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koganbotTo continue my X-post extravaganza, I put this on both the BLEUGH thread and the Adjunct thread. Mark had brought up Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and I'd said — based on my unreliable memory — that, to Jones, "Black American culture contains — among other things — a critique of America, and he doesn’t want to see that critique blunted" (e.g., Black American musical practice contains a critique of America):
(1) Any opinion on Sidney Finkelstein? I read Jazz: A People's Music but can't recall specifically what I took from it; and I once owned but out of a combination of busyness and fear never read How Music Expresses Ideas (the fear because, when I opened it at random, I read something along the lines of "While the Soviet criticism of Shostakovich may have been heavy-handed, there was a fundamental truth...,"* and decided I just wasn't up for it emotionally; I'm sometimes very weak). Do remember considering the jazz book interesting and smart; also that Jones/Baraka cited him favorably — notice that for the title of my John Wójtowicz–Leroi Jones chapter I paraphrase the title "How Music..."
(2) A question we should go into — that we're implicitly raising — is whether Jones (as I've perceived or misperceived him) is right, that music (in comparison to, say, books and essays) is up to the task of creating a cultural critique, at least creating a critique that's more than merely incipient.
(3) Actually it's Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris and ilk who really propelled me to the question. The way I thought of it in college was that the two great proto-auteurists, Ferguson and André Bazin, both treated filmmakers' aesthetic decisions (not just dialogue, but what to show, how to show it, whether to cut or pan, what angle to use) as ways of thinking. To put it crudely, Bazin reads movies for, among other things, the filmmakers' attitudes towards the world, whereas Ferguson reads movies for, among other things, what filmmakers are doing in the world. But obv. it's not either/or for those two critics or in general. Anyway, extend to anyone's behavior, e.g., musician choosing to play this note rather than that, singer phrasing this way or that, fan deciding to dance and deciding which dance, person wearing or not wearing band T-shirt, and on and on and on. Question is, does this hairstyle and acting out really take us far in the way of usable and repeatable critique, of effective understanding, rather than just placing us in Spot A or Spot B etc. in various social situations? (Ludwig Wittgenstein belongs here: we can include in our idea of language that it's more than just the utterances/words, it's also the social practices in which they're embedded, including events, actions.) Btw, what I drew from auteurism wasn't "the director is the author of the film" but rather that filmmaking is a series of choices, and these choices, no matter how original or how rote, constitute thought, no matter whom or what you assign the thought to — the actor, the screenwriter, the director, the studio, social habits, the social structure, the zeitgeist — and no matter how good or bad the thought is. Question is, how far does such thought go? E.g., how a cashier goes about scanning bar codes represents thought, but that doesn't necessarily mean one's scanning of bar codes is a form of social commentary, or can be extrapolated into social commentary.
*Can't locate the exact quote through Google books, which doesn't show any general excerpts and is sparing as to what from my searches of this book it's willing to show. The phrase "heavy-handed" gets me no hits. I did find this noxious sentence: "In the Soviet Union, criticism is a sign of the high regard the people have for music and its creators."
(1) Any opinion on Sidney Finkelstein? I read Jazz: A People's Music but can't recall specifically what I took from it; and I once owned but out of a combination of busyness and fear never read How Music Expresses Ideas (the fear because, when I opened it at random, I read something along the lines of "While the Soviet criticism of Shostakovich may have been heavy-handed, there was a fundamental truth...,"* and decided I just wasn't up for it emotionally; I'm sometimes very weak). Do remember considering the jazz book interesting and smart; also that Jones/Baraka cited him favorably — notice that for the title of my John Wójtowicz–Leroi Jones chapter I paraphrase the title "How Music..."
(2) A question we should go into — that we're implicitly raising — is whether Jones (as I've perceived or misperceived him) is right, that music (in comparison to, say, books and essays) is up to the task of creating a cultural critique, at least creating a critique that's more than merely incipient.
(3) Actually it's Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris and ilk who really propelled me to the question. The way I thought of it in college was that the two great proto-auteurists, Ferguson and André Bazin, both treated filmmakers' aesthetic decisions (not just dialogue, but what to show, how to show it, whether to cut or pan, what angle to use) as ways of thinking. To put it crudely, Bazin reads movies for, among other things, the filmmakers' attitudes towards the world, whereas Ferguson reads movies for, among other things, what filmmakers are doing in the world. But obv. it's not either/or for those two critics or in general. Anyway, extend to anyone's behavior, e.g., musician choosing to play this note rather than that, singer phrasing this way or that, fan deciding to dance and deciding which dance, person wearing or not wearing band T-shirt, and on and on and on. Question is, does this hairstyle and acting out really take us far in the way of usable and repeatable critique, of effective understanding, rather than just placing us in Spot A or Spot B etc. in various social situations? (Ludwig Wittgenstein belongs here: we can include in our idea of language that it's more than just the utterances/words, it's also the social practices in which they're embedded, including events, actions.) Btw, what I drew from auteurism wasn't "the director is the author of the film" but rather that filmmaking is a series of choices, and these choices, no matter how original or how rote, constitute thought, no matter whom or what you assign the thought to — the actor, the screenwriter, the director, the studio, social habits, the social structure, the zeitgeist — and no matter how good or bad the thought is. Question is, how far does such thought go? E.g., how a cashier goes about scanning bar codes represents thought, but that doesn't necessarily mean one's scanning of bar codes is a form of social commentary, or can be extrapolated into social commentary.
*Can't locate the exact quote through Google books, which doesn't show any general excerpts and is sparing as to what from my searches of this book it's willing to show. The phrase "heavy-handed" gets me no hits. I did find this noxious sentence: "In the Soviet Union, criticism is a sign of the high regard the people have for music and its creators."
no subject
Date: 2015-04-11 05:06 pm (UTC)You immediately — and crucially — go into the relationship between work and audience. In my proto-auteurist examples, Ferguson does more with this than Bazin does. Of course, how an audience uses a work is not always going to be embedded in the work (e.g. brick in the wall & hot in herre), though a commentator can read a new work for how it can potentially be used. Ferguson has a nice bit where he predicts the lines in a movie that people are likely to repeat upon leaving a theater.
(I find Ferguson's film criticism more useful than his music criticism, his eye for how movies look, how they're constructed, how they relate outward and radiate outward.)
Not to speak for Jones-Baraka, whom I need to reread. But what I was reading in him (or into him) was what I was also getting from Ferguson, Farber, Bazin, Truffaut, Bangs, Meltzer, et al.: the idea that behavior itself contains possibilities and messages, even or especially behavior that isn't explicitly "social commentary," and that such possibilities go deeper when embedded as behavior than when merely stated verbally. And — believe it or not — my basic complaint in "The Autobiography Of Bob Dylan" and in the first several issues of Why Music Sucks — that modern music circa mid 1980s, especially punk and postpunk, was letting the symbol stand in for the event (an extension, "the feeling stands in for the event")* — is a cousin to Truffaut's complaint in the early '50s that the films in the French postwar Tradition Of Quality were in effect illustrating a bunch of simplistic verbal points rather than deeply communicating by way of mise en scène (mise en scène being, e.g., the "what to show, how to show it" stuff in my post).** An example of my complaint would be:
Dylan feels most real not when he's attacking injustice but when he's attacking Dylan (ditto Stones providing greatest rush when pulling rug out from under Stones) --> punks running this into the ground --> finally, in punk and postpunk, self-destruction merely symbolizes a critique without being a social critique --> HENCE ONE REASON I FIND THAT JONES QUOTE ABOUT HEROIN IN BEBOP SO PROBLEMATIC.
I mean, come on, can being a junkie really be a social critique? —I don't want to simply say "No." Maybe in certain circumstances it can be. But I'm not confident I'll arrive at a "Yes." And my complaint about symbol standing in for event is about how "Yeses" turn into "Noes," anyway.
Hope this wasn't too condensed.
*This is where, back in the day, you and I began our convo, right? Don't get hung up on the word "symbol" — I'm not using it in any deep way, just as a synonym for "signifier."
**This misleadingly makes Truffaut seem anti-verbal. When I get back to my apt. I'll try to dig out a great quote where he talks about how a novel ends with a passage that's essentially mise-en-scène, which the movie version ruins by changing the setting to make a sneering social point.