paper roadmap -- hard to conceive in the iPhone era.) It's shot on location in a nondescript town in New Hampshire. The characters (who have come together in what seems to be an annual ritual) play board games, listen to live music at a town bar, hang out by the river, play basketball at the neighborhood playground, and that sort of thing. The film is saturated in small-town pleasures and pursuits; the only hint of any "glamour industries" is in the characters who work for a senator in D.C., whom they disparage. No one seems to have much money. The emotional significance of everything is muted: One of the visiting couples has just split up and their pain is palpable without being overwrought, sending out ripples through the relations of everyone else. The looming possibility of love's entropic decay serves as a background for the other implicit tensions: a character played by Sayles drunkenly runs through the pros and cons of parenting, a woman in med school sleeps with a local Lothario (played by a young and goofy David Strathairn), a drifter wannabe musician bums money off his friends and considers really trying to "make it." You have a sense that it has just dawned on all of them that life might possibly having turning points and that adulthood inevitably involves a reckoning with the adolescent dreams that may or may not have propelled you to where you are and which may still be malingering in the back of one's mind. It's all meant to ultimately disconcert viewers; the surface mellowness can no longer defer having to deal with life. For people who love one another and have become embedded in one another's lives to continue to get along, they have to embrace conflict. Social being takes inescapable effort.

In The Big Chill, everything has been Reaganized. The film is set at a mansion on the South Carolina coast, and there are Porsches, power suits, cocaine, branded running shoes, VCRs, home video cameras, hideously furnished family rooms with home entertainment centers, and so on. The small town we see briefly appears to already be a gutted relic rather than a living place with its own palpable rhythms. Several of the characters work in media: a TV star, a writer for People magazine, a radio call-in psychologist, and their melodramatic posturing sometimes seems as though it is a consequence of their proximity to the media. It's not clear if this is by design or of it was simply an expression of the zeitgeist, but all the characters exude a smug self-awareness that makes their emotional difficulties seem maudlin and extra contrived. (I think the moral center of the film is Jobeth Williams' square husband, who views all the other characters with contempt, seeing them as the childish narcissists that they are, and simply leaves the scene after basically telling them to get over themselves.) The occasion for their reunion is the suicide of one of their friends, which prompts lots of overwrought and glib soul searching. William Hurt narrates his pain to a video camera, setting the template for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and while there is no live music in the diegesis, all the characters experience poignant moments scored to 1960s hits, proto-Wes Anderson style. And eventually the rightness of nesting and checking out politically is affirmed, as Kevin Kline praises the cops for protecting his property, Mary Kay Place gets impregnated, and William Hurt hooks up with Meg Tilly to fix up an old house. Conflicts have been discharged for viewers, who can flatter themselves that they have been living right all along. The question of social being becomes irrelevant; there is only private life.

My point is that Secaucus 7 dramatizes how friends help one another get through life, positing a bond that transcends life's phases and stages. The friends as group transcends the ebb and flow in the individuals' lives and gives those individuals a point of orientation, a reason to resist moral drift. The Big Chill shows us the opposite: the evaporation of the concept of collectivity or collective identity and the self-dramatization for friends-as-audience that replaces it. The friend group in The Big Chill has degraded into a social network: the bonds connecting them are wholly nostalgic. They get together to serially justify themselves to one anther but mainly to themselves. They give each other no resources on which to draw to resist rationalizing their lives into hollowness. That's why Jeff Goldblum's blunt and repellant reporter character, who tries too hard to sleep with the deceased's girlfriend and who eagerly exploits the details of his friends' lives for work product, is covertly normative in The Big Chill; though he is tepidly demonized, his character's true function is to authorize the sort of calculating behavior he pursues, represent it as honesty, against which the other characters' hypocrisies can appear. His tactless self-promotion seems like the truth about how people really are. I wonder if the mediatization that becomes so palpable in The Big Chill has something to do with this shift in values. Media form audiences but dissolve communities.

ADDENDUM:
I came across a passage from Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) that lays out the contrast I see in the two films.

The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families! -- how I hate them! the misers of love!" -- Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance--and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.)

Obviously the Secaucus 7 doesn't constitute a full-on nomadic "band," but I think the film is gesturing toward a collective identity, something open to a kind of intersubjectivity that assimilation to adult life in capitalist society certainly suppresses. The film is about preserving something like tribal loyalty to one's friends in the absence of concrete external enemies -- or rather when the enemies turn out to be ourselves. Whereas The Big Chill is all about the restitution of the nuclear family, augmented by a certain selfish individualist myopia that epitomized the moral outlook of the Reagan years, and likewise epitomizes neoliberalism in general.

"This generation got no destination to hold" (4 April 2011)

I enjoyed the essay about the "iPod era" by Nikil Saval in the new n+1 (excerpt by Slate here), which considers the ramifications of solitary listening for political action. I thought it would cover the same ground as sociologist Michael Bull's book about the iPod, Sound Moves (which I wrote about here), but it turned out to be something quite different.

I don't accept Saval's claim that the music of the 1960s was "an incitement to social change" without a lot of qualifications that are not supplied in the essay; I think the music was shaped by political ferment that preceded it rather than vice versa, and most politicized pop was cashing in on the zeitgeist. The explicit merging of politics and youth music culture in the popular mind undermined political action, diverting it into self-neutralizing spectacles like Woodstock (funny how that more or less heralded the end of radicalism for many of its participants even as they claimed it was just the beginning; instead it was as if they knew they had achieved the goal of having participated in something "historical").

I'm more persuaded that the surge in politicized pop in the 1960s was a demographic phenomenon, a Baby Boomer thing. There is always music for youth expressing a rejection of certain aspects of the status quo; when there was more youth, there was more of it, and it was more prominent culturally, as that bulge of young consumers made what they consumed significant to the entire capitalist system. There was no golden age when music could be put to good political use. All music conjures a feeling of solidarity, I think; iPodization has just made the vicariousness of the process explicit.

What I liked best about Saval's essay was the survey of pop music sociology: Saval suggests Adorno and Bourdieu offer "the two most considered attempts to connect music and society" and contrasts them: Adorno held out for traditional aesthetics and the importance of high culture as a form of resistance; Bourdieu rejected musical taste's autonomy from the social order, arguing that it reflected status rather than an appreciation for something transcendent. I'm glad Saval takes some tentative steps to refute the idea that Adorno was "wrong" about popular music (I've written about that before for what it's worth), but still seems to want to emphasize the autonomy of the consumer in an administered consumer system. However, the essay makes this excellent point:

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network.

Popular culture is already subsumed by capital; this is not different from the situation in the 1960s. RCA didn't care what kind of polemic Jefferson Airplane put on its albums, because the company just wanted to sell records. The radical sentiment was already commodified and neutralized; what it inflamed in listeners was to a degree already contained, already likely to express itself as radical chic, vicarious fantasy, and scenesterism rather than radicalism. And scenesterism is good for the culture industry; it enriches the value of products with new, valuable meanings for customers. It builds brand equity.

Saval suggests Bourdieu is a "philistine" who asserts the "falsehood" that "music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and it has nothing to say." I don't think that's false at all; I think it is a recognition that music, like any other form of art, is not an untarnished container for humanistic pieties about what constitutes "greatness." But music, like asbtract art, more easily masquerades as such because it seems "purifed" of interpretable content and presents audiences with the higher truth of form qua form.

Bourdieu, Saval claims, refuted Adorno, but I think that Adorno and Bourdieu have complementary perspectives; both see popular culture as manifesting the failure of popular culture to be autonomous from capitalism and the classes it structures to support itself.

Saval's essay concludes, probably ironically, by recommending silence as a mode of resistance, as a means of steering between the Scylla of Adornesque snobbery and the Charybdis of Bourdieuian identity self-consciousness:

One radical option remains: abnegation—some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: The word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. But it was the tremendously congenial avant-garde gadabout John Cage who showed, just as the avalanche of recorded music was starting to bury us, how there was "no such thing as silence," that listening to an absence of listener-directed sounds represented a profounder and far more heroic submission than the regular attitude adopted in concert halls—a willingness to "let sounds be," as he put it ... Silence is the most endangered musical experience in our time. Turning it up, we might figure out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear.

That seems like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me: "against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will look also for slowness," he wrote in Fatal Strategies, in 1983. "Not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too."

The dilemma Saval diagnoses is painfully familiar to me; I am always trying to find a way to "really" hear music, stop instrumentalizing it. But I probably won't ever choose silence or to "Enjoy the Silence" or even listen to Hymns to the Silence. My strategy recently has been repetition. (Insert obligatory citation of Derrida and/or Lacan here.) I tend to listen to the same handful of albums over and over again and hope that constitutes a nullification of the imperative to seek and enjoy novelty for its own sake through the medium of popular culture. Right now (god help me) one of those albums is Wings' Wild Life.

Dead Media and Mediatized Subjectivity (23 Feb 2011)

Though lots of CDs are still being sold (more than 200 million last year), it still seems fair to pronounce the medium dead, dead as the 8-track or cassette tape. Compact discs were an intermediate technology that full-scale digitization has rendered obsolete. Unfortunately for me, I got caught up in the way that technology was exploited for all it was worth in its 15-year reign, which brought on levels of record company opportunism that, as an insufficiently cynical teenager, I was unprepared for.

Anwyn Crawford surveys the damage wrought by the CD in this essay, which recounts the medium's history. She points out that "a CD’s capacity for 74 minutes of data, as opposed to an average of 40 minutes (20 each side) for vinyl, encouraged artists to record longer and longer albums – or alternatively, for labels to stuff CD album releases with remixes, ‘bonus’ tracks, demos and other filler, particularly in the lucrative market of CD reissues." That in turn destroyed the integrity of albums, always a tenuous idea but one which defined the heyday of rock music. In the CD era, albums were a filler dumping ground, and reissues offered unnecessary rejected material that made the original release seem retroactively provisional. Quality gave way to quantity, both ideologically and on the discs themselves.

Now it seems obvious that CDs were misbegotten, especially since the transformation of songs into digital files has made packaging far more important, and the files' infinite reproducibility has made the analog aura of vinyl into a fetish. But when CDs were first introduced in the 1980s, I took the hype at face value and believed that it made perfect sense to discard my record collection and pay for it all over again, so I could hear albums in their alleged pristine digital state. Back then I imagine I was tired of records getting scratched or warped, tired of plucking dust balls of the phonograph needle, tired of having to remember to step lightly when I walked past the table the stereo sat on so I wouldn't make the record skip and possibly ruin it. I was eager to believe the promise of CDs' indestructibility, their "perfect" sound. I wanted to believe that such a thing existed -- a perfect copy of an album, unworn by time; it suited my impression that the music I was getting into was "timeless," transcendentally great.

I had no idea, however -- couldn't imagine -- that industry engineers would be so indifferent, so negligent, in remastering those transcendental classics from the back catalog. I disbelieved my ears when I heard the hollow, trebly sound of the Byrds CDs and Astral Weeks. I didn't believe that Columbia would simply cut several minutes out of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for the first Blonde on Blonde CD and not mention it anywhere. Or that the opening chords of "Brown Sugar" would be lopped off the Sticky Fingers disc. Or that the Doors' first album would be mastered at the wrong speed.

And so on. I just trusted for no good reason that record companies cared about the quality of their products. But in retrospect, the compact disc as a medium was definitive proof that they didn't. The CD offered inferior sound for inflated prices, and the product itself was often adulterated (intentionally or through negligence), which forced consumers who cared to repurchase the same albums on CD multiple times. (How many times has the Village Green Preservation Society been reissued?) And then there are the problems of overcompression destroying the dynamics, and discs being normalized at eardrum-bleed decibel levels for no apparent reason. Ultimately, I came to see that I had been duped and felt betrayed by the record industry, though it never really owed me anything anyway.

I wonder if something similar will happen eventually with iPods and MP3s. Obviously the sound quality of MP3s is inferior, but their convenience has always trumped the need for fidelity, and lossless formats don't seem to catch on, partly because Apple refuses to support open-source codecs like flac. As hard-drive capacity increases, presumably some commonly used future version of MP3s will eventually reach CD levels of fidelity, but such files intrinsically cannot compare with analog sound. The purpose of music in the iPod era seems to have changed fundamentally -- the iPod, as sociologist Michael Bull details in Sound Moves, provides a portable sound world that offers solace and privacy in the abrasive environments we must traverse in modern life. (This always makes me think of the film Morvern Callar, in which the main character uses a Walkman to keep herself tuned out, and viewers are made to recognize the disjunction between her sound world and the diagetical sound we don't hear.)

We use music more and more to propel us through other activities; less often do we make listening our primary activity. Virtually the only time I make paying attention to music my primary activity it is when I am at a live performance, and I hardly ever do that these days. And more important, as Bull's book suggests, we use it to experience mediated faux togetherness through pop music while managing our privacy and exerting our individualist right to hear what we want and block out everything else. MP3s are designed to indulge our individualism and produce/compensate for our isolation. The surfeit of them, the overwhelming number of songs anyone with sufficient hard-drive space can collect, is a reflection of that need for more and more building blocks for us to construct our sonic uniqueness in playlists. The medium encourages the use of music to express subjectivity, even more so then the previous era of music-oriented youth subcultures. With MP3s, music doesn't express its content so much as it expresses us.

Perhaps at some point it will seem insane that people walked down the street wearing sensory deprivation devices that allowed them to ignore one another, and perhaps the format for piping those supplementary noises into our heads will be reviled. But probably MP3s will be replaced by an aural media that gives us even more apparent control over how to experience community as a commodity while we remain safely isolated, entombed in sound.

Misapprehending What's Popular (4 Feb 2011)

I don't recommend this essay about Mad Men by Daniel Mendelsohn; it seems like an extended exercise in shaming its "addicted" viewers, who are assumed to be prurient poseurs trying to excuse their interest in a soap opera (used pejoratively throughout the piece) by overhyping its supposed smartness. Mendelsohn writes as though he is shocked and affronted to discover Mad Men is not as good as the hype promises. What is?

I find I often make this mistake; I expect culture product that is widely discussed among the intelligentsia will be somehow extraordinary rather than adequate, when really what is at work is a kind of power-law phenomenon: one show among many worthy contenders will start to get momentum in the attention it attracts, and suddenly, thanks to the supercharged network effects and all the mediated feedback loops in society, it looms large. It becomes something that must be discussed in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and so on. Late comers, like Mendelsohn to Mad Men (or me to such things as Radiohead, Pixar movies, Harry Potter, etc., etc.) can't help but wonder what all the fuss is about, and tend to import critical standards that the work itself doesn't warrant. It becomes hard to take a work on its own terms; instead, the zeitgeist around it is judged, and almost always condemned as vulgar or vaguely dangerous.

Mendelsohn accuses Mad Men of the "worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering." I wonder what works set in the past aren't pandering and contemptuous when viewed without sympathy; what historical fiction isn't at once also about the era in which it was conceived and thus suffused with doubleness and distortions? Such judgment is an expression of the critic's temperament, not an account of the work being assessed. (And really, the "worst possible offense"? Lots of revisionist history arguably does worse things than that. And does Mendelsohn really think that most people assumed Mad Men would be watched by 70-year-olds? "This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts." ?!?)

Critics aren't obliged to be sympathetic to everything they write about, of course, but it's unsatisfying for me as a reader to get nothing from an essay but "that critic thinks he's too good for that thing he's discussing." Probably too much of what I write has that effect on others.

Distant listening (30 Dec 2010)

I have another Distant Listening essay up, about "Horse Latitudes" by the Doors, at Generation Bubble. These Distant Listening essays are 1,000 word pieces about a single song that seems indicative of something larger: a particular culture-industry strategy, or an emerging genre, or a dilemma that confronted pop musicians at a particular cultural moment. It's supposed to be a play on Franco Moretti's concept of distant reading -- here is a New Left Review piece by Moretti about it, but the analogy doesn't really work; these distant-listening essays aren't crunching numbers and citing ngrams. Moretti defines distant reading as an approach in which specific texts disappear

Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more.

My main purpose is not to write hermeneutic analyses (traditional "close readings") nor to evaluate the songs in aesthetic terms but to use the songs as small windows onto some of those neglected "units," or maybe take the songs as evidence of some building cultural tension or contradiction. This is sort of the opposite of what Moretti advocates, I guess, which would be to draw no conclusions until you studied an aggregate of songs. But on the other hand, he also wants us to consider how the form an object takes is a diagram of the forces which made it.

But mainly I hope my distant listening essays are funny even if not entirely persuasive.

---

Twitter: @marginalutility

Novel in a Month Backlash (5 Nov 2010)

Longtime readers of this blog (I hope there are some!) may remember that I once wrote a novel in a month in November as part of NaNoWriMo. I didn't think the experience was a waste of time, but it didn't really open up my horizons as a writer either. It was rewarding for the sake of the time spent writing, of pushing necessarily into a state of flow; in that way it was its own reward.

Laura Miller, Salon's book critic, thinks everyone participating in NaNoWriMo should find something better to do, like perhaps read books written by legitimate authors who get published by a "major" house.

While there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant -- publication by a major house -- will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

I can't say that Miller's condescension makes me feel any sorrier for the plight of published novelists. It doesn't make me want to rush out to scour the bookstores (weirdly described by Miller as "cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading" -- really? aren't they in fact dedicated to the selfish art of selling stuff?) for more fiction to buy.

Miller seems to suggest that it's wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller's counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters. She instead wants to extricate reading from writing, as if they weren't symbiotic pursuits, and promote the former at the expense of the latter. We should worry about getting more people to read, because their writing is basically a waste of time since there are already so many books lying around.

Isn't writing just a selfish demand for attention anyway? "Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?" Miller asks. Yes, shame on you; you think you deserve attention because you bothered to work on something. And worse, you might even distract literary agents from their holy endeavors: "editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive." Oh, no! What about the agents? No one thinks of the agents! It's not as though they chose for themselves the role in life of rejecting some people's work and trying to pick winners. Heaven forbid they should have to do their job!

Wouldn't it be a better world if only the people with the proper grooming and pedigree bothered to make things? Certainly we don't do enough as a society to discourage the artistic ambitions of ordinary people. Sapping it off in crypto-participatory co-creation branding schemes only goes so far. Miller is troubled by the possibility that books about how to write fiction could be more popular than fiction itself, but she regards that as the audience's fault rather than the authors'. It may be that the manual writers are catering to a fantasy that is currently more powerful than what fiction writers can conjure -- that people would rather vicariously be an author, a creator, imagine themselves creating, than imagine themselves in someone else's fictional world, becoming someone else, being at their mercy.

The implication seems to be that reading is rightly self-abnegating and masochistic; correspondingly, Miller derides encouraging the fantasy of readers writing for themselves as "narcissistic commerce" that prompts self-centeredness (like basically just about every other kind of consumer good in our culture, sold as part of a lifestyle package). The right thing for the nobodies to do is to efface themselves and consume more, and become "the bedrock" of literary culture (i.e. nonparticipants who fund it and fuel writer egos). Reading should teach them to never put themselves forward, to never "misplace" their creative energy by preventing them from generating it in the first place. We should as a society label their ability to consume as creativity. We should personally use our energy the way Miller's champ reader used it: "Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and 'expanded my reading world.' " Reading should lead to more reading, nothing else. What else is there?

Anyway, on to my requisite social-media point: Considering how much quasi-fictionalizing of the self must go on in social media, it's no wonder the how-to manuals appeal -- they have real practical value. Social media reinforces the value of trying to imagine oneself as more creative, as sharing more. Whereas for novels, beyond escapism and those fleeting moments of sympathetic insight, their practical value lies mainly in the social capital that comes from being able to say you've read them and can discuss them. Miller would like us to work on enhancing that social capital and cheer the formation of more book groups (is there really a shortage of them? Are more people really participating in NaNoWriMo than in reading groups of some form or another?). I don't see why one couldn't do both -- it's not zero sum. Amateur writers and readers can all be the "real heroes." I also don't see why people couldn't get together and read one another's work, even if it is "bad" by professional standards. I have been to see enough of my friends' bands, and they have been generous enough to come see me play and certainly none of us are ever going to be putting out records on major labels. Reading and writing both are lonely, solitary activities by necessity; people often adopt them and become passionate about them because social interaction is for them far more taxing and far less rewarding. Anything that injects a hint of sociality into either process probably won't make for better writing or reading, but it might make for people who feel less isolated by their own passions.

Family suffering (20 Aug 2010)

Last weekend I saw The Kids Are All Right. That is not to be confused with The Kids Are Alright, which has awesome footage of the Who playing "A Quick One" on the Rock and Roll Circus and parts of Tommy at Woodstock. The Kids Are All Right was considerably less awesome, though it featured a lot of solid acting and had the virtue of not being totally confusing, like the only other recent film I've seen, Inception. I admit I had a hard time getting past the fact that one of the characters was named "Laser" (why not "Radio" or "Computer"? Maybe Flux Capacitor?), one of those decisions that makes you question the entire judgment of everyone involved in the whole project -- kind of like when a rock band has a stupid name that precludes you from taking any of their music seriously. But the bigger problem was that the film had a very dismal lesson to teach, namely that one has to earn family feeling through a long slog of suffering.

Obviously that ties in with gay marriage -- the subtext of the film that makes it so suitable for the current zeitgeist and assures it a bountiful Oscar season. The film has an apparent agenda of proving that gay families are real and normal because they suffer ordinary marital problems like everyone else. That cheerless pessimism at least makes the film something other than a way to acclimate sympathetic straight people to the sight of gay parenting, but it makes one wonder why anyone would be so urgently desiring to start their own families at all. "Marriage is really hard," one of the mothers announces at the film's climactic scene, where the lesson is imparted. But must it be so? And if it must, do we need to have entertainment that dwells on the fact? I suppose it's meant to dignify the difficult road many have chosen to stick it out in not entirely fulfilling relationships in pursuit of a more "meaningful" commitment/duty and make parents feel like heroes to themselves.

Still I was rooting for Mark Ruffalo, who seemed like he had a pretty good life and was not "interloping" in the lives of the heroic family so much as making it less tedious. If being in a family means shutting such influences out, it seems like a pretty bad bargain, though the film wants us to believe apparently that Ruffalo is some sort of a creep for showing an interest (albeit a boundary-challenged messy one) in a group of relatively boring people instead of having hipster sex with his organic-localvore-restaurant co-workers, et al. When the moms slam the door in his face at the end, it seems as though we're supposed to think, Ha-ha, you don't deserve familial comforts, you just haven't earned it yet baby. I think I wanted it to be a movie about him and not the rest of them, and the fact that his humiliation at the hands of the screenplay allows the healing to begin in the family did not console me.

Ultimately The Kids Are All Right is about the tenaciousness of the nuclear-family construct in the face of social forces that might otherwise liberate us from it for something that's less of a hothouse of shame, resentment, spite and claustrophobia.

Sowing Ideological Seeds (5 Aug 2010)

This dialogue between Ben Walters and J.M. Tyree at the Owls site (via 3qd) raises lots of good points about the film Inception, which I saw over the weekend and promptly forgot. They note that for a film about dreaming, it is very undreamlike and unfolds more like a video game. It wants to make us think about identity but does so in the most mundane and circumscribed way.

I too had hoped it would be an evocative exploration of identity in the era of social networks and invasive advertising and so forth. Instead, like all Christopher Nolan movies, it was an incoherent mess, with lots of unnecessary and incompetently staged chase and fight scenes shoehorned in, basically defying you to care about any of its cardboard characters or the outcome of its shambolically constructed plot.

It is probably my own incompetency, but as I watched Inception I spent the entire time asking myself, What is going on? Who are these people? What are they trying to do? Why? Which guys in the white snow suits shooting at the other guys in white snow suits should I want to get killed? Do they even die? Is it all a dream? Who the hell cares then?

So while I was engaged with those annoying questions, I wasn't mulling over the interesting possibilities suggested by the movie's premise of dream invasion. Is dream invasion a good metaphor for how ideology works, planting a seed in your mind and making you believe it is your own idea? How do manage to blend with your dreams and make you accept the alien idea as natural, desirable? How do the invaders find out what will move you? What sort of dreams can they get you to build with them? What sorts of resistance are really possible?

The apparatus for developing those ideas is all there in Inception, but they are never taken up. Instead, the character who is getting "incepted" and having ideas planted in his mind is manipulated through a hackneyed and scantily developed father-son conflict, and the nature of the internal ego defenses are presented confusingly, to say the least. We never are truly disturbed by what should be terrifying, the idea that our dreams could be driven by someone else's agenda, and we have been blithely content to call that our unconscious. I wanted to walk out of this film paranoid and stoked to think about identity construction and ontological security and all that, but instead left apathetically confused. To make meaning out of Inception one has to do it against the grain of its own shallowness, reading in things the film's producers did not consider and have worked into the film almost accidentally, symptomatically, as a result of the milieu that has shaped their vision of what is entertaining.

What Hollywood deems entertaining seems a less pressing question to me than these philosophical questions about identity construction, but maybe that exemplifies my own ideological mire -- I'm screening out the dismal social truths to be gleaned from Hollywood films with my preoccupation with these more abstract concerns about manipulation. But what if the specter of invasive identity manipulation is an excuse to avoid confronting the more insidious problem of our own collusion with the culture industry in shaping an acutely limited self, programmed to receive pleasure from films structured around visual spectacle rather than narrative coherence. This then perhaps carries over to our own self-constructed narratives of identity, which end up filled with chases and explosions but not much in way of ethical consistency.

Revisiting the Coens' 'Burn After Reading' (30 June 2010)

This almost seems timely in light of the breaking Russian spy story, but recently I rewatched Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, hoping that I would find that it had risen in stature, Big Lebowski-like, with the passing of time. But it was still the same half-baked, intermittently amusing and corrosively cynical movie it had been when I saw it before; repeat viewing doesn't fill in the many blanks or reveal any ingenious connections as can be found in Lebowski, which also seemed a complete mess to me when I first saw it but on second viewing a few years later, removed from the halo of expectations generated by Fargo (an inferior movie, it turns out), seemed like an entirely different film. There will be spoilers, probably, in what follows, though Burn After Reading seems designed to mock the very idea of worrying about having the plot spoiled.

It seems like the film is meant to be a comment on the Iraq war run-up and the closed loops of national-security intelligence bureaucracy that spawn institutional corruption, self-satisfaction, and paradoxical ignorance. It dramatizes certain aspects of the Dunning-Kruger effect (explored by Errol Morris in this series of essays for the NYT), which describes the phenomenon of being too stupid to know you are stupid. The satiric portrayal of the CIA in the movie takes to heart not only Donald Rumsfeld's famous concern with "unknown unknowns" but also Daniel Ellsburg's point about secrecy, which is that in intelligence communities, access trumps accuracy and breeds contempt for the opinions of anyone without privileged access. In this 2006 interview Ellsburg elaborated the idea:

Top secret is almost like toilet paper in the Pentagon. I literally just did not have time in my 12-hour days to read very much that was less than top secret. I was reading, reading, reading, and it was all top secret. That means if you live on that stuff, you really look down on the New York Times readers, along with the rest of the country. If you look at the New York Times, you look at it very rarely for information, just to see what the rubes and the yokels are thinking about and what they think is going on and what they think the policy is, which has very little to do with what's going on to an insider.

Imagine losing that access and just having to rely on the New York Times again, knowing for the rest of your life that you're just reading fantasies basically, something that isn't really related to what the insider knows. It's a very great loss.

The film's title, Burn After Reading, seems meant to capture this idea, as does the over-the-top arrogance of John Malkovich's character and the flustered cynicism of the CIA chief played by J.K. Simmons. Of course, the film turns the notion inside out, as no one in the intelligence community can figure out what's going on in the caper the characters played by Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand initiate (it seems telling that their names in the film don't really stick), or what it means. Simmons's character is only concerned about controlling access to whatever it is, even if it turns out meaningless. The access to the information has become the meaning for the intelligence community, for all intents and purposes.

That theme of the film comes together only once Simmons's character appears a little more than midway through. Before then, we watch a slate of unpleasant, one-dimensional characters played with surprising and frustrating hamminess by actors capable of much better. (Tilda Swinton in particular is forced to harp on one shrill note.) We are never meant to sympathize with anyone, and we aren't given much reason to care what happens to the characters -- an attitude borne out by Simmons's final assessment (he basically says the whole thing was meaningless and wishes various characters dead or in Venezuela). It's as though the film wants us to be as exasperated as he is -- as if we are supposed to finish watching and wish to forget about the characters and the plot as soon as possible.

The film's tone is also muddled, with the Coens pursuing seemingly incompatible ideas. Part of what's going on is a parody of the devices of paranoid espionage movies like Enemy of the State: thundering, pulse-racing drums on the soundtrack, surveillance-camera angles, mouse-eye shots of gray-suited men pacing down echoey corridors. But that mode doesn't at all coalesce with the satire of can-do optimism and workout culture embodied by McDormand and Pitt. Those people don't fit in a spy movie, and it's not amusing that they are in one -- just confusing and difficult to accept. In the allegory the film vaguely develops, those characters reflect the eagerness of Bush administration officials to "make their own reality" in Iraq and believe the intelligence that they've acquired, which they don't understand, means what will benefit them personally. Instead of remaking reality through foreign policy, McDormand's ardent desire is to get cosmetic surgeries to reshape her body. This wish apparently overrides any possible ethical concerns, voiced in the film by her lovestruck boss at the Hardbodies gym where she works with Pitt. Instead she is willing to steal, break into houses and sell state secrets to the enemy, all so that she can keep up appearances. She is the only character who gets what she wants in the end, though she has gotten two of her friends killed in the process.

The cult of exercise is an obvious motif in the film (George Clooney's character likes to go for a run after his adulterous sex), seeming to betoken an insouciant narcissism, a smugness akin to the insulated intelligence community, presumably, but it's not really clear. Exercise is socially useless effort, much like what the CIA is shown to accomplish in the movie's storyline. But the gym scenes seem out of sync with the Georgetown settings of the rest of the film, whereas Lebowski's various locales always feel of a piece. The gym scenes feel contrived, and what's gained thematically doesn't make up for the strain they put on our willingness to suspend disbelief.

But Burn After Reading's biggest enigma is the Clooney character, around whom the plot pivots. He's a can-do type as well, which I think we are supposed to infer from his implausibly building an elaborate sex toy on the cheap in his basement out of supplies from Home Depot -- a device that automatically shafts whoever sits in it. (That non-hilarious sight gag is typical of the movie's oddly poor comedic timing.) He is supposed to be a decommissioned former secret service agent, I think, but that seems to be a detail supplied only so that he can be carrying a gun. He seems like he should be the film's hapless hero, but he's a little off to the side and the audience isn't given much of a sense of what is driving him. His character is used to suggest some sort of a metaphoric relation between espionage and marital strife -- he mistakes the private eye hired by his wife's divorce lawyers for a secret agent after killing the blundering Pitt by accident in his lover's bedroom closet. His affair with Tilda Swinton, however, is never made psychologically comprehensible; his relationship with his wife, a children's book author, is also ambiguous. With no way of gauging the stakes, the audience has little choice but to be indifferent to what happens to him. We don't know what a positive outcome would be for him.

The Coens' A Serious Man is a more successful attempt at putting across some of the same ideas that Burn After Reading gestures toward -- exploring whether stories have inherent meanings, or whether these are imposed institutionally or individually after the fact -- and is much funnier too. I keep wanting to see more in Burn After Reading though -- no doubt I will give it another try in a few years and be disappointed all over again.

Marina Abramović at MoMA (25 May 2010)

ArtsJournal linked to this New York magazine item written by a performance artist who is performing one of the pieces in the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA. Here's the first paragraph:

I am a performance artist myself, and it’s unusual for me to participate in someone else’s work. When I stumbled on MoMA’s casting call, I responded because I’d been steeped in Marina’s work for a long time. My own pieces are very slow-moving. I’m doing one now called Tidal Culture, where I film my own still sittings by the ocean, and make objects out of algae.

One's response to this paragraph may be a good barometer of one's attitude toward this sort of art generally. After I read it, I couldn't stop giggling.

In general, I find the proposition of gawking at living, breathing bodies objectified into "works" already so sufficiently disturbing that I am able to persuade myself that I already get what the pieces are about without having to bother going to see them. That's my loss, I suppose. I hope to go check it out, though, this week -- lunch breaks permitting.

The piece that has drawn the most attention in the retrospective, not surprisingly, is one in which museum goers can wait in line to sit opposite of Abramović and take part in the performance of her piece - a very timely encapsulation of the pseudo-reciprocity of much interactive Web 2.0-style culture as well as, by many accounts, a potent demonstration of how affecting these sorts of participatory experiences can be despite (because of?) how contrived and asymmetrical they are. Standing in line, waiting for one's moment in the chair, one must pass through a welter of superficiality and self-criticism. "How desperate am I for the spotlight?" one must wonder. But the transcendence of the microfame one experiences in the chair, the unflinching and largely undeserved attention, seems to justify all the patient waiting. The structure of the piece builds a powerful machine for simulating focused attention, which turns out to be just as powerful as the kind of reciprocity that involves more than staring. As we've learned from the rise of social media, the presence of a spotlight is all that we need to feel the pleasures of notoriety and self-display, or to have the layers of our personality unveiled to ourselves. (See what I mean? I have already decided what the work is about without having seen it, which makes it hard for me to go and actually see it clearly. I wish I would have stumbled on it by accident.)

Arthur Danto describes the genesis of the piece in this NYT essay, but Carles of Hipster Runoff has perhaps the most illuminating take.

Lady Gaga Critique (21 April 2010)

I've read here that people would rather be reading about Lady Gaga than Goldman Sachs. I will do my part. Lady Gaga is a phenomenon I was hoping I could get away with opting out of, sort of like Twitter. It comes up often enough, but never in a way that makes me feel I'm truly missing out.

But PopMatters recently ran a feature about Lady Gaga that inspired me to try to listen to her album The Fame Monster. It doesn't seem like the sort of album you are supposed to listen to by such a deliberate process -- as a recording complete unto itself that you play from start to finish, as though it were a symphony or something. It's not Sgt. Pepper. It's purposely vapid dance music that succeeds by getting you to forget yourself and blend with a crowd. It certainly felt odd to be listening to it by myself in my apartment.

It took some perseverance, but I made it all the way through. (It seems like it is several hours long.) For something that is supposed to be sort of outrageous, it was fairly easy to ignore. Two of the songs sounded like "Strangelove" by Depeche Mode. Another sounded like an amped-up "La Isla Bonita." One song mentions "riding a disco stick," which I assume is sex- or drug-related innuendo? There are lots of dopey chants that seemed especially engineered to be catchy, as though they had neuroscientists doing brain scans to see which stuttering syllables lit up the greatest proportion of the temporal lobe.

Much of the rest of the album was already familiar -- from cars driving by, from going to Phillies games and hearing it between innings, from being in restaurants and stores that play the radio. For me, much of the album was the sound of being in public places. It made me feel sort of exposed while it was playing, as if just having it on meant I was seeking publicity or was simply visible. I felt like Lower Merion School District might have activated the webcam in my laptop.

Lady Gaga seems good at what she does, but I have no interest in listening to her album again. Still, I don't really get what Mark Dery is complaining about in this essay (which is nonetheless an highly enjoyable read, despite his theory baiting). He seems surprised that Lady Gaga is not as legitimately strange as her handlers, apologists, and devotees sometimes make her out to be, as if something genuinely weird could ever achieve repeatable commercial success. He's right; she is not an outsider artist. She is not Gary Wilson (though arguably their music is vaguely similar). Lady Gaga, as Dery demonstrates without really explicitly arguing, sells the promise of outré weirdness without ever being genuinely transgressive or even semiotically coherent. Instead of presenting a series of interlocking propositions of a grand artistic vision, Lady Gaga serves up flat signifiers of superficial ideas -- the frisson of the peculiar, disassociated fragments of subcultures (S&M porn, haute performance art, etc.) that would be entirely unpalatable for mainstream Americans if presented more thoroughly. Her shtick is not meant to add up, because then that would actually scare the people she's trying to woo.

I was confused, though, to learn that Lady Gaga compares herself to glam rock performers from the 1970s, like T.Rex and Bowie. As Dery points out, she doesn't make make rock music, and she is not doing anything unusual for the genre she is working in. (I'd be hard-pressed to differentiate her songs from the other stuff on top 40 radio, or Disney radio for that matter.) Maybe she will move to Berlin and start making tranquilizing mood music.

I suspect most of the media people who praise her are mainly glad that any musician can still become megafamous, which seems to prove the continuing survival of the whole superstar system that justifies the existence of professional pop-music pundits. If there are a few relevant artists that everyone is supposed to care about, big media can assign someone the job of covering that beat. But if the pop music market splits into so many niches that each demands its own microexpert, then big media won't bother trying to cover it all.

That's about all I have on this subject. Of course, the most important commentary on Lady Gaga can be found here.

Reviews for consumption convenience (16 March 2010)

I understand what Jason Kottke is getting at in this post, but it still struck me as unsettling. He argues that the "new rules for reviewing media" are that reviewers should primarily discuss the convenience of consumption (what formats it is in, how easy is it to carry around, etc.) rather than the success of a work's content, which he seems to regard as a pure matter of personal taste and not apparently not something reviewers of any sort -- "citizen" or professional -- would have anything useful to say about.

In the end, people don't buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts.

That seems to suggest that ease of consumption is the only thing purchasers care about; device integration has trumped aesthetic experience altogether, or worse, using your devices is the aesthetic experience. This seems like designer sensibility run amok. Kottke argues that "Packaging is important. We judge books by their covers and even by how much they weigh (heavy books make poor subway/bus reading). Format matters." And that's true. But one doesn't need a critic to point those things out. And that doesn't mean those concerns are not superficial; it's not as though all texts delivered to Kindles are the same because the medium is the message. Format is not synonymous with form; in some ways format denotes the material aspects of a work the maker doesn't ultimately control or care about when they are done shaping the form of a work. Discussion of form is interesting; discussion of format can be thoroughly exhaustive in a parenthesis under the title. The idea that I would want to read more about that in the text of the review itself seems nuts to me.

This may be a question of how the difference between reviews and criticism is evolving. If Kottke and his ilk have their way, reviews will be about the hydraulics of consumption -- how fast cultural goods can be pumped through the media we have encrusted ourselves with and how well the goods will serve as lifestyle accouterments. Criticism will recede into recondite elaborations of personal experiences with the goods, as the idea of trying to capture a consensus view will have disappeared completely from public discourse. Public discourse itself seems sort of threatened anyway, subject to replacement by social networks. Lost will be that middle ground of critical reviews, which help establish a context of reception that makes our engagement with something far richer and more meaningful.

Swedish Crime Fiction (2 March 2010)

Via the Morning News comes this n+1 essay by Ian MacDougall about Swedish crime fiction, primarily Stieg Larsson, the author of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two other similarly named books. I grabbed Dragon Tattoo out of the free pile at my old job after I was in Madrid and saw dozens of different people on the subway reading it. I started in on it after I abandoned Infinite Jest in frustration. It was the perfect antidote for me; a coherent, plot-driven novel written in sturdy, easy-to-parse sentences with not a whiff of wordplay or irony. MacDougall suggests that Larsson's books are an elaborate critique of the welfare state, and that interpretation is certainly there, though arguably Larsson's condemnations are too heavy handed to be taken all that seriously as a critique. (But then again, some people actually regard The DaVinci Code as though it was the return of Feuerbach.) It is refreshing to see Larsson deploy misogyny to increase reader outrage rather than titillation -- or is he doing both? My recollection is that there was something ultimately ghastly and Patrick Bateman-like about the novel. I wanted the female hacker character to be the sole protagonist; the heroic journalist character read at times like mawkish wish fulfillment on Larsson's part.

I subsequently began reading the police-procedural novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which are much more nuanced and subtle in their critiques and bizarrely prurient about misogyny in a slightly different way. (The Wikipedia page on the authors offers this: "Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.' ") Several of the early books in the series hinge on female nymphomaniacs and the social trouble they cause. The authors are somewhat ambiguous with regard to whether they see nymphomania as a legitimate condition or a misogynistic pathologization of women with the temerity to express sexual desire. These novels were written in the 1960s, and ideological fallout of various liberation movements were clearly on the authors' minds. Readers are not left with a ringing, overemphatic indictment of any particular institution or attitude. But, as MacDougall claims for Larsson's books, there's a comparison to be made with the best seasons of The Wire -- you get a sense of the complexity of social conflict and sympathetic rehearsals of various rationalizations.

MacDougall thinks Larsson's books offer a fantasy solution to the social problems the Wire depicts as endemic and cyclical, and he seems to suggest this makes them superior.

Although there is an obvious analogy to recent American forays into the crime genre, like the HBO series The Wire, this only points to what sets Larsson apart—a particularly Scandinavian optimism that insists it’s never too late to effect real change. Larsson, unlike David Simon, doesn’t see institutional dysfunction as a tragic wheel driven around by some essential human flaw. Larsson the idealist believes that an opposing force, if applied strongly enough, can slow that wheel, if not bring it to a grinding halt.

I haven't read them all, but Dragon Tattoo made me think that such optimism is precisely why they are inferior, escapist. Perhaps I have been working in publishing too long to believe that a crusading journalist can ever be plausibly taken as a idealistic force for change.

Avatar and Invisible Republic (29 Dec 2009)

I had no particular interest in seeing Avatar, but ended up seeing it the day after Christmas with my family. It seemed futile to resist. I even saw it in gimmicky 3-D, which added nothing to my enjoyment but did cause me to fidget ceaselessly with the glasses that I had to wear over my regular glasses. The film seemed primarily an exercise in glow-in-the-dark crypto-zoology, with little in the way of plausible plotting or character development. (We know Sigorney Weaver's character is cantankerous and outside-the-lines because they have her smoke a cigarette when she gets out of her cryo-travel pod.) It has a half-baked, programmatic but effective sentimentality that elicits emotional responses to the rite-of-passage cues. It kept me engaged by and large, though much of it reminded me of watching my roommate play Final Fantasy 9 (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one) on PlayStation while I was in college.

Only later did its trite politics annoy me. At first, I found it a little bothersome that I had to watch a bunch of humans get slaughtered by cartoons. Humans as a species haven't looked this bad in a sci-fi film since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (which I strongly endorse). We are given no explanation why the resource the greedy humans are after is so important other than the tautology that it's worth a lot of money. Weaver's character tries to counter the already confusing insistence on resource extraction with a non sequitur about how the "real value" of the planet the humans are pillaging lies in the fact that the trees are networked together to form a giant bio-Internet. (Great. The last thing we need is metaphors that glorify and naturalize digital, mediatized interconnectedness.) What is valuable about that? It's regarded as unimportant by the film's producers.

What is important to them is the quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo about the native race on the planet, which seems modeled mainly on American Indian tribes and is represented in an extremely patronizing fashion as a bunch of simple primitives who understand their environment only in supernatural terms. It takes a human outsider, naturally, to teach them the significance of their ways and rally them to defend themselves, since they are helpless against aggression and superior military technology.

The Sociological Images blog sums up the racial politics this way:

Avatar is a fantasy in which the history of colonization is rewritten, but it a fantasy specifically for white people living with a heavy dose of liberal guilt. And it is one that, ultimately, marginalizes indigenous peoples and affirms white supremacy.

I don't see how anybody can contest that analysis. I feel a bit ashamed, actually, that I was sitting in suburban Bucks County with all my white, middle-class compadres, complacently consuming the spectacle without becoming disgusted as it unfolded. At the time it seemed curmudgeonly and cliched for me to reject the high-imperialist homilies the film was lazily built on and the blithe righteousness I was expected to share with the "good" humans. I didn't resist being constructed as viewer in that way because it felt good and flattering. It reaffirmed my sense of belonging to a group of wise and morally pure Westerners who would have done colonizing right -- that is, it played to the ingrained sense of superiority that being white and middle class in America provides. I should have been nauseated; instead I was verklempt as the hero claimed his squaw.

By coincidence, I began reading Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, which in part is about the demise of the 1960s folk movement and Bob Dylan's role in destroying it after having come to exemplify it. The folkies, in Marcus's depiction, had the same patronizing attitude toward Appalachian poverty and civil-rights injustices (the Other America, as Michael Harrington dubbed it) that the makers of Avatar seem to evince about colonization. Capitalism sullied and exploited the pure rural people, as clear-headed bourgeois liberals can best recognize. To adherents, folk music (and Avatar) offers us glimpses of pre-capitalist America, a "democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed" in which art seems "the product of no ego but of the inherent genius of a people." The Avatar planet is such a product, for the race occupying it and the film-industry execs who made it.

The substance of this fantasy about indigenous people at harmony with their appropriate environment is the denial of individual subjectivity (the overriding value of the folk revival, according to Marcus), which is rendered unnecessary and impossible. Everyone is at one and merged with one another. Just look at the blue people in the movie sway to the unsounded rhythm as they worship their special tree. Marcus: "As they live in an organic community ... any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular." This is an attractive fantasy to have about other people, as it leaves oneself as the last unique individual standing -- like the hero of Avatar. Folk music tends to make a virtue out of a subject people's lack of autonomy because its adherents can't see a way to ameliorate those people's powerlessness without surrendering some of their own comfort. Avatar offers a fantasy solution, in which one vicariously becomes one of the subject people without losing one's distinctive identity, and then helps that group achieve autonomy. The story conveniently ends there, before the logic of communal unity eradicates the hero's sense of self.

But the faceless masses are most likely not so keen on being turned into a contemplative object for someone else, not psyched to have their identity and destiny predetermined by historical circumstances. We generally want someone else to be living by that pure code of acceptance of "authentic identity"; we are always tempted to try to reserve for ourselves the power to shape our own destiny and be anything we want. No one seems to volunteer to become the folk if the condition of that is disappearing into holistic anonymity. Instead we impose our notion of authenticity on others, and let their being trapped in it serve to limn the terms of our own private freedom.

Goodbye, critical consensus (16 Dec 2009)

Reading Simon Reynolds's assessment of best-of-the-decade lists ("musical value and consensus are intimately connected") made me think of how symbiotic the music industry and music critics are; that is, critics can only be as relevant as the culture industry is powerful and univocal. The hegemony of taste that the big labels sought to perpetuate relied on critics' pronouncements, making the release of new Springsteen albums and whatnot seem epochal.

Reynolds shares his hunch that the critical consensus unwound completely in the past decade, leading to a situation where more "good" but "unimportant" records are made.

I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it'd be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it's just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call "importance" or "greatness".

Musicians make music; critics and A&R people make "importance" or hype, and the latter is what allows music to become the broadly "unifying force" that critics yearn for it to become. Big, broadly popular records with an aesthetic aura (Reynolds and Pitchfork offer Funeral as the epitome) perhaps validate the importance of critics more than the music itself. It lets us then consume the zeitgeist in product form rather than listen.

The future of recorded music, I hope, belongs to microcommunities, small groups of friends who determine their own standards of importance (through listening rituals, what they play for each other in everyday life) and share them internally without needing to promote those standards online and proselytize. For these communities, it is all "best-of," anything that is heard and remembered, that helps the group cohere, matters. Whether it had been released that year, or decade, or was promoted by the music industry or was a demo from a busker, or whatever, won't matter. Taste can potentially be deindustrialized, and the critics will disappear into the multitude of voices. Ideally, artistic provenance will be relevant to us only if we want it to be.

Decade-end lists (23 Nov 2009)

Having looked at a few of these "best music of the decade" lists that are just starting to appear, I think you are at a big disadvantage if you put out an album in the last year or so, and the albums that are put out early in the decade are at a great advantage. The rest of the decade's releases are viewed through the lenses focused by the albums that come out in the first few years. A teleology of trends is established to make for a conveniently packaged decade zeitgeist. Hence, London Calling, released in 1980, is regarded as one of the most important albums of the 1980s. In 1991, Never Mind is released in the "year that punk broke," revolutionizing culture for the 1990s. Kid A, out in 2000, sets the agenda for the 2000s and is its most important album by critical consensus.

Perhaps a work's "influentialness" has largely become a factor of external considerations like this -- of how well the release date fits with the marketing culture, with publishers' deadlines, with formulas for magazine features that are already established. Artists can start to produce meta-important works, works that presage the needs of the critical apparatus destined to arbitrate things like social relevance. They can help frame the narrative we want to tell about our times, which is anchored to arbitrary divisions like decades. If I wanted to release an album right now, I would most certainly wait a few months.

'Twilight' and True Love-ism (18 Nov 2009)

Until I started writing this, my knowledge of the Twilight series isn't extensive: it's limited mainly to having noticed the covers of the books on the subway since they had chess pieces on them (for a brief moment of insanity I wondered whether they might be chess-related books -- maybe I had missed the birth of the hyper-hypermodern) and a brief discussion I had with a friend after seeing a giant poster of the goofy lead actor in a Target. (It seemed as though the photographer had him say "duh" to capture that perfect look of cuddly harmlessness.) I also know that it is about vampires and the author is a Mormon.

But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?

Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.

Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.

But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:

Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.

Girls not yet ready to enter fully into mature sexuality find in vampires/gay friends something both threatening and harmless at the same time.

Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.

This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:

"This is what I call 'true love-ism,'" Laura Miller told me. "True love-ism is the secular religion of America, one that all of us can believe in. What's appealing about Edward is his certainty. He craves Bella monogamously. The book feeds the delusion that an erotic god could love you, and that he'd also be faithful."

In Miller's review of the books, she argues that

Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.

Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:

Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love

(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)

The Urban Haute Bourgeousie (11 Nov 2009)

At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary -- it's open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman's own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I'm especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it's closet-drama dialogue.)

The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:

After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

That's a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.

Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.

Carl Wilson's 'Let's Talk About Love': A Journey to the End of Taste (3 Aug 2009)

I'm reading the 33 1/3 book about Céline Dion by Carl Wilson (who is not to be confused with Carl Wilson), which is less about Dion than it is a sociology of pop culture taste. It appeals to me because it dispenses with the obfuscating fictions that taste is autonomous (i.e. intrinsic to one's inner being and the music itself), or that taste can be "right", and looks instead at what social functions taste plays, which class boundaries it helps regulate in a society that pretends to be without them.

The book is framed by the ongoing debate over what the function of pop-music criticism should be, or whether there should be any pop criticism at all. I waver on that question. Wilson mentions the rockist/popist debate, which seems like a red herring; at their worst both approaches are condescending, only in different ways. Embedded in most pop criticism is the idea that listeners need their preferences justified or vindicated by a better-informed outsider. Generally, I get impatient with will-to-power would-be tastemakers, and my experience in the magazine business has confirmed for me without question that pop music critics don't have any special listening expertise -- their ears aren't refined like a wine connoisseur's palette. They aren't doing the sonic equivalent of philology. Perhaps their class habitus affords them the instinct of authority. Usually, though, they are compromised by their own supposed qualifications, the concessions they make to be published for pay. At best, reviewers are clever writers who can startle with a turn of phrase; their work should be appreciated on a formal level, not for anything they might say about a particular record. What reviewers and their editors seem good for is establishing the horizons of relevance -- picking out the dozen records worth hearing and talking about in various genres every year. I like reading what other people have to say about a record I already know pretty well; then I can pretends I am part of a conversation, internally agreeing or disagreeing, coming up with objections. I don't read reviews of records I haven't heard already; since it is so easy to sample music or yourself rather than rely on recommendations, I imagine I am not alone in this.

It used to be that reviewers also established the parameters for pretending to your own expertise. They taught the grammar of snobbery. When I was younger, reading about music helped create the context within which I, a nascent taste bully, could enjoy it, positing the elitist club I can earn my way into by mastering various facts and references and attitudes. Music critics in the 1960s and 1970s taught where the cultural capital might be in pop music, basically inventing the idea that mastering the canon of pop could have any cultural value. In other words, they helped integrate the free field of pop where anything was permissible, listening-wise (it all failed to register as anything but trivial) into the matrix of social class determinations, so that it suddenly became like an investment, something that could open some door for you and allow you to shut the door on others.

But that need for a context is not limited to aspiring music snobs. Without a listening community, literal or implied, it's hard for an individual to get much pleasure out of pop. Listening to pop is a way to consume the zeitgeist as pleasure, and critical conversations (which are now more dispersed and democratic than ever) are a part of that zeitgeist, helped render it material. The depth we recognize in music is supplied by the listening context, which works both ways -- some rich music is emptied of its potential depth; some rudimentary music is enriched with contextual content. But a pure listen, without the compromising effects of context, is impossible, though bogus criticism will pretend to such purity.

If we want to opt out of the zeitgeist, the music bound up in it is lost to us -- what happens is we have to discover certain music years after its popularity (as when I started listening to Dookie last year), with some other rationale than belonging to our time, sharing in the pleasure all the other people seem to be getting from whatever it is. In that case, the pleasure may be in the illusion that one's own tastes are unique, consuming one's own special ability to resist conformity. With all this, the quality of the music itself doesn't matter -- it just needs some marked peculiarity, some relative novelty, to hang all the posturing on. The notion of taste then mediates the contradiction between our desire to belong and our desire to be unique, ineffable individuals. Macro-aspects assure us that we're within the appropriate boundaries, where as the particularities seem to speak to our uniqueness. Tastes can shift routinely and tactically yet somehow seem to us as if they never really altered but merely came into clearer definition.

Of course, when we listen to music, nothing but its intrinsic quality seems to matter; all the identity building and social participatory aspects are suppressed. Clearly our experience of our own taste is visceral, spontaneous -- I hear the Red Hot Chili Peppers and my body wants to vomit; my intellectual preferences seem to have nothing to do with it. It seems beyond questioning, like asking why you wouldn't want to eat a chocolate bar smeared with mustard. That's why it seems that criticism's most important function should be to demystify taste so that the ideological freight it carries is at least exposed. Wilson's book is a model for this; it's great at showing the sort of class contempt that gets disguised and authorized by manifesting as musical taste (especially in Chapter 8, which lays out sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's ideas in an accessible way). Wilson suggests that middlebrow, straightforward, sentimental conformist music like Dion's is hated because it is associated with average people who don't register on the media landscape. It's "schmaltzy" -- it's engineered to succor the status quo. Wilson explains, "It is not just cathartic but socially reinforcing,a vicarious exposure to both the grandest rewards of adhering to norms and their necessary price." It's blandly aspirational for what has already been endorsed, for what seems given, in all its inequities and imperfections. Hating such music makes us feel above average, with bigger dreams, until the opportunity opens up to become avant-garde by salvaging it, loving it. Musical taste, from this perspective, is sublimated prejudice, social bias turned into something you might be proud to display. Which is why it can seem that a good default position to always insist that people's tastes are wrong.

But in hating other people's music, we may perhaps fall prey to a different quasi-utopian illusion, a kind of aesthetic eugenics: that if we messianically hate what seems like average, mediocre music with enough ferocity, mediocre and average people will somehow vanish also. Everyone will be special and wise in their own way, and society will so attenuate itself that conformist mediocrity simply won't be possible. We won't have the option to like blah things (and thus be blah people) if we make impossible for the culture industry to manufacture blah art. Social classes determined by cultural capital will be obliterated along with cultural capital itself. Everyone will be forced to be free. It's a contemporary, secular variant on the recurrent fantasy of ending religious wars once and for all by simply forcing everyone to convert to your faith. It can be difficult to resist this and adopt a kind of indifferent tolerance when we yearn to make the music that moves us into a religion.

Is it possible to avoid these pitfalls, or should one discreetly drop the subject of music from one's conversational repertoire? Is what's left a tepid relativism that forces one to feel guilty every time one doesn't like something? Not long ago, a friend randomly sent me a link to this video of "The Witch", by the Rattles. I'd never heard it before, and it was reassuring that I knew someone who would know that I needed to hear it. Discourse about music always has a chance to open up the possibility for feeling recognized, understood, like that, and that can makes the discrimination and mockery it engenders seem a price worth paying. And Wilson's book itself exemplifies what careful attention to taste can reveal, though the price then is a endlessly recursive conversations on the level of meta-tastes.