Swedish film pioneer Mauritz Stiller is known mainly for his connection to Greta Garbo; it was he who brought her to MGM. But in the 1910s and early ’20s he was a major force in movies, perhaps the era’s only Scandinavian director who could challenge Victor Sjostrom in terms of sophistication and artistry. Stiller’s surviving output suggests that he favored two types of movie: the poeticized nature parable of “Johan” and “Gunnar Hedes Saga,” and the urbane, suggestive comedy epitomized by his 1920 “Erotikon.” “Thomas Graal’s Best Film” belongs to the latter category. Released in 1917, it’s a reflexive, curlicued farce set within the world of silent filmmaking, and for fans of romantic comedy it may come as something of a revelation.
Real money, eh? Upper-middle class life vs. middle-middle class life … I grew up thinking that a little more money than my parents had might grant me access to many of the good things in life — better art, more ease and style and travel, higher-quality chitchat. I imagined that, with a little extra dough, I’d be able to enjoy the fun of being middle-class plus get to enjoy more leisure and better trimmings. But what I discovered was that the “people with real money” world often turns out to be (by my I suppose sentimental middle-class standards) supercold, beyond neurotic, amazingly self-interested, and emotionally harsh. The houses, the entertainment, the clothes and such really are prettier … But the human price you have to pay to inhabit that world is often ‘way too high for me.
Here is Pew’s assessment of religious affiliation in the United States.
The unaffiliated make for a large number–over 16%, or 10 times the number of Jews or Muslims and over 20 times the number of Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus.
Most of the unaffiliated are casually so. Only 1.6% describe themselves as atheist and 2.4% as agnostic, with the balance (12.1%) “nothing in particular”, with this split almost evenly between “secular unaffiliated” and “religious unaffiliated.” So Bill Maher probably goes too far in making his claims about the large number of actual non-believers, since a lot of these folks are not so much active non-believers as they are just indifferent. But these are still big enough numbers. There are still way more actual self-described agnostics and atheists than Jews or Muslims or Mormons or Buddhists. And it seems likely that some number of the casually unaffiliated are objectively atheists or agnostics, but just don’t want to use the words to describe themselves.
As The Economist recently pointed out, those of little or no express faith have not had an easy time of it in the public square, given the tendency to distrust non-believers. That does not condone obnoxious behavior on the part of organized atheists, like the Times Square billboard this Christmas season.
But I still generally agree with Maher that non-belief needs more respect. Whether this is the way to do it is another question.
Some of this relative exclusion of the other is just human nature. Believers tend to reach out first to other believers. Further, believers of somewhat like minds will reach out to one another before they reach out to others whose faiths are further afield. Interfaith dialogue in this country is by and large an Abrahamic religion kind of thing.
After the Newtown shooting, Morning Joe hosted an interfaith discussion including a bishop, a rabbi and an imam. That’s a pretty common format, expressing the desire to be ecumenical at least among one’s extended religious family. And that three-way dialogue seems to be the most common format overall–a Google search reveals three-way Abrahamic conclaves here, here, and here.
What’s interesting about this given the Pew numbers is the relative absence in interfaith dialogues not only of non-believers but also adherents to other, non-Abrahamic faiths. According to Pew, there are more Buddhists than Muslims in the United States, and Hinduism is not far behind. Why not at least include them, and continue to stiff the non-believers?
Perhaps we just have not yet mastered the doubletalk required for interfaith discussions to include religions that come from an entirely different space? Maybe, but we could probably stretch the doubletalk if we needed to. But do we need to? Maybe not. It seems to me more likely that the relative absence of Buddhists and Hindus reflects the fact that conflicts on those religious borders have not yet risen to the point that they need to be managed.
And isn’t that what interfaith dialogue really is: an effort to manage potential conflict? After all, interfaith dialogues are not the most intuitive thing. If you believe x and someone else believes y, the simplest and most direct course is for you to defend x and question y. Yes, you can try to find least common denominator similarities among different religions, but it is hard to truly reconcile them.
It’s like the push for multiculturalism: as long as you have two cultures bristling up against one another, there will be a felt need to tamp down inevitable conflicts via beliefs and habits that are strongly counterintutive. But perhaps necessary and useful. That’s why I gave one cheer to multiculturalism on 2Blowhards some years back. Ideas don’t have to be logical or consistent for them to be useful or helpful in fixing vexing social conundrums.
Here is a rabbi on HuffPost telling it like it is. C’mon, let’s face facts, he argues–interfaith dialogue mostly doesn’t work.
(M)ost of we time we are satisfied with mouthing a few noble, often-repeated sentiments. Thus, we affirm the importance of mutual understanding, tolerance and dialogue; we assert that all human beings are created in the image of God; we proclaim that despite our differences, all of our traditions preach love of humankind and service to humanity. Nothing is wrong with these sentiments, of course; in conceptual terms, I believe in them all. But if we don’t dig beneath the surface and focus on substance rather than rhetoric, they mean very little. . . interreligious dialogue truly touches us when we can discuss what we all know to be true but what we rarely say: that, in some ways at least, we all believe in the exceptionalism of our own traditions.
Just so.
But does this make the exercise useless? That depends on what its true function is. Participants may expect revelation and synthesis, having based their participation on such hopes. If so they will be disappointed. It is probably more correct to say that we engage in these things to stop us from following the internal logic of our faiths, and in turn causing social harm. In that sense interfaith dialogue can be said to work even if it doesn’t feel too good.
I have been waiting to see Mark Cousin’s 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Good news for me, and for you too if you are interested: it is now on Netflix streaming.
I watched the first episode last night and based on that I am looking forward to the next fourteen.
Cousins is an interesting host: at least so far just a disembodied voice, speaking with a soft, breathy brogue. And it is his own voice both literally and metaphorically–he promises to deliver his own take on things.
At first thought you guess that the story of film would be about scenes like this one, from Casablanca, full of yearnings, story and stardom?
Because Casablanca is a Hollywood classic. Ingrid Bergman’s lit like a movie star, highlights in her eyes.
It’s all filmed in a studio set. (Sam puts his piano bench on top of the piano and wheels it away. Cue sad version of “As Time Goes By” theme.)
But films like Casablanca are too romantic to be classical in the true sense. Instead Japanese films like this are the real classical movies.
Romantic films are always in a rush, but this moment, in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, is a pause in the story. A cat, a chiming clock (long pause in narration to hear chiming clock and watch cat),
. . . . a kettle quietly coming to the boil, the almost square frame filled with smaller squares and rectangles.
Calm, emotionally restrained, like a little classical Greek temple. So Hollywood’s not classical. Japan is.
That’s throwing down the gauntlet, no? In the first minute of a 15-hour series he opts to take on Casablanca, the veritable poster child of favorite movies (it came in 6th in an AMC poll).
We’ll see if this idiosyncratic view continues. I note that A.O. Scott wrote that the series “stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom”, so I guess it is possible there will be less than first meets the eye over the next installments.
And indeed, after this heady introduction, the first installment was mostly a somewhat conventional retelling of the beginnings of film, from Edison to Lumiere to Melies to DeMille to Griffith. Cousins does include some nice academic-style discussion of the development of editing techniques to accomplish various tricks, which soon settled into vocabulary. But I was let down in that he failed to mention my first cousin, twice removed, who was co-director, with Cecil B. DeMille, of The Squaw Man, properly identified as the first feature length narrative film made in a Hollywood studio. Cousins credits the film to DeMille only.
But heck, DeMille went on to greater things and my relative sunk into the relative obscurity of character parts, and history is after all told from a victor’s POV.
I am mostly happy in 4/4 but like the odd time signature challenge.
Here are two of my favorites.
First, Blue Rondo a la Turk. This version is performed by Two Generations of Brubeck, which is Dave recording with his talented sons.
Nice how the 7/4 slides into a straight 4/4 blues and then back again.
And here is John McLaughlin doing something similar but more strongly flavored–The Dance of Maya, from the first Mahavishnu Orchestra album.
Here, McLaughlin starts out in 10/8, which is pretty easy to follow as long as you parse it out and think 3-3-4. Like Brubeck, he then breaks into at least a somewhat conventional blues riff. You want the blues to be forced back into a 4/4, as with Brubeck, but there’s something off about the move–it feels like there is a half beat missing or something. Where did it go? The answer, I guess, is that McLaughlin moved from a 10/8 (3-3-2) to a 20/8. That’s 6-6-6-2. Though, since the music is pretty fast, it feels more like 3-3-3-3-3-3-2, with each 3 being felt like a triplet on a single note, which is why when you get to the 2–oops, what’s missing?
This Mahavishnu version of McLaughlin was both musically and spiritually ambitious (I wonder what Philip Larkin made of him?) So after he does the dirge-like 10/8 and the more upbeat 20/8 he decides to crash them altogether and see how it sounds. Like some sort of storm, I think, made more dramatic by the recurring Rite-of-Spring like theme announced by Jerry Goodman on violin.
Here’s a time signature question for the commenters here with actual musical training.
You can take a 4/4 time signature and run triplets on each quarter note. It sounds a little waltz like, but you know you are moored in the overall 4/4 ness of the piece.
OK, so then you actually listen to a real 3/4 waltz. Is there a big difference between the 4/4 with triplets and a 3/4? In the case of the actual waltz, each 3/4 measure ends up being part of a four measure structure, returning you to the feel of 4/4 when considering the larger structure of the song. Is this always the case, or have composers nestled 3/4 measures into larger structures that are themselves three, rather than four, part? What would that sound like? Any examples?
Maybe where music is concerned we can deal with the non-four temporarily, but yearn in the end to return to its stability and resolution.
So then my next question is: why does drama seem to cohere in three parts, following the conventions of the three acts in a well-structured play? And even when we set these in larger frames, corresponding to measure and groups of measures in music, there remains a tendency to want to follow a rule of threes: trilogies. Do we default to 4 in music and 3 in narrative?
File this under questions nobody thought to ask — until they did: Who decided how long “it” has to be in order for “it” to be called a novel?
If you assume the answer’s a matter of form following function, you’d have a point. Length is determined, in part, by how much territory the novelist stakes out to tell his story. Start with multiple characters and a handful of plot twists, and you’re up to 70-90,000 words before you know it. Toss in some writerly nuance and it’s easy to add another 10-20K — and there you are, holding the standard trade paperback. Three hundred pages or thereabouts. Or, perhaps a more useful measure: 5-6 hours of consumer entertainment.
Turns out it’s an oversimplification, however, to think that consumer preferences or gawdhelpus “taste” was the sole, or even primary factor in establishing the 6 hour novel as the form’s norm.
‘Twas avarice & greed made me the 300-page literary form I am today!
People are rightly criticized for criticizing movies they haven’t seen, so I won’t set myself up as a critic of Django, which I have not seen and don’t plan to see.
I don’t know, it’s just that I have seen the trailer and I find the whole enterprise, in miniature form there, so tedious, so faux-shocking, so pre-adolescent, so self-referential-into-a-cul-de-sac that I can’t get it up to spend the time on the long form.
I’ve been down this road before. I doubted that I really wanted to see Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds after those trailers but took the plunge, with later regrets, in those instances. Unless my curiosity or your comments get the better of me, though, not again.
This was not always the case with Tarantino ‘n me, for sure. I have to admit I really liked Pulp Fiction when it came out, though even then I had reservations about the content. Sure, the violence and the dialogue were both clever, but what works when challenging genre conventions doesn’t always work as well if it aspires to be victorious as a new genre. Every hero is, as they say, a bore at last.
A special exemption, IMHO, for Jackie Brown, which was earnest and honest in its throwbackness. But most of the rest I can do without.
Now, I am not going to criticize Django, as I said. But I will reference a little to-do over the use of the n-word in the film. It is used a lot, apparently, and Drudge has been making much of that fact in his unique fashion–i.e., not by saying anything directly but simply through the number and nature of linked articles. As a left-leaning journo on a Village Voice blog put it:
Drudge just puts the very fact out it there, apparently hoping that it illustrates two weary complaints of white conservatives: 1. That liberals are at best hypocritical and at worst the real racists; 2. That if white conservatives have to watch what they say, than everyone else does, too. The assumption is that Tarantino’s film is, by math, 100 or so times worse than, say, the Fox Nation commenter who just spews it once.
The blogger goes on to defend Tarantino, but he does so in an unusual way. He seems to want to make it out that Tarantino has some kind of Ken Burnsian obligation to history to use the word.
First, and most obviously, the film is set in a time when the word was, for white Southerners especially, practically a synonym for property. To not use it would have been the most distracting of compromises — a whitewash, if you will.
It also helps the the word gets the biggest workout from the leads: a former slave and a bounty hunter who deplores slavery.
This makes sense both in terms of plotting — the duo go undercover as slavers themselves in an effort to free Django’s wife from her own legal bondage — and in terms of verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude?! Did you ever think someone would resort to the v-word in discussing Tarantino? Is it really credible to maintain that using the word 100+ times in a Quentin Tarantino film is an effort to be respectful to history?
Ah, but I am not out to critique a film I have not seen. Perhaps I should see it. The Voice critic seems to think I should:
The film is complex, surprising, and somewhat great. Also, being Tarantino’s, it’s impossible to unpack sight unseen — or even after just one viewing.
Gee, I may have to see it more than once even. We will see. In the meantime, I remind myself of Confucius’ maxim: he who has tongue too firmly in cheek may find head up ass.
Chucho commented on my Desert Island Discs post, mentioning slyly that that old pagan Rowan Williams included a song by the Incredible String Band among the eight he would take to a desert island.
There are some artists just so much of their time (like Lew Lehr) that, however famous in the hothouse, they fade to obscurity quickly as things cool. Nowhere is that truer than the hothouse environment of the sixties. ISB was a pretty big deal Way Back in the 1960s*, among other things performing at Woodstock, where I think but cannot be sure that I saw them. Their somewhat idiosyncratic music made a lot of sense in the very specific period from 1967-1970. Outside of that period . . . not so much.
The band’s first outing was as a folk trio in 1966. Good stout British/Irish folk music but that was about that.
Less than a year later, in 1967, it was clear they’d gotten into the medicine cabinet, or something. Here’s the cover to The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. They’d been reduced to a duo at this point of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, sometimes accompanied by girlfriends and other merry associates.
And in 1968, which Wikipedia calls the band’s annus mirabilus, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was released. As the cover indicates, the music inside was hip and it was hippie but it was also intended quite clearly to look back as much as look forward. And it is about as ripe as it gets. Love it or hate it–this is as far as the magic goes, IMHO. Many albums follow over some years of time but since the moment was gone, much of the magic was, too.
As Rob Young wrote in Electric Eden, his book about the tension between the past and the future in British music from this time:
Paradise is a kind of false-memory syndrome, a clinging refusal to let go of an illusory golden age. Elements are periodically amputated along the way in order to prevent aspects of the culture from becoming gangrenous, but when things are killed off, the voices of these ghost memories tend to linger. The British imagination seems peculiarly well attuned to their uncanny cries.
Steve Sailer has taken to writing recently on the Sixties himself, wondering where the crazed parts came from. The question is understandable: people who grew up in or near the era take the excesses to be a kind of sui generis thing. The world turned upside down, events taking a 180, you had to be there yada yada yada. But in truth, there are no 180s, really, in terms of history.
Of course, we may be tricked into thinking so. In fact, the way our minds work it is almost guaranteed that during a religious revival, enthusiasts will be experience events as a radical break. But connections can eventually be found, after the love has gone and a dispassionate view is possible. So Steve is right in looking to situate aspects of the sixties in terms of prior historical trends and events, like the German Wandervogel movement.
In the US, a great deal of the historical connections were smudged, and lost by the time the urge morphed into Laurel Canyon hipness or the surfer ethic. But you can’t miss the historical connections where the Incredible String Band is concerned. The English (more properly, Celtic) past is right in there, mixed in thickly along with the sitar, exotic harmonies and eastern influences. It made for quite a heady brew.
Had you asked me for my Desert Island Discs in the 1960s I think I would certainly have come up with one or more ISB numbers–probably First Girl I Loved.
What is the job poetry is supposed to do? This may be a definition shaped by unfashionably archaic standards, but I think it’s meant to do at least four things.
It should take us into the realm of myth – that is, of the stories and symbols that lie so deep you can’t work out who are the authors of them, the stories that give points of reference for plotting your way in the inner and outer world. It’s meant to celebrate; to clothe ordinary experience with extraordinary words so that we see the radiance in the ordinary, whether it’s in landscape or in love or whatever. It’s meant to satirise – to give us a sideways glance on familiar ways of talking or of behaving or exercising power, so that we’re not bewitched by what looks obvious and wants us to think it’s obvious. It’s meant to lament, to give us ways of looking at our losses and our failures that save us from despair and apathy.
If you listen to the Incredible String Band’s songs, you realise rapidly that they correspond with astonishing completeness to the requirements of poetry. Plenty of songs of that period managed the celebration or the lament, few could do the myth or the satire. Perhaps for a lot of us growing up in the late-60s and early 70s, there was a gap in the heart where this very traditional bardic, even shamanic, sense of poetry was looking for expression; and the ISB did just that. Forget the cliches about psychedelic and hallucinogenic vagueness: this was work of extraordinary emotional clarity and metaphorical rigour – an unusual combination. Lyrics stick after decades, “Every cell in my body has it all writ down”; “You know all the words and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song”; “The caves where sleep the stars by day”.
And the literacy you might have needed to pick up all the allusions was and is intimidating – Sufism, Celtic myth, Biblical and Gnostic symbols. Combine this with a versatility in musical idiom worthy of Lennon and McCartney at their best, and you have a rare phenomenon: the contrapuntal intricacies of much of Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending, the Caribbean jog of the Hedgehog Song, the sly parodies of Bob Dylan in more than one piece.
For those of us who fell in love with the ISB, there was a feeling of breathing the air of a very expansive imagination indeed. It was all right to be enchanted – but not bewitched (see above) by colossal and antique symbols; all right at the same time to be thinking about the experiences of “ordinary” first loves and first betrayals; and all right to find the earnest nonsense of real hallucinogenic maunderings funny. There was no one quite like them; we liked to think it was a very grown-up taste, but that makes it sound too serious.
If I go back to the start, I’d have to say again that it was simply a discovery of poetry; and as such – risking the embarrassment that so regularly goes with my particular vocation – I’d also have to say that it was a discovery of the holy; not the solemn, not the saintly, but the holy, which makes you silent and sometimes makes you laugh and which, above all, makes the landscape different once and for all.
To be more of a completist, I will mention that there are some interesting ISB videos on You Tube, including a video of the Woodstock performance.
To be even more of a completist, here are the witty and telling lyrics to Way Back in the 1960s (1967):
*I was a young man back in the 1960s.
Yes, you made your own amusements then,
For going to the pictures;
Well, the travel was hard, and I mean
We still used the wheel.
But you could sit down at your table
And eat a real food meal.
But hey, you young people, well I just do not know,
And I can’t even understand you
When you try to talk slow.
There was one fellow singing in those days,
And he was quite good, and I mean to say that
His name was Bob Dylan, and I used to do gigs too
Before I made my first million.
That was way, way back before,
before wild World War Three,
When England went missing,
And we moved to Paraguayee.
But hey, you young people, I just do not know,
And I can’t even understand you
When you try to talk slow.
Well, I got a secret, and don’t give us away.
I got some real food tins for my 91st birthday,
And your grandmother bought them
Way down in the new antique food store,
And for beans and for bacon, I will open up my door.
But hey, you young people, well I just do not know,
And I can’t even understand you
When you try to talk slow.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 