theovisaries

[theovisaries]

Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee: Media, Mediation, and Immediacy

In early April, 2024, an eerie, recurring image landed on my social media feed: a lone cartoon woman with a blunt bob haircut, apparently weeping, and superimposed over the Alberta Terminal’s ominous grain siloes. Shortly thereafter, some of my most trusted online music buds (if you’re reading, y’all know who you are) declared the record bearing this cover—Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee—a masterpiece.

I had to hear it for myself, of course, but in order to receive this music, I needed to engage with—and, to some extent, become unwittingly interpolated by—the ways in which Cindy Lee foregrounds reception theory itself. In Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Anna Kornbluh identifies our common compulsion “to have done with mediation” (11). With Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee doesn’t so much dispense with mediation (a fool’s errand), but rather endeavors to micromanage it. The album is not on a label, and is not streaming on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music. As of this writing, Diamond Jubilee is unavailable on physical media. Ostensibly, Patrick Flegel’s objective was to maximize his revenue stream and assert full creative control over the Cindy Lee project. To these ends, it’s a resounding success, but I found the listening experience strangely impoverished; I would have preferred to digest this sprawling double LP on some format untethered to the internet, screens, and devices. Luckily, the music compensates.

Wildly ambitious and clocking in at over two hours, Diamond Jubilee runs the gamut of loosely-confederated musical styles: tender, Sun Studios-inflected torch songs, glitter-rock inspired bass and drum workouts, glitchy synth interludes, and even a bit of butt rock. The  opening track “Diamond Jubilee” sets up the album’s dominant sonic palette with a slinky, pentatonic guitar figure reminiscent of Tuareg rockers Tinariwen, but by track three we’re in different, and, to these ears, more interesting territory. “Baby Blue” channels the melody to The Merseybeats 1966 hit “Sorrow” (later covered  by Bowie), and showcases the record’s signature double-tracked, echo laden vocals. It’s gentle on the ears, but impedes an easy engagement with the album’s lyrical content, for better or for worse.

Around the one hour mark, Diamond Jubilee hits its stride (how many records can you say that about?) “Dracula,” my favorite track, is a fried homage to J.J. Cale built on a syncopated bass groove and dissonant guitar (Patrick Flegel is a fine guitarist, but his deft bass playing is the record’s most arresting quality and often its saving grace.)

Overall, Diamond Jubilee’s antecedents are the early Elephant 6 sounds from bands like Of Montreal and Olivia Tremor Control, the mid-aughts Brooklyn scene carved out by labels like Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, and Woodsist, and 2010s neo-freakbeat and psych auteurs like White Fence, Ariel Pink, and Ty Segall.

As for those listeners who hear in Diamond Jubilee a more classic set of influences, say, the Shangri-Las or the Beach Boys, well, my drugs aren’t that good—and sorry, neither is Cindy Lee.

Due to a puzzling inability and/or unwillingness on the part of otherwise articulate music critics to accurately describe Diamond Jubilee, substantive criticism of the record and its unusual release plan have been slower to emerge. Indeed, amidst the avalanche of hyperbole, both grassroots and online, writers for esteemed publications like Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Aquarium Drunkard seemed desperate to one-up each other with breathless, praise-laden, post-critique pieces. With all due respect, a lengthy self-released album by an artist from the Canadian prairie—which, last time I checked, was part of the Commonwealth—does not constitute a lost transmission from an alternative electromagnetic spectrum, or whatever other dopey cliché was bandied about in relation to Diamond Jubilee. And curiously, Cindy Lee’s most frequently referenced cultural touchstones, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, aren’t even records at all! Yes, the work is doubtlessly strong—compelling, even—but is it a game changer? Or an index of cultural exhaustion?

These questions would never be seriously posed were it not for the record’s edgy, anti-marketing marketing plan, which has strong “I graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades” energy. Objectively, Cindy Lee deviated from the standard way of doing business in the music industry at that level (Flegel's former band Women released records on Jagjaguar). This is the textbook definition of disruption. Stranger still, it worked, capturing the attention of an audience that, as musician and academic Franklin Bruno astutely put it on X, is “too jaded to be sold something, but supports what they 'discover,' all at once, the same week.”

But we need not scrutinize Flegel exclusively through the lenses of sour grapes and cynicism; a splashy self-release can be a practical way to seize the means of production and distribution. It’s an impulse that many musicians-turned-entrepreneurs from Ian MacKaye to Mac McCaughan have built lasting and profitable businesses on. Nor need I rehash the extreme defenses of the record, wherein an unsavory group of mostly male stans interpreted Cindy Lee’s distribution strategy as a joyous middle finger to the music industry’s normative (or “tedious,” as many put it) rollout: the album announcement three months in advance, three teaser singles that a publicist attempts to “place” on blogs that are typically ad-driven and lacking in quality control, and a big, friend-annoying push on release day. In sum, releasing a record on Geocities is a knife that cuts both ways; it enabled Cindy Lee to squeeze out the middleman, hack the attention cycle, and shroud the record in the romantic aura of mystery and solitary genius; however, it also contributed to no small amount of misunderstanding, something few artists enjoy or actively court. The decision to ride as a lone wolf reeks of a rugged individualism I do not share; I value collaborations and partnerships.

I am fairly qualified to comment on Diamond Jubilee’s rollout. Like Cindy Lee, my band Trummors began work on our latest LP four years ago, and a few of the songs were based on melodies or progressions that had been kicking around for far longer. Yet, at each step of the way—from arranging to recording, editing to sequencing, and, most crucially, outlining a release plan—we made nearly opposite decisions as Cindy Lee. This is not to say one path is unambiguously superior to the other, only time will tell, but merely to reiterate that I have some insight into the costs, benefits, and stakes of these choices, both commercially and aesthetically.

Trummors 5 was culled from about 20 songs we recorded at home using a hodgepodge of analog gear, DAWs, and flown-in drum tracks. I played most of the instruments: piano, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and lap steel. The results were charmingly "deskilled" at best, amateurish at worst. When I sent roughs to Pete at our label, he encouraged us to follow this path, noting that he liked the intimate vibe and thought others would respond positively to it as well. Maybe he was right. At any rate, Anne and I weren’t satisfied; we recorded our previous LP Dropout City at Palomino Sound, an affordable, well-outfitted studio in L.A, so we didn’t feel too terrific about what we perceived as a lowering of our sonic standards.

In the thick of the pandemic, we booked time with producer Dan Horne at his Lone Palm Studio (now Universal Hair Farm), and called in friends to help us live track. This method may not suit everyone, but for us, there’s a certain alchemy that only comes from making records this way—after honestly assessing our record-in-progress, we realized we weren’t prepared to dispense with that. All told, over the course of two years, we spent upwards of 6k making the record, not including travel costs. We did not receive a recording advance (ask PayPal credit how we made this record!), but eventually we were paid back half of that amount upon agreeing to release the record the traditional way: on a label, with a coordinated publicity campaign, and a vinyl pressing with a limited edition colored variant. These were not decisions we took lightly; it was not driven by blind, unreconstructed faith in the status quo. Rather, as a band with a small, niche audience—far too small to reach our longtime goal of being a bookable live act in 2024—this was truly a case in which the standard practice appeared to be the best way to achieve our goal of modest audience growth. Albeit on a much smaller scale, the effect of Cindy Lee’s release was akin to proximate rollouts by megastars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, artists whose teams are hellbent on sucking all the oxygen, and every last dollar, out of a music business increasingly circumscribed by an unhealthy monoculture.

Too, Trummors 5 eschewed the sprawling, maximalist approach that characterizes Diamond Jubilee. Instead, we did that sometimes painful thing writers and artists do: edit. We chose what we thought were the strongest ten songs from nearly two hours of music we recorded at home and shaped them into a coherent whole. I maintain the conservative position that the LP-as-unified-song-cycle is the heart and soul of the recorded music game. Moreover, as Alfred Hitchcock famously quipped, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” The same can be said of albums. Still, we had a nagging sense of “if a tree falls”; the only option was to reconcile ourselves to the gaping maw of obscurity. In short, Cindy Lee showed me the folly of maintaining any sanguine hope for modest but significant audience growth in a winner-take-all world, and for that, I begrudgingly thank them for removing the scales from my eyes (Flegel’s pronouns have vacillated between they/them and he/him; I’ve used these pronouns interchangeably in this essay).

What’s left is a record full of contradictions: simultaneously an earnest and impressive artistic statement, a pragmatic (if self-serving) tweak on the music business’s notorious PR boondoggles, and, of course, a bit of a gimmick. According to Sianne Ngai (2020), the gimmick is the capitalist form par excellence. Ngai writes, “Gimmicks are fundamentally...devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention)” (1). Cindy Lee's mid-fi, minimally edited recordings achieve a magical immediacy by working too little, but they also work too hard to make sure we notice. Thus, as Ngai observes,

"The gimmick [...] acquires its reputation of bad timing—being too old or too new—based on its deviation from a tacit standard of productivity. Under or overperforming with respect to this historical norm, it strikes us as technologically backward or just as problematically advanced: futuristic to the point of hubris, as in the case of Google Glass, or comically outdated, like the choreographed jerks used to simulate turbulence in television episodes of Star Trek [or Geocities]" (3).

Had Flegel released this record a few years earlier, it would have merited inclusion as a case study in Ngai’s book. Perhaps the tensions that subtend the gimmick are what makes Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee so difficult to parse, and so prone to endlessly recursive debates about its merits.

Works Cited:

Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism. Verso, 2024.

Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022.

[theovisaries]

Catching Up With Allan Wachs

I recently had the chance to chat over email with singer-songwriter Allan Wachs, whose privately-issued 1979 LP Mountain Roads and City Streets is a low-key rural folk masterpiece. The title track was recently included on the Numero Group’s 2016 compilation Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music:

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions, Allan. Let’s begin by talking a bit about the making of Mountain Roads & City Streets. Where were you living at the time, and what were you up to?

I was 24 years old when I made Mountain Roads and City Streets. I was born and grew up in Los Angeles but had basically moved up to the Oregon Coast Range outside of Portland by the time I was 18 in 1972.

In early 1979 I had been care-taking some property at the end of a logging road with my then girlfriend Patrice (now married 36yrs+). I had already recorded the single and had some regional success. My songwriting was influenced by a lot of different roots styles of music. I played a lot of old timey / bluegrassy / ragtimey/rootsy/irish/anglo/blues/folk/rock and roll music as well as being immersed in a certain authentic back to the land point of view and counter-culture aesthetic that was going around at the time. When I first moved up to Vernonia it was to be part of a traveling marionette/puppet/musical medicine show called the Blue Sun Lyric Theater. Basically we took renaissance forms of entertainment and attempted to fill those post medieval forms with a modern, new age (circa 1973) sensibility. We worked together for about three years and this experience planted me in the Northwest arts and cultural scene at the time. I was young and dumb. I wanted to walk down the same dirt roads that Woody Guthrie or someone like him might have walked down, tromp through the same muddy woods where the big trees used to stand. I was blown away by the forest and the extreme beauty of the place. I wanted to chop fire wood, haul water, dig out septic tanks in the middle of winter and eat home baked bread. Growing up in the Los Angeles/San Fernando Valley area I didn’t get a lot of that.

A lot of these songs were informed from that experience. The earliest song on the album is Least Of My Strangers from 1973, I was 19 when I wrote it, a mix of influences mostly Dylan and Cohen. I was an acoustic purist for a while but fortunately I got over that. I wanted to make rock and roll poetry writing modern traditional songs with acoustic instruments or something approximate. The album was recorded at a former Capitol Records mastering engineer’s small 24-track studio in North Hollywood behind a florist on the corner of Laurel Cyn and Burbank Blvd. It’s long gone.

One intriguing quality of that record is the juxtaposition of archetypal “young man” lyrical themes (alienation, unrequited love, etc.) with mature instrumentation drawing from folk, blues, and bluegrass. Looking back, can you comment on any lyrics you still find poignant?

I look at songs as multi-dimensional living organisms and the main criteria for me is if the song was constructed well enough or inspired enough to stand the test of time. I can still find a handle to relate to most of the songs on the album. There are several songs that have continued to evolve and grow over the years that I can clearly see were not completely finished lyrically when I recorded them. Mountain Roads and “Travelin’ Light” in particular took decades to really complete.

“I was young and dumb. I wanted to walk down the same dirt roads that Woody Guthrie or someone like him might have walked down, tromp through the same muddy woods where the big trees used to stand. I was blown away by the forest and the extreme beauty of the place. I wanted to chop fire wood, haul water, dig out septic tanks in the middle of winter and eat home baked bread. Growing up in the Los Angeles/San Fernando Valley area I didn’t get a lot of that.”

I hear traces of some of my favorite songwriters in your work: Bob Dylan, Dillard & Clark, Jackson Browne, and even Norman Greenbaum all come to mind. Are there other influences on your music you’d like to talk about?

Yes, definitely Dylan and the one’s you’ve mentioned (Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Mississippi John Hurt, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Ian Tyson etc. to add a few more specifics) and many others crossing a span of genres, generations, even epochs apart,have been influencers and inspirations, but I’ve also been influenced by great songwriters you’ve never heard of like John Cunnick, Ken Kaganovitch and Brendan Smith to name a few.

The track “Mountain Roads” was recently included on the Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music compilation released by Numero Group (2016). Along with a spate of similarly inclined reissues,  this comp suggests some renewed interest in private folk/singer-songwriter records from the 70s. I’m curious to hear your take on this: why did you release Mountain Roads & City Streets privately? Was the decision based on any reticence towards working with an outside record label?

All I can say is it was a different climate then. I had no choice. It was really difficult to get with a major label. I was living in the woods in Oregon and recording and doing business in Los Angeles. Somehow that didn’t make for a great formula to develop a high enough profile to get any major labels interested and none of the songs were really covered which would have helped a lot. There was no commercial or independent music scene per se in the Northwest at that time. It developed just after I left. But I had some friends who were involved in the music business in Los Angeles and they backed me on spec for a single in 1977/78. One of them had a nice 24-track studio in Studio City and was looking to develop himself as a producer. They liked my music well enough to pay for a run of 45’s. They also brought in an old time record promoter who’s last hit discovery was The Captain and Tenille and had made his bones with an early L.A. rock n’ roll DJ Hunter Hancock. They liked Adventures Of The Invisible Dog and I let him have a stab at producing it. They brought in some great players. The rhythm section was from John Stewart’s band and I don’t recall who else but great musicians. Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street was a hit at the time and Springsteen had Clemens and it got to be kind of a fad with the saxophone so they decided to throw one on in a bid for “extra” commerciality.

Not really down with the arrangement but it was an opportunity as I got to produce the B side. That song was Least Of My Strangers. I brought in my friends who I had been picking with off and on for years . Tony Recupido plays a beautiful second guitar part and Steve Pearlman has an absolutely brilliant mandolin solo. It was the same rhythm section as Dog and then there was a guy named Larry? who was like a 2nd engineer who played the harmonica parts and came up with these nice vocal harmony parts he double tracked.

The success, such as it was, turned out not to be in sales as I was my own distributor before there were the great independent outlets that came to be, but the single did get a huge amount of airplay in certain radio markets in the Northwest (Portland in particular) and the South (Bowling Green, Kentucky specifically) and sales as far away as Japan. As it turned out Strangers was the “A” side and Invisible Dog was the “B” though it too got airplay as well. But there was no way to quantify it so it was basically invisible. I still have a lot of copies of the single.

There was enough success for the most part, so my “backers” helped me put together the deal to record a full album. All of the musicians were either friends or friends of friends and all of them donated their talents, the studio time (w/engineer) was given on spec as were 2000 copies of the album.

The backing vocals on Mountain Roads are great: they compliment the tunes perfectly, which is not an easy task! Who (besides you) sang on the record? 

Ann Brown and Steve Einhorn did the backing vocals.  Ann I’ve known since Jr. High (middle school) and I had always been knocked out by her voice and presence.  She was in the original group of friends I learned and played music with, and was an integral part of the first shows I did on Folk Scene (KPFK) in 1973 .  She has an incredible ear for harmony, a great imagination for parts and was a way better singer than I could ever hope to be.  I met Steve after the single came out and he had a great vocal range, especially in his falsetto and really had a complementary feel for my repertoire at the time, which was a mix of originals, friends originals and traditional songs.  We had been performing around Portland and he made his way to L.A. on his own dime to be a part of the record.  He and Ann worked really well together and we had a lot of fun working the parts out.  I think they succeeded greatly in making the music more listenable. 

What have you been up to, musically or otherwise, since the record came out?

 The most current piece of music I’ve released is the Willy Loman Blues from 2011. There is a children’s collection of songs that was recorded in the mid 80’s with Rick Cunha co-producing and playing (plus others) that would actually be the last finished work that’s really a collection of odd songs that I wrote that didn’t really fit on a “serious” album.

I am working on a new album with Keven Brennan producing for the small f.Boo label and am very excited to have something new to share. They say you have to release something new every 30 to 40 years or they forget about you. If anyone’s interested in checking out new music and old songs in various shades of development they can find me on SoundCloud.

Finally, any thoughts on the Grateful Dead?

It’s becoming more and more evident that no matter what band or who he played with Garcia was one of the great musical spirits of the 20th century. I’d have to say I’m a serious student in that regard. 

[theovisaries]

What a surprise to find this in the crates at the Woodstock Library Fair.

Jerry Moore recorded only one LP for the ESP label in 1967, but it's a show-stopper. Recalling some of my favorite sixties folk-hybrid records such a Measure of Pleasure by PF Sloan and the self-titled David Blue record, with a dash of Tim (Hardin & Buckley) thrown in for good measure.  Titles like "Life is a Constant Journey Home", "Anti-Bellum Sermon" and lyrics such as "...talkin' about freedom in a biblistic kinda way" let you know where Moore's mind is at, and indeed, word is that following this release he moved away from the Greenwich Village scene to become a street preacher.

[theovisaries]

Some Obligatory Remarks, Inspired by One Man, Following his Being Angered by a Twenty-One Year Old National Public Radio Music Intern and her Throughts Regarding Music and Money

Yesterday, David Lowery posted a polemical open letter on his blog The Trichordist (subtitle: Artists for an Ethical Internet) that sought, through the foil of an unwitting twenty-one year old NPR intern, to identify some of the reasons why people are not spending money on music, and why recording artists are suffering and dying as a result.  The piece generated a great many shares, comments, and associated hubbub on the internet, and sparked much discussion, some even interesting, on why artists' revenues are shrinking in the current music marketplace.  While much of what Lowery writes is articulate and insightful, particularly his discussion of how corporate and advertising interests profit from the so-called "free culture" movement, what follows is an attempt to nuance his argument by looking at the questions he raises from a slightly different angle. It surprises me that Lowery, a mathematician, erstwhile Camper Van Beethoven front man and university lecturer of music business economics at University of Georgia grounds his argument in ethical, rather than purely material terms.  Ethical arguments open a tricky can of worms, and are perhaps better suited for his colleagues in the Philosophy department.  For one thing, they sound finger-waggly, and even if that's only a superficial quality of the rhetoric, it's enough to alienate some readers from go.  But more importantly, the ethical argument obscures another reason why I believe consumers aren't buying enough CDs and legally downloading enough music (via Amazon, itunes, Bandcamp and the like) to adequately compensate musicians.  This reason is better explained by good old fashioned value investment a-la Warren Buffett than a metaphysics of morals.  We can pontificate about whether it's "right" to get music without paying for it, and if not, how best to police wrong behavior, raise consciousness, so on and so forth, but this fact will remain: people are increasingly reluctant to pay for something that immediately becomes nearly valueless in terms of exchange (i.e. real U.S. dollars) upon purchase.  This is one major reason why the automaker Honda is still doing brisk business selling cars, while the slavic firm Yugo is no longer a going concern.  Believe it or not, people will pay for music all day long.  They just don't want to pay for a shitty, wasteful, overpriced product.  In fact, the view from the ground isn't as dismal as Lowery makes it seem.  Like the overwhelming majority of musicians, (Lowery included) I have another job.  In fact, strange as it may seem, I never expected to make a living off music in the first place.  For a while I was lucky and I did, and that was great while it lasted.  Then things changed, NBD as they say.  I was fortunate enough to convince the kind people at Academy Records in Brooklyn to let me "work" there (play country-rock records).  Would I rather have been making my own records than selling other people's?  You bet.  Did I think the world dealt me some kind of colossal injustice because I wasn't?  Well, truth be told, some days it did seem that way...but I digress.  I dealt with frustration by learning as much as I could about what else is out there.  Something like 90% of all recorded music is not in print, usually for good reason, and not digitized.  But even if you don't live near a great record store with a listening station, public libraries will lend you tons of music, even if you're a convicted felon!  But again, I digress. What I intended to express in the above paragraph will not come as a shock to many people, which is that vinyl, as both artifact and physical object, is not that difficult to sell.  This remains true despite how pricey it has become of late (does everything have to be gatefold- sheesh!).  I know this because I sold thousands of dollars worth of records, all week long, for three years.  I also witnessed a steady procession of bands and labels that parlayed modest (in the Fleetwood Mac-ian scheme of things, I mean downright meager) vinyl sales figures into that most elusive quantity: cultural capital.  How did they do this?  Well, that's complicated and mysterious.  It's outside of my scope, which is another way of saying I have no clue.  If I did, I would not be writing this right now.  But AGAIN I digress... I hear you 21 year old intern!  Not all of us are old vinyl coots and codgers.  Besides, records are bulky...and they smell!  Sure, some people find the very inconvenience of driving 40 miles in search of a particular record appealing.  But what about the well-adjusted, busy others who view such behavior as irrational, irresponsible even, a pathetic waste of time, only appealing to deviant cretins and the mentally insane?  Well, it seems these normal young people are willing to pay for music too, only in the form of a yet-to-be-determined monthly sum granting instant access to anything ever recorded, delivered right to their phone.  Convenience!  Although many of us are attached to real value, i.e., something we can take home, look at, put on a shelf, maybe sell on eBay or trade for a decent amount of store credit when we're sick of it, others will pay a monthly sum to not bother, and never set foot in a record store.  We may not all like it, but that's where we are, these are the twin poles of recorded music's potential for revenue.  But what of the vast middle ground of CDs (Baby and non-Baby), streaming services, legal downloads, videos and so on?  With the exception of bizarre outliers such as Rhino Handmade (seriously guys, CD only in 2012?), for all but the top-grossing entertainers in the land, these occupy the traditional territory of the loss-leader.  Maybe they'll help interest people in your project and give you a little folding money on tour, if you're lucky.  David Lowery has been suspiciously quiet about Spotify, the service that currently comes closest to providing the dream of total access.  The platform is a work in progress, and I'll end this essay with a few remarks about this service, which I enjoy, responsibly, and in moderation.  Right now as I write I'm listening to Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, because my conscience was clear about not buying the latest deluxe 2CD edition of Damn the Torpedoes, bonus tracks notwithstanding.   I have familiarized myself with records by amazing folks such as Cass McCombs and The Black Swans through Spotify, and have purchased LPs by both, and paid (or will pay) to see their live shows as well.  So Spotify can't be all bad, right... I recently read a letter to the editor in Tape Op Magazine complaining that Spotify's interface does not allow users to search for similar artists based on their producer or engineer.  The idea is that if you are a fan of the band Beach House, you may want suggestions and links to lesser known acts also recorded, for example, by Chris Coady, such as Gang Gang Dance.  This struck me at first as typical megalomanic recording engineer zaniness, but it does point to another problem with the access model, which is the removal of context, credits, background information, the very things that humanize music and make it part of something larger.  And if producers are getting short shrift, imagine what's happening to bass players, who, as Lowery astutely pointed out in an earlier blog post, are "historically the most aggrieved members of any musical ensemble."  Theoretically, since links are limitless, Spotify should provide more information than a record jacket ever could.  But it won't.  However, this is the least of Spotify's image problems.  On a systemic level, it is horrendous how little money seems to be coming around to smaller labels and independent artists from Spotify.  Lowery pines for the "inadvertent subsidies" model of the old music industry.  Maybe with enough pressure, Spotify could yet achieve something like this.  

[theovisaries]

The Five Year Engagement, Shame, and Wanderlust

"In a typical romantic comedy the two lovers tend to be young, likeable, and apparently meant for each other, yet they are kept apart by some complicating circumstance (e.g., class differences, parental interference; a previous girlfriend or boyfriend) until, surmounting all obstacles, they are finally wed. A wedding-bells, fairy-tale-style happy ending is practically mandatory."[5]                                                                                                                                     *  One such "complicating circumstance", the conflict between work and romance, has been a plot device for all kinds of films worldwide, to varying degrees of complexity: silent comedies depicted the physicality and drudgery of factory labor, using the romance plot as escape for the hero who outsmarts the system.  At the other extreme, a film like Ozu's Late Spring (an example of the Japanese genre called Shomingeki, dealing with the daily lives of working and middle class people in post-war Japan), situates the work-family conflict in an intricate web of collective historical relationships such as tradition versus modernity, and the experience of women under patriarchy.  Contemporary American romantic comedies have always existed somewhere in this trajectory.  More often than not, they deal with the problems faced by white men and women in their quest to "have it all": career success, love and children.  Their British counterparts mitigate these high expectations somewhat by bringing the reality of class to bear on the situation.  French and Italian romantic comedies, on the other hand, often use the interference of past, present and future lovers (and indeed, the foibles of faith and monogamy in general) as fodder for their comedic and narrative development.  I haven't seen many Scandinavian rom-coms, but would guess their conflicts include the weather, relative severity of depression, and suicide.  I bring up these examples not to make sweeping cultural generalizations, but to illustrate my main point, which is that the primary representative conflict inhibiting narrative closure for the rom-com is historically and culturally relative, and therefore shifting.  So what happens when one such "complicating circumstance" becomes representative of a nearly insoluble social problem?                                                                                       * Since around 2008, the increasingly outrageous demands, lack of benefits, and stagnant wages of what we might politely call a buyer's labor market has brought the conflict between work and romance to the fore of the romantic comedy.  Two recent films, Wanderlust and The Five Year Engagement illustrate this to great effect.  Although the couples in these films complicate their relationships with other love interests, it is noteworthy that in both, such dalliances arise only from employment-related geographic displacement. Even more telling evidence that the work romance dilemma eclipses all the other plot conflicts is found in the tacked-on endings of both films, each showing similar solutions to the characters' former economic woes, namely, the couple as cottage industry: after a long two hours of The Five Year Engagement (noteworthy as a formalist distillation of the romantic comedy to its essence: delay), we understand that Tom and Violet will finally persevere as a unit once we see Violet beside Tom in his taco truck, with the borderline snooty academic even condescending to wear a food-service uniform in solidarity.  Likewise in Wanderlust, final narrative closure is signaled not when the couple reunites after emotional turmoil, but rather in the montage ending sequence showing George and Linda's successful boutique publishing concern (exploiting the crackpot author they once mocked).  Miraculously escaping multiple career failures and a layoff respectively, the cramped quarters of their former Manhattan digs, and finally, an ill-fitting, rural "bohemian" alternative (parodied with a fair amount of laughs), the film ends with the couple ensconced, like a couple of modern-day Goldilocks, in what's just right: the home office of a spacious Brooklyn apartment, with a few totemic souvenirs of their journey domesticated and mounted on the wall for safe viewing.                                                                                                                                          * Steve McQueen's lurid, compelling, but ultimately distasteful Shame uses sex addiction, leading to utter psychological breakdown, to link urban male worship of economic, sexual, and domestic autonomy with compulsive, asocial behavior.  While not a comedy, Shame mobilizes a similar central plot contrivance of the contemporary romantic comedy, that of the incompatible schism between a professional and intimate life.  However, it does so to a drastically different conclusion that lacks any hope of resolution: after extended, self-inflicted sexual degradation (including a few scenes which have received some flack for doing nothing to reverse stereotypes of gay men as sex freaks), the film climaxes in the bathroom with sister Sissy's blood-smeared suicide attempt, eliciting Brandon's (Michael Fassbender) pity and grief, not without a certain subtext of incestuous, necrophillic desire, perhaps the pinnacle of deviant behavior.  Earlier in the film, Brandon tries to spark up a romance with his co-worker Marianne, and during their dinner date sequence, a certain degree of chivalry and pathos is extracted from Brandon's character.  He even parts with the pornography on which he is fixated.  However, the next day at work, he drags Marianne, cave-man style, to a hotel, does a line of cocaine, attempts to have sex with her, and fails.  This leads him further downward.  He returns home to watch some cartoons, but soon his freeloading sister arrives and punctures his last fortress of defense by degrading his accomplishment of maintaining what appears to be an idiotic job and a lonely, solitary living situation.  This insult leads to his outing, a bender for all types of revolting, disgusting energy.  Aside from Brandon and Sissy's ambiguous "shameful" back-story, the suggestion in Shame is that the wanton freedom afforded by straight white male privilege, money, and membership in corporate culture comes at the cost of what we otherwise call normal social adjustment...                                                                                     * The problem with Shame, as well as the romantic comedies discussed above, is that their conclusions are too extreme, albeit in radically different directions.  While both Wanderlust and The Five Year Engagement cling to the fantasy of simple, bourgeois solutions to an impossible balancing act between stable relationships and the "freedom" to earn a living as an unfettered individual, Shame gives us a lurid account of what happens to one man when there's no feasible pathway out.  What is lost in these films is what theorist Sianne Ngai refers to in her book Ugly Feelings: non-cathartic feelings such as irritation, envy, boredom, paranoia, the kinds of states we find when effective action is blocked or suspended. Shame, with it's excesses of vitality and depths of despair sets far too grand of a stage to examine such minor feelings, and obviously, the rom-coms, despite a few laughs along the way, tie everything up far too neatly.                                                                                        * What is wanting are non-cathartic cinematic counterparts of our economic moment, in all of its difficult taciturnity.

[theovisaries]

[theovisaries]

The World Is A Bit Like That

A highlight of Jim Jarmusch's 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes is a short called "Cousins", in which Cate Blanchett plays herself, as well as a fictional non-famous cousin named Shelly, whom she meets over some coffee in the lounge of a hotel.  Blanchett is all smiles and Merchant-Ivory demeanor.  By contrast, Shelly would not be out of place at a Jet show in her native Sydney.  Near the end of the scene, Blanchett offers Shelly a gift: a wrapped shopping bag containing some expensive perfume, which is clearly swag, prompting this line from Shelley: "It's funny, don't you think, that when you can't afford something, it's like, really expensive, and when you can afford it, it's like, free.  Kinda backward, don't you think?" To which Blanchett laconically replies: "Yeah, well the world's a bit like that in a lot of ways." If one is looking for an analogous example of how "the world is a bit like that", one could do worse than examining the relationship between booking agencies and their clients.  This is neither a critique of the Booking Agency, which must operate like any other business, nor is it one of individual agents, who from the admittedly small sample I have known are a perfectly amiable lot.  But something is amiss in the world of live music bookings.  Current bands are not touring to the degree they once were, and if they are, they're skipping a great deal of the country in favor of "major markets" around the world.  Meanwhile, a handful of unusually lucky artists who have not recorded a new song in decades sell out shows within minutes.  As for the rest of us, well, we have a bit of leg work and following up to do to coordinate a long weekend of shows.  How did we get here? Conventional wisdom is that this is a natural result of technological and economic change: it used to be that bands built a fan base from steady touring.  Sometimes the tours were long and grueling and included stops in places said bands would rather not be.  Other times they were short and sweet and included trips to the beach or Sweden.  But either way, they took time and dedication.  In other words, opportunity costs.  But then, as the story goes, our viral era of streaming immediacy, not to mention expensive gasoline, ushered out this Clydesdale-like work ethic in favor of a new approach.  Now, the newly liberated musical artist is free to adopt whatever tactic enhances the bottom line of their capital, be it financial or cultural, while minimizing any troublesome sunk costs.  Much like the military, which rhetorically extols the virtue of targeted air strikes and drone operations (while reserving the "ground war" for purely symbolic reasons), the national tour is now akin to the surge, a necessary evil to manage the problem of momentum.  Of course there is some truth to the above explanation for the shift we are witnessing.  And it's not all bad.  There are as many ways to approach being a live band as there are bands, ceaseless touring is merely one mode among many.  But chalking this up to depersonalized manifestations of technological and economic change obscures the role played in the process by the agents, talent buyers and bands that stand to gain- that is, maximize their returns and minimize their unprofitable labor, from these changes. Start by looking at the "avails" on most agent's rosters.  You'll notice that roughly half of the artists represented are only available for so-called "special situations":  festivals, college $hows, cruises, fly-ins and the like.  In other words, low-stress, high payoff, no weeks in the rust belt, no endless drives from Kansas to Denver either!  While this is doubtless an understandable attitude, it's also an attitude that, ideally, should be earned.  Do we really want a situation in which recognition (i.e. cultural capital) gives a band the right to exist as a live entity only when it's convenient and lucrative?  Unless you've crossed the country as many times successfully as unsuccessfully (with "success" here modestly defined as breaking even financially with an attrition rate of less than half your band members) your avails should simply read "generally available."  That way, you can still discretely reject unattractive offers while maintaining a semblance of humility.  Needless to say, humility does not rule the day.   Another weird thing that a perusal of a booking agency might reveal to the casual observer is that the line separating an active artist, that is, one releasing newly recorded music and participating in the culture, from a merely hypothetically entity, has dissolved, as the recent rash of reunions, classic album shit storms, and career resuscitations will attest.  Many booking agencies rosters now look like a bizarre hodgepodge mixtape of the past three decades.  And it's a slippery slope.  Once another band reforms, the next step is to add them to the active roster and wait to see what offers roll down the pike.  Wait, in many cases, there's no need to add them, because they were never deleted in the first place, despite being inactive for years.  This is because there is no incentive to prune a roster, as it costs nothing to maintain an artist's hypothetical availability, and the potential gains could be huge. In the spirit of trying to find a constructive, non-complaintive solution to all this, I recently had the idea of starting a booking collective.  The idea was that myself and the few individuals  I have worked with during the past year booking shows in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley would collectivize, pool our contacts, and establish a working roster and some kind of infrastructure.  I even went as far as to pitch the idea to some potential collaborators.  But then a funny thing happened, and I had to rethink the whole idea.  This was because I found myself replicating on a tiny scale the very same logic against which I was railing.  As I brainstormed my theoretical roster, many of the names I jotted down were barely active musicians.  Maybe they released a record some years back, perhaps they had demanding careers as attorneys, and so on and forth.  Much like folks from the 90s now saddled with property taxes and orthodontists' bills, my prestige artists would probably be up for playing shows only if they were significantly better than what they experienced when they were trying to be musicians in earnest, which I certainly could not promise.      What we are left with is a paradoxical, winner-take-all state of affairs.  New bands in it for the long haul that would like to tour have little help and must go it alone, combing through years of outdated contacts to make that happen, while those who have the benefit of an agent in their corner actually have a disincentive to perform anything more than sparingly. In fact, in many cases, bands now view booking multiple shows without sufficient time between as a risky move, a liability that could potentially squander their precious and limited capital.  Which begs the question: why, given that as commercial viability increases, the quantity of work a band is obliged to take on decreases, does that band then receive the benefit of an outside party to manage their affairs?   While those who actually would prefer to spend their time performing now have an additional, poorly compensated full time administrative job?

I guess the only answer is that the world is a bit like that.     

[theovisaries]

[theovisaries]

Gram Parsons

This past November 5 would have been Gram Parsons' 65th birthday.  Ms. Anne Cunningham and I celebrated by venturing from our home in Saugerties across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to Club Helsinki in Hudson, NY to see a Gram Parsons tribute show.  A southerner now residing in the nearby Berkshires named Johnny Irion got the call as Gram, and Otto Hauser was on drums.  A fine show as far as tributes go, but really, with a body of work like GP's, there's not a lot that can go wrong. 

Driving home, I remembered one defining incident explained in David Meyer's excellent biography, Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music, an event that deserves reflection here, as it was key to Gram's later musical development.

In the canon of Rock 'n' Roll myths, Gram Parsons' now imfamous decision to quit The Byrds prior to their tour of South Africa ranks high. The story goes like this: The Byrds, who at this point were pared down to a business partnership between Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, had a contact through singer Miriam Makeba's management, and were told they could do well performing in South Africa.   Another well known fact is that at this point, Gram was spending a lot of time with the Rolling Stones, specifically Keith Richards.  Either Mick or Keith informed the politically naive Parsons about the situation in South Africa with respect to the "brothers."  Gram was appalled, and famously, though not entirely inaccurately, cited Mississippi as a frame of reference for his new found contempt.  He knew he wasn't going there.

Accepted wisdom is that Gram didn't go only after he was told it wasn't cool.  According to David Meyer, because Parsons was "such a bullshitter and never admitted fault", he reached for the high ground.  Popular opinion has historically emptied his refusal to go to South Africa of political content, reducing it to a facile attempt to align his growing disenchantment with the Byrds and attraction to hanging with the Stones with an ethical concern in which he scarecly believed.   McGuinn and Hillman, on the other hand, couching their decision to go to South Africa behind the acceptable rhetoric of "professionalism" played the part of jilted lovers and seemed more like the victims of bad luck than reactionary opportunists.

But to place Parsons' ulterior motives and subsequent actions above the political situation strikes one as funny, not to mention unfair.  According to this sort of rigid "persona moralism" one should never follow one's pleasures following any act, lest it be unethical.  Should Gram have been participating in racial sensitivity workshops rather than playing music with his friends in the Rolling Stones simply because he didn't want to work under conditions of apartheid?  It seems absurd to hold him to that.  Everyone knew Gram was basically apolitical, but even he had his limits.  Again according to Meyers: "The Byrds were sold a load of shit by their promoter and went to South Africa and got pilloried" playing dicey shows to segregated audiences.  Parsons, however passively and questionable the manner in which he weaseled out of it, did not.  The Byrds found this galling, and vented their frustrations on Gram's reputation, not to mention nearby inanimate objects: upon returning from their disastrous trip Chris Hillman reputedly smashed his bass, claiming he never wanted to play that thing anyway, quit the Byrds and joined the nebulous Flying Burrito Brothers, taking up residence with GP at the house where they would later write the majority of The Gilded Palace of Sin, arguably the finest document of the then nascent Country-Rock genre.  That should stand.

And it might have, if Gram himself didn't say anything and simply let his actions speak  Unfortunately,  Gram's statements on the matter nearly undermine any attempt to recover his actions as totally righteous.  Claiming he "had a negro brother" based on having grown up alongside a servant family is off the mark, to say the least.  However, according to Meyer, this was typical of his class and era: "white southerners...felt they could claim soulfulness by extension and ignore the class realities that underlay the racial ones."   

[theovisaries]

Ivar Kants performing the amazing Dylan pastiche "I'm Me, Babe" in Peter Weir's The Plumber, 1979.

[theovisaries]

[theovisaries]

Midnight In Paris

      The upcoming month of September, 2011 marks the ten year anniversary of a tragic event that forever upended life in America, leaving our reality forever and irrevocably altered.  I'm speaking, of course, of the now infamous fracas between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey over her selection of his novel The Corrections for the Oprah Book Club.  A cursory summary of the events:  On September 5, 2001, Franzen's publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux released an initial print run of 90,000 copies of The Corrections.  In no way similar to sprawling, difficult work such as William Gaddis' The Recognitions to which its title bears superficial resemblance, the book is a highly readable affair, an ensemble family drama dealing with rough but ultimately redeemed contours of mid-thirties male consciousness.  With generally favorable reviews, blurbs by notables like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, and early appearances on some bestseller lists, Franzen appeared poised to become the latest entry to the genial canon of "postmodern fiction" established on college campuses in the late 80s and 90s when he came of age.  After spotty sales of Franzen's first two novels, The Corrections was shaping up to be a success.  It would free him to continue his preferred mode of writing while earning a living doing so (he has publicly stated that he dislikes teaching), and allow him to consolidate the respect of his publishing world associates and literary peers.     All of this changed one fateful day in September.  After reading the novel, Oprah Winfrey concluded that it would resonate with her audience.  Plus, a little literary prestige wouldn't hurt her either, especially since the novel was so, well, readable.  The September 24th announcement that The Corrections would be included in the Book Club was a boon for book sales projections.  New York magazine reported on November 5, 2001 that after the Oprah-announcement "publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux called for another 680,000 copies, 500,000 of which Jeff Seroy, FSG's publicist, attributes directly to Oprah." Remarkably, this staggering figure left little impression on the cold, conflicted Franzen.  On October 12, The Oregonian published some of Franzen's remarks:     "The first weekend after I heard, I considered turning it down...I feel like I'm solidly in the high art literary tradition, but I like to read     entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood."  No longer anxious about economic survival, and perhaps slightly worried about being "misunderstood", interviews reveal that Franzen's overriding concern was whether the British literary establishment would take his latest novel seriously upon publication in the United Kingdom.  Would the reviews say anything beyond the perfunctory pleasantries issued for his first two books?  Oprah's stamp of approval, which Franzen on several occasions referred to as a "corporate logo", might help his bottom line, but it would be disastrous for his reputation as a purveyor of serious intellectual writing, particularly across the pond.  In the series of now legendary foot-in-mouth episodes for which he only last year enacted a public reconciliation, Franzen insulted Oprah's taste and previous picks, alienating and offending both her and her viewers in the process.  On October 22, Oprah rescinded her invitation to have Franzen appear on the show, diplomatically claiming that she never wished to make Franzen feel "uncomfortable."      In November 2001, the book was published in the UK and met with generally favorable reviews that failed to consider the work outside the context of this debacle.     Ten years later, Jonathan Franzen's cavalier dismissal of Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, its implied preoccupation with a specific, target audience's reception, and disregard for what promised to be a not-marginal increase in sales strikes us mostly as quaint.  In his earnest pantomime of the familiar antagonism between the "high-literary tradition" and commerce, the gesture we witnessed was really the last dying gasp of disinterest in monetary success and disdain for mass acceptance as a key signifiers of qualification for any so-called "high aesthetic" realm, the literary appendix of which Franzen so fervently wished to join.  Or to put it another way, in most cases it is no longer a meaningful, or even decipherable social gesture to snub a revenue stream. Given our current economic conditions, the refusal of compensation for one's work appears inscrutable, not principled.  This is a significant shift in the prevailing attitude of the 1990s, which I argue reached its conclusion with the Franzen episode of 2001.      In 2011, a typical work of contemporary fiction sells a fraction of the 90,000 copies slated for unloading by FSG in 2001.  For recording artists getting a start, a pressing of 200 records isn't quite a "limited edition" the way privately pressed record from the 60s or 70s were.  Musicians with steady incomes either churn out innocuous tracks featuring fifth generation copy Karen Dalton inspired vocals to sell domestic goods and automobiles, slavishly make the rounds of corporate parties and festivals, or if all else fails, revive their 90s bands.  There are exceptions of course, but as a wise man somewhere once said, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.  For the former individuals, one can safely assume that existential quandaries are not present whilst depositing that check from Subaru, Jack Daniel's or wherever at their local bank.  Yes, the economic landscape has changed for most of us, and it seems everyone is all too aware of the attendant struggle.  At least everyone except one charming seventy-something filmmaker from Brooklyn.      In his latest film, Woody Allen takes us back in time, but not exclusively to the 1920s as promised.  Echoes of the less economically dire but more philosophically confused, ethically conflicted 1990s lurk everywhere beneath the surface of Midnight In Paris.  Mr. Allen has been hard at work for 40+ years cranking out intelligent mass entertainment (to distract himself from imminent death he often claims), so we can excuse him for not getting the memo that in the past decade, the game has changed so to speak.  Instead, we get the same pop-Kierkegaardian existential dilemmas Woody Allen has been proffering for decades, and indeed continues to, despite material conditions changing mostly for the worse.     This time we have Owen Wilson as Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter with ambiguous, insecure feelings regarding his own literary aspirations.  The drama turns on two central tropes of Kierkegaardian philosophy that should be familiar even to those only casually acquainted with Woody Allen's films: Does Gil possess the courage to sacrifice security in pursuit of a higher aim?   And as a subset of this question, will his engagement to the square, status-oriented Inez (portrayed by Rachel McAdams), like Kierkegaard's to his beloved Regina Olsen, be broken in the process?      On the surface, Gil is a romantic given to wander the streets of Paris, which he finds "most beautiful in the rain."  But Gil's romantic impulses are fraught with anxiety.  He's worried he's a "Hollywood hack", but his wish to change course and chuck security for his writerly dream is in desperate need of validation.  Gil's fiancee and in-laws can't provide this: they think he's a little off, but as long as he's earning a comfortable living they do not care a wit about the quality or content of his work.  This rankles Gil, sending him into an old-school Woody Allen style crisis, which Owen Wilson portrays with the affable, disarmingly light touch that has become his calling card.  The cartoonish set of 1920s ex-pat writers and artists emerge as a device through which Allen represents a locus of Authority capable of bestowing a stamp of artistic approval upon Gil.  Bolstered by Hemmingway's caricatured machismo (played with aplomb by Cory Stoll) and a hilarious discussion with a the Surrealists, Gil works up the nerve to transgress social convention the way "artists" are expected to, culminating with a bungled attempt at an illicit affair with Picasso's former mistress Adriana.  Gil finds an old book that mentions the earrings she had worn when they consummated the affair, and attempts unsuccessfully to steal his fiancee's earrings to bring about this end.  With his desires frustrated and his morals lapsed, Gil's courtship of Adriana is left unfulfilled: the two share a kiss before she goes permanently to dwell in her own Golden Age at Maxim's of the Belle Époque.      Melancholic, Gil returns to Gertrude Stein's and receives from her a moderately favorable review of his book, and is triumphantly assured of his status as a real writer.  However, in a strange trick that defies narrative logic, Stein also mentions that she does not find it plausible that one character in the book can't see that the female character (this supposedly in a book that Gil wrote) is having an affair with a friend.  Gil confronts Inez and it is revealed to be true: she has spent a couple of nights with her pompous pseudo-intellectual friend Paul while Gil was out time-traveling.  The engagement is broken, and Gil is briefly dejected but ultimately consoled by the fact that he is, after all, a serious writer.      Interestingly, it is not through evidence of any foreseeable compensation for his book that Gil enacts the categorical leap from Hollywood hack to real writer (compare this to the more satirical transformation-to-artist narrative Allen offers as a subplot in Whatever Works).  Allen rarely depicts becoming an artist as a material transaction.  Rather, it is via implied membership to an imaginary aesthetic symbolic realm that the aspiring artist is psychologically freed to carry on with his or her endeavors.  The Gil character of Midnight In Paris ends up living in the manner Hemmingway would approve of, free to follow his desires (Id) without any further inhibition or stricture (Superego).  Or to put it in Kierkegaard's terms, the Aesthetic Stage of life has been reconciled with the Ethical, and Gil's anxieties are temporarily abated.  Whereas Kierkegaard wrote poetic, pseudonymous philosophical fragments under the tutelage of the divine, Gil walks around Paris and sits in cafes.  The film ends with Gil purchasing a record as a souvenir of his 20s sojourn from Gabrielle, a Parisian street vendor of 78 RPM discs (who, it must be said, appearance-wise is a far cry from your usual lot of 78 dealer/collectors depicted in film and bourn out by experience; as such she would in all likelihood be as rare as the copy of Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" coveted by Steve Buscemi's character in Ghost World).  The two of them walk together in the rain, and presumably she will become the muse of his next writing project, perhaps a short piece about falling in love to a backdrop of crisp dance records from the 1930s.     The film is well-written and clever enough, but it succeeds despite cultural lag: the source of Gil's self-doubt is about as anachronistic as the 1920s fashion gleefully rendered in the film.  I would hazard a guess that post-2007, those doing well financially in Hollywood and everywhere else are probably quite content with their station- not too worried about "serious writing" and on the verge of chucking it all.  However, only ten years ago, the relative cultural value of a lucrative market position was being clumsily called into question by Franzen and others.  This pose took a vanishing baseline of material support for granted, assuming that for example, the 90,000 books which once represented modest sales would persist as a stable level for the foreseeable future, a frame error to be sure.      The disturbing conclusion is that in stagnant economic times, revenue seeking as a primary objective for the artist becomes even more necessary, and hence irreproachable, across the board.  The result is a mirror image of the shrinking middle-class phenomenon visible elsewhere, whereby access to scarce funding is even less egalitarian ever.  Across disciplines and media, adequate compensation for any given individual artist now dovetails nicely into the larger project of wealth redistribution in favor of top earners, and consolidation of cultural influence for powerful institutions, the corporation being the paradigmatic example.  It is no wonder that class-conscious art is relegated to marginal status in this country, if it is even able to exist at all.  This leaves us with a difficult middle course to chart: accept that one's work will at times be situated in an unwanted, potentially degraded context, or find refuge in whatever version of the "underground" is available, a kind of destitute microcosm in which competition still rules over any collectivist ethic, only work takes much longer to be completed.  For the running time of Midnight In Paris however, no such complications arise.  Woody Allen's construction of an imaginary trans-historical aesthetic pantheon might come to us already a bit out of date, but considering the filmmaker's body of work, and his singular place as one of the most prolific mediators of serious craft and comedic entertainment in cinema, this can be forgiven.

[theovisaries]

The Hangover II

     In Todd Phillips' latest installment of The Hangover series, we have another engagement story, but as we know from the first movie, it's an engagement that will end in marriage despite having every conceivable reason for being broken off.      Unlike the slightly more sensitive males of the "Bromance" genre, a salient characteristic of protagonists in mainstream male-bonding comedy is an attitude treating the present as a mundane playground for the begrudging enjoyment of the stable work and domesticity that defines their class and racial privilege.  At the same time, memory and the unconscious serve as repositories for the symbolic and supposedly wild acts proving these men fit to transition to their newly domesticated status with their masculinity intact and beyond reproach.  True Kierkegaardian Knights of Resignation these are, and none are better case studies than the hungover gang of Phil, Stu (and to some degree, the perpetually absent Doug).  Only Zach Galafianakis as Alan defies this logic and remains something else, a kind of man-child-in-tennis-whites comic foil, the implication of which being that only those with manifest mental illness eschew conventional marriage and remain in a state of arrested development, in this case illustrated by his princely installment in the parental home.     As identified by David Denby in his New Yorker review, the trick of The Hangover franchise is that memory, inaccessible due to bizarre circumstances and extreme inebriation, must be reconstructed in the manner of the "police procedural" rather than simply recalled.  It is far less entertaining to experience or witness a drunken rampage than to trace its arc the morning after in the company of friends.  I would add that The Hangover II overlaps with another genre that takes personality schism and an alienated, typically male psyche as its precondition for narrative development, namely, the Superhero film.  Like hungover Hulks, these men react with feigned shock and horror, but a measure of tangible satisfaction, each instance they uncover knowledge of their foreign alter-egos wreaking all types of unspeakable havoc, acts they never suspected themselves or each other capable.      For a film with a reputation for transgressive humor, it's worth pointing out how predictable these acts are.  Only Teddy, who as we learn in the photo montage superimposed over the closing credits has severed his own finger in a game of Mumblety-Peg, did anything unusual.  For the others we have the usual loutish behavior that passes for wildness: tattoos, prostitutes, and firearms under the influence of copious amounts of booze.  All of this takes place against a lushly photographed backdrop of Bangkok, exoticized, personified and demonized/feminized as taker of weak men, as evinced by the repeated statement "Bangkok has him now."  None of these manly men succumb to Bangkok's clutches.  After a half-baked tour of Bangkok's criminal underworld to find Teddy, the gang is reunited, and arrive via a speedboat helmed by Alan to the colonial-style resort at which the wedding is to take place.  Stu gives his unapproving, insulting father-in-law-to-be a piece of his mind, which not surprisingly earns Stu the respect and blessing he sought, but feared was all but lost during the adventure to recover his formerly missing, newly disfigured brother-in-law-to-be.  Again we witness a curious reversal of power relations wherein white, financially secure males are objects of suspicion and must earn the approval of the racialized other, in this case represented as a condescending, snobbish patriarch of Thai extraction.     As a final note, how much better would the wedding reception scene have been if Phillips had wheeled out Murray Head to perform his authoritative reading of "One Night in Bangkok" from Chess instead of Mike Tyson'?  This choice is revealing.  Overestimating how memorable the original film's kitschy cameo of the boxer was, Tyson is again (albeit not altogether unfairly) objectified as a freak, aligned only with Alan as a fellow outsider to the normal order of white masculinity.