Future Symphony Institute running 15 year old pieces like "Recovering the Sacred in Music". Well, they're aiming for timeless values in musical art, right? ;)

http://www.futuresymphony.org/recovering-the-sacred-in-music/

The Robert R Reilly piece in question, if memory serves, was a chapter in a book called Surprised By Beauty, a compendium of essays published in 2002 by Morley Press and more recently reissued in 2016 by Ignatius Press discussing classical music, and the essay in question was formally about a surge in what Taruskin once dubbed "holy minimalism".  In the context of Reilly's larger book-long polemic the chapter could be read as a recovery of the sacred in a somewhat different form, the idea of some kind of tonality. 

So when commenter MYNYC replies in comments "This article could have been written 15 years ago ... ."  It was, in fact, and arguably before that since it takes time to get stuff published in books. 

I read the book in its 2002 edition and I thought it was okay.  It's really conservative and leans conservative Catholic (or did getting reissued by Ignatius Press not tip that off earlier?  ;)  I like a lot of tonal music so I don't mind seeing defenses made for tonality being a compelling way to organize musical art. 

That said ... a reissue could have potentially had time to interact at least a little bit with Douglas Shadle's Orchestrating The Nation, which is a readable survey of how and why American music critics created an impassable double bind for American composers.  You either had to pay proper homage to the greatest musical legacy of all time, the Germanic lineage of Beethoven and Wagner and maybe a few others, or your music was beneath consideration.  But if it sounded like that Germanic lineage you were a lame imitator.  So the double bind would seem obvious enough there, you have to imitate but not be too imitative and arts critics would get to decide if you succeeded or failed.

Reilly may well believe John Cage was the apostle of noise but Cage's approach, as scholars like Leonard B. Meyer put it, was more a transcendentalist philosophy than an actual school of thought regarding music.  But we don't even have to take Meyer's word for it, even though he quoted Cage more than a few times.  Kyle Gann's book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" gets into the philosophical ideas of Cage's work as applicable to his most notorious work.  Ben Johnston knew Cage and has said much the same thing in a book of his collected writings called Maximum Clarity.   Johnston also has stuff in that book about the mathematical defense of what he describes as extended just intonation and its debt to a composer whose works never get mentioned in the FSI scene a whole lot, Harry Partch.

Now FSI's comments section wouldn't be what it is without comments from John Borstlap, who's got a reissue of an earlier book coming out this summer that I will try to get to later.  Borstlap and the FSI team get comments that they seem to have it in for Adorno and for Schoenberg.  I'm not sure I want to recite all the back and forth of that stuff on a weekend.  Schoenberg gets the blame for abandoning tonality by formulating the twelve-tone technique and providing the basis for an incipient serialism.  Adorno ratified and sanctified twelve-tone technique as an honest way of making musical art unlike the detached and cynical chameleon-ism of Stravinsky, the fetid neo-classicism of a Hindemith, or the misguided folklorism of a Bartok. Adorno also had nothing nice to say about popular music or music as entertainment in the form of jazz.  Paradoxically Borstlap and Adorno might be on the same page about popular and vernacular styles of music but that might be a topic for some other time if I even feel like writing about that.

No, instead what I want to mention is that a potential blind spot for the Future Symphony Institute scene seems to be that there are ways of dismantling the arguments and assertions of a Schoenberg or even a John Cage not from the "right" but from the "left".  Surely someone over at the Future Symphony Institute has read Cornelius Cardew's compilation of essays Stockhausen Serves Imperialism?  Kyle Gann's even found a place that provides the book to you for free over at Ubu. For the vehemence with which FSI writers talk about Cage on the one hand and the Marxism they ascribe to a defense of atonality via Adorno, the historical occurrence that Marxist/Maoists authors condemned John Cage's complicity with what they regarded as ruling class interests is pretty easy to document from within the writings of the left.  Even more paradoxically, Cardew and Tilbury condemned Cage's weak sauce metaphysics as being a set of ideas that man cannot live by as man and that is a concept for concept mirror from the left of what Francis Schaeffer had to say about John Cage's disconnect between his philosophy of artistic creation and the way he picked mushrooms about half a century ago.  In other words, a secularist left and a nascent religious right could both condemn John Cage's philosophical approach to music as not being the sort of idea you could really live life by. 

But, and we're getting back to Partch here, Gann's observation at his blog was that there were people who believed Schoenberg's mistake was that he simply too twelve-tone equal-tempered instrumentation as paradigmatic.  In Maximum Clarity, Ben Johnston has a few essays in which he explicitly lays out this problem--up until Arnold Schoenberg formulated dodecaphonic techniques the Western musical world was operating under assumptions about tonality and linear progressions that were indebted to a vocal tradition that predated equal-tempered tunings by centuries, i.e. the medieval through late Baroque periods.  Schoenberg was the first composer to consciously and explicitly tailor his compositional approach to equal temperament and the sonic implications of that.  Johnston's take was more generous than Borstlap's regarding Schoenberg's intents but still critical. 

While Schoenberg was right to be concerned about how trite and maudlin late Romantic music in the Germanic tradition had become, in Johnston's reading of his significance, nevertheless Schoenberg's twelve-tone approach was only a short-term solution.  In fact, as Johnston has put it, Schoenberg accelerated the complete exhaustion of possibilities in the equal-tempered system of Western music.  Johnston's own polemical claim is that we should heed the idea of Partch and go back to just intonation and be open to microtonal possibilities that are opened up by no longer presuming to teach, compose or understand music on the basis of the constraints of equal temperament.  Johnston goes so far as to assert that equal temperament is a sonic falsehood that gives us pure octaves at the expense of the purity of every single other musical interval we would otherwise have at our disposal in composing and performing music in the Western tradition.

But the Future Symphony Institute folks need to remember, or be reminded, that a binary opposition of Marxists=atonality and anti-Marxists=tonality is lazy beyond any responsible defense.  It's not like Gann hasn't identified himself as left, for instance, but he has written that the problem with composers in the West is ...

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2015/12/the-perennial-fiction-of-nature.html

...

Now, I find it entirely significant that I can tell, while composing, that composers will like the piece I’m writing, and when they’re not going to like it, and that it has nothing to do with the quality of the piece. If I were really careerist, I would sit down and write another dozen abstract pieces, pieces that sound more like they just happened than were composed, like Orbital Resonance. It’s a temptation. But I don’t think non-composers automatically prefer those abstract, organic, naturally-occurring-sounding pieces, and I take the long view: I’m trying to reach a widespread audience, not just fellow professionals. This is what I mean when I say, “I don’t write my music for other composers”; what other composers mean when they say it, I have no idea, but everyone says it. Unfortunately, composers run the new-music world, and it’s composers one has to impress to get heard.

What composers value in new music differs from what most people would enjoy in it. They’re looking for a new paradigm, a new Moses, and they don’t want something that’s (as I was told at the ISCM conference in Vienna) “too much written for the audience.” They seem to want something mystifying in its aura of objectivity. As a result they exalt composers like Schoenberg above someone like Poulenc, whose music I’d prefer any day; paradigm-setters such as Stockhausen and Boulez enter history, while those who write more beautiful music, like Maderna and Pousseur, fall by the wayside. In recent years the Times has made the extraordinary gesture of running thinkpieces by composers, and after each one, 90 percent of the comments are people talking about how lousy contemporary classical music is. [emphasis added] I hear why they think so; I agree with them most of the time. I think the composing community keeps that rift alive by privileging attributes that are not necessarily virtues.  ...

If in the polemics of the Future Symphony Institute they keep talking about Cage and Schoenberg and Adorno but have no use for talking about Wyschnegradsky, one of Scriabin's acolytes, they'll be talking past ideas that suggest the mistake was to assume we're beholden to equal temperament.  Back when I was interacting with Andrew Durkin about his book he made a claim that words mean what we use them to mean.  My counter-assertion was to say that we are taught what words mean as we grow up and we are constrained to think in the realm of possibilities the meanings of those words convey to us.  It's not that Durkin is wrong and I'm right, it's that we're seeing different elements.  I would propose, however, that my concern about musicians being constrained by the pedagogical and conceptual parameters they were taught is going to be foundational to the nature of how they rebel against that pedagogy or against the nature of whatever it is they regard as cliché.  Schoenberg rebelled against what he regarded as trite and insipid in the Germanic Romantic idiom while embracing other things as given.  In Ben Johnston's take on Schoenberg, the problem was taking as given the twelve-tones of the equally tempered chromatic scale. 

Now at this point we could ask where we might expect to hear microtonally variable music within a traditionally tonal idiom and come up with a pretty ... obvious answer.  Blues and jazz on string and wind and brass instruments gave us this about a century ago and Johnston was drawn to the music of Ellington early in his life.  Who can blame him?  Certainly not me! 

Of course for we guitarists who can only afford the sorts of instruments that are built around the equally tempered twelve-tone chromatic scale Ben Johnston's microtonal explorations aren't possible for us.  Fortunately, though, Johnston's never said his approach is a "should", merely that it's one possibility that he believes can retain the vitality of the concept of tonality without being stuck in the rut of the equal tempered scale.

Gann wrote a bit about Johnston's work and theorizing over at this little post:

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/03/regarding_ben.html

...

Theoretically speaking, Ben, like Harry Partch before him, does not take a sudden left turn from 1920, as the quarter-tone composers did, but goes back to the tuning arguments of the 16th century and starts over. For the Renaissance musician, a sharp multiplied a musical frequency by the fraction 25/24 – and so does it in Ben’s music. In Renaissance music, major triads represented a set of tones vibrating at ratios of 4, 5, and 6 – and so they do for Ben. The C major scale represented the center of the musical universe, and a take-off point for more exotic phenomena – and so it does for Ben.

What happened in the 16th century, limiting our musical resources for the next 300 years, is that a decision was made to exclude the number 7, and all larger prime numbers, from our theoretical vocabulary. Under English influence in the 15th century during Henry V’s war of occupation, French theorists were convinced to expand their tuning arsenal from 2 and 3, the octave and perfect fifth, to 5, which gave them a consonant major third as well. But when they came to the number 7, the seventh harmonic, despite the advocacy of certain intelligentsia like Nicola Vicentino and the famous mathematician Marin Mersenne, the theorists balked. [emphasis added] The victorious Zarlino insisted on the infamous senario, the numbers 1 through 6, as the basis of musical consonance. He argued by analogy on the grounds that there are six directions (up, down, right, left, forward, and backward), six zodiac signs (as long as you count only the ones visible above the horizon), six visible planetary bodies (as long  as you don’t count the Sun), and so on. That there are seven days of the week, let alone 13 full moons a year and a 19-year cycle of sun and moon phases, he seems to have conveniently overlooked. The decision was cultural, political, and even racist, besides being sixist. The hindus and arabs used prime tuning numbers larger than 5, and the good Catholics of 16th-century Italy were not going to follow the path of the heathens. And so for over 300 years, Europe and then America sweated by on  12 impoverished pitches only designed for the playing of simple triads. [emphasis added]

This was the decision that Harry Partch set out to undo in 1928 when he burned his early music in a pot-bellied stove in New Orleans and started over with the 7th and 11th harmonics. It was Ben Johnston’s contribution to create a notation in which to think musically with the 7th, 11th,
and even higher harmonics, and to pursue an expansion of acoustic-instrument performance practice with those harmonics. ...

This is probably not an argument that would have much warmth sent its way by the Future Symphony Institute side, or is it?  Gann mentions more directly what he regards as Ben Johnston's contribution to music theory as follows:

I’d now like to contextualize all this with reference to Ben’s quiet, little noted, but persuasive contribution as a music theorist. Though not as noisy or controversial about it as some other composers later were (notably one of his more outspoken students), he was probably, or seems so in retrospect, the first to publicly criticize serialism on theoretical grounds, and not from a conservative position, but from a radical one – not because it went too far, but because it didn’t go far enough. [emphasis added] Much later, Fred Lerdahl would write a paper about “cognitive constraints” in which he demonstrated that our brains are not wired to process permutations as musical phenomena; years later, George Rochberg would publicly stop writing 12-tone music and scandalize his colleagues by returning to Romanticism; soon, the first minimalists would return to writing in a diatonic scale. But before all of these, as early as 1959, Ben was writing about the limited intelligibility offered by an interval scale in a 12-tone context.

The trouble with an Adorno-inspired polemic against the legitimacy of tonality is that the nature of such a polemic evaporates if we simply remove the necessity of equal-tempered instruments.  Johnston's polemic, to summarize it briefly from his writings, was that the big mistake was unforeseen and the result of Western music being tethered to keyboard instruments in ways that were atypical of the larger sweep of Western musical history and theory regarding ratios between tones.  Whereas the contributors to the Future Symphony Institute regard Schoenberg in his composing and Adorno in his criticism as having thrown out the baby of tonality with the bathwater of late Romantic clichés, Johnston's counter-proposal was that equal temperament was what needed to go.  It would seem even conservative musicians who embraced the period instrument movement and other elements of early music activity got around to this idea, too.  Now Johnston had his over-the-top declarations, such as saying temperament was an acoustic lie but people said and wrote stuff like that in the 1960s and 1970s.  As he got older he seems to have nuanced that position a little, proposing that he'd found what he believed worked for him and that others could try it out, too. 

Johnston had worked with Partch enough to observe how uncompromising Partch was.  He was also able to observe that Partch was explicitly against the Western classical tradition and also explicitly anti-Christian, being the son of missionaries who went overseas and apostatized.  As easy as it might be for people who could contribute to a Future Symphony Institute article to lament the abandonment of tonality there has been slightly less written about how the Schoenberg or the Cage or the Partch that side-stepped 19th century tonality all, in different ways, embraced religious ideas that were occult or against the grain of what would now be regarded as more conventional or traditional iterations of Judeo-Christian/Abrahamic faith traditions. 

Paradoxically the Adorno-derived repudiation of tonality could be thought of as a kind of apophatic aesthetics, defined by a progressive negation of the standards of beauty from earlier eras.  This gets to Gann's next observation, about a criticism leveled at 12-tone technique articulated by George Rochberg:

I’d like to add to Ben’s critique the complementary formulation expressed by George Rochberg, another excellent 12-tone composer who decided there was something wrong with the idiom. According to Rochberg, every new era in music history took the previous era’s practice as a basis and added to it. Not until the atonal period ushered in in the 1930s, he wrote, did musicians begin to prohibit use of the resources that had served previous composers. The 12-tone style mandated an avoidance of octaves, an avoidance of triadic points of tonality, an avoidance of evident regularity. And as Rochberg wrote, an aesthetic based on negation and prohibitions cannot serve the human race for long.  ...

In the West we've had eras of changing of the guard, but the Baroque era spanned about a century and a half and the old style co-existed with the new style for some time.  It came to be known as an era with two practices.  What tonalist reactionaries and atonalist radicals (and other sorts of radicals) seem determined to avoid conceding is what Leonard B Meyer observed to be the actual musical/cultural reality, that we've arrived at a polystylistic steady state.  What's interesting about this era since ... 1967 ... is that it's not even really that new.  We had a polyglot of forms and styles without a firmly consolidated tonal/functional harmonic idiom back in the early and middle periods of the Baroque era. 

Paradoxically if the Future Symphony Institute wants to recover a philosophical basis for the viability of tonality it would sure seem as though Ben Johnston's writings took a few very big steps toward doing that; but if the goal of FSI contributors is to champion the music of a Wagnerian/Ravelian sound and defend the established canon Johnston's criticism of such a gambit would be that maintaining the museum aspects of concert music culture will probably not ensure the vitality of the tradition into future centuries. 

Now I don't just happen to think Johnston's string quartets, recorded by the Kepler quartet, are excellent works.  Having said that, I don't feel any obligation to explore microtonality in any official way.  It gets in there, inevitably, if you ever play slide guitar or play string bends or do anything ever in your life with blues or country.  Johnston has written about how pitches derived from the seventh overtone are all over blues and jazz.  Johnston's theoretical writings are interesting but for those of us who played equal-tempered instruments with keys or frets there's another avenue we can explore which is colloquially described as "fusion". 

There's probably never going to be a "fusionist" manifesto but the idea that after a century of artists insisting all the rules be broken to discover new possibilities the ideal of a fusionist might simply be to suggest that after a century of breaking every precedent that feels inhibiting there's room to consolidate everything that is fun to listen to into a new theoretical/practical paradigm.  Jazz and blues and vernacular styles can play a vital and necessary role in this process.  After all, between the end of the Classic period and the emergence of the Romantic era things like improvisation mid-performance began to be subordinated to the aims of the Romantic-era artist-as-prophet-visionary-genius. 

What I've been considering the last few years is something that has been clarified by reading Johnston's writings on music theory--Johnston pointed out that statistical methods, aleatory, microtonal variance and just intonation, there's a whole lot of stuff that avant garde composers attempted to introduce as a substitute for tonality and the clichés of Romantic era German music.  Johnston pointed out that it was about one century after equal-temperament instruments became the norm for compositional practice and theorizing in pedagogy that Schoenberg began to feel there was a crisis of an entire musical culture being kitsch.  This had never occurred in previous centuries so what was actually different in the early 20th century?  What was different, in Johnston's account of things, was tempered instruments with fixed pitches.  But where my ruminating has gone is that the individual elements avant garde composers tried to introduce into concert music to revitalize it were generally isolated components that all existed as a whole within the vernacular idioms of jazz, blues, folk, etc. 

If we live in a new era of quasi-autocratic mercantilism would we be altogether surprised if a kind of neo-Baroque era might be upon us, where polystylistic mastery is considered a value for composers and musicians?  Just an idea to consider. 

In an era in which concern about whether or not the NEA will still exist and whether or not arts funding has its blind alleys and prejudices I can't help but wonder about the "symphony" part of Future Symphony Institute.  I've stuck with composing for the guitar because, as guitarists the world over like to say, the guitar is a miniature orchestra.  One of the complaints I had about Robert R Reilly's book was that he could devote a chapter to Heitor Villa-Lobos and never once mention that Villa-Lobos was a guitarist.  While guitar music and guitarists have seemed so marginal to the Western literate musical tradition Richard Taruskin casually said the instrument was never, basically, part of that tradition, we're in a period where at least four guitarists have completed cycles of preludes and fugues for solo guitar.  I know, I keep beating this drum, but in an era of precarious arts funding we might want to learn from Heinrich Schutz and preserve a way of musical thinking in the idioms most available to us rather than writing for a symphony whose funding might get gutted by a government policy or a city disaster ... .

Anyway, back to this recurring thing of whipping on Schoenberg as though people still care who he is outside the confines of academic musicology ... .

Johnston's theoretical writings about music are fascinating to me because, besides being interesting explications of how and why he believes we should return to just intonation and explore a tonality based on a recovered sense of non-tempered tuning in performance practice as a foundation for compositional exploration, his critique of Schoenberg can be applied to Adorno's subsequent lionization of Schoenberg's approach.  There was never any inherent need to divide the octave into twelve-equal steps beyond solving a practical issue in keyboard design.  The thrust of Johnston's most polemical statement, that temperament itself is predicated on an acoustic lie, inverts the direction of Adorno's polemics against a continuation of tonality.  The musical lie is no longer those who would seek to maintain a tonality based on the actual overtone series but would, instead, be those who insist that the "honest" approach to composition is based on an equal-tempered scale with twelve chromatic steps within each octave where the only purely tuned intervals are any given octave and none of the other intervallic relationships within that scale. 

The Future Symphony Institute, in a sense, wastes time any and every time it attempts to make Schoenberg the perpetrator of some kind of attack on tonality because, as Ben Johnston argued, Schoenberg was the first composer to take the equal-tempered chromatic scale as a given and explicitly compose music based on that scale, rather than doing what had been done for centuries before in the West in which composers and musicians made do with the equal-tempered chromatic scale as the best way to approximate musical thinking that was really carrying on idioms and ratio relationships drawn from a tradition that aspired to just intonation in musical relationships and forms. 

But because the Partch/Johnston/microtonal tradition doesn't seem to fit into an anti-Schoenbergian narrative of the sort Future Symphony Institute authors seem set on running with, it isn't on the table for them, even if it should turn out that the microtonalist critique of atonality manages to articulate a clearer basis for rejecting atonality as a binding set of rules than traditionalists managed to articulate.  And this gets to a problem Leonard B Meyer's writing about the Romantic composers indirectly addresses--the Romantic era composers talked a lot of big talk about how genius is not bound by the petty constraints of tradition but seeks to discover and become.  What?  Well, joy in the journey I suppose.  Meyer's observation about the Romantic era composers was that they spent a lot more time talking about how they were going to shake off the shackles of fusty traditions than they did actually innovating.  Meyer proposed that if you look at what John Cage was doing in strictly expressed ideological terms he was, really, the most Romantic of all Romantic composers.  To be sure his music doesn't sound Romantic!  But if you look at his ideological aims as an artist and compare that to what the Romantic era pundits on music said they wanted music to do and what they believed ambitious musicians ought to do, then Cage was the most Romantic of all Western composers.

As Richard Taruskin would later put it, if a bit more implicitly than what I'm about to write here, John Cage was a scandal to the music establishment because he was the reduction ad absurdum of the artist as holy iconoclastic genius negating conventions that earlier epochs of concert music paid lip service to.  Cage was paradoxically embodying the far out point of a Beethovenian mode of artistic visionary genius.  And if contributors to the Future Symphony Institute read all five volumes of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music they'll have already read that observation.

Not everyone who is an advocate for traditional concert music who is more or less conservative does so from a belief that the German idealists were actually a good paradigm to follow.  I've been fairly explicitly anti-Romantic and anti-transcendentalist in my outlook my whole adult life.  I adore music from the Renaissance and the Baroque era.  I also adore music from the high modernist era of the 20th century.  I really, seriously, enjoy string quartets by Xenakis.  And I love blues and jazz and ragtime and ... country if it's by people born before 1960 like Johnny Cash or Hank Williams Sr.  I believe that for the rest of us who aren't exploring microtonality one of the crises of musical culture in the West has been aptly summed up by Richard Taruskin as a seemingly impassable gulf between the repertoire canon (what people are willing to pay money to hear in concert) and the academic canon (what college professors at officially respectable schools say is respectable music). 

What I suspect may be a dead end for both the entrenched avant gardists who think Schoenberg is under-appreciated and the Future Symphony Institute authors who reject and abject popular styles is overlooking that we've got a long history in Western music of composers who managed to play music for the high and the low as "bridge" composers.  In the 18th century Haydn played in street bands and became a court musician.  In the 20th century Villa-Lobos played in street bands and composed more than a dozen string quartets.  Shostakovich got an early start playing film music.  Some of the writers over at New Music Box have claimed genres don't exist.  I have, as I've said multiple times, believe that all those genres really exist but that the boundaries between those genres are all permeable.  I would like us to explore a musicology that recognizes and explores the permeability of all those boundaries rather than trafficking in policing the purity of the genres that people simultaneously claim do not exist but that can somehow still be rigidly and stringently policed.

It's not going to be for everybody but I think Gann made a case that Ben Johnston's theoretical writings about extended just intonation could open up a path to a revitalized sense of tonality in which, as Johnston put it, traditional tonality can be considered a subset of a larger, vaster realm of musical possibilities that we can continue to explore.  For those of us in the equal-tempered scene I think the possibilities we have before us sound more like explorations of correspondence in developmental and formal syntactics at the level of gestural manipulation, a la the writings of George Rochberg or the formal surveys of sonata forms by Hepokoski & Darcy.  We live in an era in which ragtime sonatas are possible but they won't be possible if people who reject tonality on the one hand and people who deny that the vernacular and the high art idioms can interact have their way.  The anti-Adorno can end up being like Adorno about pop music, after all. 

I had planned to write more this weekend, actually, but this seems like enough for the time being.

Maybe 5,000 words is enough for a day. And to think when I started writing this it was supposed to be links for the weekend ... .

links for the weekend, on modes of comedy and moralism and the moral role of the self-described smart set (plus some Jane Austen stuff)

Here were are half way through the year and there's only been 93 posts at Wenatchee The Hatchet?  Trippy.  Not that I want to get back to the record high of 717 posts in 2012 ... but it sure has felt like this has been a fallow year for blogging. 

 Yep, it's been kind of a links for the weekend summer at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  Preparatory reading and intermittent blogging have been the order of the summer, though it feels more like the order for this year.  Composing music takes time.  There's been some pretty abstruse material that's been at the blog this year.  Finally getting around to the arts side of things has had some not entirely anticipated consequences. So, links and stuff.

Sometimes it seems like arts journalists and pundits are determined to learn the wrong lessons from box office activity in advance.  Take this ...

 Hollywood’s box-office woes: Is the industry aiming too narrowly at men?

Another weekend, another branded movie struggles.

Hollywood’s so-called franchise fatigue hit for what seemed like the umpteenth time this year, as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” followed up its auspicious domestic debut July 7 with just $45 million in ticket sales (a 61% drop) this past weekend. That paved the way for the movie to lose what many thought would be a tight opening-weekend battle with “War for the Planet of the Apes” — incidentally, an underperformer in its own right. And it raised the question, once again, of why so many supposedly surefire hits can’t seem to stick.

Many big-budget live-action movies over the last few months have been dropping at a dismal rate — at least 55% — in their second weekends. That includes films that had strong starts, such as “Spider-Man,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” and “The Fate of the Furious.” And it includes titles that didn’t, such as “Transformers: The Last Knight,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and “Alien: Covenant” (the last one falling a whopping 70%).

Clearly the geriatric age of some of these franchises is a factor — both “Pirates” and “Transformers” are on their fifth installments, and “Alien: Covenant” is even longer in the tooth, depending on how you classify some earlier entries. But it doesn’t explain why “Apes,” at just its third iteration of its current cycle and with some of the best reviews of its life, had such an underwhelming opening of $56 million. Or why “Spider-Man” couldn’t parlay its strong debut into a better second weekend.

Yet, clearly, Wonder Woman and a remake of Beauty and the Beast have done great at the box office.  If Hollywood is really so bad at paying attention to what more than just young males want then why are we getting a feature length My Little Pony movie this October?  I'm probably going to see it, honestly, simply because I have so many nieces it's going to happen and because I honestly think the show, as launched by Lauren Faust back in season 1, is actually pretty good.  I'm partial to Princess Luna myself and the show had a fun Inception homage/spoof using her character.

And did the Captain Underpants movie just not exist? So some of the limitations in punditry about film comes from this tacit reality that people who opine on film and television are vastly more likely to be riffing on prestige television and tentpole or arthouse cinema and its stereotypes rather than writing about stuff aimed directly at kids or all-ages entertainment that isn't confined to Mouse House.

For instance, it's vastly easier for an American film critic to have just declared the Ghost in the Shell remake "doesn't work" than to discuss either the anxieties Japanese artists brought to bear in the peculiarties of Japan's technocratic responses to the Cold War era or to Oshii's singular take on subversive appropriation of biblical literature to make his metaphysical and political points about his time and place.  The former requires a level of cultural history and engagement a lot of American film critics don't want to bother with and the latter, well, pretty much the same!  If you're steeped in an educational or journalistic milieu that largely presupposes that the Abrahamic religions were the worst thing to befall the entire human race then how would you be situated to get the significance of Oshii's appropriation of the Babel narrative in Patlabor: the movie?  Now, sure, people can binge seasons of Game of Thrones while still reflexively thinking that reading stories of similar nastiness in Judges is somehow a mark against Judges but that may just be how Americans are these days ... .

As for named franchises.  I never bothered with the Apes reboot.  If the axiom holds that history plays as tragedy and then a second time as farce then trying to get lightning to strike twice is a futile effort.  We got our remake of the premise of Planet of the Apes as farce a decade ago when Mike Judge made Idiocracy, didn't we? Now maybe film critics like Dana Stevens can gush that the new Apes films raises the question of whether we humans deserve the wonderful planet we live on but this is in essence code for how the wrong kinds of humans with the wrong kinds of beliefs about the nature of the human condition and the human being are going to deprive the rest of us the opportunity to live here.  Dystopian stories inevitably traffic in the kinds of justified stereotypes about the people we dread getting the kind of power and social influence we don't want them to have.  But I'm wondering this year whether the subtextual concern is a transference to "them" of a totalitarian impulse we may find in "us".  Dystopian literature is inevitably a self-exonerating exercise.

Which thematically leads us to a thinkpiece about humor in the age of Trump over at Slate. Now I've written here in the past about how there are ultimately two basic types of humor, laughing with and laughing at.  A lot of mainstream political humor has trafficked in the simple formulate of "laugh with me as I laugh at how stupid/evil/immoral/hypocritical/greedy those people are." The proposal in the piece is that Trump and the trolls who support Trump have forced mainstream liberal comedic thought to reassess both the nature of comedy in general and the tropes used by mainstream comedians.

Thus, a lengthy set of excerpts:

https://slate.com/arts/2017/07/trump-and-his-trolls-arent-killing-comedy-theyre-saving-it.html


...
 
This conviction—that humor is “a superior way to tell the truth”—is extremely recent, but it is dearly held. The 2016 election confronted liberals with forms of expression that were indisputably amusing to many people but failed miserably to meet the Nussbaum Criterion: lies, insults, and cruel pranks, emanating from anonymous abusers and presidential candidates alike. Baffled, we started to call such things trolling. The word conjures a kind of evil twin of humor. The trolls had “stolen Washington,” where, as Amanda Hess lamented in the New York Times, they worked their nihilistic magic: “No reason, no principle, just the pure exercise of power.”
 
 
The panic about trolls has little to do with their actual political influence, which is tiny, and a lot to do with our fear that shittiness and humor might be compatible. They are. [emphasis added] And when you think about how constrictive the Nussbaum Criterion is, it starts to become clear why practitioners, consumers, and critics of comedy might be struggling to understand its role in our culture and politics.
 

It's like some of these people have never actually watched shows like Rick & Morty or Archer or any number of shows where the humor of cruelty is the engine of plot. 
...
 
 
That changed around 1957. Here is how Nesteroff describes it: “Eventually men like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters came along and led a revolution by developing their own material, derived from their actual personalities.” Bruce talked about abortion; Sahl made incisive political observations. Winters said, “Just tell the truth and people will laugh.” According to George Carlin, comedy “changed forever for the better.”
 
These stand-ups didn’t see their acts quite the way we see them: They understood themselves to be constructing characters. “Will Rogers used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government,” Sahl has said of his vaudevillian predecessor. “I come out with a newspaper and pretend I’m an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.” Bruce, too, was initially received as a performatively “sick comedian” and not a portal to authentic being. The force that united Bruce’s jokes was not self-revelation but rather the urge to scorch middle-class tastes. Both men’s acts were experiments in identity, in who you could get away with pretending to be, be he pervert or pundit.
 
The idea that we couldn’t perceive the human soul until Lenny Bruce told jokes about masturbation in 1957 not only warps our understanding of the comedy that followed, it blots out the comic traditions that existed before and alongside him. It has no room for Will Rogers, Bob Hope, and Danny Kaye—former vaudevillians who somehow managed to entertain people before comedy became funny—because they weren’t “real.”  [emphasis added] Neither was Moms Mabley, the immensely popular black stand-up whose act shingled character over social observation over character. (She performed as an old lady for most of her career.) This is how Nesteroff accounts for her significance: “From the 1930s through the 1950s, Mabley was comedy’s primary voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” which started in 1954.
 
Having witnessed the rise and fall of Mars Hill the construction of a persona that trades on authenticity goes a long, long way to explain a Mark Driscoll in Puget Sound.  Why would mainstream liberal comedians, or leftist comedians, ever for a second imagine that the persona of the authentic truth-teller couldn't be appropriate by anyone regardless of social or political or religious commitments?  Mark Driscoll was in a sense nothing more than a mirror image of Dan Savage, the two men parlaying their former Catholic upbringings into shock jock moralizing from ostensibly liberal/left and right perspectives in generic terms.  Now depending on how you parse that they might both have represented what some scholars might call the relatively new neoliberal center but that's a topic other people can tackle since this is a weekend and not a school day for me. :)

These performances depend on the acceptance of a lie, the lie that the character is the person, yet it is this lie which seems to be accepted.  There may be value in slicing through the performances of social obligation and the tensions the performance of social obligation create for sincere and honest relationship and that will get us to somebody at length, but first ... .

It might be hard to overstate the observation that a performative character is not the same thing as the actual person.  Whether thanks to a Sylvia Plath in poetry or a John Lennon in songwriting or the emergence of any number of other people, the illusion that the artist expresses his or her real feelings and observations about the world can be pervasive.  We know in the abstract not everybody works or thinks this way but the generalization is that you can fairly safely assume that if artist X does Y and Z in artistic media that's a direct expression of what the artist thinks or feels.  But this can be transformed, imperceptibly into an interpretive method that goes like this "I thought or felt A and B while consuming X and Y artistic creations therefore A and B is what X and Y are actually about."  We can forget that the authenticity we read on to art works can be merely ourselves.

One of the lazier habits in arts criticism is to mine work for clues to biographical concern.  This may be one of many reasons Romantic era writers preferred Beethoven to the equally brilliant Haydn, because Haydn made his works to order and to explicitly please his audience whereas Beethoven was regarded as authentically expressing his own feelings.  This Romantic trope has been with us for centuries.  I admit to being explicitly anti-Romantic in my overall outlook.  There's an interesting passage that comes up about what the "role" of a contemporary comedian often is in the age of American comedy since Jon Stewart:
...
 
 
The role that Colbert and Fallon are competing to occupy—Your No. 1 Hypothetical Friend—would not exist had comedy not become synonymous with personal authenticity, and personal authenticity with wisdom. Their authority (and the authority of Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Trevor Noah) rests on the illusion that because an audience is laughing, the performers must be channeling some holy spirit, not their partisan loyalties or professional interests.
 
But this breed of comedy is didactic, and things that are didactic are not funny. [emphasis added] Baudelaire, in his treatise on laughter, makes a distinction between “significative comedy,” which you recognize by its carefully expressed “moral idea,” and “absolute comedy,” which you recognize because you are laughing. Our political humor today is certifiably significative. As a Vox video put it, “What makes satire such a powerful antidote to Trumpism isn’t that it’s funny.” (It’s that it’s true.) While absolute comedy affirms that we are all equally ignorant, significative comedy assures you of your superiority over others. For liberals, the experience of late-night comedy is largely one of narcissistic gratification—lectureporn, as Emmet Penney termed it. Before the election, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and company had presented themselves as jesters in the court of a crazy king. Now they play straight men to him, ceaselessly signaling to the audience, “This guy is a nut! Normal people like you and me can see what a nut he is!” Not only is this shtick monotonous, it seals its audience in a bubble where a smirk is worth more than a joke. [emphasis added]

All that pivot required was for the wrong guy to be in the oval office.  The same can also be said for lectureporn from the right. In more church terms the phrase would be preaching to the choir. There may be a whole bunch of people who imagine themselves to be employing the wit of an Elizabeth Bennett who are behaving and thinking a bit more like a Mr. Collins--using jokes and observations about the way we live now that are partly rehearsed and partly the spur of the moment but at all times signaling that we're the right sort of people, after all. Collins is not just a point of substance but of communicative mode.

Not necessarily meaning to bash Baudelaire but in real life I think we can recognize that there is some real overlap between significative and absolute comedy.  We wouldn't still be talking about either Shakespeare or Jane Austen if there were never any real way for these two modes of  comedy to overlap. 

Of course this week was the bicentennial of the death of Austen. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/jane-austen-is-everything/534186/
...
As Austen’s own Emma Woodhouse put it to her querulous father, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” But in the case of Austen, that misunderstanding seems to have an urgency that isn’t attached to any other canonized, pre-20th-century literary figure. The disagreement has been amplified as her fame has grown, and her fame may never have been greater. This year sees her unveiling by the Bank of England on a new £10 note, replacing Charles Darwin (and before him, Charles Dickens); she is the first female writer to be so honored. Meanwhile, the scholar Nicole Wright’s revelation that Austen was appearing as an avatar of sexual propriety and racial purity on white-supremacist websites made national news on both sides of the Atlantic. A few years back, her 235th birthday was commemorated with the honor of our times, a Google doodle. The wave of film adaptations that began in the 1990s may have receded, but it left in its wake a truth as peculiar as it seems to be, well, universally acknowledged: Austen has firmly joined Shakespeare not just as a canonical figure but as a symbol of Literature itself, the hazel-eyed woman in the mobcap as iconic now as the balding man in the doublet.
 
...

Iconic as she's become, the reasons for her status often stir up zealous dispute. Is Austen the purveyor of comforting fantasies of gentility and propriety, the nostalgist’s favorite? Or is she the female rebel, the mocking modern spirit, the writer whose wit skewers any misguided or—usually male—pompous way of reading her? (For her supremacist fans, Elizabeth Bennet would have a retort at the ready: “There are such people, but I hope I am not one of them.”) Any hint of taking Austen out of her Regency bubble brings attacks. When the literary theorist Eve Sedgwick delivered a talk in 1989 called “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” some male social critics brandished the popular term politically correct to denounce Sedgwick and her profession. Six years later, when Terry Castle suggested a homoerotic dimension to the closeness between Austen and her sister, Cassandra, the letters page of the London Review of Books erupted. In other precincts, business gurus can be found online touting “what Jane Austen can teach us about risk management.” Not only is my Austen unlikely to be yours; it seems that anyone’s Austen is very likely to be hostile to everyone else’s
... that gets me thinking of the Shostakovich wars but if you don't already know what that is I'll spare you even more weekend reading!

A few things from here and there on the state of the educational milieu in which Jane Austen is likely to keep getting debated.  There's concern that colleges may be heading for a crisis.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/19/number-colleges-and-universities-drops-sharply-amid-economic-turmoil

Fredrik deBoer, for instance:
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/11/the-mass-defunding-of-higher-education-thats-yet-to-come/

thus, the perhaps too obvious pull quote:

I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. And the GOP has already shown a great knack for using claims of bias against academia, particularly given the American yen for austerity.

But let's move a little further to what I took to be the real concern:

In 2010 I wrote of Michael Berube’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, “the philosophy of non-coercion and intellectual pluralism that Berube describes and defends so well isn’t just an intellectual curiosity, but an actual ethos that he and other professors live by, and which defends conservative students.” I grew up believing that most professors lived by that ethos. I don’t, anymore. It really has changed. For years we fought tooth and nail to oppose the David Horowitz’s of the world, insisting that their narratives of anti-conservative bias on campus were without proof. Now, when I try to sound the alarm bells to others within the academy that mainstream conservatism is being pushed out of our institutions, I get astonished reactions – you actually think conservatives should feel welcomed on campus? From arguments of denial to arguments of justification, overnight, with no one seeming to grapple with just how profound the consequences must be. We are handing ammunition to some very dangerous people. [emphasis added]

and this next part ties back to the aforementioned observations about lectureporn as "comedy"

David Brooks has a column out today. That means that social media is going through one of its most tired types of in-group performance, where everyone makes the same jokes and the same tired “analysis” of whatever his latest dumb argument is, over and over again. None of the jokes are funny, none of the analysis useful, but this ritual fulfills the very function that Brooks is talking about in his column: making fun of David Brooks is one of the ways that bourgie liberals signal to other bourgie liberals that they are The Right Kind of Person. [emphasis added] Brooks, of course, is incapable of really understanding his own observations, given his addiction to just-so stories about character and gumption and national grit. He does not see, and can’t see, the economic structures that dictate so much of American life, nor is he constitutionally capable of understanding the depths of traditional injustices and inequality. If he did, he wouldn’t have the column.

But his critics can’t see something that, for all of his myopia, he always has: that our political divide is increasingly bound up in a set of class associations and signals that have little to do with conspicuous consumption and everything to do with a style of self-performance that few people ever talk about but everyone understands. It is the ability to give such a performance. [emphasis added[

Sometimes I feel like we're trained to believe that it is in the distinction between social performance and the real self that hypocrisy always exists.  I don't think that's really the case.  There may be a bond between the social performance you do every day in whatever setting you're in and what you think inside your head and the push and pull of that fluid dynamic is, in many respects that are hard to express, who you actually are.  An author like Jane Austen can brilliantly convey this whereas other, lesser, comedic authors might camp out on the idea that the performance is the facade while the inner life is the real person.  Austen gives us characters in which the performance and the inner life are always bound together.  When the inner life that manifests in action and the performance are twisted into opposing directions, yes, Austen highlights the tension. 

That giving the right performance opens and closes doors of opportunity that define what you can and can't do for the rest of your life and that this peril of giving the right performance defines modernity may be one of many reasons why Austen's work is still so relevant to our own era in spite of the fact that Austen died two centuries ago. Famously she told stories of how people can appear to be The Right Kind of Person at all the surface levels who turn out to be the wrong kinds of people in how they actually treat people.  It may be a testament to the politics of authenticities and personas that people want to read radicalism into Austen rather than accept her moralism at face value because her satires of upper class entitlement and the constraints of middle class existence, particularly for women, are easier to read as political rather than moral judgments.  But if they were not first and foremost moral judgments with political implications and consequences would we still be discussing her work centuries later? 

I was struck by deBoer's piece on the dogma of educational culture that he published earlier this year:
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/04/24/the-official-dogma-of-education-version-1-0/
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/17/mechanism-agnostic-low-plasticity-educational-realism/

...

The implied policy and philosophical changes for such a viewpoint are open to good-faith debate. As I have written in this space before, I think that recognizing that not all students have the same level of academic ability should agitate towards a) expanding the definition of what it means to be a good student and human being, b) not attempting to push students towards a particular idealized vision of achievement such as the mania for “every student should be prepared to code in Silicon Valley,” and c) a socialist economic system. Some people take this descriptive case and imagine that it implies a just-deserts, free market style of capitalism where differences in ability should be allowed to dictate differences in material wealth and security. I think it implies the opposite – a world of “natural,” unchosen inequalities in ability is a world with far more pressing need to achieve social and economic equality through communal action, as that which is uncontrolled by individuals cannot be morally used to justify their basic material conditions.

Put that way it reminds me of how in the Torah there's a set of laws condemning the unfair exploitation of people with disabilities.  Yeah, there's laws prescribing the marginalization of people with skin diseases that can produce plagues, too, but there are times when I think that for all our contemporary contempt for Bronze age legal codes they managed to do something we seem to refuse to do in contemporary American contexts, admit that some figuratively and maybe even literally grotesque inequalities come from the nature of one's birth and that the legal codes need to ameliorate this for the common good rather than just deny that these kinds of things exist.  But obviously I digress. 

This may all get to something Michael Lind was writing about on the question of which American Dream we think we should be pursuing. 

https://thesmartset.com/which-american-dream/

Do we go for an American Dream in which the opportunity to rise as you make opportunities for yourself in the social ladder?  Or do we go for an American Dream in which material outcomes tend to get better (by however small the observable increments) for everyone regardless of educational or social opportunity?  We could put this, perhaps, in educational terms--do we believe the future of the United States should favor better and increasingly better outcomes for people who go through the trouble to get advanced degrees and move on from that or do we think we should favor pursuing a society in which there are decent outcomes for those people while, say, focusing more on the possibility that the "unskilled labor market" has better resources available?  Lind doesn't pretend he doesn't prefer the latter path. 

But there is a flaw in the standard-of-living-for-everyone American Dream that Lind didn't really get to, which is the potential ecological fall-out of such a dream.  There may not be an American Dream that isn't some kind of disaster, which hardly seems a surprise to me at this point since I've reached the conclusion that the United States is most likely the latest iteration of a power called Babylon the Great in the book of Revelation.  Of course other people who don't hold to any kinds of religious views at all might have other convictions about that ... .

Something else Lind riffed on comes to mind, how in utopian and dystopian visions in Western science fiction we keep seeing the presumption of a unified world.
https://thesmartset.com/the-future-of-the-future/

...

Wars, hot or cold, are also missing from standard science fiction versions of the future. Interplanetary wars don’t count, and neither do wars with robots or zombies. I mean wars among nation-states or global alliances or regional blocs. George Orwell’s 1984, inspired in part by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, imagined a world divided among three totalitarian blocs: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. I can’t think of any other well-known examples of geopolitics in science fiction.

Typically, as noted above, science fiction authors posit a united world under benign or tyrannical world government. How our present divided world came to be united in the future is seldom explained. Science fiction authors are notorious for getting out of plot holes by inventing new technologies like “handwavium.” The political equivalent of handwavium is the World Federation of Handwavia. [emphasis added, and think about Star Trek for a bit. ;) ]

Global political unification is becoming less, not more, likely. In 1900, outside of the U.S. and the independent former colonies of Latin America, most of the human race was ruled by the British, French, and other European empires. If Imperial Germany had conquered Europe and subordinated the European overseas empires, it would have had a shot at world domination.

It was already too late for Hitler to conquer the world by the 1930s. Industrialization had added the Soviet Union and Japan to the ranks of great powers outside of Western Europe, in addition to the U.S., which by then potentially was by far the most powerful country. The Soviet Union was a major threat but it never had a chance at global domination. By the 1970s, its leaders sought the status of an equal superpower, a status which their economy and military-industrial base could not sustain.

...


Great-power rivalry, demographic collapse, mass migration — three of the major forces reshaping the world — have been all but completely absent, both from classic science fiction and newer novels and movies that have shaped public consciousness. Most science fiction is not trend analysis, but a moral or political allegory, as the late Thomas M. Disch pointed out in The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of. And, as he also pointed out, much of it is children’s literature. Unfortunately, literary and cinematic visions of the future influence the way the public and the policymaking elite think about the future.

This is particularly a problem for the left. Since the 19th century, the Marxist left has expected that at some point in the future an ill-defined revolution would create a global utopia — the World Socialist Republic of Handwavia, as it were. When this vision of the future collided with reality, the Marxist left split into reformist social democrats, who were hardly distinguishable from left-liberals, and communists, who, in the countries in which they came to power, soon abandoned socialist ideology for nationalist Realpolitik and the perks of a new ruling class.

Meanwhile, from the early 20th century to the early 21st, many centrist liberals have put their hopes in international institutions — the League of Nations, the United Nations, or, more recently, projects of trans-national regionalism like the European Union. Great power rivalries marginalized both the League and the UN, and populists in European nations like the British citizens who voted for Brexit now seek to dismantle or limit the powers of the EU.

Today’s national populists are told that they are on the wrong side of history, by elites whose members claim to speak on behalf of an emerging world community. But maybe the populists and nationalists are on the right side of history and the elites have been duped by bad science fiction.

Floating an idea here for the weekend, traditional defenses of capitalism may have worked best with the supposition that it worked at a regional or local level.  The influx of trading possibilities rather than legal prohibition was what ultimately ended the slave trade and caste systems in the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes around these parts.  These tribes could be a useful exception to the idea that hunter gatherer societies could be construed as, by their very nature, being fundamentally inimical to caste systems or slavery.  That's not true, obviously, but academics can be tempted to believe that it "could" be true, perhaps. 

But the idea here is that the more genuinely global capitalism becomes the more cogent the critique of capitalism as a global system could become.  What if it was possible for the Anglo-American view of capitalism to "work" because as vast as the Anglo-American empires have been they still had fundamental social, legal, geographic and economic limits?  Every empire crumbles at some point and every bid for a truly global system is going to probably end up with a totalitarianism of some kind--it may just be that for people committed to certain modes of economic life as the ideal for human flourishing that the totalitarian element inherent in how humans historically implement that ideal can be too easy to ignore. 

Oh, yes, and here's this piece about the new Spiderman: Homecoming film that came out recently by ... somebody.

http://www.mbird.com/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming-with-frosting-so-good-you-can-forget-theres-something-off-about-the-cake/

So it's not just WtH and Film Crit Hulk who have some reservations about the odd split between the explicit moralism of responsibility and the implicit moralism of the exemptions for the special.  Richard Brody's got that concern, too.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/review-spider-man-homecoming-hedges-its-bets

Now, sure, Brody had that review of Love & Friendship where he made the absurd claim that Susan Vernon didn't break any of the "important" rules of ethics and social life.  It would be ... impossible to read Austen's take on that character as her being someone who did anything but break the most important rules while keeping up her reputation by dint of fastidious adherence to the niceties of social life.  Austen was pretty good at depicting characters who are at their base pretty bad peope but who are clever enough at giving the right performance for the public so as to come off seeming above reproach.  It may be the reason 21st century adaptations of Austen's work put so much stock in the rightness of horndogs like Wickham or Lydia to get their relationships to work is because "that" is what "we" believe in these days and we pay lip service to a Darcy or a Lizzy Bennett because we know, thanks to a century or so of academic inculcation, that we're "supposed to" admire them even if in reality we are more like a Lydia or a Wickham or perhaps a Charlotte Lucas or a Mr. Collins.

and we may be blind to our own colonial tendencies in being on the lookout for colonialism in others, to get back to deBoer.  I've managed to grab Kyle Gann's book on the Charles Ives Concord Sonata and it was interesting to read him vent his frustration at his blog about identity studies.  His lament was that even though in theory he's in favor of identity studies regarding gender or sexuality he found that the peer review process at an earlier publisher fixated on those issues at the expense of his stated goal of discussing the musical work itself.  He also vented that musicologists were doing identity studies at the expense of looking at music manuscripts and published works to such an extent that it seemed that the work of musicology that had previously been done by musicologists would have to be done by actual composers.  Point noted!  And this ties into deBoer's proposal that cultural studies in American academic can paradoxically be concerned with colonial imagination while ... demonstrating the same basic kind of colonialism itself.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/21/cultural-studies-ironically-is-something-of-a-colonizer/
...

This results in some awkward tensions between pedagogical responsibility and political theory. Patricia Bizzell exemplified the perspective that the purpose of teaching is to inspire students to resist hegemony, rather than to learn, say, how to write a paper – and that professors have a vested interested in making sure they stay on that path:

…our dilemma is that we want to empower students to succeed in the dominant culture so that they can transform it from within; but we fear that if they do succeed, their thinking will be changed in such a way that they will no longer want to transform it.

This strange, self-contradictory attitude towards students – valorizing them as agents of political change who should rise up and resist authority while simultaneously condescending to them and assuming that it is the business of professors to dictate their political project – remains a common facet of the contemporary humanities.

Perhaps this might be likened to ... to be deliberately provocative about this ... the cheater who is worried that other people get away with cheating; the liar who is incensed that other people get away with lying; the plagiarist who is alert to how he or she has been plagiarized and so on.  The colonialist, regardless of formally professed ideology or practice, may be painfully alert to the colonialism of others. 

At least the old Religious Left and the Religious Right made the war to claim culture explicit enough to make it easy for people to disagree.  If a comparable enterprise has been taken up in academia the dog whistles could be so profuse from within academia the odds of this stuff being recognized for what it is could take generations to recognize ... which ... depending on how you read this stuff and its real vs professed aims ... might be the point?

Years ago when I wrote my ... well ... basically bad review of Andrew Durkin's book Decomposition, one of my simple disagreements with his premise was that he seemed set on rejecting authenticity and authorship as concepts because these were emblematic of capitalism and commercialism.  Neither of these reflect that.  If anything the literary and historical case that authenticity and authorship fixations are endemic to the Romantic era project seems pretty hard to dispute.  Durkin seemed unwilling and unable to concede that the upshot of arguments against "authenticity" and "authorship" would be to accept that there cannot be an inauthentic style of music and that corporately produce art cannot be considered illegitimate because of the corporately-funded algorithm-driven product that may be multi-authored and singularly branded.  Durkin was not necessarily willing to grant this. 

But proposing that Western musical notation is vague and inaccurate is worthless as an attempted argument in itself.  If Ben Johnston could take Western musical notation and finesse it into a system that allows one of his string quartets, which has more than a thousand discrete, identifiable pitches, to get performed, then Johnston may have a point in saying the problem isn't the notation system and its limits as that we've constrained ourselves in Western music to the dubious assumption that equal tempered tuning of keyboard instruments is the way to think in music.  Durkin, in a back and forth in comments at this blog, asserted that words only mean things in the contexts in which we use them.  Sure, but my counter argument was to propose that the language in which we learn confers upon us the cognitive and procedural constraints we keep working with the rest of our lives.  Insisting that words only mean what we use them to mean in context is merely part of a whole and a miserable distortion of the whole if that's what gets emphasis.  It amounts to, without a proper check, an assertion that the user of language gets to magically define what language is supposed to mean.  While I appreciated getting an introduction to Nancarrow's music through Durkin's book, on the whole Durkin's arguments were non-starters and his attempt to re-mystify music notation as a way to somehow de-commodify music was a failure. 

We're never going to get to a musicology in which Steve Wonder and Haydn, or Monk and J. S. Bach can be considered part of a gorgeous and holistic musical canon if that's the kind of rhetorical angle we take.  As tedious or meaningless as it might seem, comparing the technical ways in which Scriabin and Stevie Wonder could deploy octatonic scales or chains of chromatic median relationships seems more likely to be the path to affirm Wonder's axiom that music is a world within itself, with a language we can all understand than trying to go on and on about the imprecisions of musical notation systems for a PhD earned in English. 

What, ideally, we could learn if we engage in academic and theoretical discourse across a panoply of positions are the ways in which we put ourselves and each other into unexpected double binds.  We seem sufficiently balkanized to the point where it is with some disappointment I consider the possibility that just being willing to read across the political and ideological spectrum out of curiosity is something that's frowned upon across the spectrum. 

Well, that's probably enough writing for the time being ... at least at the blog. 

At least for now.

two centuries ago today, Jane Austen died, a few thoughts on one of Wenatchee The Hatchet's literary heroes

I've written this thought a few times before but the two literary voices I most leaned on as influences for how this blog works have been Jane Austen and Joan Didion.  If I had to boil my literary heroes down to a mere two figures I guess they'd be Dostoevsky and Austen. Fortunately nobody really has to distill their literary inspirations down to a mere two authors, but if I had to pick just two those would be the two.

I consider Austen one of the great comedic geniuses of English language literature.  That Austen's characters spend so much time navigating, with success or abject failure, the differences between the formalities of expected public discourse and the private realities of what people really do has been a natural fit for a lot of my literary and regional historical interests. 

Ten years on it actually feels inevitable that Wenatchee The Hatchet would be a Jane Austen fan who has written a lot about the gap between the branding and the interior reality of what used to be called Mars Hill.  I'm also a Christopher Nolan fan and his penchant for telling stories about corrupt and corruptible men who fool themselves into thinking the terrible things they want to do are the right thing to do is another inspiration for the kinds of stuff I love writing about. 

But as a contrast to the dudely dude chest-thumpery of Mark Driscoll and the bros who admire him, it would be difficult to find a literary figure who might be more antithetical in style and guiding ethic than, say, Jane Austen. 

I'd planned to write more for this particular day but there's other writing I've been tackling.  So drawing some inspiration from some famous Christian author who's had no problem shamelessly recycling old content ... we can do something like that here.

Here's an old piece from a few years ago that ... somebody ... wrote about Jane Austen's most famous literary work back in 2013. 

With a few years between publication and the present, it's evident to anyone who has read the book that Austen regarded the mercenary pragmatism of the Collins marriage to be less than ideal.  Yet Charlotte's correction to her friend Lizzy was to say that not everyone had the beauty and brains to have the luxury of shooting down a suitor on the assumption that another offer was just around the corner.  Lizzy could afford that, Charlotte could not.  Yet by novel's end it was abundantly clear that we weren't supposed to regard the stupid horndogs Wickham and Lydia as having married for particularly good reasons.  It would be a bit tricky to assert that Jane Austen was a feminist or a romantic/progressive of any of the stripes we see in 21st century American culture; but it was relatively clear that she believed that a marriage that was not "just" bout business concerns and also more than just the fire of the loins was what was necessary.  Her ideals regarding romance and companionate marriage may have become so notorious that her satires of the self-aggrandizing and entitled nature of the aristocracy can be all but forgotten.

Anyway ...

https://mereorthodoxy.com/romance-in-pride-and-prejudice-sometimes-we-settle/
Romance in Pride and Prejudice: Sometimes, We Settle
February 18, 2013

It is axiomatic that an artist’s work will be admired and disdained for a single set of qualities. Some admire the breadth and passion of Beethoven while others find his stamina and pathos tedious. Some admire the precision and pacing of Kubrick’s films while others find them pretentious.  Jane Austen is no exception; her longevity is like that of any other significant artist. The defenders and detractors never stop having their arguments about the worth of her work.

It may be worth revisiting Pride & Prejudice, which is two hundred years old this year, to consider what distinguishes her romances from contemporary romances. After all, Elizabeth Bennett is not the kind of character we can imagine will be convincingly portrayed by a Meg Ryan or a Kate Hudson, or even a Julia Roberts. Lizzy and Jane are not heroines who lend themselves to being championed by America’s sweethearts in just about any generation of film.

Arguably, Noah Berlatsky, writing for the Atlantic, has summed up the paradoxical appeal of Austen’s work: “She has to be one of the least romantic writers ever to write romance.”
Austen’s tales of romance may endure because she put so little stock in romance as we tend to define it. In an Austen novel, career advancement, real estate values, the size of an entailment, and the social and fiscal connections that come with marriage all matter. If that seems unappealing it is because we can’t conceive of a culture in which a marriage could be arranged to benefit clans rather than as the culmination of a quest for a “soulmate.” We also live in a culture which, in some sense, denies the inevitability of death.  And so Austen’s tales of matrimony and negotiation don’t make sense to us because they are often, as Berlatsky put it, as “small as life.”  Americans want life to be bigger and grander in every respect than a life could be in Jane Austen’s time.

But a title like Pride & Prejudice suggests that however domestic the tale, Austen’s themes are hardly small. Just as stories about war are rarely “just” about war, Austen’s tales of romance are not “just” stories of people who marry.  The title tips us off to character flaws before we’ve even opened the book. Though Elizabeth and Darcy are not imbued with a social or symbolic significance as apocalyptic as Dostoevsky’s characters, they do represent ways of living life. That Austen is quotidian where Dostoevsky is apocalyptic, that Austen is mundane where Dostoevsky is grotesque hardly means she was not writing about ideas. Austen had an eye for the mundane details with which philosophies of life must contend on a daily basis. Dostoevsky wrote about the personal and social cataclysms that philosophies create when untempered by other ideals.  But it is the dry domesticity of Austen’s narrative world and the long term decisions made within it that give her characters’ decisions weight.  Irreversible life-altering decisions hinge on a person’s ability or inability to make the right decision after observing mundane details.

The marriages that take place in the novel are made by people following ideals (Elizabeth and Darcy), altruistic affection (Jane and Bingley), pragmatism (Charlotte and Collins), and visceral chemistry (Lydia and Wickham).  While it is obvious that Austen did not endorse the latter pairings, it is equally clear she shows us the latter two couples are not at all disappointed with their respective catches. Charlotte Lucas isn’t ruined by settling for Mr. Collins any more than Lydia is unhappy to be married to Wickham.  Charlotte realistically assessed herself, knew marriage to be a sure defense against poverty and loneliness, and pragmatically accepted the best offer she had. Charlotte could tell Lizzy that Lizzy had the luxury of being beautiful enough and clever enough to actually turn down proposals. But Charlotte had neither and so went with her best option. Austen’s stories are stories in which social, economic, and sexual capital are all part of a calculation for a plausible pairing as a business decision, not merely a quest for true love. But even Lydia, silly as she is, never seems unhappy with Wickham or the support they get from the Darcys by books’ end.  They just continue as they do.

Today we may recognize that the ideal is Lizzy and Darcy, but when our culture advises to settle we prefer to settle for Lydia and Wickham rather than Charlotte and Collins.  The love that bursts forth like a fire, demolishing property and removing clothing, was the sort that Austen made fun of.  Yet in the 21^st century that sort of attraction is so taken for granted that director Joe Wright determined that Austen was too discreet to tell us the real reason Lizzy and Darcy fall for each other. So it turns out for a contemporary film-maker to sell himself on Lizzy and Darcy he has to believe they were drawn to each other like Lydia and Wickham. They are now heroes for sublimating their desire more decorously than others.  But that sort of erotic obsession goes past the point of even Lydia and Wickham to become the obsession of Dmitry Karamazov with Grushenka, only benefiting from the refinement of English manners.

In Austen’s actual novel, Lizzy and Darcy must overcome their own character flaws to discover they love each other.  In Wright’s film they simply need to contain themselves long enough to get social permission to do what they soon realized they wanted to do.  Cinema is full of tales where transgressive love is prized as a philosophical statement. “Theirs was a forbidden love” has been the clarion call to more than one or two made-for-TV-dramas. If the sparks create a fire hot enough then the heat was worth it.  This ethos is so prized it was shoe-horned into a Jane Austen adaptation. Apparently without that spark we won’t believe her story in our time.

Even evangelicals who claim that we should not be like the world still seem to want that devouring spark. When evangelical speakers and writers say that a marriage founded on anything but mutual love and attraction is going to fail, this indicates ignorance not merely of literature but of history. Negotiated lives together have happened in all sorts of ways. Because the spark of mutual sexual attraction inevitably wanes, friendship is important.

So far, so obvious. But great art, music, and literature help us avoid underestimating the obvious. Charlotte and Mr. Collins may not know the rapturous heights of mutual affection that Lizzy and Darcy know, but neither do they feel the imagined betrayals or wounded egos with bitterness and shame.  For Mr. and Mrs. Lucas the whole thing was to make sure the clergyman had his wife and the wife had her home. Having asked for no more than that and having found it, that was that. Though they may seem insultingly insular and provincial to us, they found their happy ending.

That Austen showed us happy endings even for those who settled in marriage is a reason for her greatness. It is because we know the marriages in that time and place could not be simply annulled that Charlotte’s decision bears a hint of tragedy. She settled, and she settled in a way we hope never to do. And by novel’s end Lydia and Wickham also settled, in their own way. In their world there can be no seven-year itch in which they reconsider their choices.  But both couples seem happy, if not wise, and by contemporary American romantic tropes they may be sitting in a church pew near you or me.

over at Aeon, a piece surveying how usury stopped being thought of as sinful in the Judeo-Christian millieu and became respectable finance

Much of the time pieces sent to Aeon can be unconvincing and even insanely stupid.  But the price of promulgating think-pieces is sometimes the think pieces have dumb ideas, like the idea that children should be redistributed by the state across all racial lines so as to ensure racism never happens again, as though the totalitarian regime that would be necessary to enforce such a policy over against "genetic narcissism" would only be a benefit to the human race. 

But sometimes there are useful or at least interesting surveys and to such a little survey we turn:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance



...
 
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), the anthropologist David Graeber argues that before the advent of money, economic life within a community was a web of mutual debts. People did not behave as self-interested individuals – at least not from the perspective of a single transaction; rather, they would share food, clothes and luxuries, and trust that their peers would repay the favour in return. When we consider these origins of debt and credit – as a system of mutual aid between people who trust each other – it’s no surprise that so many cultures viewed charging interest as morally wrong.
 
...
 
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church played its own part in sowing the seeds of a change of attitude. In the 13th century, it introduced the concept of Purgatory – a place that had no basis in scripture but did offer some reassurance to anyone committing the sin of usury each day. ‘Purgatory was just one of the complicitous winks that Christianity sent the usurer’s way,’ wrote the historian Jacques Le Goff in Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (1990). ‘The hope of escaping Hell, thanks to Purgatory, permitted the usurer to propel the economy and society of the 13th century ahead towards capitalism.’

and here's more along those lines.  Indulgences do get a mention. 

over at The Imaginative Conservative, an author rues the day Star Wars ruined arts culture by celebrating distraction, skips over the monomyth and the possibility that Star Wars franchises may be the distillation of the total work of art sought by German and French avant garde ideals

I admit I tend to identify as moderately conservative about religion and politics.  By moderate I mean to say I'm a Presbyterian dour Calvinist who thinks the human condition is fraught by human frailties so stark that I find myself thinking the Frankfurt school authors were too optimistic about the human condition in modern technocratic societies.  And I've been reading arts history/art criticism books by authors who write for Thesis Eleven ... .  My commitment is more to Christian doctrine and teaching than to the left or right on the political spectrum.   My views may be an uneasy grab bag of Edmund Burke, Jacques Ellul and Roger Williams ... . Throw in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Conrad, some Bonhoeffer and Brunner and I guess that's where I'm at. 

Which is set up for the observation that when I see a title like "The Imaginative Conservative" I can't help but wonder if "The Imaginative Reactionary" might not be a synonymous title.  Take this recent Sean Fitzpatrick piece that rues the day George Lucas' franchise exploded into the Cineplex. 

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/07/star-wars-sean-fitzpatrick.html

Forty years ago this summer—what seems to many a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—Star Wars was released, and America was sold into the slavery of pop-culture merchandising. With this era-changing movie, the American cinematic focus shifted away from sophisticated dramas—such as The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Taxi Driver—back to a pre-60s golden-age trope where exhibitionism and carnival capers in motion pictures made money. Some say that George Lucas effected a return to what the movies were meant to be, while others argue that his swashbuckling “space opera” was a backslide from which cinema has never recovered. In either case, Star Wars was the flagship film to sell itself as a franchise, driven and dominated by mass marketing, special effects, action sequences, and cornball dialogue. Gaining the status of highest-grossing film of all time, Star Wars became the epitome of the summer blockbuster, recasting movies as commercial events that cater to the lowest common denominator of the movie-going public. The effects of Star Wars run deep in the entertainment industry and have made explosive, eye-candy spectacle an idol of distraction for many whose lives are so meaningless that distraction is a crucial drug.

Popcorn flicks like Star Wars are central, even integral, to American leisure—which is arresting if Josef Pieper’s notion about the basis of culture is correct. Where would society be without its screens, its celebrities, and its space sagas? It is rare to walk into a home that does not have a television dominating, or even enshrining, its living room. It is almost a matter of principle akin to a religious obligation in the civilian temples of Americanism. The parallels between the television and the tabernacle show how deft the forces of darkness are at leading man from the truth by imitating it. Leaving aside the comparisons that exist between the local church and the local theater, entertainment has become something like a new religion, a ritual for people to fill the voids in their lives—only entertainment is fast becoming nothing more than an addiction to nothingness, a placebo against the emptiness of the times. In these ways, modern entertainment is not simply distorting the elements of religion, but actually commandeering the role of religion in human society. A new idol has risen for the idle neo-pagans, and it is the idolatry of distraction.

***
For an author to take this stance about Star Wars while singing the praises of Dickens or Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle invites a question as to what it is about the pulp fiction of earlier centuries that let it become part of a literary canon in our more recent era.

The Godfather was no less than Jaws founded on pulp idioms and popular fiction. 

The process by which multi-media comprehensive branded merchandising and marketing was not necessarily all done in 1977.  The process started but the deregulated industry practices that allowed for children to be exposed to films for which there were toys and comics and novelizations and cartoons more properly erupted in the Reagan years.  It's not a surprise if a contributor to The Imaginative Conservative would like to think that the beginning of the doom of pop culture enslavement happened during the Carter administration but that seems daft. 

Any accounting of Star Wars that ignores Campbell's monomyth is an accounting that isn't really worth taking seriously. 

It's like a whole bunch of people don't get what European avant garde theorists were proposing centuries ago about the role the arts could play in formulating a new mythological substitute for Christian religion.  It's not that pop culture somehow was "allowed" to commandeer the cultic elements of religions.  Entertainment figures explicitly set out to create cults around their franchises.  Even an atheist like Joss Whedon can talk about how great it was, twenty years later, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer became show with the cult following it has. Perhaps he hopes a comparable cult following can let him keep playing with Firefly stuff for a while.

Now David Roberts has written three books that can be pretty opaque but he proposed, at length, that the ideal of the total work of art as precursor of and catalyst for the ideal society moved from Germany and France to the United States.  Others have mentioned this, too, but the idea I'm mulling over is that if in the avant garde of Europe utopianism and the avant garde tended to fixate on the utopian past or the utopian future, the American innovation in the later 20th century is more inclusive.  The futurist tech of the Star Wars franchise famously took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Ancient future.  Something Roberts discussed at length in his books is how the Germans venerated Athens and the French venerated Sparta and how theorists and philosophers imagined that the Athenian art religion was a unified celebration in art of a unified society.

Well, okay, let's suppose that the American approach to unified art or the total work of art or ... the brand ... is also a celebration of an idealized status quo.  That could mean the dreams of German philosophers and avant garde artists would have been most realized in American franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, My Little Pony, Transformers, G. I. Joe and so on.

But that can't be right.  It's supposed to be Wagner's operas and the literature of Mallarme and Schiller and Goethe and ... it's not supposed to be Optimus Prime and Twilight Sparkle or Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker. 

Just because the religious or cultic elements of pop culture don't adhere to an old conservative nationalistic or ethnic demographic does not necessarily make them any less functionally religious.  In an era where conservatives write about morally therapeutic deism why wouldn't they spot that this is central to a Star Wars spirituality?  A religion of universal humanity, human reason and art doesn't need a deity to be functional.  Consider the cult of Star Trek these last fifty years. What middlebrow arts critics find so loathesome about mass and pop cultural franchises is that they not only make no bones about being explicitly and directly philosophical, their moralizing is front and center.  Superheroes explicitly insist upon telling us who is and isn't a hero and why.  It's not like Woody Allen films where the protagonist is an author stand-in or other kinds of films that are open to the interpretations of suitable cognoscenti--no, the Star Wars cinematic universe doesn't give you the luxury of supposing Palpatine is the hero of the story.  You're not supposed to imagine that perhaps the Empire has some worthy goals.  Maybe someone will write a funny piece at The Federalist making such a case, replete with the line "The Empire is back, baby, and they're gonna show these hippies who's boss!" 

Fans of the highbrow from the left and the right will likely never stop wringing their hands that too many people derive too much pleasure from too much pulp fiction. 

Since I'm a moderately conservative Presbyterian rather than a really conservative Catholic I suppose I may never land in the same spot as the sort of person who writes what's quoted above at The Imaginative Conservative.

The idea that a franchise like Transformers could reflect a not-even latent desire to in some sense see the world re-enchanted in a paradoxical way through technology is probably not going to be on the table.  That's probably because the kinds of folks who write for The Imaginative Conservative are going to be soooo busy attacking all ideas that even could possibly be associated with Marxists as never being able to correspond to any ideas that people with traditional or conservative Christian beliefs could agree with.   Actually ... there's a piece at Aeon I want to link to about the long history of how Christendom in the West went from saying usury was straight up evil to defending it ...

over at Vulture a case that Tony Stark is the "real" villain of Spiderman-Homecoming with the bromide that the Vulture is a Trump voter ... but ...

http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming-is-iron-man-the-real-villain.html?wpsrc=nyma


...
 
Tony Stark’s always been something of a lovable rogue, and he’s accomplished many heroic things in other films. Here, however, his actions seem more sinister when he’s dealing with children — and as it turns out, when he’s running Stark Industries, which, in Homecoming, seems to operate on the shady end of the spectrum. In the beginning of the film, we learn that the business of cleaning up the wreckage from the Avengers’ New York battles has been given over to the Department of Damage Control, which, as Darren Franich pointed out in EW, is co-financed by Tony Stark and seems like a fairly malevolent force, despite the fact that national treasure Tyne Daly is its main spokesperson. DDC forces out local contractors like Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, giving it the monopoly on superhero clean-ups. This might be designed to prevent dangerous alien tech from slipping into the hands of the unready (even though Toomes and his pals manage to steal it anyway), but it also ensures that Tony Stark has a vertical monopoly on superhuman activity: The battles use Stark technology; the clean-up crews are Stark branded; the PR is managed through Pepper Potts. Stark’s superpower, after all, is that he’s smart and rich. He lives in a world with few consequences. Money solves most of his problems; his monopolies prevent him from directly answering to the public. Who is he to teach a 15-year-old personal responsibility?

It’s unclear whether or how Stark Industries turns a profit, but its actions, as Homecoming reveals, have forced Americans out of their jobs. Case in point: Adrian Toomes, who offers the most compelling critique of Stark before he decides to become the evil Vulture. Toomes starts out in salvaging, gets forced out of his job by the Department of Damage Control, and then turns to a life of crime. As he faces off against Spider-Man, Keaton also gives the film a rare jolt of class consciousness as he tells Peter, “The rich and the powerful, like Stark, they don’t care about us.” The movie’s quick to supply examples of Toomes’s hypocrisy; as Vulture’s own Abe Riesman pointed out, he’s something akin to a monstrous vision of a Trump voter, furious at the elites of the world but unable to acknowledge his own relative privilege, as exemplified by a modernist home with way too many windows. [emphasis added]
 
The Vulture wears a bird suit, and goes from murder-curious to murderous after accidentally killing Logan Marshall-Green, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore his ideas. In the long term, Tony Stark’s actions do hurt the little guy. He’s like a Silicon Valley CEO who, after disrupting the economy with one good product, doesn’t acknowledge the evil he’s produced as a consequence. Tony Stark and his compatriots have seized control of a significant portion of the world’s power apparatus, and they are forcing out the ordinary man. Does this make Iron Man the villain? Marvel movies tend to have villains who intend to do harm, while people who cause damage unintentionally are more redeemable. (See Bucky Barnes in Winter Soldier or Civil War.) Surely, there’s enough evidence in Homecoming to see Toomes as at least a complicated figure, operating in something of a moral gray area.

The thing about the stereotypical Trump voter/alt right voter is white nationalistic ideas.  Yet ... for anyone who has actually seen Spiderman: Homecoming, the interracial marriage that led to the existence of Peter's crush Liz is really obvious by act 3.  Perhaps journalists wanting to describe the latest Spiderman villain in political terms want to find some other reference point for a white guy married to a black woman who's committing all his crimes to provide for his family in terms that don't deviate from the mainstream script in the press about Trump. 

The problem with Toomes isn't that he's a hypocrite.  No Marvel antagonist so far seems more committed to doing everything under the radar and as quietly as possible.  Toomes ends up killing Shocker 1 after an incident where Shocker 1 insists on showing off high-powered weaponry in a suburb without regard for collateral damage.  Underground arms dealer though he is, this is still an Adrian Toomes he can regard Mac Gargan with contempt as someone he wouldn't even deal with if Spiderman hadn't messed up other business deals.  If people want to cast Toomes in some kind of political sense the idea that this Adrian Toomes is a Trump voter seems a bit much.  Maybe he could be likened to a Reagan Democrat ...

But his criticism of Stark and the Department of Damage Control (subtle name, as always) is that what Stark and company benefit from is the kind of crony monopolistic capitalism in which the haves get to have more and those who don't get completely sidelined.  How do we know that Adrian Toomes, if he were magically a real person, wouldn't have voted for Sanders?  He might even have voted for Clinton, whose record as a hawk doesn't seem in any contradiction to the Vulture's family-driven pragmatism.  Had Trump not won would journalists even think to interpret the Vulture's activities and motives in Trump-voter terms?  Not ... very ... likely.  Last year some tried to describe the antagonist of the Magnificent Seven remake of a remake in Trumpian terms even though the production was under way (i.e. already scripted) before Trump's candidacy was solidified.  But there seems to be this penchant in the entertainment industry for a kind of political punditry recency bias; X or Y is imputed to a pop culture event that may have taken years to come together as though it were somehow consciously anticipating or responding to current events.  That makes sense if we're talking about a show like South Park where Parker and Stone are obviously reacting within a few weeks to current events.

When Parker confronts Toomes at the end Toomes' objection is that he is, in fact, pretty much doing the same thing that got the Starks their empire of wealth, selling weapons to killers.   Toomes' problem isn't hypocrisy so much as that he refuses to concede that the difference between what Starks Tony or Howard did and what he's been doing is the difference between the formal relationship granted by the state.  The state, in the form of the Department of Damage Control, deprived him of his job and contract to clean up the post-Avengers 1 damage. He, in turn, steals from Damage Control to refurbish alien tech into weapons and tools that he sells on the black market.   he's still a criminal but with an understandable motive.

If the studios want to even bother with a Sinister Six film they can bring back Keaton as the Vulture and maybe bring back Molina as Doc Ock.  One of the fun things about the classic Spiderman villains is that since they're older guys older actors could step into the roles.  Odds are pretty decent that the Osborn stuff has been too badly played out to be worth continuing.