Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Off to Greener Pastures (i.e., Tumblr)

I've finally caught up with the times: the Blogger platform is played out. Apparently it's very 2007. I, too, am quite 2007. Hence the time lag.

Is Tumblr very 2013? I don't know. Maybe in three years I'll find out that it's quite 2010. In any case, PostLeaf is over there now.

I'm in the process of transferring some postleaf.blogspot content to postleaf.tumblr, and should have new stuff soon.

Blogger, it's been real. And virtual.

Monday, March 25, 2013

SoundLeaf (Phosphorescent, "Song for Zula")

How to make your listener be all, "I've heard this before, WHERE HAVE I HEARD THIS BEFORE... it sounds like that song, you know, the one I loved when I was in college, or maybe when I was in high school - the one with all the atmosphere and the... chord progression, and the quiet sense of majesty, and the synthesizers intertwining with the organic instruments to create a textured, gradually clarifying soundscape. Oh yeah, it sounds like 'With or Without You.'"



Monday, March 18, 2013

"Veronica Mars," Kickstarter, and Crowdfunding as Consumption

1

"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producers ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer."
- Adam Smith, economist

"I'm not going to conform to some consumer need. I believe people want to hear this kind of music, that people want to hear records that have a story. Or maybe they don't. I have no idea."
- Billie Joe Armstong, lead singer of Green Day

"I realize that people have an emotional reaction to Veronica Mars, and one that I'm grateful for, but we're trying to give good value for the money. We're asking you to pre-buy the products to prove to the studio that there can be money made. If they sold you the t-shirt and the download later, they're making profit then. No one cares that they're making profit then."
- Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars

"... reunions and resuscitations aren't just about adding new wrinkles to familiar characters or telling funny jokes. At heart, they're about satisfying the eternal human urge to undo an outcome that we believed to be wrong and unfair and that continues to depress and obsess us. ... So we join forces with like-minded depressive-obsessives and try to turn a negative into a positive, to swap out death with life. We don't just do it because we loved and respected the original thing, whatever it happened to be. We do it because some part of us wants to return to the time and place associated with it."
- Matt Zoller Seitz, critic at Vulture

2

This past Wednesday, the creators of the long-dead crime series Veronica Mars announced their intentions to make Veronica Mars: The Movie. But there was a catch. They had to raise two million bucks, or else Warner Brothers would refuse to greenlight the project. So they set up a page on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website, and asked Veronica Mars fans to contribute. By Wednesday evening, the dollar total of donations had reached two million; by Thursday evening, three million.

Predictably, there came a flood of online think pieces, most of them wondering, with varying degrees of delight or dismay, whether Kickstarter and Veronica Mars had just revolutionized the model for funding and promoting entertainment. I, for one, agree with HitFix's Alan Sepinwall: the VM campaign benefited from an unreproducible mixture of fans being well organized, actors being available, and crowdfunding being, for the moment, a novelty. The next time a late, beloved program (Terriers? Deadwood?) tries to crowdfund a feature, it almost certainly won't receive as much support.

So I would speculate that the sky is neither rising nor falling. It's changing color - slowly. And critics who say otherwise are probably just trying to raise their SEO profiles.

3

What interests me, however, is whether crowdfunding will or should change the behavior of pop-culture consumers.

Is it better to buy products or back projects? Out of my limited budget for DVDs, mp3s, books, and show tickets, how much should I set aside for the unrealized dreams of Internet-savvy artists? Am I willing to invest in a venture that might never come to fruition? Am I cool with lining the pockets of entertainment executives, who will surely scheme their way into a piece of the crowdfunding pie? And hey, shouldn't those executives, flush as they are with Bieber profits, be the ones fronting the cash and assuming the risk?

Lots of bright folks seem to think so. On Twitter the comedian Mike Birbiglia joked, "Someone's gotta help these 'Warner Brothers.' It's 2 brothers, right?" Making the same point, but more soberly, Chadwick Matlin tweeted, "Is Warner Bros., a huge conglomerate, not just outsourcing its fund-raising to the proletariat? Who gets the profits? Not us." Many of my favorite critics took a similar line.

So apparently if you ponied up for Veronica Mars: The Movie, you're a sucker. A wretched proletarian, helplessly enmeshed in Hollywood's ideological state apparatus. Sure, you may have been promised a t-shirt, or a DVD, or even an invitation to the premiere - but all you really did was let a bunch of rich scaredy-cats take advantage of your false consciousness.

Well, call me a sucker, because I plunked down thirty-five bucks for the VM Kickstarter, and I did so without hesitation. Worst of all, I still feel pretty good about it.

4

In its three beleaguered seasons on UPN and the CW, Veronica Mars was by no means the best thing on television. Created by Rob Thomas (who went on to produce the wonderful, short-lived Party Down) and starring Kristen Bell as an adolescent gumshoe, the show took place in a noirishly-lit simulacrum of southern California and followed a conventional case-of-the-week structure. As with most crime procedurals, some episodes worked better than others; there are only so many new iterations of the old formula. Plus, VM suffered from the maladies common to all financially unstable TV productions: a revolving-door policy for all but a few characters; a variety of dead-end subplots; and a flailing, sputtering, drowning final season.

Yet even when its head was barely above water, Veronica Mars was a joy to watch. Bell's blend of toughness and whimsy - so misused by the romcom industrial complex - sustained the show through its fallow periods. But unlike most of her hardboiled forebears, Veronica worked well with others. The primary crux of the show was her relaxed rapport with her private-eye father; the secondary crux, her cautious romance with a spiky-haired bad boy. To her scenes with Enrico Colantoni (the dad) and Jason Dohring (the love interest), Bell brought a special sweetness, a sense of wit and play. It was clear that she adored acting with them, and they with her.

So Veronica Mars's early cancellation in 2007 was upsetting not because its last season boded well for the future of the show, but because its two key relationships never got satisfyingly resolved. And there's nothing like a lack of 'ship closure to mobilize a fanbase. For the past six years, VM enthusiasts (or "marshmallows," as they style themselves) have been clamoring for a follow-up movie. They mailed 10,000 Mars Bars to CW headquarters. They wrote fan fiction. And they circulated petition after petition after petition.

Every now and then I checked in on the marshmallows, hoping vaguely that they would be heard, but knowing full well that no studio would go all-in for a Veronica Mars revival. I mean, the show did get canceled after three seasons. And it was on the CW, for chrissakes. The poor animal had died a natural death.

5

So here's what what I get for my $35 donation to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter:
  1. A digital copy of the film.
  2. A t-shirt.
  3. A PDF of the shooting script.
  4. Regular behind-the-scenes updates.
I'm most excited about the first reward. On iTunes you can download a movie for between $10 and $20. My local multiplex charges about the same for admission. So a digital copy of the VM movie, ready for at-home viewing within a few days of the theatrical release, has real value.

But this is largely beside the point. What I shelled out for, and already received, was an assurance that the film would be greenlit. Granted, I would have been more stoked if Warner Brothers had stepped up and paid for everything. But that wasn't going to happen, and I can understand why. Even now, after all of this publicity, Veronica Mars: The Movie probably won't be a hit; its audience will be zealous but relatively small. So I put down my $35 because I wanted to support a mainstream project that had no chance of earning mainstream funding - not because I thought I was feeding a starving artist, and not because I was unaware that WB suits were after a piece of my grad-student income (when are they not?). I gave my money willingly, knowingly, and with pleasure; I can't figure out why I should feel exploited.

So why didn't I donate to a more underground cause? To a poet who doesn't have health insurance? To a lovable grandmother seeking start-up capital for a cane business? After all, Kickstarter is meant to, you know, kick start underfunded careers, not to supplement already-lucrative ones.

Fair enough. But I would maintain that crowdfunding can serve the additional purpose of helping professionals continue a project of verified excellence. Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell churned out 64 episodes of Veronica Mars, most of which I enjoyed. I'm confident they can execute an entertaining feature-length film.

That said, I'm no crowdfunding utopian. I doubt that Kickstarter will transform the art-commerce dynamic, and even if it does, I don't think the little guys will be the main beneficiaries. So I mistrust the tech-friendly optimism of Amanda Fucking Palmer, a rocker who Kickstarted her way to $1.2 million, and who has become a huckster for the so-called "art of asking." If you've fallen on hard times, Palmer says, get intimate with your fans and invite them to help you: they will do so gladly. 

Never mind that Palmer got her actual "kick start" from Roadrunner Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. Never mind that the label spent years disseminating her image and her recordings. Never mind that, in Palmer's opinion, she earned her ardent fans all by her lonesome, and that therefore her experience is universally replicable and not merely fortunate.

Yes, Palmer comes across as self-righteous and disingenuous. But she's right about one thing: artists should feel free to ask their fans for support. And fans should feel free to say, "No, Amanda Fucking Palmer. You cannot sleep on my fucking couch."

6

The case of Amanda Fucking Palmer is further instructive in thinking through the potential consequences of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter. While burning through her $1.2 million, Palmer posted an account of her expenses. Wonder or wonders, she had treated herself to a bit of spending spree. $105,000 to make 7,000 CDs and thank-you cards. $250,000 for recording fees and band/staff/crew expenses. $300 for a photobook. Then, in September, she put out an ad asking for "professional-ish" musicians to play in her backing band at each stop on her tour. For free.

The American Federation of Musicians chastised her. Gawker ran an exposé. Steve Albini called her an "idiot." And Albini went on to say, with typical felicity of diction, that all of Palmer's asking and taking and using seemed "like a crazy moebius strip of waste."

Will the Veronica Mars story have the same bitter ending? Given that a mainstream film is far more difficult and costly to make than an indie album, and that over 50,000 people have now donated, I can only imagine how many contributors will eventually declare themselves dissatisfied. Maybe post-production will take longer than expected. Maybe the t-shirts will shrink in the wash. Maybe that lunatic who dropped $10,000 for a brief speaking role will show up stoned and get fired.

And maybe, most crucially, the marshmallows won't like the movie. Like many teen dramas before it (see: BuffyDawson's Creek, The O.C.), Veronica Mars floundered when its kids graduated from high school. A never-previously-mentioned local university had to be invented. All of the important characters had to be implausibly sent there. The show could no longer rely on the distinctive intensity of the high school setting: the shared schedule, the communal lunches, the vicious tribalism, the constant supervision.

In the upcoming movie, Veronica will be an adult, not a teenager doing a charming impression of an adult. So Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell will have to find a different angle on the VM world - and perhaps they will. Then again, they might go the nostalgia route, stuffing in too many characters, tying up too many loose ends, slipping in too many clever references to past glories. They might, in other words, make a piece of fan fiction. Which is exactly what the fan-fiction writers themselves wouldn't want. 

7

And this is where the filmmaker-filmgoer relationship gets sticky: the marshmallows might start behaving like aggrieved stockholders. They invested their hard-earned cash, dammit, and all they got was this turkey of a picture? Admittedly, I myself might get a little hacked off if Veronica Mars: The Movie turns out to be dreadful. But the reality is that I own nothing, and that I didn't pay the VM team to succeed; I paid them to try.

The entertainment consumer has always been subject to risk. As we grow accustomed to YouTube and iTunes and Pirate Bay, we forget that we used to buy LPs and CDs without having heard more than a radio single. Back in 2001, I pre-ordered Weezer's much-anticipated Green Album, expecting that it would recapture the magic of Pinkerton and the Blue Album. It didn't. It sounded like Jimmy Eat World. And I swore that I would never pre-order something again.

Fat chance. This May, I will take the train to the multiplex and watch Before Midnight, the sequel to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Directed by Richard Linklater and starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight concludes the eighteen-year-long saga of Jesse and Céline, Generation X's very own star-crossed lovers. My money is already spent, for all intents and purposes. There's no way I'm going to fail to see this film on opening day. And if Linklater had asked me for $200 to defray production costs, I would have fallen over myself trying to give him more.

Pop culture is usually disappointing, and always a waste of money. The value is in the hoping.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

ThoughtLeaf (Krista Comer)



"One power of the keyword 'west' is its ability to conflate the geopolitical entity and physical topography currently referred to as 'the American West' with matters of identity, style, and cultural belonging. 'Western-ness' is highly mobile. If the term typically invokes conventional forms of masculinity, a good deal of its social force and moral credibility owes to a suppressed but sustained dialogue with that 'other' West: 'Western civilization.' Together these connotations map flexible investments in both masculine individualism, including 'wild western' bohemianism, and Western civilization's grandest claims. Since the late eighteenth century, Western forms of cultural belonging and style have been mobilized in the United States in defense of nation, home, white supremacy, and empire."

"President Bush's everyday western regionalisms - his retreat to Crawford Ranch, his invocation of the mythical line at the Alamo to separate cowards from heroes in the 'war on terror,' his posting of old-western 'wanted' lists after 9/11 - [have] renarrated 'western' to justify multiple U.S. wars in defense of the values of 'Western civilization.'"

- Krista Comer, "West," Keywords for American Cultural Studies, pp. 238-39, 242



Saturday, March 9, 2013

Annotated SoundLeaf (pomDeter = Nine Inch Nails + Carly Rae Jepsen)

How to exploit the full potential of the mashup form.



Some context might help here.

"Head Like a Hole" surfaced nearly a quarter century ago, leading off Nine Inch Nails' now-classic album Pretty Hate Machine. NIN's industrial sound wasn't new; since the early eighties, underground groups like Ministry and Big Black had been exploring the connections between electronica and punk, experimenting with layers of abrasive synthesizers, guitars, and drum machines. But Trent Reznor, NIN's founder and sole songwriter, brought industrial rock to a mass audience.

In fact, Reznor became an icon for a certain type of disaffected teenager, the type who might enjoy shouting along with lyrics like these: "Head like a hole, / Black as your soul, / I'd rather die, / Than give you control." Over the years, Reznor's brand of melodramatic angst has proven durable; NIN still has a massive, fervid, self-reproducing following. Radiohead aside, I can't think of another contemporary band that gets taken so seriously by so many.



Enter Carly Rae Jepsen. A few years ago she placed third on Canadian Idol. She wears Zooey Deschanel bangs. She makes poppy pop records, with an extra dollop of pop. "Call Me Maybe" is the poppiest of them all, and last year, even in our fractured cultural world, it was damn near impossible to go a day without hearing those pixieish vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ons, those precise repetitions... those pixiesh vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ones, those... "Hey, I just met you, / And this is crazy..."



Pretty much everyone ended up annoyed.

So now, with the height of Carly Rae-mania several months behind us, a little-known DJ named pomDeter has slapped "Head Like a Hole"'s vocal track on top of "Call Me Maybe"'s instrumental track to create this brilliant mashup, "Call Me a Hole." Like much of Girl Talk's and The Hood Internet's best work, it yokes together the sacred and the profane, the hip and the unhip, the deep and the shallow, the eternal and the ephemeral - and it deconstructs the crap out of those binaries.

Trent Reznor's fans tend to think of "Head Like a Hole" as a subversive text, a middle finger to the mainstream. The same fans, especially the ones still trudging through the me-vs.-world morass of being an adolescent, are likely to view Carly Rae Jepsen as an unholy emblem of corporate pop culture. But what they forget, and what "Call Me a Hole" vividly demonstrates, is that while Reznor and Jepsen may belong to different teams, they play the same sport.

"Head Like a Hole" and "Call Me Maybe" (note the matching four-syllable titles) are both in 4/4 time, and both proceed in lockstep from verse to bridge to chorus. After the second chorus, both segue into a catchy middle eight (Reznor: "Bow down before the one you serve"; Jepsen: "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad"). And both make the most of an exaggerated quiet-loud dynamic, introducing each chorus with a blast of instrumentation: Reznor uses guitars; Jepsen, violins.

As pomDeter himself avowed, "They went together with little effort."

In short, "Call Me a Hole" takes what appear to be disjunctures and turns them into continuities. And since a lot of people are invested in the original disjunctures - rely on them, even, to maintain a sense of superiority - pomDeter's track has caused plenty of anxiety. Amid the many compliments and expressions of joy in "Call Me a Hole"'s SoundCloud comments section, there are insults, accusations, expletives, and cries of misery, a few of which I quote here with pleasure:
  • "I can't unhear this! HELP"
  • "To use a NIN track and fuck it up should be against the law"
  • "Call me closed-minded or whatever, but I find this a bit disrespectful [of] Trent Reznor/NIN"
  • "This is evil"
  • "THIS IS WRONG"
  • "This gave me cancer"
  • "Reznor never sounded so poppy"
  • "We're all going to hell, and this is the dance track that they'll play there"
  • "What an awful trend, but I'm sure all her fans are ecstatic and think they're cool now"
The last comment makes me especially happy. Too often musical taste is used as an instrument of cultural distinction and social aggression, particularly among teenagers. The NIN fans go in one cage, the Carly Rae fans in another. Now I'm not saying that "Call Me a Hole" will set anyone free, but it might remind the hip kids that their cage isn't necessarily better than the other, more crowded ones.

A wise SoundCloud commenter puts it this way: "Pop is pop is pop."

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Goats! Music! Goats and Music! I'm Losing My Marbles

People on YouTube like goats and the dumbass sounds they make. A couple of weeks ago, this video went viral:



I was hooked. I mean, who wouldn't be? They're goats! And they're silly and... human sounds... and... they're goats! Goats!

So it was inevitable, perhaps, that the Internet would drop into my lap the following lump of nonsense:



The goat is singing along with Usher! THE GOAT IS SINGING ALONG WITH USHER!

I need help. This is a cry for help.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

On Taking Offense

1

Seth MacFarlane is that dipshit you find in every frat house. You know the one. When he makes a sexist joke and someone, usually a woman, cries foul, he says something like, "Hey, lighten up. Can't you take a joke?"

This familiar type of exchange played out on a massive scale last Sunday night, when MacFarlane turned the Academy Awards into a festival of misogyny. All over the Internet, people took issue with his reliance on ye olde slut-shaming tropes. But they were outnumbered by those suggesting that MacFarlane's detractors lacked a sense of humor, or took offense too easily, or needed to "lighten up."

More than a few feminist writers threw up their hands. "I AM TIRED OF TRYING TO EXPLAIN THIS SHIT TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT," ranted Lindy West on Jezebel. The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum tweeted, "One of the annoying things about crap like MacF's Oscars is how it forces all of us female critics to pull on our Nurse Ratchet hats." Slate's Dana Stevens quickly seconded, "My white orthopedic shoes are killing me." I can only imagine.

It must be infuriating to have the same conversation over and over about sexism in popular culture; to be always on the defensive, always the Debbie Downer; to spell out in a million different ways a tricky idea that most people will ultimately reject: frivolous entertainment has a serious influence on social values.

It's not widely acknowledged that an Oscars telecast is capable of doing what literary scholar Jane Tompkins calls "cultural work." As Tompkins puts it in her classic Sensational Designs, popular culture should be understood as "providing society a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality[,] dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions."

So MacFarlane's "We've Seen Your Boobs" isn't just an inconsequential bit of mischief. It expresses and reinforces the harmful "social reality" that sex is a rigged competition in which "we" (the guys) win when "you" (the gals) shed clothing. MacFarlane doesn't ask us to question this dynamic, or to think about its structural similarity to rape. He just asks us to laugh at the spectacle of powerful women being shamed.

Yes, Charlize Theron and Naomi Watts were "in" on the joke. No, this doesn't let anyone off the hook.

2

The above is, I believe, a reasoned critique of MacFarlane's performance. Were I to publish it on, say, Slate or newyorker.com (or some other website with an actual audience), readers might sum up my stance by saying, "He seems offended."

Possibly true. But totally beside the point. When we focus on whether I'm offended, we stop talking about the intersections of culture and politics, and we start talking about me. My indignation. My sensitivity. And if I were a woman, we would suddenly be speaking in code about my hysteria. Woops.

On Oscar night, you didn't have to look hard to find repetitions of this pattern. When Troy Patterson, a colleague of Dana Stevens's at Slate, posted an article entitled "This Was the Best Oscars Ever," Twitter user @mostlymartha retorted, "What [Patterson] calls 'MacFarlane's edge,' I call a dull misogyny shitshow. What a disappointment, Troy."

Patterson replied, "I'm sorry to disappoint and, moreso, to hear that this trifling movieland ritual upset you." It should be noted that @mostlymartha hadn't said anything about being upset. So not only did Patterson imply that it was uncool to be serious about a "trifling" event, but he gratuitously brought up @mostlymartha's emotional condition. As if her disagreement could only be a manifestation of distress.

It was a smarmy move, and she wasted no time putting Patterson on blast. Predictably, he panic-moonwalked away from his initial position. "The issues you are concerned about are serious, but the Oscars are trifling, totally, year after year." "I support your right to be upset." "Oscars = frivolous. Thinking rigorously about frivolity = serious business."

I agree, more or less, with the last sentiment. But why keep insisting that the Oscars are silly, if not to insinuate that soberly critiquing them is also silly? And why keep referring to @mostlymartha's feelings, if not to portray her views as irrational? Clever as he is, Patterson dug his own grave here. He could have had a debate about cultural politics; instead, he had one about private emotions.

So maybe I should put it this way: it doesn't matter whether I took offense to Seth MacFarlane's Academy Awards. But what might matter, in a small way, is the habit of thinking critically about the connections between entertainment and society. And I maintain (not feel) that MacFarlane's jokes, frivolous as they were, made our social world a little less hospitable, a little less wise, and a little less just.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

ThoughtLeaf (Seth D. Michaels)



"The song, the reaction shots, and Seth MacFarlane's general attitude are all based on a commonplace and awful trope: that sex is a contest, and that men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It's an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.

"MacFarlane thinks if he has seen a woman's breasts, he has won and she has lost, and he is now entitled to gloat about it... Even if your character is naked because she's being raped, it still amounts to a victory for Seth MacFarlane to have seen your breasts.

"MacFarlane presents the whole skit as something he shouldn't do, which makes it even worse, because he wants to get credit for the cleverness of his idea while also pretending it is beneath him. Which is completely candy-ass and cowardly.

"The sexuality-as-contest-between-men-and-women thing is bubbling underneath so much that is awful: rape culture, workplace harassment, slut-shaming, abuse-themed porn, pick-up artist culture, etc., etc. It sets aside women as a separate thing from a person, and makes them into an object that is 'ruined' by sex or nudity.

"In a culture with a healthy attitude about sex and sexuality, MacFarlane's song would have no sting at all, because nudity in film would be a completely different sort of animal... [T]here wouldn't be shame associated with having been naked on screen...

"We don't, yet, live in that culture."

- Seth D. Michaels, "The Awful Gender Politics of 'We Saw Your Boobs'" (2013)

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

SoundLeaf (José James)

How to get your D'Angelo fix while D'Angelo himself continues to crumble under the pressure of following up that masterpiece he made 13 years ago.
 

Sunday, February 24, 2013

American Films and the Tales They Choose to Tell

1

"[The author's] very choice of what he tells will betray him to the reader. He chooses to tell the tale of Odysseus rather than that of Circe or Polyphemus. He chooses to tell the cheerful tale of Monna and Federigo rather than the pathetic account of Monna's husband and son. He chooses to tell the story of Emma Bovary rather than the potentially heroic tale of Dr. Larivière. The author's voice is a passionately revealed in the decision to write the Odyssey, "The Falcon," or Madame Bovary as it is in the most obtrusive direct comment of the kind employed by Fielding, Dickens, or George Eliot. Everything he shows will serve to tell; the line between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one.

"In short, the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it... [We] must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear."

- Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961, rev. 1983), p. 20

2

Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at tonight's Academy Awards, three claim to depict historical events. One is about an American outwitting a bunch of scary Muslims; another is about an American interrogating and outwitting a bunch of scary Muslims, then spearheading an operation to kill one very scary Muslim; and a third is about a white American collaborating with several other white Americans to liberate a bunch of noble, deferential African Americans.

All three movies are expertly written, acted, and directed; one of them will likely win the big prize tonight. (Argo. It's going to be Argo. Or Lincoln? Not Zero Dark Thirty, I think.)

But to the credit of the American critical community, these history-based Best Picture nominees have all been held to account for their political implications. Smart critics and dumb politicians alike have censured Zero Dark Thirty for its insinuation that torture led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden's courier. In a compelling New York Times editorial, Northwestern history professor Kate Masur objected to Lincoln's relegation of black characters to the political periphery. On Slate, Kevin B. Lee slammed Argo for reimagining the disastrous Iran hostage crisis as "a mere backdrop" to the glorious rescue of six American diplomats.

Among the majority of filmmakers and filmgoers, however, these politicized critiques have not gone over well. First, people have been playing the old "it's a movie, not a documentary" card. Disguised as a knowing acceptance of Hollywood's tendency to fabulate, this argument glosses over the fact that inaccurate representations of historical events have real social consequences. When Zero Dark Thirty depicts a torture victim divulging key intelligence, it's not just falsifying a detail for the sake of dramatic unity. It's contributing to the public perception that torture, while ghastly, is effective.

Granted, this pragmatist pro-torture stance is one that many people (read: awful people) agree with, and one that a work of art has every right to adopt. Equally, critics have the right, even the duty, to evaluate movies on political grounds. So far, though, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the creators of Zero Dark Thirty, have refused to concede that their film takes any partisan position. Sometimes they claim artistic license. Other times, journalistic objectivity. Anything to evade responsibility for the real work that Zero Dark Thirty does in the real world.

3

Lately I've become aware of a second mode of thinking adopted by those who dislike politicized film criticism: "Review the movie you saw," they say, "not the movie you wanted to see." Variations on this bromide pervade the comments section below Kevin B. Lee's anti-Argo piece:
"Critique the film based on the filmmaker's goals, not your cinematic wish list." 
"Don't criticize a movie for not being about what you think it should be about. That's not how it works." 
"So, Argo is a fraud because Kevin B. Lee would like it to be an entirely different movie. Great argument!" 
"The worst kind of movie review is the one that says, 'You made the wrong movie! THIS is what your movie SHOULD have been about!' If you want that movie, go make it yourself." 
"Do we have to judge films on what they could have and should have been?"
To answer the last commenter's question: Yes! We definitely should judge films against what they could have and should have been. Les Misèrables sucked. It could have and should have been a different, better film.

But a deeper fallacy underlies the comments on Lee's article, and that is the unwillingness to criticize the premise of a narrative, the "what it's about." Who says we aren't allowed to find fault with an artist's initial, foundational choice of tale? As Wayne Booth reminds us in The Rhetoric of Fiction, when an author decides to tell one story and not another, he takes a significant rhetorical position.

To push this thought further (and into what would be uncomfortable territory for Booth himself), I would contend that an author's choice of tale powerfully determines the ultimate political meaning of his work. Bigelow and Boal chose to depict the successful mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden, not the failed attempt to capture him during the Battle of Tora Bora. Tony Kushner and Steven Speilberg chose to make a film about white politicians negotiating and passing the 13th Amendement, and in so doing, they chose not to make a film about black abolitionists bringing about their own emancipation. (Which, to a substantial degree, they did.)

Most egregiously of all, Ben Affleck not only decided to tell the story of American triumph over Iranian perfidy, but also washed, polished, and waxed the historical record to render the Americans more triumphant and the Iranians more perfidious. Midway through Argo, the stranded American diplomats visit a bazaar in Tehran and barely escape getting their asses kicked by a mob of inexplicably furious Iranians. Didn't happen. Whole-cloth invention. The film also fabricates nearly all of the dramatic complications in the climactic airport scene. We see menacing Iranians at the passport counter, menacing Iranians at the gate, menacing Iranians forcing their way into air traffic control, menacing Iranians piling into a truck with their guns and chasing the plane down the runway. No such Iranians existed. In reality, the Americans glided through the airport without arousing suspicion.

So in addition to focusing on the one U.S. victory in the entire 1979 hostage crisis, Argo finds a number of dishonest ways to emphasize the heroism of the Americans and the malevolence of the Iranians. Perhaps after seeing an early cut of the film and sensing this bias, Affleck tacked on an introductory voice-over (not to be found in Chris Terrio's original screenplay) that clarifies how U.S. meddling in Iran contributed to the instability that, in turn, led to the Islamic Revolution and the storming of the U.S. Embassy. But this brief moment of anti-imperialist lip service fails to shift the film's overall sympathies and politics. The calm, rational C.I.A. operative is still our hero; the fiery, irrational Muslims are still our enemies; and at every turn we are encouraged to feel that our diplomats-in-distress must escape to a safer, whiter part of the world... or else.

This is the tale Affleck chose to tell.

4

So why should we hesitate to hold him responsible? In a New Yorker blog entry, Nicholas Thompson, one of the editors of the Wired article that inspired Affleck's movie, lamely asserts that "none of Argo's fibs really matter."
They don't change the way we think about history or politics. They don't alter the emotional truth of the story.
Wait, the demonization of Iranian revolutionaries doesn't change the way we think about history or politics? The bullshit sensationalism in the getaway scene doesn't alter the emotional truth of the story? I don't know why Thompson would so casually dismiss these possibilities. Maybe Argo insulates itself from serious critique with its larky tone, its self-deprecating Hollywood satire, and the relative obscurity of its historical subject. But light entertainment has always done heavy ideological lifting. We shouldn't let Argo slip under our analytical radar just because it's less po-faced than Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty.

Nor should we stop being critics as soon as we find ourselves questioning a filmmaker's choice of what to tell. Some stories, by their very nature, offer a partial, naïve vision of the world. And one of these stories is going to win Best Picture tonight.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Literary Rejection

When I worked for ZYZZYVA between 2007 and 2009, I spent hours sorting through the slush pile, skimming cover letters, and smirking at resumes. I would trash everything but the manuscripts and the SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes).

On my desk, within reach of my left hand, would be a stack of freshly copied rejection letters. I would date-stamp one of these and include it with each manuscript/SASE pair. Gradually I would build a stack of submissions, sometimes hundreds, 99% of which would never get close to being published.

Howard Junker, the founder and now-former editor of ZYZZYVA, would look at every last essay, short story, free-verse poem, and "excerpt from my unpublished novel." Most of the time he would read the first paragraph or stanza, stuff the manuscript and rejection letter into the SASE, and toss the package into the outgoing mail. Sometimes he would persevere through a whole piece, then dispose of it in the same manner. Every now and then, a submission would survive. There it would sit, palpitant with relief, on the office futon.

Ultimately it, too, would probably be rejected.

In an industry full of unpaid slush-pile interns, Howard's routine was an extraordinary display of editorial diligence. Nevertheless, he would occasionally catch flak for refusing to alter his standard rejection letter, with its standard apology "for not offering comments or suggestions," and its standard handwritten (and repeatedly photocopied) sign-off: "Onward!"

("As if we're all on some glorious boat ride to the tropics, sailing through a storm.")

But I, for one, liked Howard's form letter. It was kind ("Do not be discouraged by this or any other momentary setback") yet blunt ("I don't think a few quick remarks would really help"), and unmistakably Junkerian in tone. Why change it?

Besides, I'm not sure how writers would feel if they actually received personalized rejections.

I've often had this thought during the past few weeks, as I've been plowing through microfilm of a nineteenth-century periodical called the Golden Era. Like ZYZZYVA, the Era was based in San Francisco and devoted to west-coast literature. In a weekly column entitled "To Our Correspondents," the editors would publish feedback to recent submissions. Usually they offered polite encouragement. Sometimes, though, they wrote things like this:
Dobbs: There are only two objections to your communication; one, that it is too lengthy - the other, that it is sadly devoid of all manner of interest.
Well, then. Onward?

Saturday, February 16, 2013

SoundLeaf (Kurt Vile)

How to spend nine minutes on a Saturday morning.



Monday, February 11, 2013

50 Years After the Demise of John Lennon's Vocal Cords

On February 11, 1963, during one of the coldest winters anyone could remember, The Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios in St. John's Wood, London, to record a batch of filler tunes for their first album. They had spent the winter touring England with an unremarkable pop singer named Helen Shapiro. Their second single, "Please Please Me," had just become their first major hit, sneaking into the British top twenty. It would rocket to number one by the end of February. Almost exactly a year later, the Fab Four would land in New York and find themselves beset by a mob of crazed Americans.

But on that February afternoon in 1963, The Beatles went to work like an ordinary pop group. Guided by producer George Martin, they bashed out their tunes briskly, using as few takes as possible. By the end of the day they had committed 11 songs to tape. (In contrast, the 13 tracks of 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took 129 days to record.)

Four of the 11 were Lennon-McCartney originals; the rest were covers repurposed from the band's well-honed live act. The second number they played, "I Saw Her Standing There," was a stunner. A cheeky countdown ("One, two, three, FAW!") introduces a tight Merseybeat groove, driven by Paul McCartney's propulsive bass and John Lennon's bluesy rhythm guitar. The first couplet is sung with an audible leer by McCartney: "Well, she was just seventeen, / You know what I mean." Mm hm, I do. Rock-n-roll.

But where "I Saw Here Standing There" was slyly risqué, the final track The Beatles recorded on February 11 was a goddamn lust-bomb.

Shredded by a heavy cold and a marathon session of tuneful yelling, Lennon's vocal cords were not long for the world. "Every time I swallowed," he later said, "it felt like sandpaper." But 11 PM was approaching, and the group had yet to lay down its most demanding song, a cover of an R&B hit called "Twist and Shout." Recorded in 1962 by The Isley Brothers as a "La Bamba"-style dance number, "Twist and Shout" was reworked by The Beatles into a balls-to-the-wall rager - one that required an ecstatic, throat-ripping lead vocal.

So after a glass of milk, Lennon strapped on his Rickenbacker 325, stood shirtless at the head of the band, and delivered the most thrilling rock performance I've ever heard.



Holy mackerel, that's exciting. Happy 50th deathiversary, John Lennon's vocal cords; you did God's (or perhaps Aphrodite's) work.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

My Top 5 Songs of 2013

This post, which runs down my five favorite songs of 2012, might come as an anticlimax, given that I've spent the past month and a half intermittently, painstakingly descending from #13 to #6. (I've been busy lately.) But today is February 10, the Grammys are about to begin, and it's time to move on.

So.

#5: Killer Mike, "Reagan"

Too often, it seems to me, the rage in hip-hop is directed at rival MCs rather than, say, the War on Drugs. Or mass incarceration. Or American imperialism. Or the legacy of Reaganomics.

There's plenty of important stuff to be angry about.

Thank goodness, then, for Killer Mike, whose bracing blend of straight talk, unhinged paranoia, social analysis, and righteous anger you will not be seeing on stage at the Staples Center tonight.



"They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror, / But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever."

#4: Chairlift, "I Belong in Your Arms"

Sweetness and sunlight, open hearts and banana splits. The aesthetic antithesis of Killer Mike's "Reagan." The aural equivalent of the film Amelie. Lyrics consisting of dadaist joy-bursts. Octave jumps! Synthesizers! The 80s! Just the slightest undercurrent of sadness!

All the girls wear polka-dot dresses, and all the boys are uninhibited by masculine norms!

I want to live in this song, even at the risk of turning into a twee lunatic.



"Because the world goes on without us, / Doesn't matter what we do-o-o. / All silhouettes with no regrets, / When I'm melting into you."

#3: Dum Dum Girls, "Lord Knows"

When music critics have no idea what's going on, they use the word "charisma." Why did the Beatles send young concert-goers into hysterics? They played with charisma. What made Michael Jackson different from every other pop star? He danced and sang more charismatically.

And why does "Lord Knows," essentially a pastiche of The Pretenders and "Crimson & Clover," seem unique? Why is it so moving? So much better than anything else by the otherwise unremarkable Dum Dum Girls?

There's something about the vocal. It's really, really....

(Charismatic.)



"I want to live a pure life, / I'd say that it's about time."

#2: Frank Ocean, "Thinkin Bout You"

Yeah, Mumford & Sons (ruthlessly inauthentic as they are) will likely win the Grammy for Best Album tonight. But Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE remains the best loved, or at least the most intensely loved, record of 2012, combining mass and critical appeal in a way that only Kanye West's finest albums have recently matched.

Lead single "Thinkin Bout You" highlights Ocean's most underrated strength: his facility with melody. Listen, for instance, to how he contrasts the circular, low-register verse with the vertical, falsetto chorus. The effect is one of a private, obsessive anxiety releasing into a straightforward ache.

And then you arrive at the bridge. 2:12. Whoa.

(The nonsensical music video I've embedded below features an alternate version of the song. It's the best I could find in the free, legal regions of the Internet.)



"We'll go down this road / Till it turns from color to black and white."

#1: Japandroids, "The House That Heaven Built"

Hey bro, you play air drums. I'll play air guitar. We'll have the BEST F#@$ING TIME EVER.



"And if they try to slow you down, / Tell 'em all to go to hell."

Monday, February 4, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #6 (Islands, "This Is Not a Song")

There I was, all ready to despise Islands.

In 2006, the Canadian band had a minor indie hit with "Rough Gem," a shapeshifting number with a peppy riff and a kitchen-sink aesthetic. It got passed around the nascent mp3 blogosphere, placed on a few best-of lists, and developed into a rousing concert closer.

But unlike their fellow montréalais Arcade Fire, who also broke through in the mid-aughts, Islands were not ready to be adored. Their music began to take on a willful inscrutability. Band members quit, returned, and quit again. And a few years ago, frontman Nicholas Thorburn announced in concert that he would henceforth refuse to sing "Rough Gem."

Granted, he was being partly, perhaps mostly, tongue-in-cheek. But it's clear that he was also being a bit of an asshole:
This next song we're about to do - it's an old song, and it's a song we all collectively don't like at all. And I think we're gonna retire it tonight... The song is called "Rough Gem." [Crowd cheers.] You shouldn't applaud, 'cause it's a shitty song... I'm not gonna sing it, 'cause I hate this fucking song so much. And here's how much I hate this song. I puked twice up there and then down there. Didn't tell anybody about it. 'Cause I wanted you to smell it. And now I think the whole venue smells like puke 'cause I didn't clean it up and didn't tell anybody. And then someone jerked off 'cause it smells like cum, so that helps. And then I dropped my phone in the toilet, which was cool. I don't know how that relates to this, but I just thought I'd tell you that. Anyway, so I'm not gonna sing "Rough Gem" tonight...
Congratulations, dude. You're better than "Rough Gem." What's more, you're better than anyone who enjoys "Rough Gem," including and especially your fans. You, my friend, are the greatest hipster of all time.

*          *          *

All in all, I would have loved to have kept hating Islands, to have treasured them as my personal paragon of indie insufferability. But, damn it all, in the past six years Nicholas Thorburn has learned a thing or two about songwriting.

On 2012's underappreciated A Sleep and a Forgetting, he uses a minimal backdrop of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Gone are the addled synthesizers, the jolting shifts in tempo, the GarageBand trickery. Vocals, lyrics, and melodies take center stage. And they're all stunningly well crafted.

The album's second track, "This Is Not a Song," rides a stately chord progression to violin-section solo straight out of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts." It's a simple, gorgeous ballad - one that Islands should never give up singing.



"If this is just a song, / Then why-y-y-y-y do I fi-i-i-i-ind it so hard... to move on."

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #7 (Chris Malinchak, "So Good to Me")

Contentment is not among pop music's preferred topics. Ever since the agitation of rhythm-and-blues combined with the anguish of country-and-western and exploded into rock-and-roll, popular songs have thrived on the extremes of adolescent emotion: heartbreak, jealousy, ecstasy.

"You make me so lonely, baby, / I get so lonely, / I get so lonely I could die." "Maybellene, why can't you be true? / Why can't you be true? / You've started back doing the things you used to do." "It's such a feeling that my love / - I can't hide! I can't hide! I can't hide!"

While all of this Sturm und Drang is terrifically exciting, it begs the question: What comes afterward? What happens when you're no longer lonely, when Maybellene cleans up her act and the two of you find yourselves chilling on the sofa, holding hands? Does pop music collapse under the pressure of your tranquility?

Chris Malinchak's "So Good to Me" seems to say no, it doesn't have to. Mellow yet giddy, matching Balearic synthesizers with some Marvin Gaye vocal snippets, this track is about the gratitude one feels for a sustained contentment. It finds glory in maturity. It is the sound of an endlessly re-listenable love.



"Every sky would be blue, / Long as you're lovin' me, / Lovin' me."

Monday, January 7, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #8 (Kacey Musgraves, "Merry Go 'Round")

There's a lot to like about this sigh of a country song: the push and pull of the backing arrangement; the elegantly elongated chord progression in the chorus ("where it stops, nobody knows"); the conversational yet tuneful vocal; the revisionist nursery rhyme that serves as an outro, anchoring what could have been a drifty tune; and above all, the understatement of the whole affair, the refusal to go big and cheesy, when going big and cheesy must have been terribly tempting.

But in "Merry Go 'Round," the debut single from Kacey Musgraves (who's too talented and pretty to remain obscure for long), the lyrics are the main attraction. Rather than paying obeisance to small-town mythology, as every Nashville newcomer seemingly must, Musgraves says stuff like, "And it don't matter if you don't believe, / Come Sunday morning, you best be there in the front row like you're supposed to." Yeah, it's not exactly a Sinclair Lewis-style polemic. But in mainstream country, you hardly ever hear skepticism toward God and community, much less from an ingenue.

Bracing as it is, "Merry Go 'Round" also tells a lived-in, empathetic story about a place and an ethos. Particularly moving is the chorus:
Mama's hooked on Mary Kay,
Brother's hooked on Mary Jane,
Daddy's hooked on Mary, two doors down.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
We get bored, so we get married,
And just like dust, we settle in this town.
On this broken merry go 'round
And 'round and 'round we go,
Where it stops, nobody knows.
All of this punning on "Mary," "married," and "merry" might seem facile at first. But it turns out to be more than cleverness; the shared phonemes represent a shared disease: a helpless, mechanical repetition. Mother, brother, father, and singer (sister?) are trapped on the same Mary/married/merry go 'round. And ever so delicately, the circles sketched by the piano and the banjo suggest the same thing.



"Ain't what you want, it's what you know, / Just happy in the shoes you're wearin', / Same checks we're always cashin' to buy a little more distraction."

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #9 (Solange, "Losing You")

A few years back, Solange Knowles, kid sister of Beyoncé, recorded one of the most underrated songs of the young millennium. Co-authored by soul specialist Cee-Lo Green, "Sandcastle Disco" coasts on a shuffling beat and a relaxed vocal, then punches the accelerator into an ecstatic, girl-group chorus: "Bay-b-b-b-bay-bay, don't blow me away!" It's pure Motown, a 21st-century answer to "You Can't Hurry Love."

With this year's "Losing You," Solange goes both more current and more mainstream, exploring the downtempo aesthetic preferred by many of today's R&B artists. The ambivalent lyric, alternating between entreaties ("Just treat me good baby and I'll give you the rest of me") and threats ("I'm not the one you should be making your enemy"), wouldn't seem out of place on a Drake track. And yet something of Solange's predilection for vintage party music remains in the song's jubilant, Family Stone-like beat.

Despair and self-assurance, brooding and boogying: it's this emotional and textural complexity that, in a year full of remarkable R&B singles (see: Usher's "Climax," Miguel's "Adorn," and my soon-to-be-revealed #2 song of 2012), sets "Losing You" apart.



"I don't know why I fight it, clearly we are through. / Tell me the truth boy, am I losing you for-eh-eh-ver?"

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #10 (The Mountain Goats, "Harlem Roulette")

John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, is often called a poet. While he deserves the compliment implied by that label, his talents have more in common with those of a short-story writer.

Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.

As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?

And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.



"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."