Carries the Tulkinghorn Seal of Approval™.
Friday, September 24, 2010
HG Live Music Recommendation
Carries the Tulkinghorn Seal of Approval™.
Benign Inconsistency
An enjoyable discussion with the offspring about subjective POVs in Faulkner and the possibility of Truth harked back to those late-night dorm room b.s. sessions. So bear with me.
An argument recently about whether consistency is a virtue. In one's thinking and in arguments, I'm probably still more of a stickler than some. In behavior toward others, less so.
Consistency on behavior is tough because there are competing values, and the balance doesn't always tilt the same way. A staunch vegetarian, my mother has on rare occasions eaten meat or fish when dining out to avoid offending her host. I think she would say that there is a point beyond which sticking to one's principles becomes a form of selfishness.
It's only in intellectual matters that complete consistency is ever possible. If we shrug that off, how can we be clear-headed when allowing exceptions in behavior?
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
If we waited to post anything until we fully understood it...
...HG would be seriously underpopulated. Chairman Bob calls her "the Billie Holiday of folk." Discography.
C.I.: Tulkinghorn
Could it be?
"Iain Sproat–the former Tory MP who helped clear Wodehouse’s name of the taint of collaborationism–has long maintained that an early Wodehouse short story was on Tolstoy’s bedside table the night he died."This is a rumor referred to obliquely in an article in the Spectator about a new biography of Roald Dahl, one of whose books was the last edited by Maxwell Perkins.
According to Alex Ross, there's evidence that both Adolf Hitler and Arnold Schoenberg were present at the premiere of Strauss's Salome. Conducted by Gustav Mahler.
I wonder if Ravel saw Louis Armstrong perform.....
Friday, September 17, 2010
Tulkinghorn's picks for the weekend
You didn't ask, but hey:
Un Prophete: Hardly unheralded -- it got the Grand Prix at Cannes -- but surprisingly true to genre rules. Godfather II (as everybody says) meets Le Trou. Jacques Becker and Jose Giovanni would be proud of mise en scene and script. Also Brando/Pacino worthy performances by Neils Arestrup and Tahar Rahim, respectively. (Arestrup is also terrific in Audiard's earlier "The Beat My Heart Skipped", which is worth seeing, but which suffers from a silly premise -- it's a remake of Fingers(!))
Skippy Dies: As good as I had hoped -- in fact, better. What I hadn't expected was how chilling and bleak it becomes -- after hundreds of pages of Apatow-worthy schoolboy humor, it suddenly clouds up...
Thursday, September 16, 2010
What I Like: Narrative Version
Late to this party as always -- since I'm not exactly in the demo -- but Jamey Johnson is being praised as the second coming of Waylon Jennings.
(In fact, he's written a song "Between Jennings and Jones" ostensibly about where he's filed in record stores, but you know what he really means.)
He's got a new double album out called "The Guitar Song."
He's clean and clear, passionate, and tuneful. And he tells great stories.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Great Tradition
UPDATE: Surfing around looking for video footage of The Plasmatics, I was reminded just how anyone-can-do-this God awful they truly were. So the comparison above turns out to be grossly unfair to Ms. Vi$$er, who is a much more focused and charismatic presence. Less room for discomfort here, certainly, wondering if this performer is on the joke.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Narrative
Forgive me for doubting that certain folks have in fact "always thought" that narrative virtues were overrated. (For starters, as opposed to what?) This one is an extremely conservative (!) and familiar choice as an illustration of the narrative tradition in country music. One of the most popular songs of one of the form's most revered singers. If I suggested that the fondness for story songs in country is descended from a long line of ballads in folk music, I would be saying more than I know, but it sounds plausible.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
What I like, part 3
I have always thought that narrative virtues are overrated, especially when the performer appears to be ready to fall asleep.....
I like this because of its passion, its relative complexity, and because it was taped in a bookstore. Mumford and Sons is the name of the group.
It Takes a Real Man Part 2
Continuing to update and revise my "arguing about taste" notes, I offer the following as an example of the "direct expression of emotion" school of popular (loosely defined) music. Cases in which the music is a vehicle for what's being expressed rather than a stand-alone aural object -- the latter a school from which I am all-but completely excluded by my lack of actual musical knowledge.
The distinction is complicated in this case because Lucinda William's "West" is also an example of a country song that has a strong narrative element. The situation in the lives of the characters (the singer and the person she's singing to; obviously one particular person) -- better perhaps a series of negotiations that has broken off, giving rise to the resigned conclusion the singer has come to -- none of this is ever spelled out, but it is nevertheless, at least in outline, perfectly clear.
You could base a movie script on this song -- which would be a pointless exercise, however, because a much more powerful effect is produced by only alluding to the events, allowing the narrative to take shape in the listeners mind. So the song is allusive and yet direct. How cool is that?
Friday, September 10, 2010
What I like, part 2
Best Coast.... Less introspective, to put it mildly, this is a throwback to what we called 'New Wave' in the eighties: melodic, big, and without a thought in its head. If you can find any recordings of a group called "Lets Active" you'll see the resemblance. Or Marshall Crenshaw.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
What I like, part 1
Short-listed for the Mercury Prize (twice, the first time at 16), 20-year old Laura Marling is the real thing, if you're looking for a post-Dylan, post-Mitchell singer/songwriter.
The Guardian interviewed her last week and made a video that is actually somewhat more effective than the one I've embedded here.
Great quote:
She admits she "didn't get" popular culture as a teenager; it's only her incipient feminism that's dissuaded her from wanting to live in a Jane Austen novel ("I don't think I'd want to be a woman held back by her generation, that's not ideal.") And her ideal day off is "a nice café and a crossword". "I think I'm quite... not prudish in an extreme way but... I think I quite like things to be polite and elegant."
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Apatow goes Mumblecore
This note is a bank shot among a number of different film sites. Initial inspiration is the deal that HBO just made with Judd Apatow to produce a half-hour comedy pilot to be written by, directed by, and starring 24 year old NYC indie phenom Lena Dunham, as reported on Deadline Hollywood.
Dunham is the writer/producer/star of the recent SXSW entry "Tiny Furniture", reviewed very amusingly here by Glenn Kenny. TF raises a number of questions that haunt me these days: It sounds almost staggeringly obnoxious. Dunham, her sister, and her mother (an art world star) play Dunham, her sister , and her mother (an art world star), who live together in a beautiful expensive loft in lower Manhattan...
Kenny anticipates my reaction:
In being a certain age (in my own case, just a hair over fifty) and dealing with material by and ostensibly for people in their uncertain twenties, one must be ever-wary of falling into the "they are scum" trap that ensnared Somerset Maugham when he assessed a seminal work by and about a then-younger generation, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.On the other hand, the great Richard Brody loves this movie so much he's reviewed it three times, and it hasn't even opened yet. Brody takes direct issue with Kenney on the issue of the obnoxiousness of the characters and is admirably, if somewhat impossibly for me, firm
One also finds one rolling one's eyes at (Dunham's) taste in men, if you can call them that (if nothing else, the film provided me with an insight as to why Dunham, in real-life interviews, tends to refer to the individuals she dates as "boys"); she's rather inexplicably drawn to a smarmy creep named Jed (Alex Karpovsky, who I hear through the grapevine is a bit of a micro-indie heartthrob, yeesh) who makes videos of himself philosophizing on a rocking horse under the rubric "The Nietschean Cowboy," and also to a sleazy self-described "chef" (David Call) who will "date" Aura if Aura can score some pills from the eclectic medicine cabinet of her glam unsupervised artist's-daughter friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirk). One is rather used to men being awful in Manhattan-set films concerning the romantic travails of young women, but man, if these two guys are really representative of the dating pool these days, ladies, you have my utmost sympathy.
....even at its most queasy-making, Tiny Furniture never registers as genuinely hateful in the way that gets cranks such as myself so worked up about when we're faced with what we take as blinkered hipster solipsism; rather, I sensed that Dunham herself is too young and too confused to be able to distinguish between showing compassion for her characters and slathering her own self with masochistic love.
...it was, in part, the excessive attention to the characters in films that she wrote about that got in the way of my taking much interest in Pauline Kael’s reviews, despite the ancillary reading pleasures they offered.
A movie, if it’s any good, conjures a world, or, rather, a world view; and complaining, as Glenn does, that one character is “a weirdly lumpy sad-sack” and another is “a smarmy creep” and that the film’s men are “quasi-monsters” does little to advance our understanding of the world Dunham does, indeed, artistically conjure, and, for that matter, of the world as such, through her vision. Imaginative sympathy isn’t a quality that the director earns through making sympathetic characters but through the force of her or his own character. And, of this, Dunham has plenty.
Takes a Real Man to Admit he Loves Opera
Notes on arguing about accounting for taste:
Our taste can be argued about because it does mean something -- though not nessecarily what it pleases us to think it means. And of course it can be "accounted for," though some people would rather not.
Apart from the ones that take place in the depths of Schoenberg Hall, very few arguments about music are really, primarily about music. Back in the day, for example, we all knew that the pop quiz opposition "Beatles or Stones?" was about what sort of person you were. Or rather (since how could you possibly have known at that age?) what sort of anxious pose you'd decided to strike.
I've already done way more, in terms of accounting, for my taste, than people here who are way more categorical in their pronouncements. One theme that has emerged is: where does one come down in terms of expressions that are direct and naked and those that are indirect, oblique, ironic, elusive. One either admires the former and wants to have more of it in one's own life, or not.
But it's not always a simple distinction to draw.
It could be argued that "Dalla Sua Pace" is a direct musical expression of emotion -- though not icky because the emotion expressed is complex and "grown up." Complicated by the fact that DSP is dramatic music, so that, whatever is being expressed by the lyricist or composer, it's been filtered through a character. Also it's in an antique musical idiom that many people find alien, so appreciating it has a degree of difficulty that's good for the ego while also removing some of the stigma of emotional accessibility.
Because it is "fiction music," DSP was written "arm's length," as Laura Marling says above. In what sense does Mozart "mean" the music of DSP? First thought is that he means it to the extent that it's true; it's true about DO if not about himself. a pose, on the other hand, is fraudulent by definition.
Don Ottavio, BTW, is pretty close to the definition of "lame" -- "weak and ineffectual." The music therefore expresses lameness but is not itself lame.
Being effectual (as opposed to in) is related to the notion of having legs that reach all the way to the ground.
(more to come)
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Anonymous and disinterested
Since no one knows my real name and who my employer is, I can offer this following quote from salon.com's television critic without being accused of naked self-promotion:
....Nikita is remarkably good.
The creators of "Nikita" went with Maggie Q, an actress with somber eyes that evoke exactly the kind of self-possessed, mature energy you don't expect to find on this channel. Like Anne Parillaud, who played Nikita in Besson's original film, Maggie Q's expression always carries an almost palpable weight of regret, whether she's threatening to kill her abusive foster father or calmly informing her former higher-ups at Division, the shadowy government agency that trained her to be an assassin,"It ends now."
Monday, September 6, 2010
From Bob Dylan's TTRH show on body parts 2
Worth noting that in a TTRH episode from the second season, Dylan says flat out that all the records played on the show are from his own collection; stored in "various places," because it is so extensive. Which lends some additional weight to the fact that Rilo Kiley and lead singer Jenny Lewis, as a solo act, have been featured on the program several times. Lewis has also contributed spoken interludes.
UPDATE: Bumping this up to make the point that I've listened to it again several times, with the criticisms of commenters both forthright and furtive firmly in mind, and still like it. Know too little about music to be able to explain why, though as with many of my musical preferences the response may have a strong extra-musical (narrative and/or emotional) dimension. I will say that as a writer the charge of bad lyrics reminds me of the legendary suggestion that Abraham Lincoln's legs were too long. Famous response: "They're exactly the right length. They reach all the way to the ground."
The point I would make about this stuff is that you start with the response, then go back afterwards if you care to and try to figure it out. Especially if you're writing about it -- the first thing you owe anybody who might be reading you is an honest account of your experience. If you ever get to the point of being embarrassed to admit you like something, it's over.
RK lead singer's new one sounds much closer to that worst of all possible genres, "glossy pop." Pretty much irresistible at first listen; unclear how much staying power it will have.
And the Hugo goes to....
....the poseur with the earrings. (See how I'm making an effort not to disagree with my host?)
It's more interesting than that, actually.
The best novel award was a tie. Shared between "The City & The City" and "The Wind-up Girl". First tie ever, and an interesting swerve away from the less self-consciously literary winners of the past.
All winners, including Charles Stross and Russell T. Davies (for "Waters of Mars") listed here
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Endorsed by "The New Yorker"
If arguments from authority mean anything, anymore.
In an interview with Philip Roth, Milan Kundera said, “When I hear learned arguments that the novel has exhausted its possibilities, I have precisely the opposite feeling: in the course of its history the novel missed many of its possibilities.” If so many musicians are comfortable with returning to the past to pick up lost possibilities, we might do well to let go of our allegiance to our heroes, so that more of their work can reveal itself.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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