January 2001 Archives
The urge to complain about Some Complaining About Complaining
The king of the post-ironicists, Dave Eggers, has been holding an email conversation on his website this week all about how we really should stop criticising people and start encouraging artists. It's called Some Complaining About Complaining, and so far there are 1, 2, 3 sections; I think more are forthcoming. It's a very long conversation, which I would recommend you read,
and a short quote can't really do justice to its breadth or its general
flavour. All the same, here's one entry from Eggers:
I've been in LA this week, and as horrible as it was staying on Sunset, I do really like the city's enthusiasm for just about everything, every stupid ugly cheap thing. I like that they get excited about making TV shows. That they want to make things, and make them quickly, and then make more things, and reach people, and make them laugh or cry or whatever. It's nice ñ it's jumpy and desperate in a healthy and wide-eyed sort of way. They obviously fear death, and this is good.
Critics in general (and, it must be said, the interlocutors do not
exempt themselves) are, well, criticised for being mean about artists,
be they pop stars or writers or whatever. It's silly dismissing large
chunks of Bob Dylan's oeuvre, we're told; Norman Mailer embarrasses
himself when he pans Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full; liberals should
stop carping on about where Michael Moore (Roger and Me) sends
his kids to school.
My friend Matthew Rose attuned me to this sort of thinking back
in December, when he made some very unflattering noises about the
New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire, who had just devoted
a column to criticising the New Yorker's Anthony Lane. Whether
Cheshire was right or wrong was beside the point, Matthew said: film
critics have much more important things to do than indulge in public
infighting between each other.
Now, I'm sure I'm nowhere near being on the McSweeney's radar screen,
but I felt as though the dialogue on the website was aimed straight
at me.
Twice in the past few days I've penned long screeds tearing apart
the design of certain websites; follow this link to my "Dancer in the
Dark" piece and you can see me in the same polemical voice
taking apart Jonathan Foreman's review of Lars von Trier's latest.
Furthermore, I'm generally a big fan of negative criticism. Anthony
Lane, for instance, is never better than when he's panning a film:
his Independent on Sunday review of Sammy And Rosie Get
Laid remains, in my mind, the best and funniest film review I've
ever read. Or consider Clive James's review of Judith Krantz's Princess
Daisy.
So my initial reaction was to try to pick holes in the arguments.
One thing missing from the McSweeney's debate so far, for instance,
is to be any consideration of criticism as an artform in itself, something
in which quality and artistry can inhere every bit as much as it can
in a novel or a film. I subscribe to the New York Review of Books
not because I want to know which books are good and which bad, but
because the quality of the writing in the Review is so high
in itself. And if criticism itself is raised to the level of an artform,
any imperative not to criticise art would apply equally to negative
criticism.
There's also a certain element of hypocrisy in what Eggers writes.
He's just as guilty of putting people down as any of us: consider
this from his website.
Speaking of messes, we would like to invite readers to visit Slate.com, because your McSweeney's Representative last week did a Diary on that site, and the reaction to it -- see "The Fray" -- provides for much fun. Why? Well, see, in a sort of running theme of the diary, the diarist muses aloud about why there has not, to date, been someone courageous enough to produce an all-black remake of The Wizard of Oz.Eggers admits he's failed to live up to his new high standards in the past, of course, although this is the relatively recent past. But what he did in this instance was more than just laugh at people: it was he who incited those people to do the laughable thing in the first place. It's tantamount to asking an entire room to sing, and then having fun at the expense of those who are tone deaf.
Yes. Well.
It seems there are a number of people out there, reading Slate, who are aware that there already is an all-black Wizard of Oz. And some of them -- including one frequent (though, thus far unsuccessful) submittor to McSweeney's -- were not happy that the diarist was seemingly unaware of this. Go see and have yourself some fun. You deserve some fun, with how hard you work and all.
But what's really important here is not whether Dave Eggers is a
perfect human being or not; it's whether we (and, more immediately,
I) have been corrupted to the point where there's more fun to be had
in negative
criticism than there is in positive appreciation.
For all my sarcastic tendencies, people often make fun of my positive
hyperbole, telling me that not everybody in my orbit can be the most
fabulous person I know, that not every movie I've seen can be the
best film ever made. Presumably, the New Eggers Philosophy wouldn't
mind that tendency at all: better to wax lyrical about how Breaking
the Waves reignited my faith in cinema than to snipe about the
shortcomngs of Three Kings.
But I have a feeling that no one holds only positive strongly-held
opinions. If we're to have a healthy intellectual life, it's better
that artists grow thick skins than that critics self-censor. I'm not
saying that good criticism is a necessary condition for good art,
although I'm partial to that argument. What I am saying is that good
criticism is worthy in and of itself, and shouldn't be circumscribed
by exhortations to civility.
If, Mr Eggers, that is, you don't mind me saying so.
Posted by Felix at 2:11 EST | Comments (2)
Alex Ross on John Adams
In the latest issue of the New Yorker, the magazine's music critic
Alex Ross has a profile of John Adams. That, in itself, is no great
surprise, and in fact the profile tells us little new about the composer.
The quality of the writing, though, is very high indeed, much higher
than most of Ross's work for the magazine.
So in the fashion, perhaps, of Victorian commonplace books, I'm
going to copy out a couple of my favourite passages here.
It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object ñ a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting ñ but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form ñ so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, "Jazz is America's classical music." To make the counterargument that America's classical music is America's classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost.
There's some great stuff here. "Cerebral" ñ love that word. "You have
to be possibly a little mad." And that lovely final sentence, which
isn't actually the final sentence of the paragraph. Ross ends it with
the assertion that "In such a climate, composers easily become embittered."
A little bit weird, that, considering that he goes on to detail how
minimalism "reversed the trend toward the marginalization of the American
composer," how "America's classical music, then, is alive and well,"
with "a huge new audience for contemporary music," and how "Adams
is one of the very few American composers who receive a comfortable
income from commissions and royalties." (Well, Mr Ross, you're the
reporter, why don't you tell us what a "comfortable income" is? Presumably
this has been fact-checked; I don't like the way that there seems
to be a conspiracy between Ross and Adams to prevent us from gauging
for ourselves just how under- or over-valued the composer is, financially.)
But never mind the bricks and mortar, check out the colour:
Adams was something of a child prodigy. He wrote music, played the clarinet, and, on accasion, conducted the local orchestra, which was sponsored by the New Hampshire State Mental Hospital. He had to cope with the fact that the hospital patients who played in the group sometimes improvised freely during the performance. When he was thirteen, the orchestra presented his Suite for String Orchestra, and he became the talk of the village. At this time, he was listening to little twentieth-century music, although he did fall under the spell of Sibelius. "I was used to seeing snow and pine trees in New Hampshire," he explained. "When I went into the record store, I bought albums with snow and pine trees on them. They were all Sibelius." Adams has takn on many other influences with the passing years, but he remains loyal to this early one; echoes of Sibelius's slowly evolving musical landscapes can be heard in all his major orchestral works.
It's a very ambitious paragraph, moving as it does from the child
prodigy to the precocious young composer, back to the almost unbelievably
naive child, and closing with a general musical observation. My favourite
bit is the way he jumps from Sibelius to a completely unrelated quote
about New Hampshire's winter flora, and then manages to tie it up
very elegantly. A bit like John Adams's own music, in a way. Again,
though, I could probably have done without the final sentence.
Still, there's one more great paragraph yet to come, which has great
colour (John Adams as forklift operator!), fantastic locations ("the
Arboretum in Golden Gate Park"), and a lovely ending:
By 1972, Adams had had enough of East Coast musical politics, and he drove to San Francisco in a Volkswagen Beetle. After working for a year as a forklift operator on the Oakland waterfront, he took a low-paying job at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as a jack-of-all-trades instructor. He had been studying the writings of John Cage and began organizing elaborately anarchic Cagean happenings. For one piece, "lo-fi," he and his students assumed various positions around the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and played 78-r.p.m. records that had turned up in Goodwill stores. This activity proved no more satisfying than the highbrow work that he had done at Harvard. In an autobiographical essay, he wrote that "the social aspect of these events was piquant, and the post-concert parties were always memorable, but the musical payoff always seemed elite.' I began to notice that often after an avant-garde event I would drive home alone to my cottage on the beach, lock the door, and, like a closet tippler, end the evening deep in a Beethoven quartet."
Posted by Felix at 2:14 EST | Comments (0)
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