Love and insomnia

[koganbot]

Pasted in from freakytigger's livejournal. In a previous episode advice had been offered in regard to what the panicking, woefully underprepared freakytigger and koganbot should write about in their respective columns (deadlines looming, ideas not in place):

skyecaptain:
2007-09-17 06:48 pm
Both of you should write about Cassie. She's great (I'm late in my Cassie obsession phase).

If I could, I'd talk about "esoteric reading" of modern teenpop, which basically means you pay attention long enough to listen to a whole album/oeuvre to figure out what's going on. I tried to play Ashlee Simpson for a reluctant friend, and realized that I was making my argument backwards: "HOLD ON! Pretty soon this will signify 'complicated' even to you, the instinctive bristler, because you don't need to try to figure out how her contradictions work in advance." I.e., when Frank talks about "Autobiography" being a personals ad, it's important to stick with Ashlee long enough to realize that her superficiality MAKES HER DEEPER. And that this isn't "reading into her too much" -- when she says "I've got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt," it's kind of as silly as it wants to be, and it only scans as deep in relation to the other stuff happening in her other songs (not just the oft-quoted coffee incident in "Better Off"). Like listening to "Pieces of Me," I now have a better understanding of what's happening here -- she's finding love for what basically amounts to the first (and ONLY) time on the whole album, but you don't figure out how this usually works (I'm a mess and I guess we love each other but then why are we both so fucked up??) until you've already gotten to know her. Which makes "Pieces of Me" a bad place to start. Almost as bad as starting with "Autobiography." (Unless, that is, you want to get to know her, in which case it's all good because you're probably in for the long haul, maybe because you've talked to a supporter via poptimists about it already).

Um. Anyway. This is sort of a riff on your [Tom's] Big Idea idea (keep riffing on this; I feel like there's something important but still underdeveloped here) -- the Big Idea of Ashlee Simpson (to someone who isn't totally closed off to the possibility of enjoying her music, who will like think the Big Idea is "SHE SUCKS SO WHY SHOULD I LISTEN TO HER!1!11") is probably "Pieces of Me," but this is overshadowed time and again elsewhere, which retroactively enriches the song for its very incongruity. I.e., the Big Idea turns out to be a pretty Small Idea after all! Whereas ABBA's catchiness and adult themes always work in tandem, pretty much at all times. Catchiness isn't an inflated Big Idea, it's just the one that gets privileged (often at the expense of the other ideas, but not in a way that precludes them from working at all, whereas with Ashlee, if you think the understandable surface read -- I even had this read until I started noticing how friggin' BLEAK some of it is, but with the possibility of redemption from bleakness -- of "Pieces of Me" is the norm, you're missing Her, period.

(Is this making any sense?)

skyecaptain:
2007-09-17 06:49 pm
Should note that my "HOLD ON!" response was futile, and I was pretty much wasting my time. Some friendships can't encompass all of my interests, but so what? Anyway, it was worth a shot.

koganbot:
2007-09-17 08:59 pm
Auteurist! I mean, when you come down to it, that's a big part of auteurism, taking the time to get to know a lot of what, say, Raoul Walsh does, not merely a single one of his movies. But then this is how you get to know anything, from your best friend's sister to quantum mechanics. You see a bit of it in action here, more of it in action there, you notice similarities, surprises, the surprises getting you to rethink what you'd "known" earlier. And you can carve out different areas of knowledge that contain the same phenomenon. E.g., "Pieces Of Me" as part of teenpop 2004, "Pieces Of Me" as an example of John Shanks' riffage and strumming and chorus release, "Pieces Of Me" on your best friend's sister's iPod, "Pieces Of Me" in relation to female adolescent development in the United States in the early 21st century.

I don't have much tolerance for people who won't even listen. No, that's not true. I don't have much tolerance for people whose reason for not listening, beyond the usual "I don't have much time," "I tend to find jazz more relaxing," "I've got 65 books to read and 29 albums to listen to by yesterday," etc., is that they think they already know what's there. But then my reason for not reading books on astrology and books on the seven habits of successful businessmen etc. is that, while I may well find something surprising that teaches me something new about the world, I'm not expecting them to feed my soul. Of course, how can my soul know this, if I don't read them? Or that I should give really low priority to reading mystery novels in which a cat is a main character? I've never read one, and I most likely never will, but how do I know? But making such choices is a necessity. Without habits and prejudices and received ideas, we don't get through the day, and a lot of our snap judgments work well enough. It's only on the basis of being conventional and nonexploratory in a whole bunch of areas that I have the time and the stamina to go looking for surprise in music. (But then, my contempt for Simon Reynolds' and Idolator's treatment of Paris is a whole different issue; and what's going on with the people you meet who won't give Ashlee the time of day isn't time management, it's social differentiation, and a cultivated ignorance. That's my guess, anyway.)

Interestingly, I am going to talk about some of this in my column, how new ideas fare, how conventionality can sometimes go dysfunctional and leave dark areas of bigotry and ignorance, thoughts about how we can break out of our own ignorance.

mooxyjoo:
2007-09-17 09:48 pm
hermeneutic circle yo

koganbot:
2007-09-17 09:13 pm
I don't find Autobiography bleak in the least; I think the words you're looking for are "anguished" and "uneasy," in the way that "Frankenstein" and "Lookin' For A Kiss" and "Private World" and "Jet Boy" are anguished and uneasy. But they're exuberant, too, and so is Autobiography. Not just embracing the struggle, but making it a spirited dance.

I love "Pieces Of Me," and even if it's one of the few songs on the album where happiness scores a solid victory, it's got its bottom crashes and its sleeplessness. The sound and the thick emotional stream of the chorus seem plenty representative of the album and of Ashlee. Of course, I'm now hearing it through ears that have heard the rest, that have felt the bottom crash elsewhere and know what's at stake.

skyecaptain:
2007-09-17 10:35 pm
I dunno, I think "bleak" does describe "when I hit that bottom, crash, you're all I have," but the bleakness is buoyed (maybe made less bleak?) by the fact that this makes her feel genuinely great. But I think it's just as important that she doesn't really feel genuinely great again until Album Two. ("Better Off" might be the closest she gets to feeling great, and that isn't really saying much, but it's certainly saying something -- and that's precisely what the song is about!) Anguish might be a better word, but I think there's a fundamental pessimism at play, a sort of bewilderment maybe (I relate to this), even if it's relegated to a period of time that Ashlee's pretty confident she'll get through, possibly with the help of this Dude.

Interesting to contrast the sleeplessness in "PoM" with it in "Autobiography" (walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep -- presumably, she's not doing any sleeping, though maybe she does it while everyone else is walking a thousand miles), also because you get a really contained and sorta tightly coiled example of what I'm trying to talk about above:

(1) "Walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep": great line with no real world connection -- the real world connections in the first song are kind of silly, it's actually NOT a great introduction to her (if you're not planning on getting comfortable and reading her autobiography, now that she's dared you to).

(2) "Monday, I am waiting, Tuesday, I am fading, Wednesday, I can't sleep": could be read as Girl Falling Head Over Heels for Random Dude. But that's not all that's going on.

(3) "Monday, waiting, Tuesday fading, into your arms so I can dream": OK now she's fallen head over heels. Before it was sort of equal doses of love and insomnia (love means never having to say I'm going to bed now). When she finally becomes the Big Idea Girl (not actually a very Big Idea in the scheme o' things), it's only (extra-)poignant if you realize that it's not who she was even at the beginning of a song. She might be more in love at the end than she was at the beginning.

Well yeah, it's auteurist by your definition (and it's probably Realist by Bazin's definition, since Realism = "the stuff Bazin digs [into]"). Or we could just call it paying attention to what the piece does. (There's a difference between paying attention and imbuing everything with either great significance or authorial intent, of course, but that kind of goes without saying...it matters when it matters, and with Ashlee it matters a LOT, because you really have to pay attention to understand how she works. I'd argue the same of ABBA, actually.)

skyecaptain:
2007-09-17 10:41 pm
"So I can BREATHE," not dream (need to be careful when I quote lyrics off the top o' me head). So she hangs on to some of the unrest, I guess. And you could read that as more messy than it probably is.

koganbot:
2007-09-17 10:58 pm
You're right, it is "breathe," but the lyric sheet says "dream," so I've made that mistake a number of times, too. Maybe you picked it up from me.

"Finally rest my head on something real." Like, at last! (Reminds me of the Dixie Cups' "Chapel Of Love" (written by Jeff Barry or Ellie Greenwich), which is a totally happy celebration but has this one line that goes "And we'll never be lonely anymore," implying that the basic pre-wedded state is loneliness.)

Um, have to stop writing about Ashlee and write my column (or fall asleep and then dash it out tomorrow).

EDIT: Comment thread contains excellent OTIS FERGUSON quotations.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I should maybe point out that despite the excellent ideamongering above, I decided to follow my heart and write about a gorilla instead.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the gorilla is awesome.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The new Cassie single is SO GOOD. I must remember to check youtube daily for the video's emergence.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Did the Cassie album ever actually get a release in the UK? If not I'm off to the internets, since my previous pirate copy seems to have been swallowed by my hard drive's machinations.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes! Though it had the WORST PR ever - I remember being so frustrated that I just bought it in the end.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What's interesting is that to the extent I find "realism" a useful category (and it can be, but I try to avoid it) Ashlee is pretty "realist." In the sense that I get a really great, direct idea of a real person in her songs.

[koganbot]

Well, "realism" usually means "Matches up with something else in the world that is real." "Hearing a real person in her songs" isn't quite the same concept as "is realistic because that's what people are really like in real life." Not that the two concepts can't coincide, but they're still not the same thing.

In La Chinoise Godard has Léaud claim that Melies was more realistic than Lumiere, that Lumiere was basically copying genre pictures from Impressionist paintings, while Méliès in "Trip To The Moon" and such was depicting what people really cared about. (Um, I haven't seen the movie in over 30 years and I'm having trouble finding the quote online; here's a link to excerpts from a Sarris piece that brings it up; "By contrast, Méliès may have staged the state visit of a Balkan monarch to France with actors and fake sets, but nonetheless he transformed the cinema into a kind of Brechtian newsreel." And here's a bit of the quote I found in another piece, "Well, he made newscasts. Maybe the manner in which he did it made them reconstituted newscasts, but it was really news. And I'll go even further: I'll say that Méliès was Brechtian." But I'm not sure how he claims that "Trip To The Moon" was a Brechtian newscast. Maybe the Léaud character didn't bother to elaborate, and probably the phrase "what people really cared about" is from my mind, not from the script. I'm sure he included "A Trip To The Moon" in his lists of Méliès' realist accomplishments.

Ferguson says of Disney's animated, animal-filled The Band Concert, "The thing in main outline would be very little, if it weren't for the way every incident, every foot of film, is given a solid basis in observation, so that natural action is caught and fixed in a typical gesture, rendered laughable through exaggeration or transference into the unfamiliar; and for the swift way all the incidents pile up on one another. No one ever saw a band so busy, proud, and full of troubles as this, from the virtuoso swapping of hands in the flute duet to the hard-pressed air of the brass section; but the point is, no one ever saw a band that did not have all these things logically in solution, once he looks back on it. As one who has wasted a better part of a lifetime following the bass drum and wondering whether to be a great trombonist, with all that sweep of brass, or famous in the lower registers, to blow thunder into a tuba, I can say that in The Band Concert one of the final comments on the public playing of instruments everywhere has been commented."

But I'd say that Disney is pulling two things off at once; making the comedy work by making it feel real, and making commentary through exaggeration. And I'd say that Ferguson as a critic was real strong on showing how the movies do the former - make something feel real, to the benefit of the yarn, the experience - while not having that much to say about how (or if) movies do the latter; i.e., make a comment on extra-cinematic life.

I'd say that Ashlee and crew created someone real in her songs, and I'd be very surprised if this creation didn't match pretty closely to the Ashlee you get in her day-to-day life, at least the Ashlee as she experience herself internally, getting the motives and the understandings and the feelings you don't necessarily see in the reality show (and so may be truer to Ashlee than the show is); but nonetheless, it this Ashlee on record doesn't have to match up with Ashlee Off Record to feel real. And a character in song is real, even if there is no matchup, in that you do experience and respond to that character. I mean, songs are part of real life, since we really listen to them.

(But then, there are different uses of the word "real"; often it's employed to ask, "What else is going on; what's going on under the surface?")

[koganbot]

The Ferguson paragraph that precedes the one I quoted:

But aside from reminders, The Band Concert was a really marvelous little bit of nonsense, with a fine, tempered edge and the consistent ability to carry the fancy on, not letting the old dog die. The situation was that of a few musicians from the animal kingdom playing a job in some open-air stand - led, as I remember, by the mouse gent, who was most terribly baffled by a sleeve that flopped down over his baton in the sforzando passages, and by the tendency of his band to leave off following the beat and join in with a wandering duck, who was getting "Turkey In The Straw" out of a tin fife at a signal strength of about forty, beating it out with his foot, and not to be quelled either. I don't recall all the details now, but the main number was the "William Tell" overture, which was assisted by the elements, there coming up a fierce twister of wind along in the more dramatic passages, the band getting carried up in the air completely, scattering individually through the air but still playing music like the devil and on the beat, and finally coming down one by one into the coda, which wound up in a glory of sound and wreckage.
- 7 August 1935

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Important to remember that none of these guys were particularly hard-line on realism and were really using it to test out broader ideas (FWIW, just got Farber and Ferguson from the library). I don't think you could really apply realism to music, but I could probably use a term similar to realism to help me define what separates Ashlee Simpson from so many of her peers. (And I think, as I think I've said before, that the teenpop thread people were using "teenpop" and Poptimists are using "pop" for purposes like these, a simultaneous preservation move and rallying term through which we can work out our ideas.)

For Ashlee I'd be tempted to go with something closer to...I dunno, "celebrity mundanism" or "tragic mundanism"? "Mundane" needs a qualifier, and celebrity doesn't quite work (though I like how loaded the word is in the culture right now), but I would say that Ashlee would be Melies -- a sense of craft in shaping the reality of Ashlee On Record serving a more accurate depiction, in this case simply of character and (presumably) of the person, though that's not what's most important -- and any number of nondescript singer-songwriters could probably stand in for Lumiere. (Interesting to see how Lumiere is used in auteurist/auteurist-derived theory, in that some oppose him to Melies in a sort of "spectrum of artistic acheivement," while Bazin, e.g., separates out Lumiere and Edison as "technicians," thus making them something of a nonissue as it pertains to his own arguments about realism and artistry.

[koganbot]

But what I'm remembering of Bazin's realism (I've got the book but really don't have time to reread it) is that Bazin thinks that cinema has embedded within it - or we have embedded in ourselves - the demand that movies show reality and tell the truth about reality. And I think that Bazin is mostly wrong in this regard. Which is to say that filmmakers can want to depict and analyze the world, just as they can want to include moral content in their work, but there's no necessity in this. The "nature of the medium" doesn't force this on them, and actual films that get made don't generally strive to depict and analyze. What they tend to do is to use the world as source material, and because of this they can inadvertantly show us things that depict and even analyze. And they can influence our perception of life outside the movies in that, since we do at least somewhat experience film characters as people, we can bring some of these experiences to our expectations of real life. Which is to say that people who complain about movie and TV stereotypes having an effect on how people perceive young black men (including how young black men perceive young black men) - about movie and TV stereotypes having an effect on how we perceive anyone - have a point. Which isn't to say that the effect is always negative.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Bazin thinks that cinema has embedded within it - or we have embedded in ourselves - the demand that movies show reality and tell the truth about reality.

This is probably about right...there are a few quotes along these lines in "Ontology of the Image" from '42: "It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny. ...If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism."

This gets into even trickier waters when he brings in "indexicality" (my prof said that this is a definitional issue, and that I'm not using "indexical" the way Bazin is, but honestly the problem is I'm not sure what Bazin is trying to say): "The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model."

And finally: "The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is...an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time."

Well, that was one guiding myth, but by no means the only one (the history of film animation pre-dating most narrative/post-Disney animation tells a very different story). As you say, there's nothing inherent about film that marks it as a "documentary" tool (my definition of documentary is incredibly broad, though its widespread usage tends to be fairly limited).

[koganbot]

Don't have time to reread it today, that is.

[koganbot]

I'm thinking of the word "documentary" deriving from "document." How did this happen? You can base your history on actual historical documents, and I think by analogy what's shown in a documentary as facts can be considered akin to documents, and to document something is to make a kind of record (note derivation of the phonograph "record"); but this runs close to the idea of an "artifact." And fiction films might make better artifacts than documentaries, not because they show "real life" better but because they show stories and narrative styles and ideals and objects of lust, hence teach you more about the world that produced them.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

If you look at the Lumiere/Edison split (through Erik Barnouw's history of documentary), you immediately see a difference between taking the camera out to "document" the world, and bringing the world in (to the studio) to be "documented," or to "perform" in front of the camera (Lumiere). And you can kind of track the "documentary/fiction" split between the two of them, Lumiere finding the world outside and Edison sowing the seeds of most narrative or, more specifically, vaudeville and theater-derived film.

Anyway, the problem with documentary-as-genre is that when you go back, back to the beginning, back to when the earth the stars the sun all aligned and cinema was born, you find that "perfect" isn't really perfect, and a lot of these distinctions are totally arbitrary. The usefulness of documentary is that as a category, it -- like "realism" and "teenpop" etc. -- bands together films and methodologies for making films that are only partially compatible with most non-fiction/narrative cinema. There are different questions of power relationships between maker and subject (and audience), which aren't unrelated to how fiction films are made, but are very much distinct. In fiction films you (often) don't get a sense of the life happening outside of the frame (some of my favorite narrative films give a sense of this better than plenty of documentaries, and some of my favorite films don't need life outside of the frame that continues after the plot has ended, and that's kind of the point)l. Whereas with documentary, the continuity of the subject is inescapable by default.

Like many other concepts that I'm hesitant to dismiss entirely just because they confuse me (postmodernism, psychoanalysis, semiotics) I think that documentary works best as a mode of thought, a kind of functional placeholder categorization that tells me there's a "place" for what I'm thinking about/doing in a wider context/conversation (to say the opposite of what you say about "rockism," I can see myself on a map that has the term "documentary" on it, even if I can't really do much with the "document" part). Personally I don't think of my films in terms of "documentary" or "narrative" while I'm making them. I just think of what I'm trying to achieve and how I'm going to achieve it; what sorts of relationships I need to develop and then convey. This would hold as true for a scripted film as an unscripted one, and I think collaboration between subject/maker/audience, if not explicitly than somewhat abstractly (sometimes simply by asking productive questions) is the key concept in all cases.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Uh, that's Edison in the parenthetical up there ("performing for the camera"), Lumiere should be after "taking the camera out into the world." Both took the camera out in the world, of course, but Edison's trajectory has a distinctively narrative/theatrical bent that Lumiere's doesn't as much.

[koganbot]

Warning about Ferguson and Farber. Ferguson as I've said has long sections where he goes opaque or blank or sentimental; and Farber is frustrating in his lack of specificity, so you get metaphors for what's going on in a movie but often the movie itself doesn't seem all that tangible on his page. He's a better theorist than Ferguson; in a way you could say his theories do right by Ferguson's practice (better than Ferguson's own do), but that he himself never came up with nearly as good a practice. Also, difference in personalities: Farber has a lot of resentment. What I've been running to Ferguson for recently is his lack of resentment. Obviously, this isn't particularly his long-run intellectual value, that he lacked resentment, but he did seem to avoid being beaten down or obsessed with the fact that he was taking positions that were very minority amongst the literary intellectuals of his time. So his good humor seems very different from my own reaction to the nastiness and laziness and stupidity that you and I are running into every day in regard to the music we love.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Farber's resentment issues so far have been a bit of a roadblock (Ferguson's prose is more enjoyable; I can read it pretty quickly)...he's pretty quick to dismiss filmmakers (IIRC, De Sica, Wilder) without really justifying it -- kind of like the "pop contrarian" position that goes out of its way to take swipes at indie rock to no great effect. But I haven't gotten far enough to pass any definitive judgment.

[koganbot]

The invention of "sound recording" did really change our sense of music (and really changed music, obv.) in that it raised the singer over the song - which may have been true in popular culture anyway but most certainly wasn't true of the way that historians told the story of music, which was the story of composers - which they were forced to, because the composer's work was retained by history, while the performer's wasn't.

Obv. parallel in the movies in relatino to drama; the history of drama is of playwrights up until the invention of the photoplay; whatever you think of the relative importance of directors, actors, screen writers, cinematographers, set designers, location scouts, costume makers, etc., the writers no longer have the priority that historians and literature professors once - out of necessity - had to give playrights.