From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V8 #310 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, August 16 1999 Volume 08 : Number 310 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: wots, uh, the (big) deal? [fred is ted ] Re: Just when you thought life couldn't get any better.... ["JH3" ] Re: brimstone and treacle [DDerosa5@aol.com] Re: fegmaniax-digest V8 #305 ["Andrew D. Simchik" ] Big Gay Band ["Andrew D. Simchik" ] dial-a-cliche ["Andrew D. Simchik" ] Re: Big Gay Band [Eb ] Re: Unrepentant King [Eb ] Convulsions "R" Us ["JH3" ] Re: Big Gay Band [Christopher Gross ] Re: she's in potties [Eb ] Hair of the Eb [Christopher Gross ] RE: Neutral Milk Hotel. No Robyn Hitchcock ["Partridge, John" ] RE: Neutral Milk Hotel. No Robyn Hitchcock [Eb ] arts and crafts redux. [Capuchin ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:08:00 -0700 (PDT) From: fred is ted Subject: Re: wots, uh, the (big) deal? - --- David Dudich wrote: >What is the big deal? So a governor (who is >by many accounts doing a good >job) >is a former pro-wrestler. What's the >difference between a pro wrestler >and a B- movie >actor? not much. Well, ya got me there. >Remember, there are signals going out to >space of Ronnie Ray-gun >co-staring in a movie with a CHIMP! >LATER, the space aliens are going to get > signals of the same guy as > President...... > What are they to think? The humans must be strictly quarantined! or perhaps, (in Dalek voce) Exterminate! Exterminate! >And what IS so wrong with "the mind" >ventura having a little fun, and >steping back into a role >he loved for a night? Is this" worse" >than Clinton's (or Gingrinches >or Bushes or every-other-president-except Carter's >"extracurricullar fun >activities"? > I think not... Boy, you make it all sound so *reasonable*. I'm going back into the laboratory to ponder my miscalculations. Wrestling + Politics = ? Well, I now live in a state where the honorable Jerry Springer recently considered making a senatorial bid. A person just isn't safe anywhere these days. >And I don't say this just cuz I am an >admitted "Feg-Neck" 'Raslin fan. Aha! Ted "Yeah, we get high on music" Kim Deal _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:05:50 -0500 From: "JH3" Subject: Re: Just when you thought life couldn't get any better.... From: http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/16/089l-081699-idx.html >Maybe now we should augment the definition with a new >story: Chutzpah is the quality displayed by the man who >names a soda after dope, markets it with the slogan "Stoned >to the Bone" and then claims it's an anti-drug product. Naah - that's just good ol' fashioned capitalism! Chutzpah would be if he did all that AND tried to sue Ann Magnuson et al over their use of the name. I did a search on "Bongwater" and apparently there's also a band called "Cretins Bongwater Revival." I'm gonna order all of their albums right away! >Is this a great country or what? Yeah, whatever. JH3 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:32:30 -0400 (EDT) From: dmw Subject: Re: wots, uh, the (big) deal? On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, David Dudich wrote: > BTW, thanks to those who came out for the Feckless Beast/ Number Nine Line > farewell show last night. unnecessary clarification dept: while we are indeed grateful to everyone who stuck out the long evening, the beast has no intention of bidding ye farewell. we will be nipping at your heels, snapping at your ankles, for quite some time to come...next on 11 september for the infamous (take note, eddie!) RED PARTY. be afraid... ...and next we take manhattan?! stay tuned... - -- d. - - "seventeen!" cried the humbug, always first with the wrong answer. - - oh no!! you've just read mail from doug = dmw@radix.net dmw@mwmw.com - - get yr pathos:www.pathetic-caverns.com -- books, flicks, tunes, etc. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:25:38 EDT From: DDerosa5@aol.com Subject: Re: brimstone and treacle Viv asked << I've never seen the movie, but I've heard about it. Did anyone see this? Yes, a few of us. Was it a miniseries? >> No. Implied final question: any good? not really. Creepy in a gratuitous way. I found sting believeable as a rapist, but then didn't care to watch him. Use of Squeeze's "Up the Junction" was the best part of the movie. dave ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:54:01 -0400 From: "Andrew D. Simchik" Subject: Re: fegmaniax-digest V8 #305 >From: Eb [Quoth I:] >>No, no, that's Charles Dikkens with two "K's", the well-known Dutch author. > >What did we decide was the penalty for superfluous Python quoting? Do I get >to punch him in the arm now? ;) Superfluous? Hmph! >From: "Partridge, John" [NMH] >I. can. not. stand. the lead singer's voice. On most songs It makes such a huge difference for me. It's not just that I like good -- well-trained, beautiful, technically skillful -- voices; certainly a lot of voices that are either fairly plain or technically poor (but perhaps make up for it with their "mannered" qualities) appeal to me, such as Siouxsie's, Robert Smith's, Nick Cave's, Peter Murphy's (really poor -- the show I saw circa _Cascade_ was painful -- and at the edge of tolerable for me), and even Robyn's. (What a tortured sentence!) I can't quite put my finger on what makes a voice like Cerys (Catatonia) Matthews' appeal to me over that of the singer for the Manics (forget if Bradfield or Wire sings for them). But the voice can make or break the band for me, and it broke NMH for me. >From: "Capitalism Blows" >and i guess i'd have to admit that, in general, i don't care for a lot of >poetry or metaphor in my protest songs. Well, Utah Phillips it is, then! Drew - -- Andrew D. Simchik, wyrd@rochester.rr.com http://home.rochester.rr.com/wyrd/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:11:53 -0400 From: "Andrew D. Simchik" Subject: Big Gay Band >From: ultraconformist@mail.weboffices.com >Um, anyway......I think what I found sorta mystifying about that sentence >was that it kind of came out of nowhere. It was like "You don't like Oasis, >you must like Blur", which is sort of odd. What if you don't care for >either? It's a big world out there with lots of bands in it besides those >two. It wasn't odd if you're into that whole music press circus of pitting Oasis against Blur as rivals for the super-duper number one British band of (what was it?) 1994 (?). It's odd if you have a brain cell or two. >Additionally, I guess I'd never thought of Blur as a "gay band". They're not, and my own enthusiasm is just for Damon, Alex, and occasionally Graham (sorry, Dave! not my type) as cuties. I'm told Alex is gay, and there was the sorta ambiguous (but not so, if you work it out) "Girls and Boys," but that's about as far as it goes. >Which sorta goes back to what some of we Americans don't like about some >British music mags- the sheer viciousness of it all. I enjoyed that for a while, but I'm getting sick of it, not least because I then track down the few bands they don't trash, who turn out to be shite. So I'm reading NME less, and the sweeter Q more. >But frankly the way some British music >mags have of whipping people into odd tribal frenzies of this nature is >really off-putting, and while it may make for more liveliness, that >liveliness is of an ugly nature that I personally don't care for. They're just making copy, but yeah, it's annoying. >From: MARKEEFE@aol.com > I'm betting that Eb just *knew* I wouldn't be able to resist replying >to this! I'll just never understand why this seems to be considered a valid >argument against an album. If it all works together ("sequentially in its >entirity"), then hasn't it done exactly what it's promised to do? Some albums are collections of songs. Others (The High Llamas' _Hawaii_ comes immediately to mind) are Albums. I would agree with you that some albums are meant to be albums, but I think you might have taken it too far in the other direction when comparing the album to the novel. >From: Eb >I mean, I >could hardly quote a goddamned line out of the entire Bauhaus catalog. Who >gives a quail's ass what Murphy is singing, as long as he can sound >"scary," right? I'll chime in for a moment and repeat that Peter Murphy is an awful singer -- he's even more painful to watch than to listen to -- and note that Bauhaus are shite but a lot of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing. So yes, that's precisely the point -- it doesn't matter at all what Peter Murphy is singing, and it's crystal clear that that was often intentional (if the track on _The Sky's Gone Out_ called "Exquisite Corpse" didn't tip you off that you were dealing with Dadaist art-school boyz, nothing would...except maybe the track on _Burning From the Inside_ called "Antonin Artaud"!). That criticism doesn't apply so much to Siouxsie, Robert Smith, Morrissey, or ...well, okay, yes, it does also apply to Simon Le Bon, but with our dear Durannies there was much less point. >And regarding John Partridge's comment that "sincerity kills art"...whew, >what garbage. I guess that Hitchcock's detachment must be a real breath of >fresh air to you, then. Much more comfy to just sit outside a work of art >and smirk post-modern style, I guess. Oscar Wilde: The First Post-Modernist. Whose doctoral thesis was that again? Drew - -- Andrew D. Simchik, wyrd@rochester.rr.com http://home.rochester.rr.com/wyrd/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:27:25 -0400 From: "Andrew D. Simchik" Subject: dial-a-cliche >From: The Great Quail I could buy most of what you said about Eyes Wide Shut, even if I didn't agree with all of it, but this: >Other things, too, amazed me. The dialogue, for one -- it was so >original, so without cliches, so psychologically devastating; it No way, dude. I spent most of the first half of the movie trying to figure out why Kubrick had written the script almost entirely in cliches or near-cliches. The explanation that he wanted to tell the story in body language (the woman who came on to Harford after her father had died -- did you see her nostrils just before he left? Flaring like mad?) just seemed too obvious. But I found the dialogue almost ritualistically cliched. >From: "Partridge, John" [the fifties:] >Before: Shakespeare, Byron, Yeats. >After: Ashberry, Plath, Heaney. >Not dead, just convulsing. That's a little unfair, don't you think? Your "Before" covers 4 centuries or so, while your "After" is barely 4 score years. And Plath's reputation is much, much worse than her poetry. >From: Aaron Mandel > >On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Partridge, John wrote: >> That's fair: I don't like post WWII "art". Rothko and Warhol >> produced stuff that was fun to look at, really cool stuff, but >> it wasn't art. > >it always boggles me when people say something like this. what standards >do words on paper bound between covers have to meet before you will call >them a "book"? "Art" is, like "literature," pretty much up for grabs. But it's not the case that art:Rothko::book:Atwood. Rothko produced paintings, and Atwood books, but it's debatable whether they were "art" or "literature." (The debate is pointless, but occasionally entertaining.) >> John Cage's work was a mockery of music: listen to the audience >> members rustle, cough, and sneeze; here's what a piano sounds like if >> you put a hammer and a coke bottle over the strings; here's how >> painful atonal music can be; etc. > >"i don't like it, so not only can't it be any good, but the artist can't >even have intended for it to be any good." Cage was indeed fucking with people. It's difficult to argue that he was part of an unbroken line stretching back to Palestrina and beyond; he was obviously trying to curve or break or bend that line intentionally. But, as you say (unquoted), not everything he did was part of that effort. Drew - -- Andrew D. Simchik, wyrd@rochester.rr.com http://home.rochester.rr.com/wyrd/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:41:18 -0800 From: Eb Subject: Re: Big Gay Band Drew: >I'll chime in for a moment and repeat that Peter Murphy is an awful singer -- >he's even more painful to watch than to listen to -- and note that Bauhaus are >shite but a lot of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing. So yes, that's >precisely >the point -- it doesn't matter at all what Peter Murphy is singing, and it's >crystal clear that that was often intentional Just because it was intentional doesn't make the music any more substantial. Eb ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:47:03 -0800 From: Eb Subject: Re: Unrepentant King >>From: The Great Quail > >I could buy most of what you said about Eyes Wide Shut, even >if I didn't agree with all of it, but this: > >>Other things, too, amazed me. The dialogue, for one -- it was so >>original, so without cliches, so psychologically devastating; it > >No way, dude. General advice: When challenging one of Quail's librynthine dissertations, it's not recommended to include the line "No way, dude" in one's response. ;) Eb ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:03:44 -0500 From: "JH3" Subject: Convulsions "R" Us >>Before: Shakespeare, Byron, Yeats. >>After: Ashberry, Plath, Heaney. >>Not dead, just convulsing. >That's a little unfair, don't you think? Your "Before" covers >4 centuries or so, while your "After" is barely 4 score years. This is the third or fourth time someone has posted this sort of counter-argument, so I hope Drew doesn't think I'm picking on him in particular - but just think about it! How many books were published during the 4 centuries prior to WW2 compared to the 50 years after? How many people could afford to buy them? Shit, how many people were *alive* during that time? And how many of them were even literate, and could afford the leisure time required to pursue a career as a poet, of all things? Not as many, I should think. In fact, one-eighth is not an unreasonable figure. Not only has the "post-war era" seen a huge explosion in the sheer volume of material being published/sold/read, the sheer commercialism and glamor of it all has attracted far more people into the literary field than ever before in history. (Most of them are hacks, but that's always been true to some extent.) If you include songwriters as poets, the difference is even greater - they didn't even have recorded music prior to the 20th century. And even if you didn't think of it purely in terms of the number of people involved, 50 years is plenty of time to at least spot a *trend* in literature. (Meanwhile, most musical/cinema trends last what, 6 months?) I'm not necessarily saying JPartridge is right, because there was plenty of gawd-awful crap published in the old days that nobody remembers, and the people being published now are maybe not quite so awful as he suggests. But the "talent pool" isn't so much smaller as you may think, and I also agree that it's very hard to look at high culture today and not get just a wee bit wistful. John "and don't you dare quote me" Hedges ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:22:12 -0400 (EDT) From: Christopher Gross Subject: Re: Big Gay Band Drew (according to Eb) wrote: >I'll chime in for a moment and repeat that Peter Murphy is an awful singer -- >he's even more painful to watch than to listen to -- and note that Bauhaus are >shite but a lot of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing. Are you basing that on his tour for _Cascade_? I saw Murphy and the boys on last year's Bauhaus reunion tour and they fucking kicked ass, dude -- er, I mean, they were accomplished and energetic entertainers. The band was tight, the few stage props/gimmicks were well-executed and did not distract from the songs, Petey's voice close to what it is on disc, and all four members looked and acted surprisingly fit for geezers almost 20 years older than they were in those classic videos. (Up close, Daniel Ash reminded me a lot of a picture I once saw of the Small Faces.) I saw them twice and it was worth every minute and every penny. Peter Murphy's voice might not be technically great; I'm no judge. But in Bauhaus and at least some of his solo work, that voice was used to great effect. In this Murphy is a bit like Jeff Magnum, another singer about whom we disagree.... Eb wrote: >> So yes, that's >>precisely >>the point -- it doesn't matter at all what Peter Murphy is singing, and it's >>crystal clear that that was often intentional > > Just because it was intentional doesn't make the music any more substantial. "Substantial" is kind of a vague criterion. I prefer "fun." To me, Bauhaus is fun. - --CHRIS "not in the Christian sense" THE CHRISTER ______________________________________________________________________ Christopher Gross On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog. chrisg@gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 17:38:18 -0800 From: Eb Subject: Re: she's in potties >To me, Bauhaus is fun. It takes all kinds, I guess. You ought to see the press bio I have for Murphy's last EP, which is written by David J. I wonder if you'd still think the band is trying to be "fun." ;) Eb, who still curls into a foetal ball when confronted with the opening guitar-scratches of "Bela Lugosi" ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:58:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Christopher Gross Subject: Hair of the Eb On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Eb wrote: > >To me, Bauhaus is fun. > > It takes all kinds, I guess. > > You ought to see the press bio I have for Murphy's last EP, which is > written by David J. I wonder if you'd still think the band is trying to be > "fun." ;) Clarification: when I said Bauhaus was fun, I meant that I have fun listening to them, not that they're trying to be fun. For all I know, Bauhaus's whole catalog is one extended, deadly serious hymn to Allah. That wouldn't take the fun out of it for me. > Eb, who still curls into a foetal ball when confronted with the opening > guitar-scratches of "Bela Lugosi" Love the archaic/British spelling on "foetal"! I use it myself when the opportunity arises. - --Chris, who once touched the hem of Peter Murphy's garment ______________________________________________________________________ Christopher Gross On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog. chrisg@gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:05:25 -0700 From: "Partridge, John" Subject: RE: Neutral Milk Hotel. No Robyn Hitchcock > On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Partridge, John wrote: > > That's fair: I don't like post WWII "art". Rothko and Warhol > > produced stuff that was fun to look at, really cool stuff, but > > it wasn't art. > > it always boggles me when people say something like this. > what standards > do words on paper bound between covers have to meet before > you will call > them a "book"? if i get up on a podium in front of 200 people > and talk but > i don't make any sense, have i really not given a speech? > come on. you've > already admitted you don't like it; don't go trying to redraw > the rules so > that everyone else's opinions are meaningless. > Don't be so worried about the meaninglessness or meaningfulness of your opinions - nothing I say makes a whit of difference about *that*. What I am trying to do is restore a high bar on the term "art" so that the latest Jackson Pollack paint can accident doesn't make the cut. I mean I like texture and "picture plane depth" as much as the next guy, but honestly its only merit was to hide the stains on the dorm room wall. > > John Cage's work was a mockery of music: listen to the audience > > members rustle, cough, and sneeze; here's what a piano > sounds like if > > you put a hammer and a coke bottle over the strings; here's how > > painful atonal music can be; etc. > > "i don't like it, so not only can't it be any good, but the > artist can't > even have intended for it to be any good." > Please don't put words in my mouth: John Cage may well have intended his pieces to be artful. I have no idea and I don't care. I *would* say, however, that his efforts seemed more directed at rebelling against the legacy of western music than anything else. And rebellion is an inherently derivative and therefore lower artistic effort. > though i only own one John Cage piece (a, er, cover of 4'33" that the > Magnetic Fields put between their first two albums when they > were reissued > on one CD), i've heard several and enjoyed them. not > everything he wrote > was conceptual, "Conceptual". What a fig-leaf. What an apology. What a nudge-nudge wink-wink. The marketers really struggled with packaging that one: "No, really! It's *better* than art - it's... it's... it's *conceptual* art. Yeah that's the ticket!" > and since you seem to have studied > contemporary music at > least somewhat, i expect you know that. > > > Before: Shakespeare, Byron, Yeats. > > After: Ashberry, Plath, Heaney. > > Not dead, just convulsing. > > um, yeah, if i got to pick my three favorite records from > 1990-1998 and > compared them to my three favorites from 1999, the first > batch would be > better. is it because pop music is in its death throes, or > because i've > rigged the results by comparing two periods of time of which > one is eight > times longer than the other? > I didn't think this was as unfair as you and others clearly do so I'm open to rethinking it. Do you really feel that the fifty years preceding WWII were no better than the fifty years since WWII. I sure don't. > > *BUT*: just because they suffered more than me doesn't > > make them an artist, much less a good artist. > > what you said, though, was that your pain (and all other > emotions) were > the same as everyone else's. being imprisoned in a labor > camp, or whatever > the example was, doesn't make someone a great artist; it does > expose them > to facets of emotion that you haven't seen, and won't see > unless they DO > turn out to be a great artist. > I'm not sure I see what you're getting at here. My point was small: Jeff is no better and no worse an artist for having suffered a lot or a little. So forget about his suffering and listen to his music and decide whether it sucks or not. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 21:11:17 -0500 From: David Dudich Subject: oops!!! I goofed! Feckless Beast is alive and uncaged! Number Nine Line has pulled into the last station. Sorry about the confusion. How was the MABD show on the 13th, btw? -luther dmw wrote: > On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, David Dudich wrote: > > > BTW, thanks to those who came out for the Feckless Beast/ Number Nine Line > > farewell show last night. > > unnecessary clarification dept: > > while we are indeed grateful to everyone who stuck out the long evening, > the beast has no intention of bidding ye farewell. we will be nipping at > your heels, snapping at your ankles, for quite some time to come...next on > 11 september for the infamous (take note, eddie!) RED PARTY. be afraid... > ...and next we take manhattan?! stay tuned... > > -- d. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:19:33 -0800 From: Eb Subject: RE: Neutral Milk Hotel. No Robyn Hitchcock >And rebellion >is an inherently derivative and therefore lower artistic effort. Well, we could discredit the entirety of music the same way, eh? >"Conceptual". What a fig-leaf. What an apology. What a nudge-nudge >wink-wink. The marketers really struggled with packaging that one: >"No, really! It's *better* than art - it's... it's... it's *conceptual* >art. Yeah that's the ticket!" Ugh. Kinda pushing the "obnoxiousness" envelope, there. Eb ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:21:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Capuchin Subject: arts and crafts redux. On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, Aaron Mandel wrote: > On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Partridge, John wrote: > > That's fair: I don't like post WWII "art". Rothko and Warhol > > produced stuff that was fun to look at, really cool stuff, but > > it wasn't art. > it always boggles me when people say something like this. what standards > do words on paper bound between covers have to meet before you will call > them a "book"? if i get up on a podium in front of 200 people and talk but > i don't make any sense, have i really not given a speech? come on. you've > already admitted you don't like it; don't go trying to redraw the rules so > that everyone else's opinions are meaningless. Aaron, are you confusing the art and paintings? I hate it when people say they have "some art over there" when refering to paintings. Paintings are not automatically art. No way, no how. The definition of art is the heart of this argument and it's something I brought up a few days ago and discussed offlist with Michael Wolfe the other night. Art requires a craft perfected. Simply expressing your gritty internals doesn't make you an artist, nor does universality or emotion or floweriness. To paraphrase (badly) Tom Stoppard on calling mere self-expression "art": It's like me claiming I can fly. And when you ask me to show you how I soar about in the sky, I tell you that modern flying no longer requires soaring and, in fact, leaving the ground at all is frowned upon. The idea of art in modern times has been skewed to absurdity. Art is the expressive work of a master craftsman. What other folks call art comes, for me, in three categories: art, craftwork, and expression. The first is a refined combination of the latter two. And while expression is impossible without some medium (and therefore at least some rudimentary craft), craft can be honed to perfection and contain no expression. For eddie's sake, from Miller's Crossing referring to Leo's expressive style in his mastery of the sub-machine gun: The old man's still an artist with a Thompson. I feel like saying anything more will be beating the idea to the ground, but I'm probably going to address a few particular examples. > > John Cage's work was a mockery of music: listen to the audience > > members rustle, cough, and sneeze; here's what a piano sounds like if > > you put a hammer and a coke bottle over the strings; here's how > > painful atonal music can be; etc. > "i don't like it, so not only can't it be any good, but the artist can't > even have intended for it to be any good." > > though i only own one John Cage piece (a, er, cover of 4'33" that the > Magnetic Fields put between their first two albums when they were reissued > on one CD), i've heard several and enjoyed them. not everything he wrote > was conceptual, and since you seem to have studied contemporary music at > least somewhat, i expect you know that. > > > Before: Shakespeare, Byron, Yeats. > > After: Ashberry, Plath, Heaney. > > Not dead, just convulsing. > > um, yeah, if i got to pick my three favorite records from 1990-1998 and > compared them to my three favorites from 1999, the first batch would be > better. is it because pop music is in its death throes, or because i've > rigged the results by comparing two periods of time of which one is eight > times longer than the other? Still Aaron on John: > > *BUT*: just because they suffered more than me doesn't > > make them an artist, much less a good artist. > what you said, though, was that your pain (and all other emotions) were > the same as everyone else's. being imprisoned in a labor camp, or whatever > the example was, doesn't make someone a great artist; it does expose them > to facets of emotion that you haven't seen, and won't see unless they DO > turn out to be a great artist. This is untrue in two ways immediately obvious to me. First, the pain of being imprisoned or whatever horrible suffering you choose does expose a person to a different set of emotions (or different facets of the same few emotions in different relative intensities) only insofar as people are all different and constantly experience varied and complex emotion that may or may not have ever been experienced by anyone ever before now. Everyone's experience is equally valid as a source for emotional reflection and expression. The relative intensities of various emotions are unrelated to the type of experience that brings them. Second, it is completely possible for this imprisoned person to express pain and suffering or the joy of bondage or whatever "facets of emotion" brought out by imprisonment without acquiring any artistic skill whatsoever. We can all be shown the emotion of one who has suffered by the sufferer without ever seeing a piece of art. On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, The Great Quail wrote: > >Rothko and Warhol > >produced stuff that was fun to look at, really cool stuff, but > >it wasn't art. > No, John, come on. You can say you don't like it, but saying that > Rothko's not art, that's just untenable. And look -- I used to > dislike Rothko myself until I actually saw some in person, and really > began *looking,* and I was amazed. It was a revelation. So I am not > someone who comes to things easy just because I've heard it's cool, > if that makes sense. But to claim that these things are not "art" > only removes your statements from the realm of possible discourse, > and it makes it pretty easy for others to marginalize your opinions > without really engaging them. Rothko is merely an expressionist in my book. Whether you like him or not. I can dig his work, that's not the issue. At issue is his employment of a craft. I see his craft diminishing in his later work. What was once very promising abstract painting with some expressiveness (some that showed a mastery and some accidental expression) turned to sloppiness and poor execution. Poor execution negates art absolutely. Art is about control and mastery. There are no happy accidents. Randomness and chaos are expressive, but they are not a medium for expression. You cannot skillfully apply that which you cannot control. Still Quail, still on John: > >Which is why it's mostly butt-ugly or embarrassed (like the soup can). > I love Warhol's soup cans. Knowing Warhol as well as I do -- I've > read as much as I can! -- I can't imagine calling his work > "embarrassed." Like much of his work, it functions primarily on a > conceptual level, calling in to question our ideas about art itself, > rather than engaging our critical abilities on a technical or > "sublime" level. Personally, I think Warhol went back and forth, like Picasso. Some work is artistcally valid and some is mere crap with a famous name on the side. Warhol expresses a whole lot to me in his soup cans. I think it's a very nice commentary on the commoditzation of everything there is... and how products are as iconic as religion. I also believe that he mastered that medium in representation, presentation, composition and abstraction. That piece in particular is dandy. Some of his silk screens are similar. But in the opposite vein, I think sometimes he was just crafting and sometimes he was just expressing without using the skills he'd shown so successfully before. > >John Cage's work was a mockery of music: > Oh, my. > Look, John Cage -- who, like Byron, Wilde, and Duchamp, may be more > important for who they were rather than their work itself -- hardly > was out to make a mockery of music. Rather, he wanted to show us that > music, sound, noise, and silence were all of the same essence. He > wanted to explore the relationships between music and noise, silence > and sound . . . he wanted to test the frontiers of our preconceptions. > >listen to the audience members > >rustle, cough, and sneeze; > His notorious piece 4'33, yes. The equivalent of Rauchenberg's white > canvas. A conceptual piece that asks us to focus on the difference > between organized sound and random noise. It was a very important > statement that needed to be made at that time. It does not, however, > stack well against the Pathetique or the Ring Cycle. But that is not > it's point. To me, people like Cage and Rauchenberg did some of the things they did to show us the value of skill and craft. I think Cage's work is there to show us what can be done with no skill. Some of his work is random and noisy and done all the skill of a Jackson Pollock (the quintessential craftless expressionist... a man with once-skill ruined). > >here's what a piano sounds like if you put > >a hammer and a coke bottle over the strings; > I happen to like some of his prepared piano works. They are startling > and enjoyable. The idea is to test the limits of the device, to > explore new possibilities . . . he helped open that door for > composers, and some of our most interesting composers today are still > working out that legacy. Luciano Berio, George Crumb, Christopher > Rouse, Sophia Gubaidulina, John Zorn, Tan Dun . . . . I'm not going to pick out each of these individually (and I'm not going to claim I have anything reasonable to say about most of them), but from what I've heard of some of those composers, they're like Rothko or Warhol. Hit and miss artistry... sometimes exploring their craft and sometimes just making noise. > >here's how painful atonal > >music can be; etc. > Now, first of all, I happen to find atonal music beautiful. I am a > huge fan of the Second Viennese School, and I find as much beauty in > Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and their descendents as I do in any other > music. It just takes some adjustment, some mental re-arranging. But > the whole world of music after them became dominated by serialism, > and many composers sought some pure Holy Grail of total control, > increasingly alienating the public and writing only for themselves. > And Cage challenged that. By creating atonal works based on purely > random principles, he demonstrated that the human mind could find no > difference between those and works created on purely mathematically > controlled principles. To the human mind, a Cage composition based on > the "I Ching" and a work by Milton Babbit based on *total* serialism > sounded exactly the same! Again, Cage served the music world as the > Trickster, as the Holy Fool and the Laughing Buddha all rolled into > one odd fellow. And nobody is arguing that Cage is meritless. John is saying that Cage is noisy and random and expressive, but not artistic (which is more or less what I'm saying) and Quail is arguing that Cage throws the heartless craftsmen into sharp relief. I think these statements can be simultaneously true. So can the statements that John hates Cage and Quail loves Cage. And just quickly, if your human mind can't tell the difference between the mathematically generated and Cage's random spewing, do you enjoy the calculated stuff just as much? > It sounds more like you are lamenting a change in styles than some > mystical dearth of talent. . . . which I think characterizes your > whole discussion on the modern arts. I think you nailed it here, Quail, but at the same time, you missed it. He IS lamenting a change in style. He is lamenting the change from crafted work that reflects and evokes to expression with or without craft. Oh wait... maybe that's just me. > >I recognize I am at the very fringe and I appreciate your kind words. > Well, I enjoy these sort of discussions! And I jump at any chance I > can get to talk about classical music! Man, don't let my boss hear you say shit like that. You didn't mention a single classical artist in your post. Classical music, Aaron will drive through your skull, is music of the Classical Period, that is ~1750-~1820. This period is marked by the deaths of Bach and Beethoven respectively. > >Great question! No I can't and only a really good artist does. But > >I don't think universality is in itself the acid test of art. > No, but it is *an* acid test. Naw. An artist can be topical and referential and specific to a place and time. I have no problem with that. > >I agree: making it interesting is not easy, requires great > >intelligence and artistry, and succeeds or fails independent of > >how much sincerity is brought to the task. For this listener, > >Jeff did not succeed at all. > Fair enough! Personally, I think NMH is quite artistic and also pleasant! The craftsmanship in his noisy mess is very high and the expressiveness is way up there. I'd say Mangum's mastery of the varied instrumentation is way above that of other E6ers like Olivia Tremor Control where the instrumentation is obviously experimental and hit and miss. I keep thinking about something Mark Gloster said about the most underappreciated guitarist in rock, "he always plays exactly what's appropriate." And that's what artistry is about. It's about always being right. As for your dislike of the band, well, I can't say much to it. I would say that there are descriptive couplets in there that are more or less unassailable. I would say that the aesthetic to which this Jeff fellow prescribes is outside yours. I would say that you're listening for different things. I mean, I HATE trite, heavy-handed themes that go on and on about personal bullshit... but I see the stories on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as more allegorical and not to be taken so literally. Where it is not abstracted and vague, it is meant to be almost mythological. And whoever griped about the production being fuzzy and thought it went against the point of varied instrumentation might want to know that to my mind this is fuzz done right. The ONLY problem I have with Jewels For Sophia is the clarity of the instrumentation. It doesn't have a cohesive sound as much as it has lots of little instruments making their own sounds. Sometimes (as in the title track) you get the sound of all the instruments together making one noise, but too often you get all these little noises that prevent you from hearing the whole picture. And that's my long post for the day. J. - -- ________________________________________________________ J A Brelin Capuchin ________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V8 #310 *******************************