Archives for 2009

Do internet memes perplex you? Do you just not care enough to follow (or do you need your kids to explain) that thing with the cats, that squirrel, or Kanye at the mic?

Well, there’s a site that will do it for you, and it will even parse the Auto-Tune trend trajectory (though admittedly the “how” does not illuminate the “why”).

In (finally) setting up a blog aggregator for myself a couple weeks ago, I realized how far behind I’ve fallen since the days when my Friday Informer deadlines kept me on a regular hunt for great online content.

However, now that I am properly outfitted with a consumption method, I love finding out who is reading what and why. But it’s also making me wonder: Is anyone regularly reading blogs anymore, or have they been traded in for your TweetDeck? Who ranks as the best of the bunch you are following, and how are they feeding you?

Yes, the “Painfully Honest and Epic Mobile Home Commercial” is more, um, well, more everything.

[via BoingBoing]

But the one designed by Rhett and Link of “I Love Local Commercials” for Ray’s Midbell Music of Sioux City, Iowa, capitalizing on the “band rap”, is awkwardly poignant as well.

Now, I hear the LA Phil has the community cultural advertising thing down, but some other towns might need a hand in the marketing department. I’m not sure if these guys are open to such a project, but just imagine the possibilities if they showed up in your neck o’ the woods.

Okay, admittedly this is a Gap commercial, of all things, and extrapolating large life lessons from it might be a little lame and more than a bit misguided, but it got me thinking about the role of art–as in: is the ultimate goal of art always to shake up our private worlds and ways of experiencing things, to let us mentally knock over a mannequin in the middle of a department store, so to say? And what about our arts institutions? Do we need them to be the staunch, quiet pillars and white walls of unchanging non-intrusive presentation, or could they use a radical redecoration in the way they do business as well? (Not that I’m suggesting we necessarily get extreme about it.)

Speaking of stirring up the dust, the NEA’s own Rocco throws a hypothetical punch behind agency support for artistic areas such as hip-hop and graffiti. Cool, right? Gawker explains why this may not be such a great idea.

Some years ago Carnegie Hall asked me to draft a composer profile/program note for Idiot Divine, a solo show of Rinde Eckert‘s they were putting up in Zankel Hall. I didn’t know much about Eckert’s work before preparing for our quick interview, but I remembered that phone call for a long while afterward both because of what he had to say and the fact that he could be so philosophical with a phone in one hand and a spatula in the other (he was simultaneously chatting about theatrical devices and cooking dinner for his wife).

As it turns out, that conversation merely hinted at what this artistic polymath and self-confessed philosopher has to offer his audiences. I’ve been having a grand time digging much more deeply into his work as I put together the materials for this month’s NewMusicBox cover story on him, which we posted today. His interview is brimming with great quotes, but here’s a crash course that includes as much performance footage as I could pack in:

As per usual, editing choices had to be made and I didn’t get to include one of my favorite Rinde Eckert tracks in the final production. Thanks to blogging, I’ll be able to correct that in this space. This is “Carlo Dreams” from Eckert’s song cycle Four Songs Lost In A Wall, which appeared on his 1997 release Story In, Story Out.

Moving into a new community, even for a short time, requires adaptation. When traveling in America, I usually find these adjustments to be small in scale and yet strangely frustrating–challenges of the “they sell 10 kinds of Coke and yet there’s not a single bottle of plain seltzer at the gas station?!?” variety.

And grumble though I do about eating dinner before six, the lack of public transport, and what’s not playing at the local cineplex–basically, the way people live their lives in community X as opposed to where I have chosen to make my home–the truth is that I recognize that the smacks about the head these trips deal me are very valuable. I live in a bubble of assumptions about life, surrounded by people who tend to agree with me, and if that shell doesn’t get punctured from time to time, I risk forgetting that there are millions of people who live their lives quite differently than I do and, more importantly, I might never learn about why that is.

My mom has a habit of clipping out newspaper articles for me, often of the “opinion” variety from the local newspaper. In the last batch she included a syndicated piece by a conservative columnist named Rod Dreher, who writes for the Dallas Morning News. Titled Polanski Affair Reveals True Hollywood, it was a look at why groups of people–American citizens, Hollywood actors, the Catholic Church, etc.–will quickly rally to defend people “like them” even when controversial (and in some cases illegal) activity is involved. I was willing to follow him through the first few graphs, but then he decided to take down “Art” and the “cult of the artist” and I had to pause:

Does the filmmaking world celebrate child molestation? Of course not. What it celebrates is Art, which is to say, aesthetic pleasure elevated to the level of moral principle. It wasn’t until I left reviewing films professionally that I realized fully what immersing one’s mind in the imaginative world of contemporary filmmaking can do to one’s moral sense. Without realizing it, one might come to see boredom as the root of all evil, and the artist who can deliver us from dullness as a kind of priest who brings us absolution through beauty and transcendence through self-forgetting.

That’s greatly oversimplifying matters, admittedly, but this is only a crude version of a concept deeply embedded in modern thought: the cult of the artist. The creative class sees the artist’s role as revealing deep truths to humanity, especially verities we may not wish to hear. It’s all too easy to accept that men who serve as a bridge between the sacred and the profane are somehow exempt from the moral code the rest of us live by.

Leaving aside the Polanski issue for a moment, since that was flat out illegal, assuming that the moral code “the rest of us live by” is a fixed idea dividing “artists” and “everyone else” seems beyond an oversimplification to me. These codes are fluid in so many ways, variable by so many factors–geography, economics, age, religion. More than most groups, artists seem to flow between them, ferreting out their fundamentals and illustrating how communities of people apply them to their lives. And if we’re going to count on this creative class of people to do the exploring and the feeling for those who can’t or won’t go there for themselves but yet go buy tickets to see what those artists have discovered, is it hypocritical to then chastise those same artists for bad behavior (as long as it’s of the legal kind)? Is there a line, or does the value in the exercise require that we don’t draw them one?

Now that’s not to pretend that the things artists want to show us aren’t scary and shocking and uncomfortable sometimes. But you don’t have to reflect on the travails of your local drug dealer or watch another Lars von Trier movie if you don’t want to.

Indeed!

Hipsters everywhere should take heed. Buble’s success demonstrates the
enormous power of that not-yet-banished sector of entertainment
consumers: uncool people. While their tastes may account for zero
percent of the stories America’s hipster-obsessed music press writes,
they still control a vast swath of the actual music spending dollar.

[via Gawker]

I’m seriously into musicals lately, of a television kind. First there was this, and now this:

The humor lies in having actually sat in the theater when the curtain went up once or twice, though, no? Would it, could it actually be a murderously good joke without that part?

As anyone who has lived some of it knows, there is plenty of funny to be found in orchestra life [link via Adaptistration], but there are people who get anxious when you giggle over it. 

I love that Leonard Slatkin (or the people behind his website at least–anyone know if he’d be the sort to pen this kind of thing himself? Leonard, are you out there?) was willing to go there. I mean, it  has impact precisely because it’s a Music Director of Slatkin’s reputation tossing out ideas like:

For the final work on the program, Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony, the conductor is not only going to reinstate the cuts sanctioned by the composer, but will add some additional ones as well. All in all the total performing time will be about 12 minutes.

“The piece is so long and repetitive. Once you have heard the main tunes, well, they are so memorable that they do not have to be played again.”

Slatkin went on to say, “It is my hope to perform a Bruckner cycle using this philosophy. In that way, we can get through all of them in one concert, perhaps with time for the two that have no number as well.”

Shield your eyes if you find such satire shocking, but really, love or hate that the Maestro is cracking jokes, it offers all symphony patrons something vital–something to dish about over intermission cocktails. 

Considering I’ve had my head buried in the “so how are we going to pay for this whole internet journalism thingy” issue quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, I read this article covering “public radio’s 10 most effective fundraising strategies” with a close eye. I mean, what NPR listener hasn’t groaned aloud when turning on the radio in the wee hours only to discover that she is going to have to endure the guilt trip that is the week-long fundraiser? Still most of us remain unable to change the channel in response, and apparently enough of us open up our checkbooks to keep public radio (alongside its other streams of revenue) afloat. Could this work on the internet?

Reading over the list, I don’t think that websites foster the same sense of obligation in the reader that public radio can suggest to those consuming its transmissions. We might be offering similarly enriching news and information, but no single site holds me captive or emotionally connects strongly enough that I wouldn’t just click away. Am I wrong about this? If your favorite website carved out a week and relentlessly asked you for cash, implied that you owed them for what you’d been reading for free and enjoying all year, threatened that without you they couldn’t go on, and offered you an umbrella in return for your charity, would you pony up?

(And if so, do you need my mailing address? I’ve got these lovely tote bags I can send as a thank you, and for the next hour your donation will be matched dollar-for-dollar by my Aunt Sallie.)