One-Way Street

Cinephiles and Infantilization

I've become convinced that whenever someone complains about the banality/mendacity/mediocrity/immaturity of Hollywood, they're really talking about something else. Such is the case with yesterday's article by A.O. Scott entitled "Open Wide--Spoon Fed Cinema." He growls, "Mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths--that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us." For a film critic this sort of complaint is like spitting in the wind, especially in August.

I won't speculate about Scott's deeper motivation for writing the article, but I can certainly understand his impatience and frustration with the cinema, that most exasperating of obsessions. I've felt it too plenty of times. In one interesting passage, Scott compares moviegoers to babies. "What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing?" he asks. "A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one!" Scott claims studios are turning us into babies to keep us coming back for the same old junk as before. But I wonder if to be a cinephile is to be, in a sense, a baby.

This last weekend Lollapalooza was in Chicago, attracting roughly the same demographic as the summer blockbuster movie. Everyone I talked to or read--fans and critics alike--was satisfied with an experience that was every bit as predicable and familiar as anything going on in the multiplexes right now. So what's the matter with Scott?

Our patterns of cultural consumption alternate between regression and openness. I couldn't begin to count how many times I've heard the songs on the Clash's London Calling, and I've owned a copy of it since it first came out. And now 'm listening to Santigold and Ida Maria, who I heard for the first time when they appeared at Lollapalooza. When listening to music it's easy to stick with the familiar for long stretches of time, so when you branch out into something new, it feels genuinely fresh, even if, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't all that special or different. Santigold, for instance, may really just be recycled M.I.A., but I haven't figured that out yet.

Film isn't like that. Like novel readers, film lovers need a constant supply of the new. You can only fill in with 1940s film noir and early Godard for so long. Eventually you have to come up for air. That's where the trouble starts. It's possible to run through every worthwhile current release in a weekend, especially in summer. Then what? Look for clues that Judd Apatow is an auteur so you can watch his films with a clear conscience, I guess. Or gripe about the system that constantly lets you down, and which you can't live without.

Mr. Passion

Last night, after a wine tasting at The Bottle Shop, the store's manager Joe Alter and I drove to the Hideout to hear the DKV Trio. Together for ten years now, the Trio consists of Kent Kessler on bass, Hamid Drake on drums, and Ken Vandermark on sax. All three musicians are fixtures on the Chicago jazz and avant-garde music scene. Vandermark, you may recall, was the subject of Daniel Kraus's documentary Musician (2007), an installment in Kraus's WORK series.

Vandermark works with ensembles as large as 11 and as small as two. Five seems to be about right for him; the Vandermark 5, for which Kessler plays bass, is Vandermark's best-known group. His music can be densely layered to the point of being overwhelming at times, especially when Vandermark is in full flight. Thus the trio format is a good introduction to the basic elements of Vandermark's music. He combines the rhythmic drive of Dave Holland with the hyper bebop of Eric Dolphy. Another point of comparison is the trumpeter Dave Douglas, for whom jazz is like the novel: a heteroglossic medium weaving together voices from a variety of different musical forms, from swing to rock to funk to hip hop. Douglas and Vandermark have both completed interesting cinema projects: Douglas took it upon himself to provide music for Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's 1915 silent film Fatty and Mabel Adrift, while Vandermark was commissioned to create the soundtrack for Augusto Contento's forthcoming documentary Strade d'Acqua. 

Vandermark once played in a group call Mr. Passion, and that still describes his style of playing. Last night the first set lasted about 45 minutes, but consisted of only two songs. Vandermark kicked things off with a Coltranesque fury, with Kessler and Drake treading water, waiting their turn. This apparently formless run of squawks was actually a thematic introduction to Vandermark the musician. Every moment he played he was going to go all out, but in a more disciplined way than the late Coltrane--in other words, like Dolphy would have played. Kessler and Drake each had a role to play, too. Kessler and Vandermark clearly feel very comfortable with each other, with the bassist alternately pushing and pulling the sax player, adding heft to Vandermark's frenetic runs, then withdrawing notes to bring Vandermark back down to earth again.

If Kessler added depth to the DKV Trio, Drake added breadth. The drummer switched deftly between musical idioms, leading the ensemble through its eclectic sources. I've never seen a drummer change sticks so frequently, although at one point his juggling got away from him and he knocked a cymbol to the floor. It was Drake who ensured that the songs maintained their balance and that the musical ideas, which could get esoteric, resolved themselves into recognizable forms.

The first set--neither Joe nor I had the stamina for the second set--may have only been two songs, but they covered a lot of ground. At the end of the set Vandermark withdrew to a corner of the room, at once spent and charged up, which is exactly how jazz is supposed to leave you feeling. It was how I felt leaving the Hideout. 

The DKV Trio performs tonight at the Sugar Maple in Milwaukee.

The King of Pop Is Dead

So the King of Pop is dead. Actually, in a way he's come roaring back to life. He's been such a disgraced, spectral presence lately that it's something of a revelation to see images of him in his peak to remind us of what an amazing talent he was.

The first time I ever saw Michael Jackson was as a cartoon. There was an old Saturday morning series starring the Jackson 5. Michael was conspicuously younger than his brothers even in animated form, and while he was the star of the show, he was portrayed as an oddity of nature even then, like a dog that could talk.

As I recall, each episode included a performance by the Jackson 5. It was astonishing to hear Michael's voice in the context of animated performance. When I actually saw a live Jackson 5 performance on television, the impression was the same: that amazing voice leaped out of his slender body. Even his much-mocked speaking voice was mesmerizing. Only the four members of the Beatles and Elvis Presley had such a fascinating speaking voice. The gaps between their singing and speaking voices made their personas all the more intriguing. By contrast, Kurt Cobain's speaking voice was completely ordinary. It made him sound just another tense egomaniac.

On the other hand, unlike Cobain, or the Beatles for that matter, Michael Jackson remained a pure artifice. It's hard to imagine Jackson unplugged, or performing solo, or even just singing. He was a creature of the stage; even his MTV videos were filmed in explicitly artificial environments. He was the last great song and dance man, the link between the music hall and MTV.

Now that we can see his life story as a unified narrative, the appearance of his single sequined glove marks the beginning of his Baroque period, with its mildly alarming military imagery and flashes of arrogance. In his last years he performed in costumes that combined armor with bondage, as if he were growing an exoskeleton to support the vaporous being inside. 

I have a Facebook friend who had tickets for third-row seats for one of his London performances. She's pretty upset, but maybe it's just as well. Fifty performances in one place seems excessive and ill-advised. Jackson was always an elusive performer, best when he appeared on stage for a few songs, then leaving before he needed to catch his breath or to wipe sweat from his brow. Even his trademark dance move, the Moonwalk, imitated the act of leaving the stage. He seems to have understood the ephemerality of the spell he cast, but being an adult meant stepping outside the magic box, which he refused to do. Few performers in American history were so gifted, and few betrayed his gift so completely as Michael Jackson.

The Proliferation of Marginalia

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin argued that technologies of reproduction enable the masses to assume a "progressive" orientation toward art, which he described as "characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert." 

The Internet age slogan "information must be free" is in the same spirit as Benjamin's essay. Here are two bulletins from the first medium that had to deal with the changes brought about by digital reproduction, and the last one. The BBC's Ian Youngs profiles the American band Fleet Foxes, the members of which are musical autodidacts of the post-Napster era. Lead singer Robin Pecknold says that file sharing exposes listeners to an unprecedented variety of music. "I think we're seeing that now with tons of new bands that are amazing, and are doing way better music now than was being made pre-Napster," Pecknold says. 

While digitally reproduced music has had a positive impact on musical creativity, if not profitability, the future for the last medium to digitize, book publishing, is less certain. Clive Thompson considers the state of digital publishing and urges us, first of all, to separate the act of buying a physical book from the act of reading, but he gives the position a techie, Wired spin, suggesting that interactive online reading technologies, like if:Book's Golden Notebook Project, will create a class of "professional readers" who are "people so insightful that you'd pay to download their footnotes." 

This class of people used to be called literary critics and literature professors. What's to prevent them from becoming as narrow and as pedantic as their academic predecessors? Is the mass reproduction of marginalia a sustainable discussion of books? Literature? Culture? Walter Benjamin warned that simply making a work of art accessible to everyone won't necessarily lead to change. Without a means to adequate organize reception, "the same public which responds in a progressive manner to a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism."

Strange News Tonight

Tonight the Chicago Chamber Musicians will perform the North American premier of Strange News, a multimedia music theater piece by the Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin and Belgian director Josse de Paauw. The performance will take place tonight at 7:30 PM at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Wallin arranged the piece for 13 musicians accompanied by surround sound electronic effects, video, and a live narration by the Ugandan actor Arthur Kisenyi in which he reads testimonials from former child soldiers in Uganda and the Congo recounting their wartime experiences and their eventual rehabilitation into society.

All History Is Art History

Leon Wieseltier has a heartfelt essay in the latest issue of The New Republic in which he denounces the constant drive for the "new and improved" as a nefarious bit of "Google marketing." He counters with the very low-tech concept of the nostalgic, which, like the sentimental, is an unjustly maligned concept with a perfectly respectable history. He suggests that, under certain circumstances, nostalgia can be an effective tool for a critique of the present. "One method for exposing the inadequacies of the present is to hold it up against the past," he writes. "And in the event that the present should be found lacking in comparison to the past, this is not nostalgia. It is critique."

Admitting to feeling nostalgic about something is a capital offense in some circles, but without nostalgia there's no way to express the experience of loss within the concept of progress. Nostalgia may appear to be a delusional human residue, but that's precisely its critical value. It forces us to ask, What gets left behind? Or, to put the question in more properly Benjaminian terms, What historical desire has been frustrated once again?

But in his haste to rehabilitate nostalgia, Wieseltier glosses over one of its problems: that it closes off its suffers from experiencing anything new or different. The other problem with nostalgia as a critical concept is that its scope is limited to lived memory. This isn't necessarily a disqualifying objection, but deploying nostalgia doesn't mean one should succomb fully to its myopia.

Take, for instance, Wieseltier's anecdote about finding a CD copy of a rare 1970 Dizzy Gillespie recording. He's overjoyed to discover that the CD transfer preserved the scratches from its vinyl record source.

And the sounds of the scratches were beautiful to me. They were the traces of human use, of human ardor. They restored me to the liberal age that preceded the frigid perfectionism of the new technologies of reproduction. The more you listened to a record, and studied it, and deployed it as a soundtrack for intimacy or interiority, the more scars it bore, and they were the scars of true feeling.

Wieseltier's sentiments are common enough, but they're also indicative of a particular generational experience. Considered from a broader historical perspective, the "original" 1970 recording carries with it a vexed history. The advent of vinyl records in the mid-twentieth century was partly responsible for the marginalization of jazz from American popular culture. Rock music eclipsed jazz (and classical music) in the culture market because rock's brighter and more distinct sounds came across better on records, especially when the records were broadcast to car radios or spinning on portable record players. To this day the core audience for jazz is affluent male audiophiles. After the arrival of mass market vinyl records, jazz developed a more subtle, intimate sound. At the same time, it de-emphasized certain other qualities, most notably sonic power. Even on record the power of the 1940s Count Basie Band in full flight is startling.

Wieseltier's point isn't simply that vinyl is better than digital, but that things don't always get better even though we're compelled to buy into that belief. (And, by the way, we're not always compelled only by corporate marketing; a quick tour of technology blogs will induce technolust in the most hardened Luddite.) However, Wieseltier's litmus test for historical developments--does a technology preserve the traces of ardor?--is too limited, too myopic. A less idiosyncratic way of assessing historical experience is to view all history as if it were art history. Only a philistine would apply standards of linear progress to developments in artistic techniques and principles. The result, inevitably, would be a history of steady decline from painting's representational peak in late-eighteenth-century Neo-Classicism. A more effective way to regard the history of art--a way that allows one to really see modern and non-Western art--is to look for what has been lost with each new development, and what has been gained. Or even better: what elements of art have been de-emphasized, and which ones have been stressed. The history of line becomes much more varied and complex--a revelation in Giotto, mere scaffolding in Monet, but the star of the show in Mondrian.

As for vinyl LPs, I couldn't care less about the warmth of their sound or the way they preserved the traces of their use. I like how digital music allows me easy access a much wider variety of music than was available in the suburban shopping mall record stores of my youth. On the other hand, I miss the liner notes and the great album art.

Feist at Ravinia

Last Friday evening my wife and I were sitting in our lawn seats at Ravinia listening to a concert by Feist when the woman sitting in front of me suddenly turned around. "Have you ever heard of this Feist woman before tonight?" she wanted to know.

The woman was between 50 and 120 years old, showing a plunging neckline and collagen lips. She was wearing the sunglasses she would still be wearing at 11:00 PM. She was very drunk. She was one of those assertive North Shore types, so I knew I'd better have some answers, and they better be good ones.

"Yes," I said. "We have one of her albums."

She scowled. "Where is she from?"

"Canada."

Apparently satisfied with that answer, she abruptly turned around and resumed concentrating on not falling out of her chair.

I could have added that Feist is best known for her appearance in an iPod Nano commercial in which she's a one-inch tall woman dancing fetchingly to a bouncy tune. However, earlier I had overheard the woman's husband and twentysomething daughter trying to explain this to her. "What's an iPod commercial?" she asked.

I also could have told the woman to stop asking so many questions and just enjoy the show. However, hardly anyone else was. The very large crowd was overwhelmingly female, and they couldn't sit still. I was astonished. On the ride up I was only one of three men on my car on the express train to Ravinia Park from downtown Chicago (my wife met me at the park). The car was standing room only. The guy behind me had his pickings of the entire car, but as is usually the case during these situations, he couldn't focus, so he ended up flitting about, hitting on every woman within earshot. He had plenty of opportunities; one woman in the aisle began juggling three balls, a novel but effective flirting technique. His lines, though, ranged from the ill-advised (he told a German tourist, "I've never been out of the country!") to the desparate ("Today is my birthday."). The third guy in the car wasn't making matters any easier. At one point he told him, "That's German for I wish this guy would leave me alone."

(The guy behind me had one moment of gallantry, though. When we arrived at Ravinia, the woman sitting next to him confessed, "I've got some butt sweat going on here." He replied, "That's okay. I've got some back sweat going on.")

The train ride up led me to expect a large, rapt crowd once the concert began. It was a large crowd all right, but a restless one. A constant stream of people passed by our eight square feet of lawn space. Ravinia is notorious for distracted audiences, but this indifference was striking. At one point I got up to see if the pavillion audience was paying any attention. People were standing six deep at the back of the pavillion, so I peeked over their shoulders to see a few people milling about, but an otherwise people seemed to be listening. On stage, in the distance, was Feist herself, still only one inch tall.

And what was the music like? Hard to say, exactly. The sound system on the lawn was poor, and her band was easygoing in the coffeehouse tradition, so neither melodies nor rhythms were enunciated very clearly. Feist got the iPod song out of the way immediately, rushing through it as the second song in her set. "Gatekeeper," a lovely song, came through eventually, but not as seductively as it does my iPod. I couldn't tell if Feist's folky music was simply lost in the shifting masses of Ravinia or if her limits were on display. Some of the music came across as the edgy drone indie rockers resort to when they run out of ideas. Clearly, though, she had a hard time commanding a large crowd. 

The music was the least memorable part of the evening, which is too bad, because Feist is an appealing performer. The experience made me wonder how important the music itself is when we attend a concert. Certainly this varies by genre and circumstance. People usually sit still for folk music, I would think. (I don't especially care for it, so I'm guessing here.) Maybe sitting in a lawn chair drinking wine under a cloudless summer sky doesn't lend itself to concentrated listening regardless of who's playing. That may be the point: I've always had the impression that summer music venues like Ravinia were the equivalent of a summer lifeguarding job for musicians. In any case, when and if I ever see Feist perform again, I'll make sure it's a small, indoor venue.

Changing Gears for Summer

For a while I've been thinking about making some adjustments to the form of this blog, and the summer is a good time to do it. I'm still enough of an academic to feel the pull of its seasonal rhythms, and the summer is when I used to search for new material about which to read and write. I would also explore new ways of presenting that material. Finally, the summer is when I would really get down to work on longer-term writing projects--or at least I vow to. I have a couple of those to finish, too, so I need to divert some time and energy to those projects.

So first I'd like to swipe an idea from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and present a "What I'm Reading" list, expanded to include what I'm listening to as well.

Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Reading Unforgiving Years has inspired me to read more from this neglected modernist. 

Charles Lloyd Quintet, Rabo de Nube. A live recording of one of the masters of avant-garde jazz. The quintet features Jason Moran, a personal favorite, on piano.

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. A look at the digital future of the cinema from a major voice in film studies.

Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL. Actually, I'm re-reading this for an essay on the generic city. For the same project I'm also looking at Mutations.

So Long, Bud's

I live 1725 miles from Bud's Jazz Records in Seattle, but I feel vaguely guilty, and definitely frustrated. about its imminent closing. Back when I had disk space to buy music, I bought 90% of my music online, mostly from iTunes. I may buy two or three complete albums a year. MIA's Kala was the last one I bought, and even that I purchased through iTunes because the Michigan Avenue Virgin store closed. I work a few blocks from The Jazz Record Mart, which bills itself as the world's largest blues and jazz record store, and occasionally I'll stop by there and buy a new CD by a major jazz musician, but it's hard to find work from lesser-known, up-and-coming jazz musicians there. One day, when I went in looking for a Soweto Kinch CD, a clerk confided to me, "this place is stuck in the 1990s." I haven't returned in months.

Jazz is a niche genre, to say the least, so its institutions are fragile. The Jazz Showcase is in the process of relocating, pushed out of its prime downtown location. You have to travel to Uptown for the next jazz club, the terrifically atmospheric Green Mill, to find the nearest true jazz club. That's why Bud's is so unique. The Seattle Times' Paul de Barros describes Bud's as jazz fans "could always depend on running into someone they knew there, and conversations often ran hot and heavy about the preferences for one artist over another. There was always an album on the CD player to compete with — or support — the conversation." Unfortunately, online sales have cut into owner James Rasmussen's profits, and with rents rising, he's forced to close down the shop.

And yet, de Barros reports that Rasmussen is now wondering "if the stock were for sale online, business might improve." [You can't see this, but I'm shaking my head in dismay.] People buy music online, especially when they can't find what they're looking for in local stores. This is just as true for jazz fans as it is for rock, hip hop--even classical music!--fans. The fate of Bud's is emblematic of jazz in general: a wonderful place that can be maddeningly out of touch.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.