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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: music (page 7 of 13)

Thoughts on Genre: Hitsville, Dullsville

13 June 2005 / / 0 Comments

So, we have two rough categories for placing tight genre product: first, exemplary genres, where the best work represents the ideal summation of what all the genre product aims at, and second, exceptional genres, where the best work stands out because of its departure from the genre’s standards. Ray Davis suggests that the ideals of 1930s comedy are simply better ideals: what’s not to like about them? I agree in part, but I don’t think this explains the disproportionate amount of good product relative to nearly every other era of filmed comedy.

One correlation to be drawn is that in the exemplary case, the best work does not emerge from particular talents but across the board, while in the exceptional case, it is the peculiarities of individual creators that give the best work its shape and form. Indeed, it’s the issues of shape and form themselves that seem to determine whether genres can succeed on their own merits, or whether they require the intervention of a particular individual to bring their own idiosyncrasies to mediocre requirements.

So then, some genres I can think of on either side of the fence. Predictably, I was able to think of far more exceptional cases than exemplary ones. One thing I’m fairly confident of is that as with many mass phenomena, exemplary genres only roll around rarely, through chance.

Grub St. Writers: Exceptional. The sheer hackwork being done by most of these novelists rivals any commercial genre extant today. The few giants of the era tower over their competitors beyond belief.

90s Techno/House/Gabba/etc. Music: Exemplary. The sheer homogeneity of the genre and the rate at which evolutions in beat percolated throughout the communities made individual authorship subservient to all sorts of emergent properties. I’m no Simon Reynolds, so I can’t give the details, but here’s one case in which no one particular artist has ever jumped out at me as being especially ahead of the pack. Meanwhile, the big names have never especially impressed me, seeming to be commercially watered-down rather than especially personality-laden. I do love DJ Scud, but admittedly he’s less interested in working within the genre than eviscerating it.

Chivalric Novels: Exceptional. If the works quoted in Don Quixote are any measure, it took masters like Cervantes and Ariosto to prove that this genre wasn’t completely unredeemable.

EC Comics: Exemplary, sort of. The confluence of talent in
EC is hard to explain, but the randomness that besets the quality of
individual creators’ work, and the ability of the writers and artists to cancel out each others’ flaws (and sometimes their strengths) is one of the few cases in comics where a huddle-room mentality worked. Still, I have to admit that people like Wally Wood certainly have their own stamp, and because the genre never overtook individual quirks, this is a conditional judgment.

Disney/Marvel/DC Comics: Exceptional. I could add many other genres here from the Golden and Silver ages, to say nothing of newspaper comics. Barks, Kirby, Cole, Eisner: without the handful of great names in these genres and their commitment to very personal visions, comic books would truly have the shameful, worthless history that many assume of it.

Stax/Volt/Motown Records: Exemplary. There’s a reason why punters focus on the multi-artist greatest hits discs.

60s Beat Groups: Exceptional. Despite the attempts at a Hitsville USA type factory approach, very little of quality came out of endless beat groups covering a narrow repertoire of house songs, until the best of them gave up and started writing for themselves. Interesting how early some of them (Hollies, Beau Brummels) started to do that.

Dub/reggae: Exemplary. Despite the persistence of some huge names, gems pop up all over the place from people who are never heard from again. Massive amounts of appropriation, plagiarism, and retooling also make picking out individuals extremely difficult to begin with.

Baroque Kantatenwerk: Exceptional. Bach’s sheer weirdness and inspiration blew away whatever qualities his competition had.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Anonymous apotheoses versus individual quirkiness. The first conclusion to draw from these examples is that by banking talent together and forcing tons of cross-pollenation, a bottom-up approach emerges whose impact is only seen in retrospect. In comparison, the top-down dictates of a publisher or a church official make for a more static environment in which it is easier for individuals to insidiously invest themselves in their work.

And that brings me to my next question: whither blogs?

To be continued…

Thoughts on Genre: The Secret of Comedy (circa 1935)

1 June 2005 / / 0 Comments

After sitting through the weak screwball comedy True Confession this weekend, a proto-I Love Lucy piece with Carole Lombard doing her best to enliven the story of a pathological liar who confesses to a murder she didn’t commit to help make her lawyer husband (an enervated Fred MacMurray) famous (along with a sad, decaying John Barrymore in a thankless part as a drunk), I decided to follow Miranda’s lead and make a list of my favorite comedies of the thirties and forties. I am not the expert that Ray Davis, who has written extensively on the subject, is, but since I realized I’d seen more films of this genre than any other since I was obsessed with the French nouvelle vague, I wondered if there was a connection. Leaving aside the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, who represent their own genre, here was my list, screwball and otherwise:

  1. The Palm Beach Story
  2. Twentieth Century
  3. Bombshell
  4. Nothing Sacred
  5. The Good Fairy
  6. Theodora Goes Wild
  7. Unfaithfully Yours
  8. Thirty Day Princess
  9. Sullivan’s Travels
  10. The Lady Eve

That wasn’t especially enlightening, so I made a list of the top ten acclaimed comedies of the period that I didn’t especially like.

  1. His Girl Friday
  2. Bringing Up Baby
  3. My Man Godfrey
  4. Adam’s Rib
  5. It Happened One Night
  6. The Awful Truth
  7. Dinner at Eight
  8. Easy Living
  9. Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
  10. Ball of Fire

This was more interesting. Several directors (Howard Hawks), actors (Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne), and screenwriters (Ben Hecht) appeared in both lists. Unlike the nouvelle vague, where rough rules like “Louis Malle has never made a good movie” and “Truffaut’s films tend to be more recidivist than most” provided heuristics for predicting my reaction to a film, the heterogeneity of any individual’s output in American comedy was stronger than I can recall it being anywhere else, even though the output was far more similar.

I don’t believe this is purely due to the ineffable nature of comedy. With the exception of “Ball of Fire,” which is pretty hard to take, all of the films on the second list are good pieces of work that have their moments. Rather, I think that there is ultimately a homogeneity of style and content that transcends the differences of these movies to place them all firmly within a genre, a genre larger than “screwball” but clearly isolatable to a time and place. What’s amazing is that there are so many that are estimable: I cannot think of any other film genre that has so many high-quality films with such similar content and formulae. (Some have suggested Bollywood musicals, but I wouldn’t know.)

to be continued…

A (True) Parable

14 April 2005 / / 0 Comments

A friend’s storage basement was flooded. He lost 90% of what he had accumulated over his lifetime, which was a lot: books, records, cds, magazines, all the low-cost high-content-density collectibles whose value lay in the information contained in them rather than their rarity or condition. Leaving aside Forster and Emerson’s wish to be freed of possessions, this is a minor tragedy.

So now my friend is faced with a battery of unappealing tasks:

  1. Remember the individual items present that melted together into a few large watery lumps.
  2. Provide estimates of the items’ value to the insurance company.
  3. Figure out which items to repurchase (and obtain them), and how much money to use for living expenses.

Even remembering must be painful; one purpose of a personal library is to remind you of the worthy items you’ve chosen to keep. Having to reconstruct the work of a lifetime on short notice requires rebuilding yourself from scratch, and as with all such hurried projects, pieces will be left out.

Pricing is anathema to whatever sentimental value the books and music held; they were simultaneously disposable and irreplaceable. It’s one thing to sell a book on the grounds that its role in your life is complete, another entirely to have it taken from you and needing to paper over its hiatus to preserve the illusion of continuity. And the option to re-buy, to make the choice of either retrieving what you had previously had to get back to where you were or else using the money to further your life, reduces one’s identity to commerce.

None of this will matter once everything is digitized and it’s all ephemerally available on demand for some micropayment. There will be nothing to lose. I don’t think I’ll miss the fragility, but object fetishization has been with us for so long that I have to imagine something else will take its place. (Though I guess for many people, clothes and/or high-tech gadgets already have.)

For the Blanchot Fans

16 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

The value and dignity of everyday words is to be as close as possible to nothing. Invisible, not letting anything be seen, always beyond themselves, always on this side of things, a pure awareness crosses them, so discreetly that it itself can sometimes be lacking. Everything then is nullity. And yet, understanding does not stop occurring; it even seems that it attains its point of perfection. What could be richer than this extreme destitution?

Maurice Blanchot, “The Language of Fiction” (tr. Mandell)

Actually, I took this from the liner text to the Mountain Goats’ Nothing for Juice, because while I have my doubts about the “understanding” that occurs through everyday words, I do hear it in popular (i.e. folk) music, and that, more than any would-be proletarian consciousness, justifies (even mandates) its inclusion in more elite avant contexts. See this Fred Frith interview for more…. (No significant exposition of Frith’s folk influences seems to exist online, alas.)

A Note on Peter Cook

28 February 2005 / / 1 Comment

Mark Kaplan writes of Peter Cook:

This stare is like an empty demand to laugh appended to whatever content Cook happens to light upon: laugh, or be a prude; laugh or be subject to the ignominy of “not getting it”. The stare says, defiantly prior to any utterance: “I’m in on the joke–how about you?”

As Kaplan implies with his Adorno quote, the insecurity and ultimate conservatism of the satirist, who depends on the object of his ridicule, has been the downfall of writers from Gogol to Mencken to Harvey Kurtzman. It reminds me of Ian Penman’s precision demolition of Frank Zappa:

He had long hair but sneered at longhairs; he made a long and lucrative career out of endless guitar solos but sneered at other rock musicians; he constantly bumped his little tugboatful of ‘compositions’ up against the prows of the classical establishment, but he lambasted that, too. In stuff like “The Torture Never Stops” and “Dancing Fool” he got some of his biggest audiences by exploiting the very idea of exploitation he was supposedly upbraiding. He sneered at people who took drugs; he sneered at their parents who didn’t. Most of all, he sneered at women; girls trying to get by in a world of hateful, mastery-obsessed fools like himself. He sneered at anything which represented the mess and fun and confusion of life. He sneered, in short, at anything/everything that wasn’t Frank Zappa.

Although Zappa built a career on purporting to despise the facades of Western consumer culture, he could never actually tear himself away from its value system (he just recycled it, reflected it back in myriad ‘negative’ forms); he could never step out of his circus-master role and plunge into the world of the Other.

(The whole article is like this.)

Penman is dead-on when he says that Zappa was wholly unable to transcend the zeitgeist; most of his stuff sounds incredibly dated, often to a specific year. Like Cook, he got the good stuff out of the way early, when there was still a bit of celebration and joy (in a 60’s Southern California kind of way) in the music of his little band. Likewise, Cook’s best work with Beyond the Fringe is less satirical than absurdist, with jokes like “One Leg Too Few” and “The Great Train Robbery” (“a misnomer, since it involved no loss of train”) dispatched brilliantly. (Alan Bennett always seemed to me to be doing the heavy lifting on the satire.) Bedazzled is comparatively limp, and I’ve been fortunate enough to spare myself most of the Derek and Clive material.

But the man had raw talent until the end. The best thing I’ve heard of his besides Fringe was Why Bother?, a set of short, improvised dialogues with his most talented scion, Chris Morris:

I mean, I held out no great hopes that he wouldn’t be a boozy old sack of lard with his hair falling out and scarcely able to get a sentence out, because he hadn’t given much evidence that that wouldn’t be the case. But, in fact, he stumbled in with a Safeways bag full of Kestrel lager and loads of fags and then proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper. Really quite extraordinary.

Morris was right. Eager to match wits with his hero, Morris repeatedly taunts and derails Cook, refusing to respond to Cook’s setups and repeatedly mentioning that Cook will die soon. Cook, relishing being challenged for once in his life, is damned sharp. I can’t imagine the partnership would have lasted had they been peers, but I think it shows that the old Cook had at least learned something about the emptiness of easy ridicule.

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