Tag Archives: Noah

Criticism Before Art; Lizards Riding Pendulums

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I’m probably overly pleased with this comment from the ongoing theory vs. art debate…but, hey, it’s my blog, and I will highlight it if I want to:

In terms of instinct…I sort of said this before, but…I don’t think the kind of instinct you’re talking about in terms of art is the same as the general understanding of the word instinct. That is, it’s not the same as the instinct which makes a lizard bask in the sun, or a bee go to a particular flower. Those are instincts that are outside of language; they’re innate.

Making art though isn’t instinctual. It’s learned. And what’s good and bad in art isn’t instinctual either. It’s part of a communal or social agreement or process. Art is like language; it’s a form of communication, which makes it shared, not isolated. That’s what Hauerwas is talking about when he says imagination is a communal project. It exists within a society, and that society gives it meaning (and, arguably, vice versa.)

When I make art (whether poetry, art, criticism, or whatever) it’s obviously something of a mysterious process. Any thinking is, because we don’t know ourselves — in large part because so much of ourselves are other people. In that vein, I’d argue that the praxis of art making is itself infused with ideas; what you create, how you create is, what you think is good and what you think is bad, is all dependent on a conversation with other artists, with other critics, with ideas and arguments. Art is made out of other art, the standards of art come from other art, and that making and those standards are a discussion.

My problem with making that into a shorthand called “instinct” isn’t that it’s untheoretical. As I noted before (and as Bert did), I don’t really know that artists necessarily benefit from reading theory. But…making art into instinct makes art seem like a lizard sunning itself, or a person urinating. Art’s not a natural process like that. It’s a social thing and a cultural thing. Which means that art is never one voice; it’s many different voices. Criticism isn’t an outside thing that takes away from praxis; criticism is praxis, and vice versa. Thought and intellect are what art is made of, just as they’re what people are made of, to the extent that people aren’t just animals (of course, people *are* animals too…but art is not the animal part.)

I mean…it’s possible that I’m misunderstanding you and that you in fact agree with all of that. But when you appeal to temperament or instinct, it seems to me like you’re trying to deny the social and communal aspects of art. The artist is alone with her instinct, creating a thing of beauty which is beyond analysis. Humans do arguably create things like that — they’re called children. And despite the artful comparisons of metaphor, art isn’t children.

The point is, when you say that without instinct art is nothing…that’s an aesthetic opinion, which one can agree or disagree with. But without intellect without language, there literally can’t be art. In that sense, criticism, or language about art, precedes art itself.

And, just to make this a little less solipsistic…here’s Bert Stabler talking about radical and conservative art.

Well, we just have, at bottom, a “conservative” and a “radical” stance. Zizek of course privileges the radical, but I don’t, out of hand. Franklin and Alex see an old order, a natural harmony, an organic tradition that surpassed language, invaded and overturned by an alien force, a new regime of arbitrary artificial homogeneity. Caro and Nate (and to an extent Noah and I) are agitating on behalf of a foundational tension, rather than a foundational order, within which Theory is only the latest in a series of attempts to cope symbolically (through language).

I think there’s kind of a historical pendulum (swinging but also rotating– you know, rotation of the earth and all that)– the Enlightenment gave us liberal universalism, and the 19th century reacted sharply, with conservative particularisms (colonial revolutions rather than domestic ones), fighting for sacred tribal earth. The twentieth century brought conservative universalism in the form of various large-scale assertions of absolute truth, and one might hope that this century would grant us some liberal particularism. That means that the totalizing arrogance of radical stances needs to start recognizing boundaries, and the vicious purity of the conservative will have to be redefined in humility.

You’ve Lost Your Way, Charlie Brown

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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Conventional wisdom would have it that Peanuts fell off precipitously as the strip entered the 80s. On the evidence of the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1979-1980…well, conventional wisdom may have a point.

The art in Peanuts had by the 80s long since declined from it’s early heights. Over the decades Schulz’s line had lost much of its nimble dexterity — so much so that it’s easy to forget how good he was back in the day. The whole point of this sequence from February 1964, for example, is the kinetic elegance of the motion lines.

By 1979, though, the battle between Snoopy and Linus has been robbed of its energy; all that’s left is a couple of almost apologetic motion scratches and an anti-climax. The fight has gone out of the art.

In the mid-70s, Schulz made up for the relative tameness of the illustration with some of his most adventurous narratives. For example, one storyline which stretched through September and October of 1976 began with Peppermint Patty’s relatively innocuous effort to go to private school. It then quickly spiraled into escalating heights of absurdity, as Patty went to the Ace Obedience School for dogs and finally the tale ended in an epic battle with a cat which Patty had mistaken for her attorney, Snoopy. In fact, at the end of the story, Schulz seems almost to be taking advantage of his reduced drawing skills, moving the most frantic action off-panel to suggest a spectacular conflict which can only be imagined, not rendered.

In 1979-80, though, the long meandering narratives have gone the way of the exciting line work. There are still some extended stories, but they lack the snap of the sequences from just a few years earlier. A storyline where the kids end up at an Evangelist camp has an unfortunate air of hesitant moralism. Schulz’s world is too small to even fit adults, much less adult opinion, and his hesitant jabs at the Moral Majority seem like they were faxed to him by a focus group. Berkeley Breathed would soon wed something of Schulz’s aphasiac genius to political commentary…but whenever Schulz himself tried for relevance, the results were ugly (*cough* Franklin *cough*).

One muffed storyline could happen to anyone. But Schulz increasingly relies on recurring gags which simply aren’t that funny. The chief offender here is Snoopy’s Beagle scout troop. Snoopy leads Woodstock and several other birds over hill and dale, up mountain and down, making cute little quips about angel food cake. It’s not that it’s horrible, exactly — I chuckled at many of these strips. But, at the same time, the conceit really plays against Schulz’s strengths. The birds are all visually interchangeable, and because they speak in bird language which only Snoopy understands, they don’t have the strong distinctive personalities of Schulz’s other players. And without those distinctive personalities striking off each other, it’s hard to generate much conflict or interest. You basically end up with Snoopy talking to himself in front of a bunch of ciphers. A little of that goes a very long way.

And yet….while there’s no doubt that this volume is an inferior work of genius, there’s also no doubt that it is, still, the work of a genius. In some ways, the genius shines through even more brightly when the general level is lowered. In the 50s and 60s, Schulz operated at such a consistently transcendent peak that you could start to take him for granted. Here, though, there are dull patches to remind you just how good the good parts are. Without the distraction of the motion lines, for example, this Sunday strip we looked at before:

attains a purity of fuddy-duddiness. The whole comic comes down to that last panel, where everything has misfired. There’s no glorious rush, just a stumbling, thumb-fingered, doofy perfection.

And then there’s this:

That left me laughing helplessly. It’s a platonic Peanuts joke; that last line doesn’t even rise to a pun. Instead it’s simply flat, unexplained surreal nonsense, delivered by a dog with a giant nose and a blank expression.

There’s no doubt that Schulz lost his way in the 80s. But his strip was always about losing its way. As he grew doddering and inconsistent, he moved closer to the doddering inconsistency at the core of his art. The pleasures in this volume are fewer, but, for fans at least, when they come they have a special bonk.

Best Writing About Something Else

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“Music itself is a call that demands response,” editor Ann Powers writes in her introduction to Best Music Writing 2010. That may be true, but it’s not exactly the message of the book she’s put together. She might have been more accurate if she had said, “Musicians are a call that demands response.” Or even, “the music industry is a call that demands response.”

There are some exceptions, but overall Powers and the writers she’s selected seem much more interested in how musicians dress, where they hang out, and in how they make their money than in how their music sounds. The first selection — an oleaginous piece by Michelle Tea about her fabulous life going to fashion shows with her friend rock star Beth Ditto and how she was poor and oppressed for queerness once upon a time and so that makes it okay for her to be ruthlessly stupid and self-absorbed now — is unusual in shittiness, but typical in the way it spends page after page on Ditto’s fashion sense and success and only about a paragraph on her voice. (That voice is, apparently, authentic.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about fashion or success or celebrity per se. In fact, many of the essays here are engaging and entertaining. Barry Walters’ coming-out interview with Prince-alums Wendy and Lisa is riveting in a high-quality celebrity gossip vein. Randall Roberts’ feature about LA latin/punk/hip hop band Ozomatli’s state department tour through Burma casts an interesting (unusually positive) light on the Bush Administration. Josh Kun’s piece about the importance of local Mexican bands to the ringtone market and Timothy Quirk’s polemic about digital download royalties are both fascinating nuts-and-bolts looks at the music industry’s money mechanisms. I probably didn’t need both an essay on the career prospects of Drake and an essay on the career prospects of 50 Cent, but individually neither of them is especially objectionable. And, to be fair, essays that focus on the music qua the music aren’t guaranteed to be all that, as Philip S. Bryant’s warmed over beat poet jazz nostalgia makes clear. (Memo to wannabe slam poets; commemorating original, individual, technically accomplished art in staid, half-assed free verse does not make you part of the tradition. It makes you a parasite.)

So the point here is not that Powers should have included more music writing that actually talked about music. Instead, it’s just to note that this particular collection made me realize, in a way I probably should have before, how small a part of music writing music criticism really is. The old “cliché about writing/music/dancing/architecture” as Powers calls it, rather obscures the fact that most writing about music is in fact not dancing about architecture, but rather writing about celebrity, or sex, or performance, or news.

That last is especially well-represented in this volume; Powers includes not just two essays about Michael Jackson’s death (which seems justifiable); but two about the Chris Brown/Rihanna scandal and one aggressively unnecessary effort about the Kanye/Taylor Swift brou-ha-ha. There’s even an Atlantic essay by Hua Hsu which uses hip hop as a relatively minor prop for its demographic change/post-racialism/Obama just got elected boilerplate.

The choice to include the Hsu piece seems like a particularly egregious genuflection to the zeitgeist…but, in general, I get where Powers is coming from. Music writers are often at least partly journalists, and what journalists do is write about things that are important. Obama’s election, or Michael Jackson’s death, or Rihanna/Chris Brown and its implications for young girls of color and domestic violence clearly matter in a way that, say, the production choices on Rihanna’s latest album don’t. Similarly, David Bazan’s struggle with his Christian faith is more important, more consequential, than what his music sounds like, which means that Jessica Hopper is justified in discussing the way his lyrics reveal the first at length while saying little about the second. One of his bands, she mentions, employed “fuzzed-out guitar hooks”; one of his songs includes a “keening falsetto;” some of his shows were “intimate acoustic sets.” There may be more detail than that, but not much.

There are pieces here which are more directly writing about music itself: a brief interview with composer Maria Schneider; Sasha Frere-Jones’ slight but smart take on The Dream; Chris Willman’s slight but smart (if inevitably hagiographic) essay about Bob Dylan’s could-have-been-worse Christmas album. Perhaps Sean Nelson’s “Let’s (Not) Get It On” qualifies too. It doesn’t precisely describe any particular song, but it’s thesis is based on the differences between the stance and sound of aggressive ’80s rock versus the stance and sound of ’90s indie fare. Nelson concludes that the less swaggering attitude of indie created a subculture which was, perhaps, more ambivalent about sex. What people were listening to affected the flavor of concupiscence — and so, even though he talks mostly about the concupiscence, you could argue that he’s talking about the music too.

The displacement, though, is a little…not depressing exactly. Maybe melancholy. At least, that’s what I took away from my favorite piece in the book, Alex Ross’ lovely meditation on Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The piece talks both about Anderson’s remarkable voice and about her place as an ambivalent political inspiration (for, among others, Martin Luther King.) Ross finishes his essay by noting that, while Anderson must have been proud of the Lincoln Memorial concert, it was “an ambiguous triumph — marking a great moment in civil-rights history but, on a private level, intruding on her dream of a purely musical life. An artist became a symbol. Her happiest memories, one gathers, were of those international tours in the thirties, when the European critics declared her a singer to watch, and the Finns went wild, and Toscanini blubbered his praise, and she became nothing less — and nothing more — than one of the great voices of her time.”

That made me tear up. And, of course, what I was tearing up at was not her voice, but her life — specifically, at her lifetime dream to be recognized not for her life, but for her voice. Ross can’t describe that dream without betraying it. What breaks your heart in that last line is the beauty of being unable to capture beauty. It’s the sweet ache of a tune that can’t quite be heard.
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This essay first appeared on Madeloud.

Utilitarian Review 4/3/11

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News

Well, the giant to Sean Michael Robinson and Joy DeLyria’s Victorian Wire post has mostly died down; we’re back to twice our usual traffic rather than thirty times our usual traffic.

Fans of that post, though, will be pleased to hear that Joy is going to join us as a regular columnist. You can read more about her here. We’re very excited to have her aboard!

In other news…if you notice over on the right we’ve got a new Donate button. If you enjoy reading us, we hope you’ll consider putting a few bucks in the tip jar. Money will go to pay Derik for his work in keeping the site running…and in the unlikely event that there’s enough, we’ll put the remainder towards the web hosting.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I have a review of the Britney album at Splice Today.

And I review an art exhibit on global warming at the Chicago Reader.

The Tyranny of Comforters

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This was first published at Splice Today. I thought I’d reprint it since it touches on some issues raised in this comments thread.
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Usually we think of empathy as a generous emotion; a gift of love. Just as often, though, it can be a crabbed, demanding, jealous thing — an insistence that others act like, think like, and even be oneself.

Michael Chabon is a writer of literary fiction, which means that in many ways, even more than a politician, he is a professional empathizer. Last week he was plying his trade as a guest-blogger for Ta-Nehisi Coates. As a matter of course, he wrote about the Tucson shooting, and specifically about Obama’s speech.

His post on the subject was mostly about the distance he felt from the speech, the audience, and indeed, from the nation. He began the post by declaring, “I’ve been thinking about the president’s speech all night and this morning, how something about it left me feeling left out.” He acknowledges that he was moved by Obama’s vulnerability and his exhortation to live up to the memories of the victims, “And yet…”, he says:

Was it all the weird, inappropriate clapping and cheering? Or the realization that I am so out of touch with the national vibe that I didn’t know that whistling and whooping and standing ovations are, when someone evokes the memory of murdered innocent people, totally cool? I never would have thought that I’d spend so much of that solemn Wednesday thinking—first on publication of Sarah Palin’s latest piece of narrishkeit about the blood libels, then all through the memorial service—please, I beg you, can you not, finally, just shut up? It was distancing. Distracting. As he joined in, at times, with the applause, the president’s hard, measured handclaps, too close to the microphone, drowned out everything else in my kitchen right then, and seemed to be tolling the passing of something else besides human lives. I don’t know what. Maybe just my own sense of connectedness to the cheering people in that giant faraway room. I didn’t feel like applauding right then, not even in celebration of the persistence and continuity of human life and American values. And then I was ashamed of my curmudgeonliness. Those people, after all, many of them college students, were in a sports arena; architecture gives shape to behavior and thought. Maybe if the service had been held in a church, things would have played differently.

Chabon then goes on to sneer (empathetically, thoughtfully) at Obama’s final image in the speech; the moment when he suggested that Christina Taylor-Green, the nine-year-old killed in the shooting, might be jumping in puddles in heaven.

I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man. The brunt, the ache and the truth of a child’s death is that he or she will never jump in rain puddles again. That joy was taken from her, and along with it ours in the pleasure of all that splashing. Heaven is pure wishfulness, an imaginary solution to the insoluble problem of the contingency and injustice of life.

Chabon concludes by noting that the image was okay after all if you inverted it and saw it as a metaphor for loss.

But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

So. That’s Chabon.

As for me, I spent most of “that solemn Wednesday” without any expectations in particular. As somebody without any connection to any of the victims, I didn’t even experience it as especially solemn. I didn’t watch, and don’t intend to watch, Sarah Palin make a fool of herself, because I know she’s a fool already, and why would I want to be irritated? I’ve enjoyed reading a number of pundits make fun of her, though (this is probably my favorite.)

I didn’t watch the president’s speech on Wednesday, either. In fact, I’ve been more or less avoiding news about the speech and about the people shot, because I find hearing about people getting shot upsetting. Especially young children — not because I’m empathetic or thoughtful, but because, like Chabon, I have a kid (he’s 7) and thinking about him dying makes me feel sick. I skimmed a transcript of the speech a day or so later. And I watched the video today because I was thinking about this article and felt like I had to.

The speech itself — well, it made me cry. I don’t know if that’s a testament to the president’s eloquence particularly. I cry pretty easily, and a bunch of people murdered for no reason is sad.

The cheering didn’t bother me. It’s odd, really, to think of it as an occasion for aesthetic approbation or denigration. People express grief in various ways. It seemed mostly like they were trying to let Obama and each other know that they were a community. Or maybe like Chabon says, they were just brainwashed by the architecture into behaving inappropriately. Whatever. I noticed that Giffords’ husband was clapping. I don’t feel I’m in a place to judge him.

As for rain puddles in heaven; yes, it’s trite. But it seems a little duplicitous to think of that triteness as causing Christina Taylor-Green’s parents more pain. If my son died, it’s not clear to me what anyone could say that would make things any worse or any better. Besides, you spout trite nothings when someone’s loved one dies, because what else do you say? A polished prose style is a lovely thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s an adequate response in all circumstances.

This, indeed, seems to be the cause of part of Chabon’s dyspepsia. Artists, especially successful artists like Chabon. receive such fulsome praises that I think they can occasionally mistake themselves for priests. Which is maybe why he felt qualified to proclaim with such certainty that heaven isn’t real and that death is just absence. To suggest otherwise is a stylistic error — rectifiable only by transforming the clumsy words of the President through the magical gifts of a real writer.

But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

Job’s comforters are a standing reminder that most people will engage in condescending assholery if offered half a chance. No reason that a lauded author should be any different, I guess.

Still, it’s worth analyzing the exact nature of the assholery. Job’s comforters were jerks because they believed that Job was suffering for a reason. His injuries were his fault or they would lead to a greater good. The comforters believed they could read tragedy. They were its interpreters.

Chabon isn’t coming from exactly the same place, but there’s some overlap. He too, believes that the tragedy should speak to him. He is irritated when he is excluded. Why doesn’t the President move me, he asks? Why doesn’t the event address me? Why this talk of heaven when I’m not a believer? Why don’t all these people who I am not interested in — why don’t they all, as he puts it, “shut up”?

The answer to all of these questions, of course, is fairly straightforward. That answer is: “It’s not about you, Michael.” Even your empathy, however well expressed, doesn’t make it about you.

Of course, lots of people who weren’t immeditately affected feel personally connected to the shootings. I do too, to some extent. But it’s important to recognize that that extent is limited. The separation Chabon felt from the people in that arena wasn’t because the people in Tucson are gauche, or because Obama is a Christian. If those things matter at all, it’s only as symbols of the way in which each person is different; a mystery, one to another. Art and love and religion bridge the distance partially and sometimes, but not entirely, and not on demand. God perhaps can love and know each individual, but for a human to try to do so starts to look like blasphemy. Even if, or perhaps especially if, you don’t believe that God exists.

The Illustrated Wallace Stevens

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I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,

So what’s being compared here?

At first the answer seems fairly obvious; three minds are being compared to three blackbirds. When you think about it a little more, though, things get blurry. For one thing, the simile doesn’t quite map; the three minds are actually being compared to the tree, not to the blackbirds. So is there one overmind in which the three minds sit? Or is the tree the mind in which the blackbirds sit — or a number of minds, in which different explanations of the simile quietly caw? The poem doubles — or triples — back on itself; it seems to be describing or explaining its own processes. And if it’s talking about itself, the simile is there merely to multiply. The mind, the blackbird, and the poem are shadows that slide one into the other, each and each and each.

Or, to put it another way, the connection between the blackbird and the mind is arbitrary. That’s how metaphors work; they connect unlike things. Language is all metaphor; a string of arbitrary links, slipping signs that magically pull meaning out of non-meaning, like an infinite string of blackbirds rushing out of that tree, or mind, or poem. Wallace Stevens poems are built out of metaphors and think about metaphors, which is what I meant here when I said:

Wallace Stevens is very much about words. It’s words as imagery, but the point of most of his poems is the evanescence of those images; they’re arbitrary. They appear in language and disappear into language.

As a result, it’s not really possible — or at least very difficult — to create an illustration that works like a Wallace Stevens poem.

Though, of course, there isn’t anything to stop you from illustrating a Wallace Stevens poem. Nothing simpler. Here’s my own illustration of the above poem, taken from a zine I made way back in 2002.

This drawing neatly reverses the poem its illustrating. In Stevens, the mind comes first, and then the image of the blackbird follows. But in the illustration, the blackbirds are as solid as, and essentially precede, the split consciousness. Instead of three minds generating three blackbirds, the blackbirds generate three minds, represented by the chain of question marks. The poem spins an epistemological conundrum (what do I think?) into an ontological one (where are the blackbirds?) The illustration, on the other hand, takes an ontological question (what is the status of these multiple, poorly drawn critters?) and spins it into an epistemological one.

Here’s another example:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Here, the illustration’s concreteness doesn’t so much mirror the poem as parody it. The poem treats the blackbird’s insubstantiality as sublime; the word is beautiful because it shimmers and passes; the singing depends on the silence and the silence on the singing. The illustration, by nailing down the ephermerality, reimagines it as (or teases out the implication of) violence. Language’s play is freedom — what separates us from the blackbird is that we can contemplate the blackbird. But that (loooooooooooooong separation) from the animal is also our knowledge of sin, which is the knowledge of death. The poem is about the joy of the world slipping into words. The illustration is, maybe, a reminder that, from the perspective of the blackbird, human mastery of the world may have a downside.

One last one…and here, I think, the illustration and the poem really do come close to meaning the same thing.

In “Thirteen Ways,” the blackbird stands in for both sign and signified. It’s the mark that points and the thing pointed to; the trace of a reality that can be indicated but not reached. The poem above can be read, perhaps, as an acknowledgement that words are not a self-contained system; the world is in there too, even if we can’t really tell exactly where. If words coat our images, then maybe images infest our words. We speak blackbirds — or at least something that looks a little bit like them.

New Visitor Intro

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We’re still getting many new visitors, so I thought I’d repost and slightly rewrite this intro post.

If you’ve come for the Victorian Wire post by Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria, you might also be interested in our entire roundtable on the Wire. I thought we were done with it…but in the interest of pandering I figured we’d do a couple more posts later in the week. So stay tuned!

You can also check out other posts by Sean Michael Robinson, including his discussion of teaching art to anime kids and his report on the issues around child pornography cases.

If you’re interested in cultural bricolage and mash-ups, you might want to check out our past roundtable on copyright and free culture. Also, you can read this recent post on the pre-fame experiences of Haydn, Christina Aguilera and Duke Ellington.

Though we’re mostly a comics blog, we do have some non-Wire posts on Television.

As for this blog, The Hooded Utilitarian is a quasi-blog/quasi-magazine hybrid devoted to cultural criticism.

HU is edited by Noah Berlatsky (that’s me). You can see a list of our other bloggers, columnists, and contributors if you look up there on the bar under the lovely banner created by awesome artist Edie Fake.

We also have frequent guest posters. If you’d like to write for us, you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail.

Hope you enjoy the site. Thanks for visiting!