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Falling Behind
I do try to keep abreast of the culture, but it's hard: so much product, so little time- not to mention the huge backlog of older stuff I've never got round to grappling with- Beowulf for instance. Right now I'm trying to catch up by reading some modern novels. I just read The Kindly Ones and The Ghost- both excellent in their different ways. Next up I'm going to nibble at some Donna Tartt.
I try to watch the happening TV shows, but I seem to have lost touch with the cinema. I read the reviews, but I don't go to see the movies. I like to think it's a blip- and somewhere down the line I'll lay in a store of DVDs and get myself back up to date- but I suspect I'm kidding myself.
One area in which I've long since given up is music. Music- and I mean popular music of course- is made for the young by the young- and I'm in late middle age and just don't care any more. I'd like to care, but I don't. Of course I hear tunes I like in passing but the last time I felt involved with the scene was when the Sex Pistols gobbed all over it- and the only artist whose albums I regularly attend to is Bob Dylan.
I try to watch the happening TV shows, but I seem to have lost touch with the cinema. I read the reviews, but I don't go to see the movies. I like to think it's a blip- and somewhere down the line I'll lay in a store of DVDs and get myself back up to date- but I suspect I'm kidding myself.
One area in which I've long since given up is music. Music- and I mean popular music of course- is made for the young by the young- and I'm in late middle age and just don't care any more. I'd like to care, but I don't. Of course I hear tunes I like in passing but the last time I felt involved with the scene was when the Sex Pistols gobbed all over it- and the only artist whose albums I regularly attend to is Bob Dylan.
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Now for the movies and TV programmes, I don't even recognise most of the names any more.
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Speaking of someone who is around those of this generation (adolescents) near-constantly -- it's too hard to keep up with current trends -- movies, music, you name it.
I joked with students recently -- that ten years from now, my upcoming students wouldn't know who Britney Spears is (when my current students didn't know who Wynona Rider, 1990's hearthrob/It-girl is) the other day. No way, they told me.
Yes way.
It's pointless to keep up, I feel. I'd rather immerse myself in the depths of what I like/appreciate. However, sometimes, (as recently, I was introduced to John Cale's music) something "new" (even it's it's old) revitalizes my world.
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It annoys me how people think the movies began with Star Wars and won't watch anything in black and white and know nothing of the history of rock and roll- but that's how it is and how it's always been...
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On the other hand, in middle age I've gotten much fonder of the music I took up in my twenties and after: classical, pre-bebop jazz, Irish/Scottish/Welsh trad folk. My best albums for listening while I concentrate on a demanding job of work are Kevin Burke, Martin Hayes, Aly Bain, Ella Fitzgerald, Mozart's Masonic music, or Wagner's Parsifal. Which is rather an odd lot, but that's a good microcosm of my musical preferences.
I do like one modern folk/rock musician, Casey Neill, but he's distinctly off the beaten track.
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Now that Christmas is looming I may find myself reaching for my CDs of medieval music. That's the kind of music I really, really like- monkish drinking songs and troubador ballads.
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My problem is that I can't handle distraction either, but for some weird reason (probably my off-center neurology) familiar music that I like isn't a distraction unless it happens to be too loud. So for me, familiar music is a counteractant to an attention-breaking distraction --- a form of stimming, as it were --- and it enables me to concentrate smoothly in the face of interruptions, train whistles, fire sirens, and all of the other things that would otherwise snap my train of thought and bring me to a crashing mental standstill.
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I don't think it's possible to catch up on culture. Just limiting the conversation to film, I started with black-and-white and one or two modernities that wired themselves into my childhood; I didn't really start seeing movies in theaters until my very last year of high school, and it took me until graduate school to go out to the movies on a regular basis (an activity strictly limited by finances, in any case; this year, on account of being broke, I've seen hardly anything at all). There are any number of actors working right now that I care very much about seeing. There are several filmmakers I keep an eye out for. And my knowledge of classic film is still probably better than my knowledge of contemporary film, which doesn't keep me from discovering new things all the time—from 1946, or '53, or '89! So at this point, I watch things that interest me, whether they were made three decades or three weeks ago; I'm never going to be in step with pop culture anyway, and I am infinitely happier thereby.
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But do you stop writing novels because Nabokov bent the form to its outermost limit in 1962? Or poetry because after Modernism and Dada, what is left but to tell a story?
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Movies are over? I disagree. I know you, and I'm sure many other people, really dig Bunuel and Welles and all those ideas guys. But that kind of thing doesn't pull people in now. I don't want to say that it's dull, but just that it's been done. Cinema is not a new art anymore, you can't get by just being weird, or by just posing interesting questions. You have to do that and more, tell an exciting story in the format that modern story has evolved into (and there are of course different modern types).
Movie studios are pushing 3D cinema as the next big thing. I don't think that'll stick though. But movies on the whole? On the up. The great works of modern culture are movies- encapsulating the dramatic, photographic, musical, and literary arts. Pretty much all of them. Modern culture is evolving, and movies (with games gradually catching up) are still at the top of the food chain.
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No. It's not a substantive change in the nature of film—if you want interactive, you still go to the theater. It's just technologically impressive.
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I agree about 3D. I read an advance review of Cameron's Avatar in which the guy said the constantly changing 3D perspectives made him sea-sick.
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A couple of days ago, I came into possession of the second volume of Michael Powell's memoirs, Million Dollar Movie (1992). It turned up unexpectedly in a used book store; I have not read the first volume, although I do own his book on the making of The Edge of the World (1938; originally titled 200,000 Feet on Foula in reference to the amount of film shot, reprinted somewhat less evocatively under the same name as the film), but it starts with in 1948 with the aftermath of The Red Shoes and the filming of The Small Back Room and I am enjoying it very much so far, if for no other reason than I'm always curious to see how an artist views their own art. In any case, I just ran into this passage:
I saw a Hollywood film yesterday, January 31, 1984, with a contemporary theme and full of attractive people, talking Hollywood English. The current version is a funny sort of language. An Englishman might possibly understand one word in ten. I can imagine what the old-time film producers would have made of it: "I want to understand what I'm looking at. Take those actors away, wash their mouths out, spray their tonsils, fire the director. I don't want to see what they are saying. I want to hear it. Don't they realize that the British market is thirty-five percent of our European gross?"
The film was shot somewhere in the South, but it might as well have been Hollywood, for all the Spanish moss hanging on the trees. It has been so overdone in the past that it always looks to me as if the prop man has just nailed it there. Put it down as somewhere in a consumer society. The direction was sympathetic, but remained outside looking in. If I had been an American, I would have been very cross to think that this was the latest modern product of the Hollywood dream factories that had given us, in their day, films like The Best Years of Our Lives. This is what talkies and TV have done to the movies. The studio giants have gone, and their pygmy inheritors have taken us back to the 1930s, when two-dimensional images talked, and talked, and talked. And yet there are giants still, creative giants: the men who made Apocalypse Now, Reds, American Graffiti, Chariots of Fire, Mean Streets . . . all of them intensely personal films, but with a wild dissimilarity of budgets. It seems as if the film business has to burn itself out every twenty years or so, and start again. It seizes upon each new invention, gobbles it up, and is in its turn gobbled up by the invention: big screen, wide screen, triple screen; the tinted image, the hand-painted image, hand-painted color, Technicolor two-strip, Technicolor three-strip; CinemaScope, Todd-AO, Vista Vision—we have had them all, and looking back they seem to moviemakers to have been an enormous waste of time and money. The only invention that has justified itself—and it took years for the camera to regain its mobility—was the talking picture.
And I would not take Michael Powell as gospel—he thinks he failed completely to get his overwhelming love for the Kent countryside up on the screen with A Canterbury Tale; I don't think he could be more wrong about that if he'd practiced—but I thought of this conversation, and of you.
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The first time I saw it I happened upon it by chance- flicking through channels- so at first I didn't know what I was watching- but even on the tiny TV I had then- with the image all grainy and snowy- it took me by storm. I think it's an extraordinarily beautiful film- both visually and emotionally.
I agree with him about the talkies. No other invention has changed the movies the way the coming of sound did.