No genre is the new genre
Can’t decide which classic holiday film to watch this weekend? Toss those chestnuts in the oven and get into the spirit of the season with this true story of two accidental elves. Fair warning: It’s a tearjerker of a tale.
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Happy Holidays, everyone! See you in 2011!
I’ve never been a gamer; that’s likely due to the fact that despite the hand-eye coordination you’d assume a concert violinist possesses natively, if you put a button-laced controller in my hands I tend to stink up the place. Even Guitar Hero confounds me. When I read about Papa Sangre on BoingBoing this afternoon, however, I was so taken with the idea of a completely audio-driven game that I only hesitated for a moment before clicking to proceed on the purchase of this $6.99 iPhone app. (Hey, it’s “work related”.)
Though there are visual controls for walking and turning, the rest of the game is completely auditory: the setting is total darkness, and you listen for music, monsters, and to the pattern of your footfalls as you navigate through this captivating scavenger hunt all by your wits and your ears (and the omniscient, angelic voice that serves as situational tour guide). Something about conjuring your own version of the terrors that surround as you tiptoe over crunchy finger bones to collect the requisite number of notes without waking the snarling, snoring beast on guard–and all in the name of saving the soul of a beloved, no less–is satisfying to me in a way Mario Kart couldn’t touch. Plus, it turns out that I’m good at it!
Hats off to the Papa Sangre team. You can find out a great deal more about the project here, and nice brisk summary of how they designed the audio is posted here.
I’m not much for those “end-of-year, top ten, most awesomest things that we read/heard/saw and can fill the remaining short days of December arguing about” lists. Push John Cage to the top of the charts if it makes you happy, twist up Yogi Bear and impress the internet by all means, but why reduce your yearly experiences to ten items when the sum of all the parts can generate something like this:
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Great to see this digital native speak passionately about social issues and debunk the idea that his generation would never think “about anything bigger than our Facebook profiles and our TV screens.”
Still, another side to the speeding social technology train (re: the future) also caught my attention this weekend:
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David Lynch is now writing electro-pop, yet considering the twisted paths his films have led us down, I hope at some point he decides to make a similarly distinct statement with his music.
Meanwhile, the film studio that is our living room produced a concert trailer for Mobtown Modern’s upcoming Ken Ueno portrait concert. The resulting teaser is not even close to Lynch-level creepy, but still, what a difference context makes.
Even as a tween, I was never much of a boy band fan, but the Maccabeats, coming to us out of Yeshiva University, have stolen my heart. In celebration of the season, they just brought out a new track for Chanukah, based on Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” and Mike Tompkins’ a cappella version. A most worthy addition to the standard repertoire!
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I dove right in to this excerpt of an N+1 article posted on Slate over the holiday weekend:
Having not broken into either literary culture myself, I admit that my reading was at first simply an exercise in seeing how both halves lived. But as I made my way through the piece, I kept testing the substitution of the word “music” (in the new/academic-ish/non-commercial sense) for “fiction” and wondered if we could make a similar case for the state of things. Be sure to get beyond the first page, because the article moves its focus rather quickly from the impact of the MFA on the student to examining it as “the system within which she earns (or aspires to earn) her living: MFA or NYC.” For instance:
But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way that this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, Calif., to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tallahassee, Fla. (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at the New Yorker offices on 42nd Street). The superficial differences between these two cultures can be summed up charticle-style: short stories vs. novels; Amy Hempel vs. Jonathan Franzen; library copies vs. galley copies; Poets & Writers vs. the New York Observer; Wonder Boys vs. The Devil Wears Prada; the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference vs. the Frankfurt Book Fair; departmental parties vs. publishing parties; literary readings vs. publishing parties; staying home vs. publishing parties. But the differences also run deep. Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement. Each affords its members certain aesthetic and personal freedoms while restricting others; each exerts its own subtle but powerful pressures on the work being produced.
So too in the worlds of music we chat about around here, no? I seem to have had more than a few conversations of late about the pros and cons of composing inside the new music hubs like NYC and the Bay Area vs. working on the campuses of various academic institutions, and it seems to me that the cultures/pressures remain somewhat similarly divided, even if along slightly different fault lines. I’m curious about the impact this has had/is having/will have on the work being produced across time. If McGurl had been charting music along similar lines, how would it play out?
I could quote seven more passages from the article that piqued my interest along these lines, but instead I’ll just add one more and then let you read it for yourself. Then come back, because I’m curious what your impressions are re: the music parallels. And if you don’t feel this type of aesthetic/economic model is where we are now, is it where we are heading? And are you alright with that?
One could even suggest that, in the absence of a contemporary American canon produced by the critics in the English department (that one consists only of Toni Morrison), the writers in the MFA program have gone ahead and built their own–as well as the institutional means to disseminate, perpetuate, and replenish it. This canon centers on short works, and distinguishes itself from the New York canon in other ways. While it still avails one to be a white guy in NYC, at least at the top of the market where Franzen, DeLillo, and Roth reside (and where the preferred ethnic other remains the Jewish male), the MFA canon has a less masculine tone, and a more overt interest in cultural pluralism. And while the New York list updates itself with each new copy of the Times Book Review, the MFA canon dates back, with pointed precision, to 1970–the year of the earliest story in both the Vintage and Scribner anthologies. NYC remembers the ’70s not at all, and the ’80s only for the coke, but the MFA culture keeps alive the reputations of great (Ann Beattie), near-great (Joy Williams), and merely excellent writers whom publishing has long since passed by.
I’ve been browsing through the Gawker posts backlogged in my Google reader this morning and got caught up in this one musing on soundtrack music in recent wordless (or mostly) movie trailers. I wasn’t so taken with their Battle: Los Angeles pick, but the Radiohead choral cover in The Social Network has indeed stuck in my brain. Thinking back through my own recent trailer viewing, John Adams’ work in the teaser for I Am Love also hits insanely hard for all of the obvious reasons, particularly to the ears of someone with my kind of musical preferences.
Still, the soundtrack that has really been on uncontrollable repeat for me these past few weeks was introduced by this commercial for an HP printer (which I suppose, in ad terms, means it really worked). A little Googling to ID the artist turned up this fabulous video for the same song filmed for a class project in the ’70s.
Just imagine if these kids had had iMovie.
The music trick gets a workout every time a foreign film is marketed in America, but even when the trailer makes full use of the dialog, I love listening for what the filmmakers try to get across in the music bed. With only a couple of minutes to capture a story line, you need to use shorthand, and aural cues are often the most powerful–if not the most subtle–hook. (See a catalog of movie trailer music cliches, among others, as captured here).
UPDATE: Since the original performance video has been removed from YouTube, here is an alternate performance. Same great artists, different source material. I know this has been a popular song here on Mind the Gap, so pass the word.
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Here in post-election, post-Juan Williams-dismissal America, music blogger Matthew Guerrieri has perhaps best characterized the scene before us:
This is the third election cycle in a row driven by one emotion–throw the bums out–which rather implies to me an electorate driving around, hopelessly lost, but too stubborn to stop and ask for directions.
In a world where political rallies double as performance art, public funding for the arts is once again a hot topic of discussion. At Sticks and Drones, conductor Bill Eddins plays provocator with a post suggesting “a revolutionary idea: kill the NEA.” He kicks up some interesting ideas about the potential impact of removing the public arts funding whipping post from the political playing field, and has inspired some equally interesting reactions from readers.
Elsewhere, government plans to cut arts funding generated a cry of protest of a decidedly different bent.
[via the headmistress over at Notes from the Kelp]
an ArtsJournal blog
