Wind Instrument Tuesday, March 08, 2005

A friend asks what the point of the quote below. As I saw it, Shaw was making a snotty point and a valid one at the same time. Snottywise, he was suggesting that he had a standard for quality and authenticity that nobody else could approach: i.e., He had such a burning talent that he was beyond categories, and when it came to sniffing out suspect art, he had a Jamie Farr special between his brows. Yadda yadda; we're all guilty of that to some extent.

But, like all criticism that stings, part of what he says is true. At least to my aesthetics, Bird is a tedious movie that goes overboard with the elegizing and downplays the sheer fun and wildness of bebop. There's more truth in Lalo Schifrin's Dirty Harry scores than in all of Bird: They're gritty, driven and urgent in a way that the biopic isn't. Somebody commented that Ken Burns's Baseball proved baseball was irrelevant: If the subject had any heat at all, there's no way all of those nice big foundations and corporations would've backed a documentary on it. I think Shaw makes a similar point about Bird: If they make an earnest biopic about you, you're lost, baby.

I won't comment on his overall take on jazz, in deference to a friend who doesn't talk to me anymore. But it's a fun take on the issue. RIP, you snarky bastid.

@ 9:11:00 PM, ,

Food for Thought

Mark Steyn, from an obit of bandleader Artie Shaw:

As much as he reviled the music biz, he had little time for the pomposity of post-big band jazz. "It doesn't have to sound like broken crockery to be jazz," he sighed. "It's solemn rather than serious. I told Clint Eastwood that Dirty Harry was the closest to art he ever got. That picture's America as it really is. Whereas a picture like Bird, which was meant to be a serious thing, was solemn and boring. If you're going to pick an artist who's at odds with his time you don't pick Charlie Parker. He was worshipped in his lifetime. He just screwed up."

@ 7:27:00 PM, ,

By the Rivers of Babylon 5

A friend of mine suggests B5 as a Sipowicz Show. I get his point (and apologize for never really giving that show a fair shake): The characters go through all sorts of mishegais by the end. But even as an outsider I recognize that B5 was a really densely plotted show with story arcs flying across each other. What makes NYPD Blue unique, I think, is that Sipowicz is the show is entirely about him: No larger plots, the minor characters don't last or don't go through significant changes. It would be like the doctor in The Fugitive growing to like life on the road, or David Banner figuring out how to stop becoming The Hulk.

At any rate, it's interesting that all the best choices along these lines are genre shows. Can you think of a really commanding character from a regular family drama (or whatever else is on TV)? Or is it all cop shows and lawyer shows?

Meanwhile, the Bay Ridge contingent had a lot of interesting comments on Quintet that I couldn't think of a good answer for but I appreciated hearing. One thing that did occur to me: The movie is part of a subgenre that I usually like a lot, one where you're dropped into an alien world (or complicated story) with little or no explanation, and many fundamental questions are still left open at the end. M. Night What's His Name forces stuff like this, but if it's done elegantly, the movies can be incredibly creepy and effective. Of course, now I can't think of a single example. Carnival of Souls? Or that crummy Jon Cusack movie from a few years ago, where everybody's trapped in a motel during a storm?

@ 7:57:00 AM, ,

Arrive Without Traveling Monday, March 07, 2005

Wow, that was a poorly fleshed out post last night. I was trying to squeeze something in before I got to sleep but lost energy after a graf or so. The broader point I was trying to make, I suppose, is that there's really no fuddy-duddy mainstream culture anymore vs. the hip, exciting "secret" culture. Even John Zorn shows up in video-game ads. The shock (or at least disconnect) is gone when something from your private fandom makes it into the broader mainstream.
 
That bugs me, just a little. Part of it is selfish: Part of what made Nick Drake so wonderful was that he was a secret. A relative handful of people knew about him, and he took some digging to find. Now, you walk into borders and his record has a big sticker on the front: AS HEARD IN THE CAR COMMERCIAL! And if you missed that, there are a dozen online forums where you can track what's played where. (Random thought: Remember those too-cute Kodak ads James Garner made way back when with Mariette Hartley? She did a guest appearance on Rockford Files a while after that, and the announcer in the promo called her "the girl from the camera commercial!" There's one for the headstone, huh?)
 
I also wonder if the music itself doesn't suffer by being blipverted like that. This is not an original thought, of course, but it seems like the rot is spreading faster and deeper these days, from new stuff deep into the back catalog.
 
Once again, the thought is petering out on me. Anybody else have brilliant ideas?

@ 7:39:00 AM, ,

It's the Wrong Song in the Wrong Style Sunday, March 06, 2005

Way back when, before there were a zillion broadcast networks and renting a videotape was a project, WPIX in New York used to run movies a few nights a week. Sixties and seventies stuff--not really "classic" movies, but fun, popular stuff you wouldn't otherwise see regularly. The kind of stuff TBS (or is it TNT?) runs now, but from a couple decades earlier.
 
Anyway, I always felt a little frisson when I saw the commercials for upcoming films: Whoever did the editing at PIX always chose a fun, funky song as background music. The two I remember: the Doobie Brothers' It Keeps You Running for Marathon Man (slo-mo clip of Dustin Hoffman hauling ass down the street) and (sigh) Becker and Fagen's Royal Scam for The Birds. I think I called everyone I knew when I saw that one.
 
Why was it a big deal? The networks were like mom and dad, or the phone company. You didn't expect them to know about secret teenage things, even stuff as fleetingly hip (and corporate, as I'm sure somebody's going to argue in the comments) as the Doobie Brothers or Steely Dan. It would be like my father sitting down and saying, "Ya know, Robert, VALIS really blew my mind."
 
OK, fast-forward a couple of decades. The other night I saw a commercial for some new doctor show with some techno-poppo music in the background. It took me a second to place it: a record I had just bought, a two-year-old record that I missed, mind you, that had been talked up all over the place as the cynosure of postmodern hipness.
 
And then I realized something, a feeling that had been building ever since I heard Pink Moon in a goddamn car commercial: Nothing is really hip anymore, in the sense of being removed from the broad mainstream culture. This may be because the culture has moved; or because hipsters are steering it; or because what used to be hip has become more palatable to the mainstream.
 
It's a small thing, what with the End Times being upon us and all, but I'm not sure what to think about it. Anybody got any interesting ideas?

@ 10:35:00 PM, ,