Time to clean out the files:
Eric Weisbard (ed) This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project (2004)
I remember when the Experience Music Projects first conference was announced in 2001 (it was actually held in April 2002) that this sounded like a great idea. A meeting of usually separate or at least separately channelled journalists, academics and practicing musicians to discuss and debate shared concerns. From the bits and pieces I heard, it was fairly successful.
This is Pop collects various presentations from the conference, ranging from suggestive and useful to some almost unreadable. Particularly worthwhile are RJ Smith’s history of “Open the Door Richard,” Simon Reynolds on collecting, Tim Quirk’s “Topless at the Arco Arena,” Douglas Wolk on how CD mastering and radio compression can actually change musical styles and Jason Toynbee’s account of how the Wailers were marketed to the rock world. I’m also fascinated by Luc Sante’s musings on the origin of the blues and wish it had more historical data, though I think it’s already wormed its way into my consciousness.
There are a few clunkers. Gayle Wald’s piece on Sister Rosetta Tharpe is intended to put the guitarist/singer in a more critical position in musical history but aside from reading more like the introduction to a book it simply never does this. She piles up assertions on more assertions with little substance to shore everything up. Sleater-Kinney-ite Carrie Brownstein’s piece would never have been accepted if she wasn’t a “name.” Ann Powers piece on unoriginality makes one major error when she claims that when a bland Enya song (redundant yes) became the unofficial anthem for 9/11 grief that the “profound unoriginality was a pathway to relief and a proper response to a time when silence was unbearable yet seemed the only appropriate response.” Left unexamined is the distinct possibility that bad art might actually be damaging, that it might shut off thought or close down emotions. In a way, that’s what she’s arguing: the ridigity and mindless simplicity of this corporate product gave direction to people who needed it. Only she thinks that’s a good thing.
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Karen McCosker & Nicholas Albery - A Poem a Day (1994, US edition 1996)
I usually avoid this sort of thing (both popcult anthologies and anything “a day”) but flipping through it in the bookstore thought it seemed reasonably wide-ranging and worth not purchasing but checking out of the library. It is a pretty nice anthology that focuses mainly on accessible short poems. There are some lapses such as the inexplicable inclusion of a poem on a subject in very poor taste and several song lyrics (which are not poems as you would have thought beaten into the ground by now but I suspect in this case somebody thought they were being open-minded by including them). And Tennyson’s “The Eagle” is a stuffed-owl candidate. There’s far too many Gerard Manly Hopkins (thirteen when three would be pushing it) and too many very short excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays. You can—actually should—skip McCosker’s foreward, exactly the kind of nitwitless thing you get from people who’ve read too much poetry in order to enlarge the NPR center of their brain rather than shaking their soul. It was a bad design decision that when a poem goes to a second page to place a repeat of the title almost as if it’s part of the poem. The strangest thing about the book is the notes that often appear at the end of a poem. The brief comments are wildly inconsistent; sometimes offering mini-biographies, sometimes a stab at explication and always nearly feeling totally random. Does it make the slightest bit of difference about Kenneth Patchen’s wife’s maiden name? Why mention the publication date of a William Oldys poem but not the date for most others? Why is Siegfried Sasson’s biography longer than the poem it accompanies? Does it make the slightest bit of difference how many children Francis William Bourdillon had? The little critical engagements are best skipped. The worst example is for Blake’s “Jerusalem” where they claim “The dark satanic mills refer first and foremost to Oxford and Cambridge and the rigidity of classics and mathematics.” Even if there’s some document where Blake wrote this is exactly what he intended it’s simply incorrect within the way the poem actually works.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Clerks II
I was going to be so cutting-edge: Saw this the first show on the first day but then it took nearly two months to post this. Guess the film really does destroy life.
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Clerks II (Kevin Smith 2006)
Holy cow, what a disaster. Smith has never been much for smarts or even technical skill but his knack for dialogue, improbable pop-culture surprise and plain old humor has completely deserted him. Clerks II wanders through a heavy-handed sitcom plot and laborious presentation of “characters” before finally hammering in a Message that any viewer got about three minutes into the film. “Friends are kool” and “follow your dreams” are not negligible but having read that you can now safely skip the film.
It probably didn’t help that in preparation for the sequel I watched Clerks a few days earlier. I hadn’t seen it since the original release and it turned out to be better and worse than I remembered. "Better" because as pure filmmaking it was more accomplished and efficient than the clunky indie film of my memory. What I probably considered clumsy acting at the time is actually an appropriate style for geeks who constantly talk and talk then talk some more. "Worse" because it’s so unambiguously weighted toward a moment of Personal Growth that there’s little real drama. What else could you say about a film that has its actual director deliver the moral on screen in his character’s only line of dialogue? And worse also because of the unadulterated misogyny shown towards the “bad girl” that Dante learns to reject. I have no use for pop psychology’s mother/whore idea but Smith seems to have embraced it so completely that it’s not clear why he even bothered to give these two female characters other names.
In some sense, Clerks II is practically just a remake with Dante again torn between a woman everybody knows is bad for him and one that everybody knows is right for him, random events with customers, toenail painting, pointless Jay & Silent Bob, etc. But anybody who’s ever worked retail knows how honest the first film was; the sequel has no ties to any reality, even a comic fantasy reality. It just feels like the cheapest kind of barrel-bottom comedy, the kind of thing that used to fill late-night cable slots like Hot Dog: The Movie and its ilk. The Star Wars dialogue in the first film about workers who died on the Death Star is exactly what you hear from geeks and it wasn’t self-contained but flowed into a customer’s dialogue and on from there so that it tied into the overall weave of the movie. It was interesting in itself and a part of the film both thematically (workers) and structurally. The sequel’s Star Wars vs LOTR is only a mainstream’s idea of geeks, pure cliche. Sure you could say the same about The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy but all of us fanboys know that there’s some truth to CBG and that the show’s creators clearly like and respect him. Smith is just filling time. Even Jason Mewes delivers only a pale shadow of Jay, helping make the whole film just a sad sad time.
----------------------------
Clerks II (Kevin Smith 2006)
Holy cow, what a disaster. Smith has never been much for smarts or even technical skill but his knack for dialogue, improbable pop-culture surprise and plain old humor has completely deserted him. Clerks II wanders through a heavy-handed sitcom plot and laborious presentation of “characters” before finally hammering in a Message that any viewer got about three minutes into the film. “Friends are kool” and “follow your dreams” are not negligible but having read that you can now safely skip the film.
It probably didn’t help that in preparation for the sequel I watched Clerks a few days earlier. I hadn’t seen it since the original release and it turned out to be better and worse than I remembered. "Better" because as pure filmmaking it was more accomplished and efficient than the clunky indie film of my memory. What I probably considered clumsy acting at the time is actually an appropriate style for geeks who constantly talk and talk then talk some more. "Worse" because it’s so unambiguously weighted toward a moment of Personal Growth that there’s little real drama. What else could you say about a film that has its actual director deliver the moral on screen in his character’s only line of dialogue? And worse also because of the unadulterated misogyny shown towards the “bad girl” that Dante learns to reject. I have no use for pop psychology’s mother/whore idea but Smith seems to have embraced it so completely that it’s not clear why he even bothered to give these two female characters other names.
In some sense, Clerks II is practically just a remake with Dante again torn between a woman everybody knows is bad for him and one that everybody knows is right for him, random events with customers, toenail painting, pointless Jay & Silent Bob, etc. But anybody who’s ever worked retail knows how honest the first film was; the sequel has no ties to any reality, even a comic fantasy reality. It just feels like the cheapest kind of barrel-bottom comedy, the kind of thing that used to fill late-night cable slots like Hot Dog: The Movie and its ilk. The Star Wars dialogue in the first film about workers who died on the Death Star is exactly what you hear from geeks and it wasn’t self-contained but flowed into a customer’s dialogue and on from there so that it tied into the overall weave of the movie. It was interesting in itself and a part of the film both thematically (workers) and structurally. The sequel’s Star Wars vs LOTR is only a mainstream’s idea of geeks, pure cliche. Sure you could say the same about The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy but all of us fanboys know that there’s some truth to CBG and that the show’s creators clearly like and respect him. Smith is just filling time. Even Jason Mewes delivers only a pale shadow of Jay, helping make the whole film just a sad sad time.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
How to Not Make an Anthology
Of course that’s misleading: The way to not make an anthology is to not make it. This was really a faux-clever way of saying how to make a bad anthology, in specific Stephen Hyde and Geno Zanetti’s Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers, and Scam Artists (2002).
Here are their techniques:
1. Arbitrary Organization
The book is divided into four numbered but untitled sections. The first is the smallest so at first glance you’d think that would be an introduction and the other three devoted to some theme. On second glance, it’s nothing of the kind; in fact there doesn’t appear to be any reason for the groupings at all. They randomly group topic and approach though perhaps the point is chronological since section two has the older material (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire) but it’s not like they’re showing any progression.
2. Ignore Fact or Fiction Distinctions
It’s tempting to think that a book opening with a Borges story is trying to rub factual against fictional material (y’know, mixing genres and questioning “reality”) but the book reads like slopiness. Not just that the pieces aren’t IDed as one or the other since you can usually figure that out but the intermingling and general lack of purpose makes the book as overblown myth as, say, Guys & Dolls than as any serious investigation into the players’ world(s). It doesn’t help that some of the “facutal” pieces appear to be mostly exaggeration if not near-complete fabrication. The excerpt from Frank Abagnale’s Catch Me If You Can, for instance, is almost assuredly not true (I’ve taken the bar exam and don’t believe that anybody could fake their way through it), made even more suspicious when he stops providing concrete information.
3. Avoid Rudimentary Information
Why bother with simple things like a tiny introduction or even dates? Rufus Jarman’s piece on the Spanish Prisoner mentions how much is lost annually on the scam and you immediately wonder if that includes the Nigerian email that’s so clearly the same thing. But hey, maybe Jarman’s piece is a few years old and predates email; that makes sense. Then you start to suspect that it’s maybe 15 or 20 years old until he mentions American victims sometimes going through Havana and suddenly this whole thing has to be at least half a century out of date, maybe more. The piece isn’t mentioned in the copyrights page so who knows? Clearly the date is crucial to evaluating the information but no date is given, as would be the original publication that printed it since there’s enough vague stories that I wonder how much is real.
4. Poor Selection
Why anything by Robert Anton Wilson would be included anywhere is something of a mystery but even past that his piece here is fuzzy minded and misleading, actually something of a scam itself. Even more mystifying is an excerpt by Rodolfo Scarfalloto that’s about lying and truth but is so completely and obviously not true that it constitutes a lie itself. Such as “The ‘Heart’ (feeling) cannot be fooled, because it already knows the truth, irrespective of the external scenery.” Maybe these are samples of clever schemers who scam readers with books that have the intellectual heft of a Jerry Springer show. But considering some of the other tedious choices I think the anthologists just don’t know what they’re doing.
Here are their techniques:
1. Arbitrary Organization
The book is divided into four numbered but untitled sections. The first is the smallest so at first glance you’d think that would be an introduction and the other three devoted to some theme. On second glance, it’s nothing of the kind; in fact there doesn’t appear to be any reason for the groupings at all. They randomly group topic and approach though perhaps the point is chronological since section two has the older material (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire) but it’s not like they’re showing any progression.
2. Ignore Fact or Fiction Distinctions
It’s tempting to think that a book opening with a Borges story is trying to rub factual against fictional material (y’know, mixing genres and questioning “reality”) but the book reads like slopiness. Not just that the pieces aren’t IDed as one or the other since you can usually figure that out but the intermingling and general lack of purpose makes the book as overblown myth as, say, Guys & Dolls than as any serious investigation into the players’ world(s). It doesn’t help that some of the “facutal” pieces appear to be mostly exaggeration if not near-complete fabrication. The excerpt from Frank Abagnale’s Catch Me If You Can, for instance, is almost assuredly not true (I’ve taken the bar exam and don’t believe that anybody could fake their way through it), made even more suspicious when he stops providing concrete information.
3. Avoid Rudimentary Information
Why bother with simple things like a tiny introduction or even dates? Rufus Jarman’s piece on the Spanish Prisoner mentions how much is lost annually on the scam and you immediately wonder if that includes the Nigerian email that’s so clearly the same thing. But hey, maybe Jarman’s piece is a few years old and predates email; that makes sense. Then you start to suspect that it’s maybe 15 or 20 years old until he mentions American victims sometimes going through Havana and suddenly this whole thing has to be at least half a century out of date, maybe more. The piece isn’t mentioned in the copyrights page so who knows? Clearly the date is crucial to evaluating the information but no date is given, as would be the original publication that printed it since there’s enough vague stories that I wonder how much is real.
4. Poor Selection
Why anything by Robert Anton Wilson would be included anywhere is something of a mystery but even past that his piece here is fuzzy minded and misleading, actually something of a scam itself. Even more mystifying is an excerpt by Rodolfo Scarfalloto that’s about lying and truth but is so completely and obviously not true that it constitutes a lie itself. Such as “The ‘Heart’ (feeling) cannot be fooled, because it already knows the truth, irrespective of the external scenery.” Maybe these are samples of clever schemers who scam readers with books that have the intellectual heft of a Jerry Springer show. But considering some of the other tedious choices I think the anthologists just don’t know what they’re doing.
Monday, July 31, 2006
getting it wrong
It's probably some streak of smug superiority but I can't help being attracted by writers who base their ideas on some technical issue that they get totally and provably wrong. Usually if you see a mention of "entropy" or "Heisenberg" you can pretty much be guaranteed it's completely wrong unless coming from an actual science writer. (A personal favorite is when Charles Rutheiser claims in Imagineering Atlanta that fractals are non-Euclidean, showing not even a superficial understanding.)
So critic Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a review of Monster House that blithely dismisses pretty much all animation prior to it, mainly because of some kind of facial abilities in the new technology. Or as he puts it "Moreover, if the actor is thinking or is full of doubt, the technology will be able to render subtle qualities of pensiveness or doubt in the animation." Which actually might be good since most actual live actors can't render these subtle qualities or at least they're in films where such skills are not needed.
Pixar animator Jeffrey Pidgeon wrote a fine rebuttal.
So critic Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a review of Monster House that blithely dismisses pretty much all animation prior to it, mainly because of some kind of facial abilities in the new technology. Or as he puts it "Moreover, if the actor is thinking or is full of doubt, the technology will be able to render subtle qualities of pensiveness or doubt in the animation." Which actually might be good since most actual live actors can't render these subtle qualities or at least they're in films where such skills are not needed.
Pixar animator Jeffrey Pidgeon wrote a fine rebuttal.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
who'd a thunk: linguist humor
http://mercury.ccil.org/%7Ecowan/essential.html
English is essentially a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
Danish is essentially Swedish run backwards at half speed.
French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
[and it just goes on and on....]
English is essentially a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
Danish is essentially Swedish run backwards at half speed.
French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
[and it just goes on and on....]
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
still here....
When I started the blog however long back (three years? four?) I knew it wouldn't be updated every week. Still, this may be the longest it's gone silent. Consider it conceptual art blogging.
Monday, May 1, 2006
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