It is a rare but happy thing to have a childhood friend with whom you not only remain in touch but still share enough personal connections to keep those early bonds from getting stale. I am fortunate to have two such people in my life - perhaps more, but two who have inspired me to write some thoughts down. Although these two friends of mine have never met, to my knowledge, I share with both of them a special relationship through two paths: rock music, and the written word.
One of them, Ira Robbins, I have know since we attended the same Brooklyn elementary school; we listened to the Beatles together in the auditorium when their first U.S. singles were released, and Ira played some of Bob Dylan's earliest songs for me in his living room. I met David Komoroff when my family moved to Manhattan; he was just slightly older than me, enough to be a major influence in my still developing appreciation for rock music. He introduced me to Jefferson Airplane, some early Stones albums, and Tommy, among many other glories of 1960's rock and roll. While at Stuyvesant High School he led me to my first rock concert - at Carnegie Hall, to see a group called Seatrain, in 1970. About a year later he insisted that we attend a concert at the Filmore East before it closed, where the highlight was a fairly new band called Mott the Hoople.
Ira went on to found the Trouser Press, through which he played a leading role in bringing awareness of the punk and New Wave movements to U.S. rock fans. I wasn't in touch with Ira then - in fact, I discovered his involvement in the early 1980's as I was standing in an Upper West Side bookstore thumbing through a thick Trouser Press record guide, and noticed the name of the editor. This was of some interest to me, since I was at that time playing in a rock band that performed at CBGB's during what was more or less the heydey of the punk era. Ira had also been in a band, and also lived at some point on the Upper West Side, but it was still many years before we would reconnect. Meanwhile, I had also been a journalist, intermittently, even writing the occasional music or film review for small political rags. Later on I spoke at conferences on the philosophical analysis of rock music (and still do this sordid kind of thing). We were leading sort of parallel lives that more or less began with trading baseball cards on a Brooklyn street corner, playing punchball and listening to "She Loves You" on a transistor radio.
When we got back in touch many years later we found that we both once again lived in Brooklyn, that we were both still deeply interested in rock music, and both also making efforts at writing fiction. That has been more than enough to keep us from blowing apart like leaves in the wind again.
David chose a quieter life, having moved many years ago to a small town in upstate New York. We rarely see each other, but from snail mail to email to Facebook we have never been out of touch for too long. David is also the main reason I make a living today as a computer professional: after I became more or less convinced that my rock band would not be the next Beatles, and indeed was not obviously on a path to making me financially self-sustaining as a musician, I looked around for an actual profession. (I was pulling in a small income as a bicycle messenger, which never really struck me as a career for some reason.) David had gone into computer programming, and after a visit to his office and some heart to heart talks I decided to pursue it too. He retired long ago; I'm still at it, for better or worse.
I don't really know David's tastes in music these days, but Ira's are on public view in the online version of the Trouser Press, as well as in his numerous other published writings, and for me in "personal communications", as human contact is euphemistically referred to in footnotes to philosophical papers. What attracted my attention recently - and partly prompted me to write this post - is his recent piece for Salon.Com. Taking a long look at his own history as a rock fan and a record reviewer, the history of Trouser Press and its decline as a print magazine, and the state of music criticism, he defends the position that "record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good." By contrast, he brings back some of the more hypercritical views he voiced over the years about bands that rated high on the trendiness scale, and refuses to apologize for most of them. Right on, I say: these days there is always someone (indeed, an entire chorus of someones) ready to tout the aesthetic virtues of anything that does not stink to high heaven of incompetence or banality. Critical opinion in the era of online communication has a snowball effect, to the point where truly independent judgment is difficult at best. A critic who dissed the latest Frank Ocean or Passion Pit album might not lose his job, but he would lose respect because one critic after another lauded it in the kind of capsule reviews you find on Pitchfork and many other sites.
The same applies across the mass arts. Case in point: I just saw Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's latest effort at the socially conscious art film. "103 Academy Awards Minimum!", "One of the Year's .213 Best!", "Daniel Day-Lewis Is the Greatest Actor Since Richard Burton!" shout the critics (or some closely related pap). My reaction: a dubious portrait of a President who always speaks in a grandfatherly voice while presiding over the bloodiest war in history; Spielberg's usual faux-dramatic dialogue with the kind of packaged emotions that worked okay for the story of a stranded alien trying to phone home, but not so great for a beleaguered President trying to make history; modern slang mixed with 19th c. cliches; irrelevant subplots (what happened to the older son anyway?), an otiose epilogue (it was a year after the Senate adopted the 13th Amendment that Lincoln was murdered) etc. etc. Screw critical conformance. Most popular art today is intellectually insulting commercial crap, and even a lot of what isn't is just not artistically successful, however well-intentioned it might be.
Thus, when I see Ira reminding us how little moved he is by the Foo Fighters, a group whose recent album Wasting Light was a kind of cause celebre among critics, or by Sting's solo efforts, and a number of other iconoclastic positions he has taken, I am happy that someone has the guts to say these things so that I don't feel completely alone in the world. Indeed, I only regret seeing him partially back off some of his earlier apostasies: Patti smith's Horses is still unlistenable, IMHO; Television's Marquee Moon has one good song; the Ramones, who Ira, the apostle of punk rock, confesses he initially viewed as "a travesty", were exactly that - they just turned out to be a rather lovable, productive and influential travesty. (For updated 50's-style rock and roll I'll take the B-52's over the Ramones any day.) Okay, I'm a bitch - even punk is not sacred. I'm not sure Ira thinks it is either; he has too much integrity to give anything a pass because it's punk. I also have to admit that I never saw any of those groups live. Maybe I'd be kinder if I had.
One of Ira's main points is that many critics today seem to have barely brushed up on a band's Wikipedia entry before they mouth off about its virtues. (My way of putting it, not his.) It was one of the trademarks of Trouser Press in its day to do obsessive amounts of research about a band before writing it up (or down), and that was before Google was even a sci-fi fantasy, when it was widely accepted that a research library was a valuable asset for civilization. I like this line of thought, but I want to add a caveat: it is certainly possible for a critic to be so intimately familiar with his subject as to leave his audience without a clue what he's talking about. This is why I stopped paying attention to reviews in the
Village Voice about 30 years ago - smug verbal masturbation with elusive references to obscure, fly-by-night
bands that only 12 people in the world would conceivably recognize. Trouser Press reviews show considerable knowledge about the bands that are reviewed, but the references are generally within the realm of known or available rock history.
It is a little too much to ask that two friends, apart for long intervals over much of a lifetime, rediscover each other with exactly the same musical tastes after five decades of rock music, each with its own character. "Regrets, I have a few" says Ira - no doubt a nod to the famous Sid Vicious hit "My Way" (think I'm kidding?). Well, he might have one or two more regrets if I had my way. For instance, this bit of invective about The Fixx, one of my favorite bands of the 80's, where in 3 short paragraphs Ira describes them as a "pretentious synth-heavy atmospheric English dance band" ("dance band"?) whose songs are "irritating", "trivial", "wretched", "mundane", "unpleasant" and lacking in imagination. What I miss here is some criteria that might make these judgments more than mere epithets. To take one that has perhaps the greatest appearance of plausibility, a "pretentious" band is one that pretends they have ideas worthy of your attention when they really don't (Rush and Radiohead spring to mind) whereas to me, reading and repeating the lyrics of The Fixx is well worth the effort. (Phantoms, as I have written elsewhere, is a brilliant musical exploration of the concepts of place and personal identity.) Maybe Ira is in touch with another dimension of listening that I'm not - he has, after all, a vastly wider and more intimate knowledge of rock music than I do. All I know is that I can no more think of The Fixx as a "dance band" than, say, the Psychedelic Furs, or Pink Floyd for that matter, and though I will admit that I find a very small number of their songs "irritating", most of their material is deeply satisfying and creative.
Or take this sweeping assessment of Grand Funk and their significance: "the band that killed rock 'n' roll", as Ira sees it. I have to admit, I can't stand 90% of their output. On the other hand, Ira reminds us that "lots of terrible albums have been made by wonderful people", and it's equally true that some of the greatest albums have been made by bands that were
generally terrible - they found their groove, so to speak, and lost it quickly. Grand Funk's Closer to Home is high on that list for me, a spark of genius, sandwiched between a lot of really forgettable junk. (Okay, this is weird but... it was a former girlfriend of David's who first made me appreciate this album. Lack of critical distance? Perhaps.) Here I admit to being the odd man out, while Ira elaborates the standard critical opinion (as in this sympatico profile): even on that album, the band was incompetent, unoriginal and tasteless. For me, 6 out of 8 songs on the album are keepers, the other two being innocuous pseudo-soul ballads. And I could not name a song that any of those six clearly imitate. For me, the critical attitude means not only seeing the soft belly beneath the shell of popularity, but occasionally allowing that there's a lonely pearl in it.
The idea that Grand Funk were significant or influential enough to singlehandedly put an end to the Sixties is also farther than I can go. In those days there were a slew of culprits over a few short years - the James Gang, Black Sabbath, Savoy Brown, Deep Purple, and if you weren't feeling particularly generous, Iron Butterfly and Mountain to boot - soon to be followed by Bad Company and such lesser lights as Montrose, Golden Earing and Foghat - who jointly conspired to usher out acid rock and promote a sound that around 1975 began to emerge as heavy metal. There were other culprits as well, regarding the death of Sixties rock - think of Chicago taking over the jazz-rock mantle from bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Soft Machine; the devolution of Fleetwood Mac from the Peter Green blues-rock band to the Buckingham/Nicks pop band; and the conversion of Motown from a vital, relevant sound to a dry disco formula. Similarly, at the end of the Seventies there was a short list - okay, a rather long list - of bands that collectively killed what was good and innovative in progressive rock and turned it into a radio-happy pop sound - think Journey, Toto, Rush, Styx, Kansas, Steve Miller, and Gary Wright, for starters. I think it takes an army to put an end to an era of musical expression, and Grand Funk were at most a highly visible unit.
Aside from that, I really wonder about the characterization of Grand Funk's musicianship as "garage-bred ineptitude" and the way Ira ties it to their working-class origin. For he does draw attention to the striking similarity of this characterization to a fair description of the origins of punk rock. What distinguishes them, he says, is Grand Funk's lack of originality. But if they were not original, I don't understand how they could have played such an outstanding role in overthrowing an era of music. A gang of imitators can't overthrow what came before them, even by doing it badly. Ira also chides them for a late-to-the-game effort at anti-war heroics. Not quite so - Closer to Home, released in the second year of their existence, already has the standard odes to revolution, freedom, love and togetherness that one would have expected in those days. Mark Farner eventually descended into a flag-waving boor, but so what - no one writes off Neil Young's or Arlo Guthrie's early work just because they tilted right later on.
Sometimes Ira's views make me wonder about the very nature of music criticism. For when he says that he doesn't think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is even a good album, and that he thinks Abbey Road is an even worse one, I want to scream, "But this is the standard by which other albums are judged!" Then I think of Wittgenstein, a philosopher I have studied fairly closely, who says that the one thing of which we cannot say that it either is, or is not, a meter long is the standard 1-meter bar in Paris, which defines the length of a meter. And this is obviously not true of Sgt. Pepper: for although it is probably the single most universally admired piece of recorded rock music, it is certainly not logically impossible to agree or disagree with that judgment. So I guess I should thank Ira for reminding me once again that consensus is not truth and emotional attachment is the opposite of critical objectivity. Be that as it may, to get me to believe that Sgt. Pepper is not at least one of the greatest albums of all time you would probably have to hire Christopher Nolan and the entire Inception team to screw around with my brain.
The inevitable musical differences aside, when Ira rattles off a phrase like "...the schoolyard syllogisms of the 2012 election", which he does with rather frightening consistency in both musical and political contexts, I start wishing that he would publish a Little Red Book of his best lines that I can carry around with me and read when I need to remind myself what contemporary writing should look like.
********
Speaking of which, Ira's 2009 novel Kick It Till It Breaks is a damn good read and another reason to keep an ear out for him. David has also been a literary type as long as I've known him, and had more of a flair for writing than I did early on. A few days ago, Ira and David had a psychic confluence that I suppose I alone would have noticed: they both posted comments in response to a piece in the NY Times Magazine about the writer George Saunders. "The writer for our time", according to the writer for the Times, Joel Lovell. WTF? Ira and Dave wanted know. How did I end up with a writer for my damn time whom I've never even heard of? Personally I had almost the same reaction - actually, the very same, until a bit of free association led me in another direction.
Almost a year ago I decided that as an aspiring writer I needed to subscribe to The New Yorker, knowing full well that I wouldn't have time to read even half the issues. So I did, and I haven't had time to read even a quarter of the issues. Generally I skim the concert listings, look quickly at the cartoons, check out the poetry (ugh... Ashberry again... talk about inscrutable), see if there are any absolutely essential journalistic pieces (hopefully not, since they tend to be even longer than my blog posts), and finally, lay into the short story. This way I have managed to get through maybe ten or twelve stories. Very few of them made much of an impression as I was reading them, and even fewer stayed with me for more than a day after I'd finished. In fact, exactly one did - a very bizarre tale about a young boy and an old man who do something like exchange tragic courses of life on a winter's day. (I mean literally exchange them, not talk about them.) I wasn't sure if I liked it, and certainly could not imagine what sort of mind could have come up with it. I noted the name of the author briefly, and forgot it soon afterward.
On reading a few paragraphs of the Lovell piece I said to myself, "I'll bet that story about the boy and the old man at the lake was by this Saunders dude." Yes it was. I will not jump on the Times bandwagon about this - the bandwagon that has only recently gotten through inflating Updike after his death into a literary titan, then beating the drums over David Mitchell's latest effort, then rolling the Franzen juggernaut down a hill, and the like. But I will say this: if there is a "writer for our time" it will have to be a writer whose ideas are as complex, tormented, tragic and exuberant as our time, all at once. No other short stories since those of Paul Bowles have struck me as having this kind of depth. I feel that Saunders has some deep grasp of the tragic sense of life, and the particularly ridiculous twist that a system driven by technology and finance capital can give to that situation, as well as an idea (which I dare to claim runs through some of my own attempts at fiction) that love and humor are our only hope for maintaining a semblance of sanity.
I will almost certainly be picking up Saunders' latest story collection, Tenth of December. I will almost certainly be picking up a copy of his friend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest too. I will almost certainly be reading all this stuff as soon as I get through Ulysses. Don't hold your breath waiting for my review. For those who want to know Saunders a little better though, The Paris Review web site has just published the autobiographical Preface to a new edition of his earlier short story collection; it is quite an inspiring read for an aspiring writer. And one of the Times blogs has an interview with Lovell that sheds a little more light on Saunders.
Well, that's enough blogging for now. Back to Ulysses, Led Zeppelin and other things that keep me from the madhouse. Back to rocking the boat, writing on rock, writing in my rocker and rocking with my typewriter. And to hoping I'll always have good buddies who will prod me with their poignant posts when I get lazy, and challenge my tastes when they start to ossify. Scratch that; my tastes in music and literature already resemble a petrified forest. Which means someone can kick them as hard as they want and do no damage. We can still be great friends.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Trouble With Tosca
If one's answer to the question "What's in a name?" is anything other than "nothing", one is probably best served by not having the name Bondy in New York Cty right now. This year one such unfortunate has managed to get himself fired from a top City job; that would be "Joel" Bondy, who is at least unofficially accumulating much of the blame for what has become known as the CityTime scandal. But my concern right now is with another Bondy, the almost equally maligned Luc, who last year offered us a new Met production of Tosca, the Puccini opera that has managed to stay in the forefront of the repertoire in spite of its rather dubious dramatic premise.
Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops.
Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.
No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.
But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.
What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.
But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.
The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.
Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder - in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.
Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.
So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.
In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.
Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.
Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops.
Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.
No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.
But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.
What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.
But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.
The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.
Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder - in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.
Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.
So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.
In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.
Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Mosques, Communities, Domes and Minarets
This letter was sent via carrier parrot to the NY Times following the Imam's Op-Ed piece on Wednesday:
Probably too long for their sound-bite aesthetic, but who knows.
I do have a word on one other looming issue, of perhaps more obvious aesthetic import than some others I've discussed in previous posts on the mosque issue. It has been vociferously denied that the non-mosque-to-be would have any cupola domes or minarets, thus attracting attention to its Islamic function. But I want to propose that it also should not have a prayer hall facing Mecca, or be constructed on the symmetircal model, or use any ceramic tiles, or indeed stones or other building materials typical of Islamic architecture. In fact, I think Park51, the developer, should be required to go to the Wikipedia page on Islamic Architeecture, page down to the section on "Elements of Islamic Style", and make a checklist of all the features to avoid so as to make the building look pretty much like a New York office building, or, say, a Burlington Coat Factory store. That would take care of the problem.
Or, alternatively, they could do what I suggested before: build a secular building with no religious function at all, make it a strictly educational shrine to the more historical, humanistic and inclusive features of Islamic culture, serve some of that great middle eastern cuisine in their restaurant, set their beautifully tiled pool in a typical mosaic pattern, and build all the minarets and cupolas they want.
As I've said before, Osama bin Laden is a despicable human being, but a great architecture critic. Nothing Park51 could build could possibly be more offensive to the eye than those two featureless obelisks that ruined the NY skyline. As far as I'm concerned they can build cupolas and minarets into the design of the new WTC as long as it's appealing and blends well enough with the environment.
All of which is to say: neither the presence nor the absence of Islamic architectural features moves this issue one way or another. It is an aesthetic issue, but not primarily that kind of aesthetic issue. It is a matter of the feeling associated with knowing the function of a building. It could apply to building a new British Petroleum office tower on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, which would be pretty offensive even if it didn't look like... hmmmm... Salisbury Cathedral? (Well, there is no British architectural style, so there goes that analogy!)
BTW - Please try to ignore the ridiculous Google ads at the left. The idea of Google's AdSense software is to automatically match the ad to the content of your blog. But it is so far from doing that that I expect to remove it shortly. Meanwhile, try to pretend it's not there.
(Update 12:03 a.m. 9/10/10: Removed link to NY Times article from title link and put it in the post; minor text change.)
In his Op-Ed column "Building on Faith" (9/5/10) Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf repeatedly refers to Cordoba House as a "community center", referring to "a swimming pool, classrooms and a play space for children." Thus he avoids characterizing it as a mosque.
But the term "community center" seems far more neutral than is justified. It was earlier reported that Imam Feisal is already holding worship services at the site; and one rationale offered by Cordoba House proponents is that the existing mosques in downtown Manhattan are overcrowded. Cordoba House will now have a "separate prayer space" for Muslims; presumably it will continue to feature services led by the Imam. It is not clear how this would differ from a mosque, albeit with various secular spaces attached.
There is another reason to be skeptical about the inclusiveness of Cordoba's "community". One of the "two fundamental commandments" that Cordoba House will be built on is "to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds and souls". Imam Feisal more than once appeals to "our fellow Muslims, fellow Christians, and fellow Jews". Indeed he now refers to "separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths", though he previously spoke only of a "meditation room, where people of any faith can pray or meditate" (http://cordobainitiative.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/what-is-prayer-space/). The building sounds increasingly like a religious institution, with a clear bias toward specific faiths and an overall Islamic function. It is not like the 92nd Street Y, which has no specifically religious spaces or functions at all.
Whether or not you believe that Cordoba House should be built at a greater distance from the site of the 9/11 attacks, the issue should not be decided by misrepresentations regarding the nature of the project.
Probably too long for their sound-bite aesthetic, but who knows.
I do have a word on one other looming issue, of perhaps more obvious aesthetic import than some others I've discussed in previous posts on the mosque issue. It has been vociferously denied that the non-mosque-to-be would have any cupola domes or minarets, thus attracting attention to its Islamic function. But I want to propose that it also should not have a prayer hall facing Mecca, or be constructed on the symmetircal model, or use any ceramic tiles, or indeed stones or other building materials typical of Islamic architecture. In fact, I think Park51, the developer, should be required to go to the Wikipedia page on Islamic Architeecture, page down to the section on "Elements of Islamic Style", and make a checklist of all the features to avoid so as to make the building look pretty much like a New York office building, or, say, a Burlington Coat Factory store. That would take care of the problem.
Or, alternatively, they could do what I suggested before: build a secular building with no religious function at all, make it a strictly educational shrine to the more historical, humanistic and inclusive features of Islamic culture, serve some of that great middle eastern cuisine in their restaurant, set their beautifully tiled pool in a typical mosaic pattern, and build all the minarets and cupolas they want.
As I've said before, Osama bin Laden is a despicable human being, but a great architecture critic. Nothing Park51 could build could possibly be more offensive to the eye than those two featureless obelisks that ruined the NY skyline. As far as I'm concerned they can build cupolas and minarets into the design of the new WTC as long as it's appealing and blends well enough with the environment.
All of which is to say: neither the presence nor the absence of Islamic architectural features moves this issue one way or another. It is an aesthetic issue, but not primarily that kind of aesthetic issue. It is a matter of the feeling associated with knowing the function of a building. It could apply to building a new British Petroleum office tower on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, which would be pretty offensive even if it didn't look like... hmmmm... Salisbury Cathedral? (Well, there is no British architectural style, so there goes that analogy!)
BTW - Please try to ignore the ridiculous Google ads at the left. The idea of Google's AdSense software is to automatically match the ad to the content of your blog. But it is so far from doing that that I expect to remove it shortly. Meanwhile, try to pretend it's not there.
(Update 12:03 a.m. 9/10/10: Removed link to NY Times article from title link and put it in the post; minor text change.)
Monday, March 23, 2009
Double Standard? Deaccessioning in Art and Music
Everybody who follows the art world at all knows that the National Academy museum in New York has been coming in for merciless criticism over its sale of two Hudson River School paintings to raise money for basic operating expenses. The Association of Art Museum Directors has prohibited its members from entering into any collaboration with the NA. The so-called "deaccessioning" of holdings to pay operating expenses is like the cardinal sin of the museum community. And there are some good reasons for this; for example: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising; (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings; (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution - a slippery slope, so to speak; and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support.
Whew! Plenty to be concerned about, there. The NY State Legislature has even begun to consider a bill that would legally prohibit deaccessioning to pay operating expenses. And though I personally doubt they would be able to prevent such sales, which can be executed under a variety of pretenses, there are more than enough examples to worry anyone who thinks that important collections have a life of their own and need to be preserved. In 2005 the New York Public Library sold a large number of paintings, including another Hudson River School work of inestimable cultural value to the area and the institution (Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits"). It ended up in the hands of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who also wished to denude Fisk University of half their interest in a world-class collection of Georgia O'Keefe paintings. With the full complicity of the university Board, who pleaded financial distress, she hoped to stash some of them in her Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. If Arkansas travellers can smuggle some artworks out of the NYPL, maybe we can kidnap some backporch country fiddlers and move a couple of swamps to Queens? (What's that you say - Queens already has enough swamps?) And in what must be the Nightmare on Elm Street of deaccessioning, Brandeis University recently announced that they would close the highly regarded Rose Art Museum due to a budget shortfall, and use the money to improve "arts education" (there's plenty of art in Beantown, they reasoned, so who needs this particular collection?)
And now for something not completely different: everybody who follows the music world knows that in 2007 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sold its recently acquired collection of classic Cremonese instruments. All sorts of shenanigans accompanied the acquisition of the instruments in 2003, including a gross overestimate of the value of the collection by the seller, Herbert Axelrod, questions about the authenticity of some of them, and doubts about the appraisal process. What is not in question, though, is that the NJSO in one leap became an orchestra renowned for its string sound (something it took the Philadelphia Orchestra many years to achieve), and the repository of a substantial share of the greatest violins ever made. Yet in 2007 the orchestra sold the collection to pay down debt and support future operating expenses. The collection, some 30 historic string instruments including several Stradivaris and del Gesus, was purchased by hedge fund managers Seth and Brook Taube. The twin bankers, whose Columbus Nova Partners fund was allegedly closed for poor performance, helped themselves to two Strads and gave the orchestra a 5-year loan on the rest.
For this act of deaccessioning, the NJSO was not roundly criticized in the press or condemned by their peers. No professional organization said, "okay, don't lend these guys any instruments". They were not censured by critics or made the goats of music bloggers. So - double standard, or what? Think about it. A museum's "product" is the display of art. An orchestra's "product" is the performance of music. The art that a museum collects gives it a particular strength, or personality. The orchestra's strength or personality is more complex, and depends on the type of music it performs, the skills of its players, and the personalities of the conductors it has had; but the instruments it acquires and uses are definitely a part of the mix, and perhaps the main component of the tonal qualities of its sound. Many orchestras will purchase or commission instruments according to certain principles of sound or taste. So the presence of 30 of the world's greatest string instruments on one stage is not exactly a minor aspect of the orchestra's sound. Replacing them with other, more modern and less sonorous, instruments is comparable to to the Metropolitan Museum saying, "You know, we could really fix the bottom line here if we just get rid of these Rembrandts and Vermeers and pull up some of that French neo-classical stuff out of the basement".
Now let's go back to some of the arguments against deaccessioning in the museum world: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising (this would see to apply equally well in the music world); (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings (contribution of instruments may be a less typical situation in music, but the argument is equally coherent when it applies); (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (less compelling in this case, since this particular collection was acquired all at once and deaccessioned fairly quickly) (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution (ditto for an orchestra with a collection of fine instruments); and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support (no question the same applies in this case, in spades).
In fact, let's be blunt, the Axelrod transaction put the NJSO on the cultural map for the first time in its history, allowing it to compete for audience with the far more famous orchestra across the Hudson, and was an important factor in their ability to lure a world class conductor, Neeme Jarvi. And let's not forget, the National Gallery sold off two major paintings, and had plans (apparently now abandoned) to sell off a few more; whereas NJSO sold off what was essentially the single most important physical component of its sound!
But there are other facts that make this decision more complicated. Bringing the sound of the rest of the orchestra in line with what amounts to one of the most resonant string sections in the world certainly would take a concerted (nyuk nyuk :-) effort. I suppose the storage, security and insurance costs must be considerable. The sale was executed only a few years after the purchase, before one could say that it was part of the NJSO tradition. And of course one can now add the standard recessionist logic, in-these-difficult-times-one-must-be-prepared-to-make-tough decisions: if they had not sold them when they did, would they be able to survive a major economic crisis?
All this, however, doesn't quite cut it as a reason to sell off the collection for operating expenses. For one thing, by the time the 5-year loan is up, the orchestra will have been using the collection for about 10 years. Those years will have been the ones in which the orchestra first drew serious attention in the music world, gained new status and audiences, and perhaps even lured a few of us across the river to check out the new sound. (I admit I have not gone to hear them yet, but it's been on my agenda. Like going to the Barnes Collection before they deaccession their original quarters. Even the Parrot can't take wing and fly to every worthwhile cultural event in this area.) Furthermore, none of these excuses would have been accepted in the art world as a reason to sell holdings in order to pay debt or operating expenses. That is considered just bad management, selling what will attract people tomorrow in order to pay what you owe today. Fool's gambit, is the thinking over in artland.
So what to make of all this? My basic instinct is that all the arguments and assumptions aren't getting to the heart of the problem, which seems to always lie a little below the surface of the institutional fracas. What it's about is that in a world where more and more people are willing to trade slot cars for video games, guitars for Guitar Hero, real life for Second Lives, real books for Kindles, real friends for Facebook "friends" and real thought for Twitters, cultural institutions have by default been saddled with the incredibly serious task of reminding us that our longstanding cultural traditions are actually still just as important as they always were, indeed moreso. They are, like it or not, responsible for reminding us that this painting, that building, that piece of music, are part of who we are - as persons, as New Yorkers (or even New Jerseyans, I guess), as Americans, and why we should care that this is so. It is to our collective benefit, as I see it, that certain things which have inherent value and help define us should simply persist; that they don't just go away and turn into something else, become virtual or get replaced with some cheapened version after dumbing down the audience so much that they barely notice the difference. This is the burden that our museums, publishing houses, orchestras, landmark commissions and other cultural institutions have to bear. To protect what is there, sometimes for no more than the simple reason that it has been there for a long time, and that the place where it is is admired partly because this or that symbol is there and carries with it the sense of place and of tradition, is a responsibility of those who are entrusted with our cultural heritage. And that includes not only museums and libraries, but universities, who merit additional calumny for pigheadedness in posing a false dichotomy between a cultural trust and the bottom line. (Ultimately you can thank Reagan and his "revolution" for this, as that is the source of the ideological migration of university boards from seeing financial accountability as serving educational goals in the broadest sense, to seeing it as a justification for stripping away tenured chairs and academic freedom, as well as abandoning cultural leadership.)
I would say this preservationist sensibility even applies to something like Yankee Stadium, which, if there weren't plenty of other reasons to question the value for the City of replacing it, ought to have been preserved for no other reason than that it is one of America's historic ballparks and has been associated with one of America's most historic baseball teams. (I didn't ask whether you like them; I'd probably say the same about Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, FYI. Squawck!) The point is, it is incumbent on every cultural institution to be a sort of levee against gratuitous change; to the extent possible, the only change should be in the direction of enrichment of what is there already, not the utilitarian swapping of art or instruments or other cultural treasures for short term gains.
Do I think that any institution that ever sold anything to pay expenses should be condemned? No. If the question is really survival in a diminished form rather than disappearance off the face of the earth, we may have to accept the smaller loss. But even that is not an absolute truth. The O'Keefe paintings were given to Fisk wth the express mandate that they may not be sold - ever. It appears that the intent here is simply that the works shall not be used as collateral, regardless of the circumstances. This is not in the least mitigated by the shool's economic plight, and O'Keefe's heirs were right to sue to recover the works. (Though the judge's decision that the university must neither sell them nor return them was, at least for the time being, the best solution.) Moreover, to say that survival is really at stake reqires being intimately familiar with the finances, fundraising history, and possible alternatives for an institution. When I was a student at the Mannes College of Music, there was an effort to merge the school with the much larger Manhattan School of Music uptown. This was supposed to be an effort to "save" the school; it's financial condition was allegedly deteriorating, and Manhattan would have the resources to support much of Mannes and its staff. To make a long story short, the Board of Directors that made this decision was sued, removed by the Court for failure to carry out their fiscal responsibilities, and replaced with a new Board that was actually committed to the school. The merger effort was a kind of deaccessioning, not just of the building, which was soon abandoned anyway, but of the musical traditions that informed the school since it was founded. Mannes has a distinctive theoretical tradition and pedagogical philosophy, and this would have been diluted at best, or in all probability swallowed whole, as it was effectively collapsed into the Manhattan School curriculum. Ultimately, a much less toxic merger with the New School allowed Mannes to maintain its independence and musical traditions while obtaining the financial resources of a major university.
So, it is far from clear that every time an institution's board jumps up and says, "Sell, sell! We are deeply in debt!" everyone must pull out their handkerchiefs and weep for the troubled institution, or look the other way while they pawn their prized possessions. The presumption should not be one of innocence, but of guilt: boards are a mixture of wealthy, well-meaning and committed individuals, and lazy, rich, obstructive, neurotic and self-interested attention-getters and status-seekers. No one can know who is winning at any given moment, but when the Board says they just can't raise enough money or hire competent enough managers to keep the institution going without deaccessioning, it's time to be suspicious.
And it is not only lack of fundraising initiative that should be looked into. In the case of the National Academy, part of the story was the temporary replacement of the museum's Director with someone who had nonprofit management and fundraising experience, but no experience in the art world. The problem only intensifies when the board is responsible to a higher entity like a university, whose primary mission is not that of the cultural institution, and whose financial goals may at times conflict with its commitment to cultural goals. For any number of reasons, our instinct should be to keep things where they are. That won't always be right, and it won't always be possible, but we should have to be thoroughly convinced before we give up the principle and accede to deaccessioning.
So, there you go: another art-and-the-public-interest post from your friendly local Parrot. If I didn't have two other blogs, three or four books to write, an album to record and a fulltime job, I could get used to this. Or maybe I could deaccession one or two of my six lives and learn to focus. It is tempting.
Whew! Plenty to be concerned about, there. The NY State Legislature has even begun to consider a bill that would legally prohibit deaccessioning to pay operating expenses. And though I personally doubt they would be able to prevent such sales, which can be executed under a variety of pretenses, there are more than enough examples to worry anyone who thinks that important collections have a life of their own and need to be preserved. In 2005 the New York Public Library sold a large number of paintings, including another Hudson River School work of inestimable cultural value to the area and the institution (Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits"). It ended up in the hands of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who also wished to denude Fisk University of half their interest in a world-class collection of Georgia O'Keefe paintings. With the full complicity of the university Board, who pleaded financial distress, she hoped to stash some of them in her Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. If Arkansas travellers can smuggle some artworks out of the NYPL, maybe we can kidnap some backporch country fiddlers and move a couple of swamps to Queens? (What's that you say - Queens already has enough swamps?) And in what must be the Nightmare on Elm Street of deaccessioning, Brandeis University recently announced that they would close the highly regarded Rose Art Museum due to a budget shortfall, and use the money to improve "arts education" (there's plenty of art in Beantown, they reasoned, so who needs this particular collection?)
And now for something not completely different: everybody who follows the music world knows that in 2007 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sold its recently acquired collection of classic Cremonese instruments. All sorts of shenanigans accompanied the acquisition of the instruments in 2003, including a gross overestimate of the value of the collection by the seller, Herbert Axelrod, questions about the authenticity of some of them, and doubts about the appraisal process. What is not in question, though, is that the NJSO in one leap became an orchestra renowned for its string sound (something it took the Philadelphia Orchestra many years to achieve), and the repository of a substantial share of the greatest violins ever made. Yet in 2007 the orchestra sold the collection to pay down debt and support future operating expenses. The collection, some 30 historic string instruments including several Stradivaris and del Gesus, was purchased by hedge fund managers Seth and Brook Taube. The twin bankers, whose Columbus Nova Partners fund was allegedly closed for poor performance, helped themselves to two Strads and gave the orchestra a 5-year loan on the rest.
For this act of deaccessioning, the NJSO was not roundly criticized in the press or condemned by their peers. No professional organization said, "okay, don't lend these guys any instruments". They were not censured by critics or made the goats of music bloggers. So - double standard, or what? Think about it. A museum's "product" is the display of art. An orchestra's "product" is the performance of music. The art that a museum collects gives it a particular strength, or personality. The orchestra's strength or personality is more complex, and depends on the type of music it performs, the skills of its players, and the personalities of the conductors it has had; but the instruments it acquires and uses are definitely a part of the mix, and perhaps the main component of the tonal qualities of its sound. Many orchestras will purchase or commission instruments according to certain principles of sound or taste. So the presence of 30 of the world's greatest string instruments on one stage is not exactly a minor aspect of the orchestra's sound. Replacing them with other, more modern and less sonorous, instruments is comparable to to the Metropolitan Museum saying, "You know, we could really fix the bottom line here if we just get rid of these Rembrandts and Vermeers and pull up some of that French neo-classical stuff out of the basement".
Now let's go back to some of the arguments against deaccessioning in the museum world: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising (this would see to apply equally well in the music world); (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings (contribution of instruments may be a less typical situation in music, but the argument is equally coherent when it applies); (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (less compelling in this case, since this particular collection was acquired all at once and deaccessioned fairly quickly) (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution (ditto for an orchestra with a collection of fine instruments); and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support (no question the same applies in this case, in spades).
In fact, let's be blunt, the Axelrod transaction put the NJSO on the cultural map for the first time in its history, allowing it to compete for audience with the far more famous orchestra across the Hudson, and was an important factor in their ability to lure a world class conductor, Neeme Jarvi. And let's not forget, the National Gallery sold off two major paintings, and had plans (apparently now abandoned) to sell off a few more; whereas NJSO sold off what was essentially the single most important physical component of its sound!
But there are other facts that make this decision more complicated. Bringing the sound of the rest of the orchestra in line with what amounts to one of the most resonant string sections in the world certainly would take a concerted (nyuk nyuk :-) effort. I suppose the storage, security and insurance costs must be considerable. The sale was executed only a few years after the purchase, before one could say that it was part of the NJSO tradition. And of course one can now add the standard recessionist logic, in-these-difficult-times-one-must-be-prepared-to-make-tough decisions: if they had not sold them when they did, would they be able to survive a major economic crisis?
All this, however, doesn't quite cut it as a reason to sell off the collection for operating expenses. For one thing, by the time the 5-year loan is up, the orchestra will have been using the collection for about 10 years. Those years will have been the ones in which the orchestra first drew serious attention in the music world, gained new status and audiences, and perhaps even lured a few of us across the river to check out the new sound. (I admit I have not gone to hear them yet, but it's been on my agenda. Like going to the Barnes Collection before they deaccession their original quarters. Even the Parrot can't take wing and fly to every worthwhile cultural event in this area.) Furthermore, none of these excuses would have been accepted in the art world as a reason to sell holdings in order to pay debt or operating expenses. That is considered just bad management, selling what will attract people tomorrow in order to pay what you owe today. Fool's gambit, is the thinking over in artland.
So what to make of all this? My basic instinct is that all the arguments and assumptions aren't getting to the heart of the problem, which seems to always lie a little below the surface of the institutional fracas. What it's about is that in a world where more and more people are willing to trade slot cars for video games, guitars for Guitar Hero, real life for Second Lives, real books for Kindles, real friends for Facebook "friends" and real thought for Twitters, cultural institutions have by default been saddled with the incredibly serious task of reminding us that our longstanding cultural traditions are actually still just as important as they always were, indeed moreso. They are, like it or not, responsible for reminding us that this painting, that building, that piece of music, are part of who we are - as persons, as New Yorkers (or even New Jerseyans, I guess), as Americans, and why we should care that this is so. It is to our collective benefit, as I see it, that certain things which have inherent value and help define us should simply persist; that they don't just go away and turn into something else, become virtual or get replaced with some cheapened version after dumbing down the audience so much that they barely notice the difference. This is the burden that our museums, publishing houses, orchestras, landmark commissions and other cultural institutions have to bear. To protect what is there, sometimes for no more than the simple reason that it has been there for a long time, and that the place where it is is admired partly because this or that symbol is there and carries with it the sense of place and of tradition, is a responsibility of those who are entrusted with our cultural heritage. And that includes not only museums and libraries, but universities, who merit additional calumny for pigheadedness in posing a false dichotomy between a cultural trust and the bottom line. (Ultimately you can thank Reagan and his "revolution" for this, as that is the source of the ideological migration of university boards from seeing financial accountability as serving educational goals in the broadest sense, to seeing it as a justification for stripping away tenured chairs and academic freedom, as well as abandoning cultural leadership.)
I would say this preservationist sensibility even applies to something like Yankee Stadium, which, if there weren't plenty of other reasons to question the value for the City of replacing it, ought to have been preserved for no other reason than that it is one of America's historic ballparks and has been associated with one of America's most historic baseball teams. (I didn't ask whether you like them; I'd probably say the same about Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, FYI. Squawck!) The point is, it is incumbent on every cultural institution to be a sort of levee against gratuitous change; to the extent possible, the only change should be in the direction of enrichment of what is there already, not the utilitarian swapping of art or instruments or other cultural treasures for short term gains.
Do I think that any institution that ever sold anything to pay expenses should be condemned? No. If the question is really survival in a diminished form rather than disappearance off the face of the earth, we may have to accept the smaller loss. But even that is not an absolute truth. The O'Keefe paintings were given to Fisk wth the express mandate that they may not be sold - ever. It appears that the intent here is simply that the works shall not be used as collateral, regardless of the circumstances. This is not in the least mitigated by the shool's economic plight, and O'Keefe's heirs were right to sue to recover the works. (Though the judge's decision that the university must neither sell them nor return them was, at least for the time being, the best solution.) Moreover, to say that survival is really at stake reqires being intimately familiar with the finances, fundraising history, and possible alternatives for an institution. When I was a student at the Mannes College of Music, there was an effort to merge the school with the much larger Manhattan School of Music uptown. This was supposed to be an effort to "save" the school; it's financial condition was allegedly deteriorating, and Manhattan would have the resources to support much of Mannes and its staff. To make a long story short, the Board of Directors that made this decision was sued, removed by the Court for failure to carry out their fiscal responsibilities, and replaced with a new Board that was actually committed to the school. The merger effort was a kind of deaccessioning, not just of the building, which was soon abandoned anyway, but of the musical traditions that informed the school since it was founded. Mannes has a distinctive theoretical tradition and pedagogical philosophy, and this would have been diluted at best, or in all probability swallowed whole, as it was effectively collapsed into the Manhattan School curriculum. Ultimately, a much less toxic merger with the New School allowed Mannes to maintain its independence and musical traditions while obtaining the financial resources of a major university.
So, it is far from clear that every time an institution's board jumps up and says, "Sell, sell! We are deeply in debt!" everyone must pull out their handkerchiefs and weep for the troubled institution, or look the other way while they pawn their prized possessions. The presumption should not be one of innocence, but of guilt: boards are a mixture of wealthy, well-meaning and committed individuals, and lazy, rich, obstructive, neurotic and self-interested attention-getters and status-seekers. No one can know who is winning at any given moment, but when the Board says they just can't raise enough money or hire competent enough managers to keep the institution going without deaccessioning, it's time to be suspicious.
And it is not only lack of fundraising initiative that should be looked into. In the case of the National Academy, part of the story was the temporary replacement of the museum's Director with someone who had nonprofit management and fundraising experience, but no experience in the art world. The problem only intensifies when the board is responsible to a higher entity like a university, whose primary mission is not that of the cultural institution, and whose financial goals may at times conflict with its commitment to cultural goals. For any number of reasons, our instinct should be to keep things where they are. That won't always be right, and it won't always be possible, but we should have to be thoroughly convinced before we give up the principle and accede to deaccessioning.
So, there you go: another art-and-the-public-interest post from your friendly local Parrot. If I didn't have two other blogs, three or four books to write, an album to record and a fulltime job, I could get used to this. Or maybe I could deaccession one or two of my six lives and learn to focus. It is tempting.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Examined Film: Review of Astra Taylor's "The Examined Life"
"The place of philosophy in modern public life" - that is the phrase I remember catching my attention from some web site for this film (though it is not on this one), convincing me that this must be an important film, and one that neatly intersects my mission here. Would that that impression were justified by what I just saw at the IFC theater in Manhattan. After 20 years as a professional philosopher - a bit more studying some of the leftist literature that informs some of the subjects of this film - my reaction was to wonder if it could possibly have been as dull for those viewers not already saturated with the intellectual content conveyed here.
Let me first say this: I have known, or met, philosophers who I would not hesitate to spend hours listening to; chewing the fat with over a beer; or just passing the time with in idle conversation that might range from Quine to Brahms to memorable camping trips. I do not limit this class of people to my personal friends or classmates. I mean people, for example, like Sidney Morgenbesser (a true character in the best Socratic sense) or Marx Wartofsky (who was really the last Renaissance man), both unfortunately resting in Plato's heaven, or David Pears, to the best of my knowledge alive and well and living in England, any of whom could hold court or be the subject of anecdotes for hours on end. I mean people like Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam, Eddy Zemach, Bas van Frassen, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Toulmin, or indeed the Brooklyn native who made the phrase "the examined life" famous as the title of one of his books, Robert Nozick. I don't mean that these are my favorite philosophers - not by a long shot, in many cases - but they are people I have met or heard and who I know can hold the attention of of an audience, have interesting things to say on many subjects, and might just convince a film audience that there are philosophers, neither superstars, crackpots, nor stuffed shirts, who are capable of taking them on a tour of reality or morality that goes just a bit deeper than what they are used to. They speak with passion, humor, and erudition, without being pompous, boring, obscure or intentionally asinine.
But it seems as if Taylor was not looking for good film subjects, but rather for philosophers who fit a certain conception of who would have something to say to a mass audience: feminists, multiculturalists, Marxists, gender theorists, literary theorists, African-American philosophers, or animal liberationists. Forget those stodgy, mainstream Anglo-American analytic types, who would want to hear them? And actually, that's largely true - who would want to hear most of them? But then again, who would want to hear a Continental or Marxist philosopher, or some slightly outré ethicist, who is trying to sound very important and relevant and only succeeds in restating their well-worn theories (because it is all they really know how to talk about)?
That, unfortunately, describes quite a bit of what Ms. Taylor captured on film. Here is Peter Singer walking ever so appropriately down Fifth Avenue, commenting on the wildly extravagant designer items, then standing in the Diamond District, etc., and calling forth references from "Famine, Affluence and Morality" and Animal Liberation that he has been working for about 35 years now. There is Martha Nussbaum going on, predictably, about Aristotle and virtue and feminist ethics, with about as much connection to the audience as a passing cloud. Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire (with Antonio Negri), ponders his failed revolutionary impulses in the 1980's and sets about thinking, in terms no more enlightening than the average activist's park bench conversation, how one can be pro-democracy and pro-revolutionary, or how one can be revolutionary at all in the face of global capitalism. Yawn. In his book, if I have gleaned his views correctly (I have not read it, but I've read several discussions of it), Hardt says that globalization is, in spite of itself, the crucible in which the new democratic society will be born. This is just an updated version of the old "revisionist" idea about how democratic socialism will come about (not a "communist manifesto for the 20th century" as it is sometimes called), but more on that later.
Though other reviewers have been duly reverential towards the sequence in which gender theorist Judith Butler takes a walk, goes shopping, and meditates on bodies and movement in the company of the filmmaker's physically impaired, wheelchair-bound sister Sunaura Taylor, while trying to say very meaningful and supportive things, I found it artificial, cloying and in some spots bordering on condescending. You cannot somehow normalize physical impairments that affect a small portion of the population by meditating on the limitations of bodies in general; all you can do is encourage those unfolding social and scientific developments that give people with physical limitations greater degrees of physical and social freedom, and permit them to participate in ever greater degrees in the type of activities that most of us consider normal, and rewarding. And you don't need a philosopher or gender theorist to do that, just a reasonably sensible and sensitive person. But more than that, in my view, the only dialogic stance that truly delegitimizes and undermines discrimination and prejudice against physically disabled persons is to treat them as exactly equal partners in respect of that asset which is not disabled, i.e., their minds. And that is not what I heard here; rather, I received the impression of a philosopher utilizing a dialogue with a disabled person to create a platform for her own ideas about bodies and movements. At other points she seemed to assent to what Sunaura Taylor said with benign reassurance but little critical consideration. Throughout the conversation I felt a lack of give and take, as if there had been a pact not to challenge one another's presuppositions, or engage in a real exchange of views. Perhaps this reflects the caregiver view of ethics, which is at the heart of the feminist approach, and emphasizes allegedly female virtues of nurture and loyalty to the circle of human beings closest to you. But respecting the dignity of persons also means not patronizing them in the way we patronize children and others for whom we are responsible. The responsible caregiver, be it a mother, nurse, social worker or home attendant, must limit the respect they show for the dignity and independence of the person in their care. Otherwise they will not be effective when they need to make decisions on that person's behalf. That ethical model does not work for normal adult relationships.
Other sequences in this film involved a pretty dry, academic set of thoughts from Avital Ronell, an NYU literary theorist who could not resist the urge to drag Heidegger into the proceedings, ending up sounding like she did not quite get this idea of philosophers (we are applying the term loosely) standing in front of a camera and saying something to a mass audience. As for Slavoj Zizek, who makes an appearance in this film after having a Taylor film of his own, he comes off as a slightly incoherent nutcase who enjoins us to love the piles of garbage among which he has chosen to be filmed for his sequence. Indeed, we are to despise the notions of nature and ecology and embrace filth and excess as the key to overcoming global warming and other environmental threats. This is the type of philosopher who should be kept as far from public view as possible, lest the world at large confirm its prejudice to the effect that philosophers are people whose job is to confuse others by arguing that absurd things are true. Be that as it may, I think there is something resembling a coherent point underlying Zizek's charades, only it would be a minor miracle if anyone understood it from this film. Again, I'll come back to this later.
I have left two people for last: Kwame Anthony Appiah, on whose contributions I'm afraid I can't comment because they came at a time when I had briefly given up trying to prop my eyelids open; and Cornell West, whose wide-ranging and wildly intertextual remarks provided the one bright spot in the film, though their import seems to have passed by most of the reviewers and for that reason probably a bit of the audience as well. While ranging over the history of art and ideas from Plato to Goethe and on through Charlie Parker and the Beatles, West focused his remarks primarily on the idea of life as a space between nonexistence and death, and emphasized the ways in which we give that brief flash of spirit some meaning and make it worth holding onto. Taylor wisely edited West's engaging remarks into several sequences, interspersed around the others, which at least broke the monotony of the other lifeless talking heads as they either failed to focus or rehearsed well-worn ideas in stiff language. While West's parts may not have been perfect, especially for indulging in a lot more references than necessary to make his points, he at least gave a hint of what a philosopher can do when he has a command of popular as well as intellectual culture and has actually thought a bit about life, death, and our place on earth.
While Zizek did display a certain fervor, what really attracted our attention with him was waiting for a payoff that never came, as he tried to convince us that trash on stilts is way cooler than ordinary waste and pollution. Personally I find it extremely unfortunate when philosophers stake out baldly idiotic positions to demonstrate that philosophy can see deeper into the nature of reality than ordinary common sense. It can, but that ain't how. But let's try to tie things together a bit, because there is a little more here than mere antics for the sake of getting attention. We can start by going back to Hardt and his globalization fetish. Since at least the Utopian socialism of the 19th century, there has been a way of thinking about the good (social democratic) society as a kind of algae, or mold, that under the right conditions grows outward from one or more initial sites until it swallows everything in its wake. The Utopian societies were supposed to do this, spreading socialism by example. Then Eduard Bernstein contributed the idea of capitalism "evolving" into socialism. Karl Kautsky conceived of an "ultra-imperialism" that spread peace due to its very reach. Even Lenin suggested that in the globalization of finance capital, the organizational framework of socialism was being incubated in the womb of international capitalism. But Lenin, unlike the others, never imagined that this globalization of capital would just roll over into socialism without a violent revolution.
The core idea that seems to be repeated in Hardt's view is that the endless penetration of capitalism into every corner of the world, and the ever-growing neural network of connections between people and nations, is destined to finally evolve into a vast world culture in which war, racism and other conflicts are submerged in the interest of the great global leviathan. But while these conflicts are removed, the fundamental exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie remains - a kind of 1984-ish dystopia in which the underlying injustice of the whole system is hidden beneath the surface of harmony and uniformity. Hardt's and Negri's main contribution seems to be the idea that we can push this capitalist leviathan to the brink of self-destruction by pushing the democratic logic it hypocritically represents as its own as far as it can go. (This too is not a very original idea, but never mind.) Thus they suggest certain key democratic demands we can make within the framework of capitalism to help the system undermine itself.
So what does this have to do with Zizek? Well, first, he wrote a lengthy article about Hardt's and Negri's book in the journal Rethinking Marxism, in which he accused them of not going far enough in rejecting the logic of capitalism. Zizek suggests that operating within the framework of demands that can be accommodated, if not entirely met, by capitalism itself is self-defeating. He therefore finds it unhelpful for revolutionaries to associate themselves with the progressive movements that capitalism (as the classic Marxist analysis has it) allows to flourish in order to "blow off steam". Environmentalism, as perhaps the movement of the moment, plays into the hands of capitalism by suggesting some sort of idealistic return to nature. Instead, Zizek thinks (not that his ideas are very clearly formulated, but this is the general drift) we should force the issue, let the contradictions of capitalism increase and destroy it from the inside. You see, it is essentially the same kind of Hegelian line, the new form of Being incubating within the old and then splitting it into opposites, the class struggle finally revealed for what it is. In a moment of inspired obfuscation and trendiness he somehow imagines the World Wide Web as the modern counterpart to Lenin's idea of capitalism preparing the framework of the new society and the seeds of its own destruction within itself. Okay, that's about as hip as Herbert Marcuse finding the source of socialist revolution in the student and intellectual movements of the 1960's.
Anyway, what I wanted to show is that Zizek's ultimately loony love affair with garbage follows the logic of a well-worn idea from the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism nourishes the germ of its own destruction within itself. From there it is an easy (but to me, long discredited) step to the idea that a true revolutionary should help capitalism make itself as bad as possible - love those discarded spring water bottles, my friends, rather than protesting them, for they are the spring of self-destruction of global capitalism, or something like that. I guess I should be honest and say I'm doing a lot of interpreting here. Zizek himself tends to stick to safer ways of putting his views, emphasizing that revolutionaries should reject the invitation to engage in the liberal-democratic critique of the shortcomings of "bourgeois democracy". But to give him credit for not being a self-contradictory lunatic means to take his views to be something like this. (I do wonder if he would tell us to love all those nuclear missiles too. I think Zizek's philosophy contains the seeds of its own destruction too.)
Okay, so much for political theory, which is not exactly in short supply in The Examined Life. But there is an aesthetic point here too. Zizek's rants about the virtues of garbage fit into a worldview that is just one step beyond that of Hardt. And this view obviously suggests that the various feminist, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, post-colonial politics of the other interviewees are just what capitalism needs to continue to dominate us. The filmmaker, however, being apparently no less naive about political theory than philosophy, fails to give the audience any clue that this is the case. So while the rather boring and pedantic pastische of left-liberal interventions based on Continental and feminist philosophical trends is disturbed from within by a philosophical and political rift, this is not even visible to the audience. There is, in effect, an intellectual fight going on here, with Zizek on one side, most of the others on the other side, and Hardt sort of moderating with a foot in both camps, but it might as well be one loose chain of vaguely related thoughts on ethics and society for all we can tell from the film itself.
It would be unfair not to mention that Taylor does attempt to use some aesthetic means to liven things up, encouraging constant movement during the interviews and letting the camera capture dozens of naturalistic images along the way. At its best, it gives us the impression that the generally ordinary landscapes trodden by the film crew and its subjects (few scenes other than those of the dump are more exotic than Central park) are as teeming with life as the philosophers' heads are teeming with ideas. Too bad the gulls and turtles are so much more interesting than most of the ideas that one wants to resist the camera's return to the philosophical promenades.
Another point, no more positive (I guess I am not feeling very charitable today, in case you hadn't noticed) is that Taylor makes only the most limited effort to guide or draw out the philosophers in ways that might get them thinking outside their predefined, well-rehearsed boxes. All I can really recall her asking, in various ways, is whether philosophy is a search for the meaning of life. The answer to this question was actually supplied so well by Cornell West that she should have left it alone for the rest of the film. The truth is, few philosophers know what to say to that question, because "meaning" itself can have so many meanings that it is not even clear what the question is. Is the "meaning" of life like the meaning of a sentence? of a work of art? of an act or event? Is the question implicitly asking if I believe in god?
My advice is, don't ask that question unless you are prepared to give a philosophical answer to the reply, "What kind of answer are you actually looking for?" Otherwise it is sort of a blank check - "say something, anything, about the meaning of life". And if I were to give an immediate answer to that, it could only be that in itself, it means about as much as a pointless film. Because either no one is directing it, or they are doing it without any clear sense of overall purpose. Which, I guess, is as good a place as any to end this review.
(Note: This post was originally published on Friday 3/6/09 at 2:06 a.m. After re-reading it I felt that it was much too sloppy, both in editing and expression of ideas. It returned to Edit mode after about 48 hours online. It is now republished with substantial alterations, mainly intended to clarify many of the original points.)
Let me first say this: I have known, or met, philosophers who I would not hesitate to spend hours listening to; chewing the fat with over a beer; or just passing the time with in idle conversation that might range from Quine to Brahms to memorable camping trips. I do not limit this class of people to my personal friends or classmates. I mean people, for example, like Sidney Morgenbesser (a true character in the best Socratic sense) or Marx Wartofsky (who was really the last Renaissance man), both unfortunately resting in Plato's heaven, or David Pears, to the best of my knowledge alive and well and living in England, any of whom could hold court or be the subject of anecdotes for hours on end. I mean people like Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam, Eddy Zemach, Bas van Frassen, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Toulmin, or indeed the Brooklyn native who made the phrase "the examined life" famous as the title of one of his books, Robert Nozick. I don't mean that these are my favorite philosophers - not by a long shot, in many cases - but they are people I have met or heard and who I know can hold the attention of of an audience, have interesting things to say on many subjects, and might just convince a film audience that there are philosophers, neither superstars, crackpots, nor stuffed shirts, who are capable of taking them on a tour of reality or morality that goes just a bit deeper than what they are used to. They speak with passion, humor, and erudition, without being pompous, boring, obscure or intentionally asinine.
But it seems as if Taylor was not looking for good film subjects, but rather for philosophers who fit a certain conception of who would have something to say to a mass audience: feminists, multiculturalists, Marxists, gender theorists, literary theorists, African-American philosophers, or animal liberationists. Forget those stodgy, mainstream Anglo-American analytic types, who would want to hear them? And actually, that's largely true - who would want to hear most of them? But then again, who would want to hear a Continental or Marxist philosopher, or some slightly outré ethicist, who is trying to sound very important and relevant and only succeeds in restating their well-worn theories (because it is all they really know how to talk about)?
That, unfortunately, describes quite a bit of what Ms. Taylor captured on film. Here is Peter Singer walking ever so appropriately down Fifth Avenue, commenting on the wildly extravagant designer items, then standing in the Diamond District, etc., and calling forth references from "Famine, Affluence and Morality" and Animal Liberation that he has been working for about 35 years now. There is Martha Nussbaum going on, predictably, about Aristotle and virtue and feminist ethics, with about as much connection to the audience as a passing cloud. Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire (with Antonio Negri), ponders his failed revolutionary impulses in the 1980's and sets about thinking, in terms no more enlightening than the average activist's park bench conversation, how one can be pro-democracy and pro-revolutionary, or how one can be revolutionary at all in the face of global capitalism. Yawn. In his book, if I have gleaned his views correctly (I have not read it, but I've read several discussions of it), Hardt says that globalization is, in spite of itself, the crucible in which the new democratic society will be born. This is just an updated version of the old "revisionist" idea about how democratic socialism will come about (not a "communist manifesto for the 20th century" as it is sometimes called), but more on that later.
Though other reviewers have been duly reverential towards the sequence in which gender theorist Judith Butler takes a walk, goes shopping, and meditates on bodies and movement in the company of the filmmaker's physically impaired, wheelchair-bound sister Sunaura Taylor, while trying to say very meaningful and supportive things, I found it artificial, cloying and in some spots bordering on condescending. You cannot somehow normalize physical impairments that affect a small portion of the population by meditating on the limitations of bodies in general; all you can do is encourage those unfolding social and scientific developments that give people with physical limitations greater degrees of physical and social freedom, and permit them to participate in ever greater degrees in the type of activities that most of us consider normal, and rewarding. And you don't need a philosopher or gender theorist to do that, just a reasonably sensible and sensitive person. But more than that, in my view, the only dialogic stance that truly delegitimizes and undermines discrimination and prejudice against physically disabled persons is to treat them as exactly equal partners in respect of that asset which is not disabled, i.e., their minds. And that is not what I heard here; rather, I received the impression of a philosopher utilizing a dialogue with a disabled person to create a platform for her own ideas about bodies and movements. At other points she seemed to assent to what Sunaura Taylor said with benign reassurance but little critical consideration. Throughout the conversation I felt a lack of give and take, as if there had been a pact not to challenge one another's presuppositions, or engage in a real exchange of views. Perhaps this reflects the caregiver view of ethics, which is at the heart of the feminist approach, and emphasizes allegedly female virtues of nurture and loyalty to the circle of human beings closest to you. But respecting the dignity of persons also means not patronizing them in the way we patronize children and others for whom we are responsible. The responsible caregiver, be it a mother, nurse, social worker or home attendant, must limit the respect they show for the dignity and independence of the person in their care. Otherwise they will not be effective when they need to make decisions on that person's behalf. That ethical model does not work for normal adult relationships.
Other sequences in this film involved a pretty dry, academic set of thoughts from Avital Ronell, an NYU literary theorist who could not resist the urge to drag Heidegger into the proceedings, ending up sounding like she did not quite get this idea of philosophers (we are applying the term loosely) standing in front of a camera and saying something to a mass audience. As for Slavoj Zizek, who makes an appearance in this film after having a Taylor film of his own, he comes off as a slightly incoherent nutcase who enjoins us to love the piles of garbage among which he has chosen to be filmed for his sequence. Indeed, we are to despise the notions of nature and ecology and embrace filth and excess as the key to overcoming global warming and other environmental threats. This is the type of philosopher who should be kept as far from public view as possible, lest the world at large confirm its prejudice to the effect that philosophers are people whose job is to confuse others by arguing that absurd things are true. Be that as it may, I think there is something resembling a coherent point underlying Zizek's charades, only it would be a minor miracle if anyone understood it from this film. Again, I'll come back to this later.
I have left two people for last: Kwame Anthony Appiah, on whose contributions I'm afraid I can't comment because they came at a time when I had briefly given up trying to prop my eyelids open; and Cornell West, whose wide-ranging and wildly intertextual remarks provided the one bright spot in the film, though their import seems to have passed by most of the reviewers and for that reason probably a bit of the audience as well. While ranging over the history of art and ideas from Plato to Goethe and on through Charlie Parker and the Beatles, West focused his remarks primarily on the idea of life as a space between nonexistence and death, and emphasized the ways in which we give that brief flash of spirit some meaning and make it worth holding onto. Taylor wisely edited West's engaging remarks into several sequences, interspersed around the others, which at least broke the monotony of the other lifeless talking heads as they either failed to focus or rehearsed well-worn ideas in stiff language. While West's parts may not have been perfect, especially for indulging in a lot more references than necessary to make his points, he at least gave a hint of what a philosopher can do when he has a command of popular as well as intellectual culture and has actually thought a bit about life, death, and our place on earth.
While Zizek did display a certain fervor, what really attracted our attention with him was waiting for a payoff that never came, as he tried to convince us that trash on stilts is way cooler than ordinary waste and pollution. Personally I find it extremely unfortunate when philosophers stake out baldly idiotic positions to demonstrate that philosophy can see deeper into the nature of reality than ordinary common sense. It can, but that ain't how. But let's try to tie things together a bit, because there is a little more here than mere antics for the sake of getting attention. We can start by going back to Hardt and his globalization fetish. Since at least the Utopian socialism of the 19th century, there has been a way of thinking about the good (social democratic) society as a kind of algae, or mold, that under the right conditions grows outward from one or more initial sites until it swallows everything in its wake. The Utopian societies were supposed to do this, spreading socialism by example. Then Eduard Bernstein contributed the idea of capitalism "evolving" into socialism. Karl Kautsky conceived of an "ultra-imperialism" that spread peace due to its very reach. Even Lenin suggested that in the globalization of finance capital, the organizational framework of socialism was being incubated in the womb of international capitalism. But Lenin, unlike the others, never imagined that this globalization of capital would just roll over into socialism without a violent revolution.
The core idea that seems to be repeated in Hardt's view is that the endless penetration of capitalism into every corner of the world, and the ever-growing neural network of connections between people and nations, is destined to finally evolve into a vast world culture in which war, racism and other conflicts are submerged in the interest of the great global leviathan. But while these conflicts are removed, the fundamental exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie remains - a kind of 1984-ish dystopia in which the underlying injustice of the whole system is hidden beneath the surface of harmony and uniformity. Hardt's and Negri's main contribution seems to be the idea that we can push this capitalist leviathan to the brink of self-destruction by pushing the democratic logic it hypocritically represents as its own as far as it can go. (This too is not a very original idea, but never mind.) Thus they suggest certain key democratic demands we can make within the framework of capitalism to help the system undermine itself.
So what does this have to do with Zizek? Well, first, he wrote a lengthy article about Hardt's and Negri's book in the journal Rethinking Marxism, in which he accused them of not going far enough in rejecting the logic of capitalism. Zizek suggests that operating within the framework of demands that can be accommodated, if not entirely met, by capitalism itself is self-defeating. He therefore finds it unhelpful for revolutionaries to associate themselves with the progressive movements that capitalism (as the classic Marxist analysis has it) allows to flourish in order to "blow off steam". Environmentalism, as perhaps the movement of the moment, plays into the hands of capitalism by suggesting some sort of idealistic return to nature. Instead, Zizek thinks (not that his ideas are very clearly formulated, but this is the general drift) we should force the issue, let the contradictions of capitalism increase and destroy it from the inside. You see, it is essentially the same kind of Hegelian line, the new form of Being incubating within the old and then splitting it into opposites, the class struggle finally revealed for what it is. In a moment of inspired obfuscation and trendiness he somehow imagines the World Wide Web as the modern counterpart to Lenin's idea of capitalism preparing the framework of the new society and the seeds of its own destruction within itself. Okay, that's about as hip as Herbert Marcuse finding the source of socialist revolution in the student and intellectual movements of the 1960's.
Anyway, what I wanted to show is that Zizek's ultimately loony love affair with garbage follows the logic of a well-worn idea from the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism nourishes the germ of its own destruction within itself. From there it is an easy (but to me, long discredited) step to the idea that a true revolutionary should help capitalism make itself as bad as possible - love those discarded spring water bottles, my friends, rather than protesting them, for they are the spring of self-destruction of global capitalism, or something like that. I guess I should be honest and say I'm doing a lot of interpreting here. Zizek himself tends to stick to safer ways of putting his views, emphasizing that revolutionaries should reject the invitation to engage in the liberal-democratic critique of the shortcomings of "bourgeois democracy". But to give him credit for not being a self-contradictory lunatic means to take his views to be something like this. (I do wonder if he would tell us to love all those nuclear missiles too. I think Zizek's philosophy contains the seeds of its own destruction too.)
Okay, so much for political theory, which is not exactly in short supply in The Examined Life. But there is an aesthetic point here too. Zizek's rants about the virtues of garbage fit into a worldview that is just one step beyond that of Hardt. And this view obviously suggests that the various feminist, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, post-colonial politics of the other interviewees are just what capitalism needs to continue to dominate us. The filmmaker, however, being apparently no less naive about political theory than philosophy, fails to give the audience any clue that this is the case. So while the rather boring and pedantic pastische of left-liberal interventions based on Continental and feminist philosophical trends is disturbed from within by a philosophical and political rift, this is not even visible to the audience. There is, in effect, an intellectual fight going on here, with Zizek on one side, most of the others on the other side, and Hardt sort of moderating with a foot in both camps, but it might as well be one loose chain of vaguely related thoughts on ethics and society for all we can tell from the film itself.
It would be unfair not to mention that Taylor does attempt to use some aesthetic means to liven things up, encouraging constant movement during the interviews and letting the camera capture dozens of naturalistic images along the way. At its best, it gives us the impression that the generally ordinary landscapes trodden by the film crew and its subjects (few scenes other than those of the dump are more exotic than Central park) are as teeming with life as the philosophers' heads are teeming with ideas. Too bad the gulls and turtles are so much more interesting than most of the ideas that one wants to resist the camera's return to the philosophical promenades.
Another point, no more positive (I guess I am not feeling very charitable today, in case you hadn't noticed) is that Taylor makes only the most limited effort to guide or draw out the philosophers in ways that might get them thinking outside their predefined, well-rehearsed boxes. All I can really recall her asking, in various ways, is whether philosophy is a search for the meaning of life. The answer to this question was actually supplied so well by Cornell West that she should have left it alone for the rest of the film. The truth is, few philosophers know what to say to that question, because "meaning" itself can have so many meanings that it is not even clear what the question is. Is the "meaning" of life like the meaning of a sentence? of a work of art? of an act or event? Is the question implicitly asking if I believe in god?
My advice is, don't ask that question unless you are prepared to give a philosophical answer to the reply, "What kind of answer are you actually looking for?" Otherwise it is sort of a blank check - "say something, anything, about the meaning of life". And if I were to give an immediate answer to that, it could only be that in itself, it means about as much as a pointless film. Because either no one is directing it, or they are doing it without any clear sense of overall purpose. Which, I guess, is as good a place as any to end this review.
(Note: This post was originally published on Friday 3/6/09 at 2:06 a.m. After re-reading it I felt that it was much too sloppy, both in editing and expression of ideas. It returned to Edit mode after about 48 hours online. It is now republished with substantial alterations, mainly intended to clarify many of the original points.)
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Cinema Rocks
Martin Scorsese, coming hot off his Dylan documentary No Direction Home (not to mention his embarrassingly belated recognition by the illustrious Academy for one of his second-rate films, since they missed his masterpieces) has another rock film, about the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light) due for 2008 release; and yet another in the planning stage, this one on George Harrison. Todd Haynes has a Dylan film too (I'm Not There) which stars six different actors (and actresses! - Cate Blanchett) as Dylan. There are two (count 'em 1-2) films coming out about Joy Division, the short-lived but allegedly influential 1980's "post-punk" band. (Everyone after the Sex Pistols was post-punk, so the appellation is kind of meaningless.) One is Control, a biopic (which does not rhyme with "myopic") by photographer Anton Corbijn; the other is a documentary by Grant Gee. Peter Bogdanovich's latest picture show is about Tom Petty, a 4-hour (r u serious?) documentary that is, according to the Times (which has also noted the proliferation of celluloid rockers) not expected to do much for the theatre industry but should sell like hotcakes to TP fans. David Leaf's 2006 film The U.S. Vs. John Lennon was part of another tide. Need I mention the formulaic Dreamgirls, all but a Diana Ross & the Supremes bio? In 2005 there was James Mangold's Walk the Line, a biopic about Johnny Cash. The year 2004 brought around the late release of some fabled archival footage of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and others (Bob Smeaton's Festival Express), andTaylor Hackford's Ray, the Ray Charles bio. And so it goes, as we drill back in time, passing through documentaries and biopix of the Sex Pistols, U2, Richie Valens (go ahead, sing it.... dadada dada la Bamba...), The Doors, The Band, Elvis, the Talking Heads, Kurt Cobain... If I appear to have shorted the films on musicians of the female persuasion it is just that I was thinking rock, but we can always throw in Coal Miner's Daughter and Lady Sings the Blues (and Walk the Line is almost as much about June Carter as about Cash), not to mention the largely forgotten film The Rose (1979), a Janis Joplin biography starring - Bette Midler? (Hello in there... casting, I mean; anybody home?) This off-the-cuff list, you will notice, includes only films with some claim to biographical content, not mere concert films like Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same. (Anybody who calls The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense "mere concert films" will be appropriately calumnied and vilified, not to mention having their MTV signals jammed.) There are many more that I have not mentioned; quite a few I had never heard of before, such as the Y2K TV film bio The Beach Boys: An American Family, and a 1973 eponymous Jimi Hendrix bio.
Now, all I want to do here is muse a bit about the following question: Why is it that the lives of rock stars (and popular music stars in general) make such appealing subjects for films? I mean, if you think about it, who really cares about the troubled lives of rock musicians, who generally abuse their bodies (and sometimes those of others), manifest antisocial behavior, rise to stardom on the strength of their musical talents, and then quickly die, wither, or fade? Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit; certainly not all popular music stars following this course. There are probably more living than dead rock musicians from the '60's. But given the average life expectancy today, the fact that we even have to pause for a moment over the truth of that statement is indicative of the problem. We all know that a very high proportion die young - the fictional group in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony even made a game out of naming them, and that was in 1980! Before John Lennon, Mike Bloomfield, Bob Marley, Harry Chapin, John Belushi, Felix Pappalardi, Dennis Wilson, Peter Tosh,Jaco Pastorius, Nico, Roy Orbison, John Cipolina, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Fogerty, David Ruffin, Frank Zappa, Freddie Mercury, Harry Nilsson, Tommy Boyce, and Jerry Garcia, and tons of others (according to this list) died premature deaths. A few of these folks succumbed to heart failure, AIDS or cancer in their 40's or early 50's; the rest all ended their lives with drug overdoses, murder, suicide, or transportation accidents. Are they models to follow? Are they heroes to canonize? Are they tragic figures whose lives are worth dramatizing?
If you said "all of the above" you were at least partially right, in my opinion. Models, not for their drug habits or sex lives, but for their obsessive dedication to an art form (which is the only kind of dedication worth talking about). Heroes for their mostly subversive versions of the Horatio Alger story. Tragic, because many of them followed a predictable and perhaps inevitable arc, from anonymity to fame to precipitous decline. Does this mean Britney Spears is going to be the subject of the next big documentary? Too soon to tell, but I wouldn't write it off. Today, she may seem a little ridiculous, along with Lindsay and Paris and the other bad chicks. And that seems beneath the dignity of anything with tragic pretensions. But go see Walk the Line, if you haven't already, and then reconsider the question. Jim, Janis and Jimi all imploded, and though I suspect the great Janis and Jimi films are still waiting to be made (Oliver Stone got the not-likely-to-be-surpassed Jim Morrison flick, The Doors) they all have their tragic sides.
That is, if you think of them potentially ascending greater heights, but for their swift descent into self-destructive addictions and in some cases sociopathic narcissism; consider the ingeniously disturbed Syd Barrett (careful with that ax, indeed). And who doesn't? Who doesn't think that Jimi Hendrix, for example, would have become an even greater artist had he had time to mature? But the tragic ending is built in, in a way (as it must be, to be really tragic): the same impulse that results in a maniacal devotion to rock and its possibilities, and rockets the owner to fame, makes them indulge in the temptations that success proffers, and suffer the numbing schedule of the touring musician. Always under pressure, always looking to the next gig, homeless as a vagabond, in bondage to a recording company (often with the profits from at least one or two albums written off to bad contracts), constantly having to negotiate with the endless list of self-serving personalities in the music industry, herded together in something closer than a marriage to band members they would not even want to date, and surrounded by people whose adoration blurs the line between true friends and sycophants, the young successful rock star may be open to anything that promises a night without stress, panic or depression. At the same time, as money pours in, so does the opportunity to spend it on designer drugs, wild parties and the like. Why not? Haven't I earned this? Don't I need this? Could this really hurt me, after I have risen from dank basements to the Garden and the Bowl? Personally, I have only glimpsed the very edges of this life, but it is all too easy to comprehend.
The grizzly list above stars mainly rock musicians who died premature deaths between 1980 and 1995. Rockers are famously careless with their lives. But the list could be expanded a bit to include Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Stan Rogers, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Watson, Kate Wolf, and many other too quickly departed people of a gentler and less flamboyant persuasion. One does not want to casually throw cancer victims in with drug abusers and suicides, but the high mortality rate of all but classical musicians is very striking. (Then again, classical conductors and pianists bend the average the other way; more than one classical pianist has given a 90th birthday concert, and at least one - Mieczyslaw Horszowksi - gave one at 100.)
But it is not my intention to paint everything an artificial black in order to promote a theory of why cinema loves rock. The innumerable Dylan bios, literary and cinematic, are not chasing a tragic figure, but rather an enigmatic one. Dylan has famously proclaimed how little he is understood by the Dylan observers. So, may way ask, who does understand you, Bob? Presumably, the answer would be "me". Or would it? No one would expect Dylan to be self-effacing at this point; but would he be honest? Surely anyone who understands himself doesn't have to reinvent himself every few years. As a bluesman; then a left-wing folkie; then a rocker; then a country star; then a Jesus Freak; then an eclectic guy who'll do anything from blues to cabaret to political broadsides. The question for Todd Haynes is: are you sure six is enough?
Dylan is probably the most eulogized living personality - ever. Elvis received plenty of attention in his later life, but a lot of it was negative. The Beatles fly together in the popular imagination, with the partial exception of John. But Dylan is the lone subject of epic biographies, film after film, endless interviews, articles and commentaries. Why? It is sometimes said that the more obscure the philosopher, the more ink will be spilled trying to figure him out, and the more famous he will become. This at least fits the picture of Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and plenty of other leading lights. (Though it does not explain why Fichte or Ernst Bloch failed to reach the highest rank.) Dylan steadfastly refuses to reveal the "real" Dylan - maybe there is none. Haynes's film title reflects this. One begins to suspect that nobody understands Dylan because there is no Dylan. Thus the search for him has all the mystery and excitement of Moby Dick, and is more about the searcher than the searchee. And plenty of writers and filmmakers want to play Captain A-rab.
Speaking of folkies, in 2005 the film rights to a biography of Tim Buckley (d.1975 @ 28, OD'ed on heroin, alcohol and barbiturates after a grueling tour) and Jeff Buckley (his son, d.1997 @ 30, accidentally drowned in a Tennessee river) were acquired; I haven't heard anything more about the release, though. Apparently Jeff is the main subject, and Tim is seen in flashbacks. These guys came and went too quickly, though Tim released quite a few albums before he died. His Hello Goodbye is about as prophetic a title as Jeff's best song and line, "Oh, it was so real" (on Grace). I have to ask myself a question: why do I feel a rush of excitement, even a twinge of impatience, at the prospect of seeing a movie about two musicians who I basically know from one album each? Who cares? Lots of people OD'ed like Tim, or accidentally drowned like Jeff. I could say: because I'm a musician too, so I can relate. But let's try something bolder: almost everyone envies, on some level, the artist who throws everything into his music, who manages, even once, to express himself in an adequate way, and to reach a mass audience even for a moment. We admire it, are jealous of it, because there is some urge to do the same thing, in some way, which we suppress in order to be real people. We would not want society to consist mainly of Tim and Jeff Buckleys, of Phil Ochs (a folk suicide, subject of the biopic Chords of Fame), of Dylans, much less of Jim, Jimi and Janis. We are not all ready to throw normalcy to the winds and sail off with these characters. But we admire them for having the guts to do what we know we could not have done. When I think about the film, what I feel is a kind of awe at the vision and energy behind their music, and their ability to put it into my head; and I guess I have desire to live vicariously through them, both to understand where that energy came from and to learn by quasi-experience how to avoid their downfall.
Incidentally, want to check a video of Tim Buckley performing one of his songs live? Please pick up - are you ready? - the Rhino DVD The Monkees: Our Favorite Episodes. You may think this is out of character, but the Monkees as a group were far more interesting than they usually get credit for, not least for their contribution to the rock video format. Keep in mind that when "The Monkees" show came out, rock film consisted in not much more than Bye Bye Birdie, some Elvis beach flicks, and A Hard Day's Night. The group had to somehow transition back and forth between the musical personae, the actors and their characters. To my mind, they managed it better than a lot of amateurish, lip-synched rock videos today. Granted they had the resources of a major TV studio. But my impression is that The Monkees themselves were major creative forces in everything they did after their first two albums. There is a lot of improv in the TV episodes. Davey I saw as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway production of Oliver, before he was a Monkee, and he was a powerful stage presence. We have focused on one paradigm, the documentary or biopik which follows a more or less tragic curve. A second is of course the rock comedy, which is almost never biographical, but loosely follows the foibles of either a fictional band, or a real one in fictional situations, with real rock musicians as actors. This is exemplified particularly in Richard Lester's Beatles films. The Monkees focused this into a 30-minute format. There are probably plenty of other candidates in this category; can't think of them right now. (I'm sort of ignoring the obvious and overdiscussed stuff like Spinal Tap and Rocky Horror, as well as the films that star rock musicians in other roles - Tom Waits (Down By Law), John Lennon (How I Won the War), David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth), Mick Jagger, Madonna, etc. Not to mention that allegedly lovable flick with Beatle-song backdrops throughout, a silly idea whose time has gone.)
There must be some other angles. La Bamba is pretty good at showing not only the personal side of the story but the sort of social tragedy involved in the loss of a pop icon. Any great life cut short by forces beyond the control of the subject can be epic material. I have not seen The Buddy Holly Story, which was widely criticized for being very inaccurate, as well as unfair to The Crickets; nor have I seen Paul McCartney's alternative film, The Real Buddy Holly Story, which is supposed to be much better. It stands to reason that such a film could capture the "American Pie" tale with much opportunity for social insight. But again, the Holly-Valens tragedy is very much a direct outcome of the kind of life that popular musicians have to lead. The media tend to glamorize rock stars, with special emphasis on their money, social and sex lives, but the tale that Paul Simon tells in "Homeward Bound" is the reality that a lot more of them face: endless travel, loneliness, frustration, and that unsung tribulation, dealing with band members who are either not up to professional level, or impossible to get along with, or dragging every through the dirt of their own nasty habits. The drugs and sex mitigate this only to an extent. The pull of these pressures and dangers is so strong that it must be difficult to make a film that avoids the stereotypical path. Dreamgirls, for all its awards (and its embedded American Idol success story) struck me as a sanitized and formulaic picture with little to say. Walk the Line constantly threatened to degenerate into formula, but seemed to avoid it through the intensity of its character portraits, not to mention a couple of great acting performances.
I think there are many more great rock films to be made. There is no way that the existing stock has adequately explored all the sides of human emotion, greatness, weakness, humor and tragedy in the lives of popular musicians. Let us hope the films get deeper and more real rather than giving in to the temptation of easy hero-worship and superficial moneymaking through peddling the name of some cultural icon. And with that hope in mind, I end where I began: what could be a better opportunity for serious rock filmmaking than a Martin Scorcese flick on George Harrison? See you there.
Now, all I want to do here is muse a bit about the following question: Why is it that the lives of rock stars (and popular music stars in general) make such appealing subjects for films? I mean, if you think about it, who really cares about the troubled lives of rock musicians, who generally abuse their bodies (and sometimes those of others), manifest antisocial behavior, rise to stardom on the strength of their musical talents, and then quickly die, wither, or fade? Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit; certainly not all popular music stars following this course. There are probably more living than dead rock musicians from the '60's. But given the average life expectancy today, the fact that we even have to pause for a moment over the truth of that statement is indicative of the problem. We all know that a very high proportion die young - the fictional group in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony even made a game out of naming them, and that was in 1980! Before John Lennon, Mike Bloomfield, Bob Marley, Harry Chapin, John Belushi, Felix Pappalardi, Dennis Wilson, Peter Tosh,Jaco Pastorius, Nico, Roy Orbison, John Cipolina, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Fogerty, David Ruffin, Frank Zappa, Freddie Mercury, Harry Nilsson, Tommy Boyce, and Jerry Garcia, and tons of others (according to this list) died premature deaths. A few of these folks succumbed to heart failure, AIDS or cancer in their 40's or early 50's; the rest all ended their lives with drug overdoses, murder, suicide, or transportation accidents. Are they models to follow? Are they heroes to canonize? Are they tragic figures whose lives are worth dramatizing?
If you said "all of the above" you were at least partially right, in my opinion. Models, not for their drug habits or sex lives, but for their obsessive dedication to an art form (which is the only kind of dedication worth talking about). Heroes for their mostly subversive versions of the Horatio Alger story. Tragic, because many of them followed a predictable and perhaps inevitable arc, from anonymity to fame to precipitous decline. Does this mean Britney Spears is going to be the subject of the next big documentary? Too soon to tell, but I wouldn't write it off. Today, she may seem a little ridiculous, along with Lindsay and Paris and the other bad chicks. And that seems beneath the dignity of anything with tragic pretensions. But go see Walk the Line, if you haven't already, and then reconsider the question. Jim, Janis and Jimi all imploded, and though I suspect the great Janis and Jimi films are still waiting to be made (Oliver Stone got the not-likely-to-be-surpassed Jim Morrison flick, The Doors) they all have their tragic sides.
That is, if you think of them potentially ascending greater heights, but for their swift descent into self-destructive addictions and in some cases sociopathic narcissism; consider the ingeniously disturbed Syd Barrett (careful with that ax, indeed). And who doesn't? Who doesn't think that Jimi Hendrix, for example, would have become an even greater artist had he had time to mature? But the tragic ending is built in, in a way (as it must be, to be really tragic): the same impulse that results in a maniacal devotion to rock and its possibilities, and rockets the owner to fame, makes them indulge in the temptations that success proffers, and suffer the numbing schedule of the touring musician. Always under pressure, always looking to the next gig, homeless as a vagabond, in bondage to a recording company (often with the profits from at least one or two albums written off to bad contracts), constantly having to negotiate with the endless list of self-serving personalities in the music industry, herded together in something closer than a marriage to band members they would not even want to date, and surrounded by people whose adoration blurs the line between true friends and sycophants, the young successful rock star may be open to anything that promises a night without stress, panic or depression. At the same time, as money pours in, so does the opportunity to spend it on designer drugs, wild parties and the like. Why not? Haven't I earned this? Don't I need this? Could this really hurt me, after I have risen from dank basements to the Garden and the Bowl? Personally, I have only glimpsed the very edges of this life, but it is all too easy to comprehend.
The grizzly list above stars mainly rock musicians who died premature deaths between 1980 and 1995. Rockers are famously careless with their lives. But the list could be expanded a bit to include Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Stan Rogers, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Watson, Kate Wolf, and many other too quickly departed people of a gentler and less flamboyant persuasion. One does not want to casually throw cancer victims in with drug abusers and suicides, but the high mortality rate of all but classical musicians is very striking. (Then again, classical conductors and pianists bend the average the other way; more than one classical pianist has given a 90th birthday concert, and at least one - Mieczyslaw Horszowksi - gave one at 100.)
But it is not my intention to paint everything an artificial black in order to promote a theory of why cinema loves rock. The innumerable Dylan bios, literary and cinematic, are not chasing a tragic figure, but rather an enigmatic one. Dylan has famously proclaimed how little he is understood by the Dylan observers. So, may way ask, who does understand you, Bob? Presumably, the answer would be "me". Or would it? No one would expect Dylan to be self-effacing at this point; but would he be honest? Surely anyone who understands himself doesn't have to reinvent himself every few years. As a bluesman; then a left-wing folkie; then a rocker; then a country star; then a Jesus Freak; then an eclectic guy who'll do anything from blues to cabaret to political broadsides. The question for Todd Haynes is: are you sure six is enough?
Dylan is probably the most eulogized living personality - ever. Elvis received plenty of attention in his later life, but a lot of it was negative. The Beatles fly together in the popular imagination, with the partial exception of John. But Dylan is the lone subject of epic biographies, film after film, endless interviews, articles and commentaries. Why? It is sometimes said that the more obscure the philosopher, the more ink will be spilled trying to figure him out, and the more famous he will become. This at least fits the picture of Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and plenty of other leading lights. (Though it does not explain why Fichte or Ernst Bloch failed to reach the highest rank.) Dylan steadfastly refuses to reveal the "real" Dylan - maybe there is none. Haynes's film title reflects this. One begins to suspect that nobody understands Dylan because there is no Dylan. Thus the search for him has all the mystery and excitement of Moby Dick, and is more about the searcher than the searchee. And plenty of writers and filmmakers want to play Captain A-rab.
Speaking of folkies, in 2005 the film rights to a biography of Tim Buckley (d.1975 @ 28, OD'ed on heroin, alcohol and barbiturates after a grueling tour) and Jeff Buckley (his son, d.1997 @ 30, accidentally drowned in a Tennessee river) were acquired; I haven't heard anything more about the release, though. Apparently Jeff is the main subject, and Tim is seen in flashbacks. These guys came and went too quickly, though Tim released quite a few albums before he died. His Hello Goodbye is about as prophetic a title as Jeff's best song and line, "Oh, it was so real" (on Grace). I have to ask myself a question: why do I feel a rush of excitement, even a twinge of impatience, at the prospect of seeing a movie about two musicians who I basically know from one album each? Who cares? Lots of people OD'ed like Tim, or accidentally drowned like Jeff. I could say: because I'm a musician too, so I can relate. But let's try something bolder: almost everyone envies, on some level, the artist who throws everything into his music, who manages, even once, to express himself in an adequate way, and to reach a mass audience even for a moment. We admire it, are jealous of it, because there is some urge to do the same thing, in some way, which we suppress in order to be real people. We would not want society to consist mainly of Tim and Jeff Buckleys, of Phil Ochs (a folk suicide, subject of the biopic Chords of Fame), of Dylans, much less of Jim, Jimi and Janis. We are not all ready to throw normalcy to the winds and sail off with these characters. But we admire them for having the guts to do what we know we could not have done. When I think about the film, what I feel is a kind of awe at the vision and energy behind their music, and their ability to put it into my head; and I guess I have desire to live vicariously through them, both to understand where that energy came from and to learn by quasi-experience how to avoid their downfall.
Incidentally, want to check a video of Tim Buckley performing one of his songs live? Please pick up - are you ready? - the Rhino DVD The Monkees: Our Favorite Episodes. You may think this is out of character, but the Monkees as a group were far more interesting than they usually get credit for, not least for their contribution to the rock video format. Keep in mind that when "The Monkees" show came out, rock film consisted in not much more than Bye Bye Birdie, some Elvis beach flicks, and A Hard Day's Night. The group had to somehow transition back and forth between the musical personae, the actors and their characters. To my mind, they managed it better than a lot of amateurish, lip-synched rock videos today. Granted they had the resources of a major TV studio. But my impression is that The Monkees themselves were major creative forces in everything they did after their first two albums. There is a lot of improv in the TV episodes. Davey I saw as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway production of Oliver, before he was a Monkee, and he was a powerful stage presence. We have focused on one paradigm, the documentary or biopik which follows a more or less tragic curve. A second is of course the rock comedy, which is almost never biographical, but loosely follows the foibles of either a fictional band, or a real one in fictional situations, with real rock musicians as actors. This is exemplified particularly in Richard Lester's Beatles films. The Monkees focused this into a 30-minute format. There are probably plenty of other candidates in this category; can't think of them right now. (I'm sort of ignoring the obvious and overdiscussed stuff like Spinal Tap and Rocky Horror, as well as the films that star rock musicians in other roles - Tom Waits (Down By Law), John Lennon (How I Won the War), David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth), Mick Jagger, Madonna, etc. Not to mention that allegedly lovable flick with Beatle-song backdrops throughout, a silly idea whose time has gone.)
There must be some other angles. La Bamba is pretty good at showing not only the personal side of the story but the sort of social tragedy involved in the loss of a pop icon. Any great life cut short by forces beyond the control of the subject can be epic material. I have not seen The Buddy Holly Story, which was widely criticized for being very inaccurate, as well as unfair to The Crickets; nor have I seen Paul McCartney's alternative film, The Real Buddy Holly Story, which is supposed to be much better. It stands to reason that such a film could capture the "American Pie" tale with much opportunity for social insight. But again, the Holly-Valens tragedy is very much a direct outcome of the kind of life that popular musicians have to lead. The media tend to glamorize rock stars, with special emphasis on their money, social and sex lives, but the tale that Paul Simon tells in "Homeward Bound" is the reality that a lot more of them face: endless travel, loneliness, frustration, and that unsung tribulation, dealing with band members who are either not up to professional level, or impossible to get along with, or dragging every through the dirt of their own nasty habits. The drugs and sex mitigate this only to an extent. The pull of these pressures and dangers is so strong that it must be difficult to make a film that avoids the stereotypical path. Dreamgirls, for all its awards (and its embedded American Idol success story) struck me as a sanitized and formulaic picture with little to say. Walk the Line constantly threatened to degenerate into formula, but seemed to avoid it through the intensity of its character portraits, not to mention a couple of great acting performances.
I think there are many more great rock films to be made. There is no way that the existing stock has adequately explored all the sides of human emotion, greatness, weakness, humor and tragedy in the lives of popular musicians. Let us hope the films get deeper and more real rather than giving in to the temptation of easy hero-worship and superficial moneymaking through peddling the name of some cultural icon. And with that hope in mind, I end where I began: what could be a better opportunity for serious rock filmmaking than a Martin Scorcese flick on George Harrison? See you there.
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