ever wonder why hey there delilah is so awesome?brendan62442May 11 2008, 03:32:05 UTC
There are a couple of superficial things I use as signs I can find for a "labour of love". If the work has a personal nature, if was produced independently, if the artist was not previously successful, or if the artist has a persona as being unhappy -- when these are true, it seems more likely that the artist would have invested a lot of effort into the thing.
I meant to imply all the "usual" arguments about why a small audience is best. Inbreeding will draw out all the unique traits of a certain family; the fastest horses all come from inbreeding between other fast horses. There are certain centuries where the poetry was straight-up better than the novels, invariably because the novels were consumed publicly and the poems were just read in parlors. Or the times where the poets were all friends and were trying to impress each other. When someone wants to please an audience, they usually just give the audience what they were expected to produce, which isn't as fun as what someone makes for a personal project.
These are all only trends and only loose trends, but I'd guess that they apply to your tastes in every art except music. You will ask me to prove it, and of course I can't prove it, I can just use Occam's Razor and trade examples with you. (The same Occam's Razor that makes people racist or makes them think God made all the animals? Probably.)
I don't want to not be answerable for all the stuff I wrote, but I'd back it up with what people like who are closest the medium. I know you're wary of conventional wisdom for this kind of thing, but critics and artists are more likely to catch all the nuances than regular, like, hobbyists. The guys who watch four movies a day, they would all say Iron Man (or let's say Superman II) is good, but none of them would put it next to their favourite black and white stuff. Does it make me a sheep that I believe this? Not really because I probably like Iron Man better.
Your last paragraph is super-interesting and I will give it its own reply.
Re: ever wonder why hey there delilah is so awesome?weasel_seekerMay 11 2008, 12:45:07 UTC
Your distinction between critics and artists and what you label as hobbyists is interesting, because you can wear all three hats at once. What makes someone a critic vs. a hobbyist? Do you mean a professional critic? I don't see why someone has more weight because they get paid to do it. Is it technical knowledge? I play four? five? instruments. I'm not in a band right now, but I have been sporadically in the past. I jam with friends on a semi-regular basis. I also, as a result of 14 odd years of classical training know enough about theory and harmony and structure to catch nuances. The categories you're setting up seem strange.
There are a couple of superficial things I use as signs I can find for a "labour of love". If the work has a personal nature, if was produced independently, if the artist was not previously successful, or if the artist has a persona as being unhappy -- when these are true, it seems more likely that the artist would have invested a lot of effort into the thing.
I won't argue the personal nature comment, but independently? So what happens when someone previously independent signs with a major label. Does it immediately cease being a labour of love? Or do you mean independent as in COMPLETELY outside the realm of the music 'industry'. The unhappy comment is clearly the most problematic thing here, for me at least. You're saying that in order for authentic artistic output to be produced and recognized as such, it's better for it to be unhappy? Really? Because pain is truer? Because it's ugly and hard to express? Or what? Because if that's the case, than emo should all be the height of authentic labour of love expression. And while some of it is undeniable catchy, it's some of the most artificial (not a negative comment, but descriptive...i.e. consciously structured with artifice) music I've heard recently...MCR's the black parade? fall out boy? etc.
but black and white stuff isn't all serious. it's just OLD. you're not setting up a mainstream/underground commercial/passion dichotomy there...you're setting up an old vs. new dichotomy. and the guys who watch four movies a day might not put iron man up there, but a decent number of them would put in pulp fiction, which wallows in low culture and is gritty, funny and mainstream AND made for popular consumption. now, tarantino certain has passion for his medium and his product, but that's pop art at its finest and it stands with most of your black and white (by which i guess you mean CK and Casablanca and Maltese Falcon and not say...Gold Rush and Duck Soup, although, you know why not?) films. In fact....with movies, I'd say the bigger division of "taken seriously" is actually not audience size but Serious vs. Funny. Comedy films are the "pop" music of cinema, which is why you DON'T mean Duck Soup or Gold Rush.
As for stuff written for public consumption and shaped to win the affections of an audience I give you Dickens (magazine serials) and Shakespeare (mass entertainment) which hold up far better than the stodgier shit of their contemporaries. Not to say that all of their stuff is brilliant, but the ratio's good enough that the "write for yourself" thing seems suspect. I saw Richard III at NTS last week while a friend was stage managing and it's still terrifying, moving, melodramatic and ofttimes fucking hilarious.
Re: ever wonder why hey there delilah is so awesome?weasel_seekerMay 11 2008, 12:51:57 UTC
Equally so anyone who can read Gaiman's Sandman or Moore's Watchmen and not see something interesting and intelligent and, yes, literary, there is looking with blinders on.
And the cult of Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley is both attractive and pleasant sounding but also creepy and hollow and less about the music and more about our weird societal obsession with celebrities/musicians and hero worship. Death = canonization. I have a whole other rant I'll save for later about how uncomfortable I am with the suicidal artist = truer artist trope.
Art doesn't become retroactively better because someone killed themselves, but our perception of it does. Tragically flaming out young is all well and good because WE don't have to do it, and we can die vicariously through them. Cobain, Drake, Smith, Buckley, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, Virginia Woolf, etc. etc. Male musicians and female authors, oddly. Anyway, that's another conversation for another post.
I guess my idea, when I put critics and artists in as yardsticks, is that the people most familiar with music are likely to be most discerning. You're more like an artist than I am, less like an artist than someone who plays every day. Professional critics and professional artists are both just pools of expertise, people who are likely to pick up on stuff others miss.
I looked up the last Sight and Sound poll to try and find some experts who don't like genre movies. Critics liked two action movies, Vertigo and a comedy in their top ten. Directors liked four movies with fighting, two comedies, and Vertigo. I could try to argue that something like Seven Samurai or Rules of the Game doesn't count but I don't think I'd get very far. Maybe I've projected my own personal taste onto a definition of "good"; that comes in line with your Battlestar Galactica point.
My thing about unhappy artists doesn't really come from suicide mythologies. It has more to do with the way someone can't really walk around complaining about their life, so they have a whole lot of baggage stored up for when they start writing.
Outdoor Shakespeare plays would have been giant circuses, everyone just talking to their friends until a dick joke or a sword-fight came along. The poetic or emotional content -- which people seem to value the most today -- that was something where he got to let loose and .
I'm pretty far into a lit degree and no one has really mentioned Dickens yet. The serialized novels I've read usually haven't aged well.
I'm in kind of a listening mood now that I got proved wrong by the Sight and Sound poll. Do you draw a line somewhere between serious art and graffiti? What do you think of Raffi?
Oh lord. I am totally not well-versed enough to do this with art. Music and lit are like....my boundaries here. Film, too I guess. Um...serious art and graffiti? I don't know. Part of me would start to discuss technical skill and artist's intent but that reads as...well...silly? I think consensus in Theory of Knowledge discussions on this back in IB was that Art is either perceived as art by its audience or intended as art by its creator.
I think saying that graffiti isn't is problematic ESPECIALLY since "proper" art circles have moved far more towards avant-gardiste conceptions of what constitutes (serious) art (and thus broader ones) than certain segments of music and literature stuff. Lit might be the most narrow actually. Art goes from Renoir to Da Vinci to pop art like Warhol to abstract to graffiti to performance art to Banksy to whatever. Music...well, there are enough critics making a solid stance on the artistic merit of most stuff, even if you disqualify it.
Literature? I'd like to see comics and GNs get a bit more respect (viz. Sandman comment). Genre books probably get less than they deserve. Television, too. Science fiction gets treated like crap broadly in terms of acknowledge the merit of it, written and otherwise. Not to harp on BSG, but...incredible cast, excellent writing, topical, fascinating and more reflective on issues of politics, morality, war, religion, etc. than any show on television and most films. But it's a sci-fi show. (Mind you, my evaluation of BSG's good-ness, genre aside is fairly "standard" in terms of reading something as "important"...if this were a music discussion, I'd be reading it through a completely rockist lens, but....whatever).
Raffi? Haven't listened in a while. Like, since I was three. I do know that Bananaphone is the shit.
But like I said, Art is communicative in nature and thus meaning is derived from both creator and consumer (nasty implications of "consume" aside, or perhaps intended). Taste it with your whole tongue and you'll get something out of it. We learn and create by reaching out from the space behind the eyes outwards.
Outdoor Shakespeare plays would have been giant circuses, everyone just talking to their friends until a dick joke or a sword-fight came along. The poetic or emotional content -- which people seem to value the most today -- that was something where he got to let loose and .\
Right. This kind of feeds into what Frank was talking about wrt Dylan perhaps? Or the opposite? Shakespeare's importance happens in the midst of what was otherwise frivolous and not viewed as weighty.
That said, I do lean conservative in how I evaluate lit. Sandman is a comic, but I value it for very literary reasons, and I'd be hard pressed to defend the Da Vinci Code. That said, I truly enjoyed reading Grisham and Ludlum for a summer or two, although I likely wouldn't claim that they're 'high art' by a long shot.
Hmm...I'm a book snob, apparently. I'll still make the all is equal argument for films, tv and music, though.
oh wait i started this conversationbrendan62442May 18 2008, 04:45:21 UTC
Raffi and graffiti were just to pry and try to see where you drew the line, where you stopped calling something art. But that's mostly just a game of semantics.
Banksy should get in a fight with Damien Hirst. The loser has to go away; the winner gets to design the new Google logos.
I think the thing I posted was harsh on comics, and I'll guess that the same thing is true for comics as for science fiction -- people with low expectations can find something and latch onto it. Whatever ideas you get in those kinds of stories, the "scenes" will still be about cool spaceships and Japanese schoolgirls. Someday I will have a Battlestar phase and a Star Trek phase and a Neil Gaiman phase, but until that day, certain genres get buried under the weight of their fans. Is it wrong that not enough people read the Watchmen? I guess. But Watchmen probably always sold worse than the 300 comics and the superhero crossovers.
Books are the opposite of comic books in this way. The bestseller lists, at least for Canada, are always Margaret Atwood and Ian MacEwen and whoever else is good. I'm kind of inclined to give books a free pass, because I know they're governed by a scene of smart moms, people who studied books in school and still fight about them at dinner parties. Whatever Oprah's favourite bands are, I guarantee they're worse than her favourite books.
That's why I average it back out, why it's always in the back of my head that the "Since You've Been Gone" kingmakers are the same people who put "My Humps" on the radio. Book fans wouldn't really let something slide like that.
Somehow I turned this into another attack on music we both like.
[TV and movies are kind of interesting, because the people who watch TV are sort of the opposite of the people who talk about TV. What are some of the TV shows people hate that you'd like to redeem? I really like America's Funniest Home Videos.]
I don't think you have to be a book snob. You like everything. In a lot of ways that's the opposite.
Art is communicative in nature
Is it weird that I think it isn't?
Shakespeare versus Dylan is unusual because Shakespeare wrote when plays were a low form of entertainment. My guess is that Shakespeare wouldn't have thought too much about what he wrote; he was putting out 2-3 plays a year, had a family, was an actor by day. There are examples in different plays for every motive he could have had. He might have been distinguished mostly by the psychology in his monologues; that seems like something personal enough.
My mom says the "I Hear Music" guy, in his second last show on Radio Two, finally admitted he thought Wagner was trying too hard to be important. He made a point of linking Wagner's mistakes to Hitler's mistakes.
Re: oh wait i started this conversationweasel_seekerMay 18 2008, 06:20:42 UTC
Book fans wouldn't let something slide like that?
Says the Da Vinci Code. Says John Grisham books. Says the Shopaholic series. Etc. Etc. Etc. ad nauseum. Book bestsellers are either crap of this nature or the Atwood/McEwan etc. stuff which IS quality literature but is generally very conservative in style and taste. Truly interesting and engaging works of newer lit aren't often there. And also, Atwood kind of bores me, to be frank.
And let's not equate BSG with Star Trek. Two completely different beasts and it's not about coming in with low expectations. It's explicitly and intelligently (and most importantly NUANCED) a work about post-9/11 politics in America and the world, ethics, morality, religion, etc. And Gaiman's work in Sandman is not only stronger than all of his novels, but is a note-perfect meditation on the role fiction and stories play in defining and shaping what it means to be human bla bla bla. Not going to rant about them now, as I'm slightly intoxicated, but to explain these as "adequate" in genres with low expectations is condescending and wrong.
Re: oh wait i started this conversationbrendan62442May 18 2008, 19:00:11 UTC
My one disclaimer is that I meant the old Star Trek, the philosophical stuff my therapist used to talk about. I'm pretty sure that the comics and sci-fi spectrums both go way above just adequate.
Re: oh wait i started this conversationweasel_seekerMay 19 2008, 03:34:11 UTC
Regardless, I find Star Trek objectionable if only b/c its philosophical and political stuff is all very Brave Americans wandering through the world/galaxy non-interfering with lower people except when we must violate our isolationism to save lesser races/countries/planets from the savagery and error of their ways. All very crusading and noble and nauseating and BORING.
BSG appeals because it's nuanced and is the kind of show where the 'bad guys' are beautiful and sexy and believe in God and a greater purpose and the 'good guys' are filthy and conflicted and make a hobby of fucking each other over and generally being assholes.
I meant to imply all the "usual" arguments about why a small audience is best. Inbreeding will draw out all the unique traits of a certain family; the fastest horses all come from inbreeding between other fast horses. There are certain centuries where the poetry was straight-up better than the novels, invariably because the novels were consumed publicly and the poems were just read in parlors. Or the times where the poets were all friends and were trying to impress each other. When someone wants to please an audience, they usually just give the audience what they were expected to produce, which isn't as fun as what someone makes for a personal project.
These are all only trends and only loose trends, but I'd guess that they apply to your tastes in every art except music. You will ask me to prove it, and of course I can't prove it, I can just use Occam's Razor and trade examples with you. (The same Occam's Razor that makes people racist or makes them think God made all the animals? Probably.)
I don't want to not be answerable for all the stuff I wrote, but I'd back it up with what people like who are closest the medium. I know you're wary of conventional wisdom for this kind of thing, but critics and artists are more likely to catch all the nuances than regular, like, hobbyists. The guys who watch four movies a day, they would all say Iron Man (or let's say Superman II) is good, but none of them would put it next to their favourite black and white stuff. Does it make me a sheep that I believe this? Not really because I probably like Iron Man better.
Your last paragraph is super-interesting and I will give it its own reply.
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There are a couple of superficial things I use as signs I can find for a "labour of love". If the work has a personal nature, if was produced independently, if the artist was not previously successful, or if the artist has a persona as being unhappy -- when these are true, it seems more likely that the artist would have invested a lot of effort into the thing.
I won't argue the personal nature comment, but independently? So what happens when someone previously independent signs with a major label. Does it immediately cease being a labour of love? Or do you mean independent as in COMPLETELY outside the realm of the music 'industry'. The unhappy comment is clearly the most problematic thing here, for me at least. You're saying that in order for authentic artistic output to be produced and recognized as such, it's better for it to be unhappy? Really? Because pain is truer? Because it's ugly and hard to express? Or what? Because if that's the case, than emo should all be the height of authentic labour of love expression. And while some of it is undeniable catchy, it's some of the most artificial (not a negative comment, but descriptive...i.e. consciously structured with artifice) music I've heard recently...MCR's the black parade? fall out boy? etc.
but black and white stuff isn't all serious. it's just OLD. you're not setting up a mainstream/underground commercial/passion dichotomy there...you're setting up an old vs. new dichotomy. and the guys who watch four movies a day might not put iron man up there, but a decent number of them would put in pulp fiction, which wallows in low culture and is gritty, funny and mainstream AND made for popular consumption. now, tarantino certain has passion for his medium and his product, but that's pop art at its finest and it stands with most of your black and white (by which i guess you mean CK and Casablanca and Maltese Falcon and not say...Gold Rush and Duck Soup, although, you know why not?) films. In fact....with movies, I'd say the bigger division of "taken seriously" is actually not audience size but Serious vs. Funny. Comedy films are the "pop" music of cinema, which is why you DON'T mean Duck Soup or Gold Rush.
As for stuff written for public consumption and shaped to win the affections of an audience I give you Dickens (magazine serials) and Shakespeare (mass entertainment) which hold up far better than the stodgier shit of their contemporaries. Not to say that all of their stuff is brilliant, but the ratio's good enough that the "write for yourself" thing seems suspect. I saw Richard III at NTS last week while a friend was stage managing and it's still terrifying, moving, melodramatic and ofttimes fucking hilarious.
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And the cult of Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley is both attractive and pleasant sounding but also creepy and hollow and less about the music and more about our weird societal obsession with celebrities/musicians and hero worship. Death = canonization. I have a whole other rant I'll save for later about how uncomfortable I am with the suicidal artist = truer artist trope.
Art doesn't become retroactively better because someone killed themselves, but our perception of it does. Tragically flaming out young is all well and good because WE don't have to do it, and we can die vicariously through them. Cobain, Drake, Smith, Buckley, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, Virginia Woolf, etc. etc. Male musicians and female authors, oddly. Anyway, that's another conversation for another post.
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I looked up the last Sight and Sound poll to try and find some experts who don't like genre movies. Critics liked two action movies, Vertigo and a comedy in their top ten. Directors liked four movies with fighting, two comedies, and Vertigo. I could try to argue that something like Seven Samurai or Rules of the Game doesn't count but I don't think I'd get very far. Maybe I've projected my own personal taste onto a definition of "good"; that comes in line with your Battlestar Galactica point.
My thing about unhappy artists doesn't really come from suicide mythologies. It has more to do with the way someone can't really walk around complaining about their life, so they have a whole lot of baggage stored up for when they start writing.
Outdoor Shakespeare plays would have been giant circuses, everyone just talking to their friends until a dick joke or a sword-fight came along. The poetic or emotional content -- which people seem to value the most today -- that was something where he got to let loose and .
I'm pretty far into a lit degree and no one has really mentioned Dickens yet. The serialized novels I've read usually haven't aged well.
I'm in kind of a listening mood now that I got proved wrong by the Sight and Sound poll. Do you draw a line somewhere between serious art and graffiti? What do you think of Raffi?
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I think saying that graffiti isn't is problematic ESPECIALLY since "proper" art circles have moved far more towards avant-gardiste conceptions of what constitutes (serious) art (and thus broader ones) than certain segments of music and literature stuff. Lit might be the most narrow actually. Art goes from Renoir to Da Vinci to pop art like Warhol to abstract to graffiti to performance art to Banksy to whatever. Music...well, there are enough critics making a solid stance on the artistic merit of most stuff, even if you disqualify it.
Literature? I'd like to see comics and GNs get a bit more respect (viz. Sandman comment). Genre books probably get less than they deserve. Television, too. Science fiction gets treated like crap broadly in terms of acknowledge the merit of it, written and otherwise. Not to harp on BSG, but...incredible cast, excellent writing, topical, fascinating and more reflective on issues of politics, morality, war, religion, etc. than any show on television and most films. But it's a sci-fi show. (Mind you, my evaluation of BSG's good-ness, genre aside is fairly "standard" in terms of reading something as "important"...if this were a music discussion, I'd be reading it through a completely rockist lens, but....whatever).
Raffi? Haven't listened in a while. Like, since I was three. I do know that Bananaphone is the shit.
But like I said, Art is communicative in nature and thus meaning is derived from both creator and consumer (nasty implications of "consume" aside, or perhaps intended). Taste it with your whole tongue and you'll get something out of it. We learn and create by reaching out from the space behind the eyes outwards.
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Right. This kind of feeds into what Frank was talking about wrt Dylan perhaps? Or the opposite? Shakespeare's importance happens in the midst of what was otherwise frivolous and not viewed as weighty.
That said, I do lean conservative in how I evaluate lit. Sandman is a comic, but I value it for very literary reasons, and I'd be hard pressed to defend the Da Vinci Code. That said, I truly enjoyed reading Grisham and Ludlum for a summer or two, although I likely wouldn't claim that they're 'high art' by a long shot.
Hmm...I'm a book snob, apparently. I'll still make the all is equal argument for films, tv and music, though.
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Banksy should get in a fight with Damien Hirst. The loser has to go away; the winner gets to design the new Google logos.
I think the thing I posted was harsh on comics, and I'll guess that the same thing is true for comics as for science fiction -- people with low expectations can find something and latch onto it. Whatever ideas you get in those kinds of stories, the "scenes" will still be about cool spaceships and Japanese schoolgirls. Someday I will have a Battlestar phase and a Star Trek phase and a Neil Gaiman phase, but until that day, certain genres get buried under the weight of their fans. Is it wrong that not enough people read the Watchmen? I guess. But Watchmen probably always sold worse than the 300 comics and the superhero crossovers.
Books are the opposite of comic books in this way. The bestseller lists, at least for Canada, are always Margaret Atwood and Ian MacEwen and whoever else is good. I'm kind of inclined to give books a free pass, because I know they're governed by a scene of smart moms, people who studied books in school and still fight about them at dinner parties. Whatever Oprah's favourite bands are, I guarantee they're worse than her favourite books.
That's why I average it back out, why it's always in the back of my head that the "Since You've Been Gone" kingmakers are the same people who put "My Humps" on the radio. Book fans wouldn't really let something slide like that.
Somehow I turned this into another attack on music we both like.
[TV and movies are kind of interesting, because the people who watch TV are sort of the opposite of the people who talk about TV. What are some of the TV shows people hate that you'd like to redeem? I really like America's Funniest Home Videos.]
I don't think you have to be a book snob. You like everything. In a lot of ways that's the opposite.
Art is communicative in nature
Is it weird that I think it isn't?
Shakespeare versus Dylan is unusual because Shakespeare wrote when plays were a low form of entertainment. My guess is that Shakespeare wouldn't have thought too much about what he wrote; he was putting out 2-3 plays a year, had a family, was an actor by day. There are examples in different plays for every motive he could have had. He might have been distinguished mostly by the psychology in his monologues; that seems like something personal enough.
My mom says the "I Hear Music" guy, in his second last show on Radio Two, finally admitted he thought Wagner was trying too hard to be important. He made a point of linking Wagner's mistakes to Hitler's mistakes.
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Says the Da Vinci Code. Says John Grisham books. Says the Shopaholic series. Etc. Etc. Etc. ad nauseum. Book bestsellers are either crap of this nature or the Atwood/McEwan etc. stuff which IS quality literature but is generally very conservative in style and taste. Truly interesting and engaging works of newer lit aren't often there. And also, Atwood kind of bores me, to be frank.
And let's not equate BSG with Star Trek. Two completely different beasts and it's not about coming in with low expectations. It's explicitly and intelligently (and most importantly NUANCED) a work about post-9/11 politics in America and the world, ethics, morality, religion, etc. And Gaiman's work in Sandman is not only stronger than all of his novels, but is a note-perfect meditation on the role fiction and stories play in defining and shaping what it means to be human bla bla bla. Not going to rant about them now, as I'm slightly intoxicated, but to explain these as "adequate" in genres with low expectations is condescending and wrong.
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BSG appeals because it's nuanced and is the kind of show where the 'bad guys' are beautiful and sexy and believe in God and a greater purpose and the 'good guys' are filthy and conflicted and make a hobby of fucking each other over and generally being assholes.
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