... The genius, the brilliant creator struggling alone with momentous discoveries or decisive decisions, has given way to the research group, the managerial team, and the governing committee. The arts, particularly the arts of mass media, also involve group activity in which the final product (a more precise word than creation)--a motion picture, television show, or Broadway musical--is the result of conference and compromise among script writer, director, actors, producer, and so forth. Impersonality characterizes human relationships: the master-pupil relationship has given way to the class of 500 and the television lecture; the physician-patient relationship has been replaced by the clinic of efficient but detached specialists; the intimacy of the personal has yielded to the impersonal mass.
In the arts, impersonality has taken different forms. In general, it has meant that "we must no longer confuse humanism with romantic individuality or with an anthropomorphic view that put the self at the center of things."
Music, The Arts, and Ideas
Leonard B Meyer
copyright (c) 1967 University of Chicago
ISBN 0-226-52143-5
page 155
So as of basically half a century ago popular art had been revealed to be a group project. Durkin's eagerness to dismantle the ideologies of "authorship" and "authenticity" in Decomposition doesn't go far enough. What he really would need to do is blow up the legitimacy of the entire Romantic era as an ideological movement. But progressive politics more or less depends on taking precisely that ideological idealism as given.
Even for those who are ostensibly traditionalist, the ideology of self-discovery and self-refinement is more or less a given. Meyer mentions this:
few traditionalists have given way to total despair, to nihilism. Most have sought and found some sort of meaning and purpose in existence. Often these have been found to lie in the discovery and perfection of the self--a state of secular grace in which the human will or spirit is specified, shaped, and refined by the choices and commitments made by the individual. Such purification and self-realization through what we undergo--what we suffer--is not a new goal. Rather, as Susan Sontag points out, it is a secular "translation" of an established doctrine, an instance of "the latest and most powerful legacy of the Christian tradition of introspection, opened up by Paul and Augustine, which equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer."
page 230
As Martha Rosler put it, artists have had a lot invested in having a literally messianic self-perception and this may be as an emotional reaction to inevitably being the servants of whatever patronage empire was in place:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-i/
...
Especially since the romantics, artists have routinely harbored messianic desires, the longing to take a high position in social matters, to play a transformative role in political affairs; this may be finally understood as a necessary—though perhaps only imaginary—corrective to their roles, both uncomfortable and insecure, as handmaidens to wealth and power.
Paradoxically viewing the result of the creative process as an actual product rather than as a distillation of the transcendence of an individual soul might be the real solution to the actual problem. Durkin's best point in Decomposition is that even the most solitary act of creativity is still a social action toward a social end. The shame of even this good idea is that because Durkin avoids committing to the proposal that there are aesthetic criteria that could or should be used to assess art as art, all that's left are the identity markers of a social community and with only that left over what do we inevitably crash into? The question of the authenticity of membership in said communities.
Sunday, August 09, 2015
why there will never be even a decent Fantastic Four movie, the wrong kind of narrative compression, heroes saving the world from problems they created, you can't have the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom share the same origin moment
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/fantastic-four-film-adaptation-marvel/400664/
There will never be a decent Fantastic Four movie. Forget about whether there can be a great one, think "decent", the kind where after you've seen it you would not think it punishment it see it again.
Oh, well, if we count Brad Bird's The Incredibles we have what could have been a Fantastic Four movie ... .
No story that tries to shoe-horn Doctor Doom into the origin story is going to work. We've had more than a decade to consider superhero films as a genre and a Fantastic Four movie that insists on a single originating process for both the heroes and their archnemesis is doomed to failure.
Let's go back to the heady days of the genre. Sam Raimi's first Spider-man film gave us a hero and a villain with PARALLEL origin stories but the stories reflected their different views about access to and use of power. It was okay for the hero and his or her nemesis to have parallel paths that culminated in a confrontation. What has come up in reviews of the clunky Fantastic Four films is we're told that the heroes have to stop the threat of a menace they have explicitly created or that is pretty much their fault. This could get me on a long tangent about why Legend of Korra is a trainwreck but we'll save that for later.
Skipping past Spider-man let's get to Batman Begins. Bruce Wayne is mentored by Ducard who turns out to be Ra's al Ghul. In this case the surrogate father turns out to be evil but since Thomas Wayne is presented as heroic, as someone from old money who believes money and power should be used to serve the community you live with, not to bend and break it into subservience to your individual vision and will, that makes sense. It doesn't breach our popular sensibility that the hero and the villain have different moral paradigms and it doesn't breach the popular genre sensibility that the hero and the villain have a conflict based on an irreconcilable difference about the use and access to power.
Now in having proposed that there's a problem with making the origin of the Fantastic Four and the origin of Doctor Doom the same inciting incident Wenatchee The Hatchet has not forgotten about Captain America. Yeah, Red Skull and Cap both take the super soldier serum. Dr. Erskine tells a story of how the Red Skull became the Red Skull and so attempting to give the serum to Steve Rogers becomes a path of atonement for Dr. Erskine. Erskine knows the serum was given to a morally unworthy test subject even if he was physically compatible with the project. Thus Erskine turns to Rogers as a new test subject as a kind of penance but also as a choice to give the power to someone who is not physically worthy of it and might potentially not survive the process but who Erskine considers morally able to handle the power if he should survive long enough to receive it. It all boils down to Steve answering Dr. Erskine's, "So, do you want to kill Nazis?" with "I don't WANT to kill anybody."
So while the serum is the same serum, the taxonomy of the hero and the villain having divergent origins is still preserved.
One of the mistakes in genre fiction, but particularly in the superhero genre in the last twenty years, is fixating on this idea that the origin story or backstory has talismanic power. Superman and Batman did not start with particularly grand origin stories. And in the case of villains there's little need for an origin story. The Dark Knight gave us a Joker who didn't even have a coherent origin story.
But Saint Augustine, way back in City of God, wrote that he could ultimately find neither a natural nor efficient cause for the origin of the evil will. It was mysterious where the origin of the evil will was on "natural" grounds because if God made all things good then where did that evil will come from? From nature? This did not seem possible. There was no "efficient" cause in the sense that while the Genesis 3 narrative could describe how the fruit was desirable as the serpent persuaded Eve there's no efficient explanation for a process as to how the evil will emerged, either. It kinda just shows up.
As an aside, one of the things that seems most pernicious about a Silence of Adam theology of gender is how sweeping it is in frontloading contemporary sexuality and gender anxiety issues on to a biblical text that seems blissfully unconcerned with giving us a Dostoevsky style portrait of the interior emotional, intellectual and spiritual life of Adam and Eve.
Now that Doctor Doom almost seems like a Gary Stue is something else for some other time. If there's going to be a decent Fantastic Four film don't cram Doom into the origin story. Why should Doom be sullied by having an origin story that is so contingent on the accidental empowerment of the clod Reed Richards? Let Doom have Doom's own origin story on Doom's terms alone. Or take a cue from Nolan, who didn't introduce the Joker until he'd gotten us to take an interest in Batman first.
There will never be a decent Fantastic Four movie. Forget about whether there can be a great one, think "decent", the kind where after you've seen it you would not think it punishment it see it again.
Oh, well, if we count Brad Bird's The Incredibles we have what could have been a Fantastic Four movie ... .
No story that tries to shoe-horn Doctor Doom into the origin story is going to work. We've had more than a decade to consider superhero films as a genre and a Fantastic Four movie that insists on a single originating process for both the heroes and their archnemesis is doomed to failure.
Let's go back to the heady days of the genre. Sam Raimi's first Spider-man film gave us a hero and a villain with PARALLEL origin stories but the stories reflected their different views about access to and use of power. It was okay for the hero and his or her nemesis to have parallel paths that culminated in a confrontation. What has come up in reviews of the clunky Fantastic Four films is we're told that the heroes have to stop the threat of a menace they have explicitly created or that is pretty much their fault. This could get me on a long tangent about why Legend of Korra is a trainwreck but we'll save that for later.
Skipping past Spider-man let's get to Batman Begins. Bruce Wayne is mentored by Ducard who turns out to be Ra's al Ghul. In this case the surrogate father turns out to be evil but since Thomas Wayne is presented as heroic, as someone from old money who believes money and power should be used to serve the community you live with, not to bend and break it into subservience to your individual vision and will, that makes sense. It doesn't breach our popular sensibility that the hero and the villain have different moral paradigms and it doesn't breach the popular genre sensibility that the hero and the villain have a conflict based on an irreconcilable difference about the use and access to power.
Now in having proposed that there's a problem with making the origin of the Fantastic Four and the origin of Doctor Doom the same inciting incident Wenatchee The Hatchet has not forgotten about Captain America. Yeah, Red Skull and Cap both take the super soldier serum. Dr. Erskine tells a story of how the Red Skull became the Red Skull and so attempting to give the serum to Steve Rogers becomes a path of atonement for Dr. Erskine. Erskine knows the serum was given to a morally unworthy test subject even if he was physically compatible with the project. Thus Erskine turns to Rogers as a new test subject as a kind of penance but also as a choice to give the power to someone who is not physically worthy of it and might potentially not survive the process but who Erskine considers morally able to handle the power if he should survive long enough to receive it. It all boils down to Steve answering Dr. Erskine's, "So, do you want to kill Nazis?" with "I don't WANT to kill anybody."
So while the serum is the same serum, the taxonomy of the hero and the villain having divergent origins is still preserved.
One of the mistakes in genre fiction, but particularly in the superhero genre in the last twenty years, is fixating on this idea that the origin story or backstory has talismanic power. Superman and Batman did not start with particularly grand origin stories. And in the case of villains there's little need for an origin story. The Dark Knight gave us a Joker who didn't even have a coherent origin story.
But Saint Augustine, way back in City of God, wrote that he could ultimately find neither a natural nor efficient cause for the origin of the evil will. It was mysterious where the origin of the evil will was on "natural" grounds because if God made all things good then where did that evil will come from? From nature? This did not seem possible. There was no "efficient" cause in the sense that while the Genesis 3 narrative could describe how the fruit was desirable as the serpent persuaded Eve there's no efficient explanation for a process as to how the evil will emerged, either. It kinda just shows up.
As an aside, one of the things that seems most pernicious about a Silence of Adam theology of gender is how sweeping it is in frontloading contemporary sexuality and gender anxiety issues on to a biblical text that seems blissfully unconcerned with giving us a Dostoevsky style portrait of the interior emotional, intellectual and spiritual life of Adam and Eve.
Now that Doctor Doom almost seems like a Gary Stue is something else for some other time. If there's going to be a decent Fantastic Four film don't cram Doom into the origin story. Why should Doom be sullied by having an origin story that is so contingent on the accidental empowerment of the clod Reed Richards? Let Doom have Doom's own origin story on Doom's terms alone. Or take a cue from Nolan, who didn't introduce the Joker until he'd gotten us to take an interest in Batman first.
from Mars Hill West Seattle to Trinity West Seattle
Mars Hill West Seattle
Trinity West Seattle
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
UBI Number 603451811
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/12/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name DAVID LEE
Address 7551 35TH AVE SW
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98126
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Fairchild, Leonard 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
Director Ellis, Clifford 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
Director Lee, David 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
Trinity West Seattle
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
UBI Number 603451811
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/12/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name DAVID LEE
Address 7551 35TH AVE SW
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98126
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Fairchild, Leonard 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
Director Ellis, Clifford 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
Director Lee, David 7551 35TH AVE SW
SEATTLE, WA 98126
from Mars Hill Tacoma to Resurrection Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
RESURRECTION CHURCH
UBI Number 603450878
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/10/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name JOEL BROWN
Address 4102 N BENNETT ST
City TACOMA
State WA
ZIP 98407
President JENNINGS, BUBBA 5238 DAHL DR
TACOMA, WA 98406
Secretary,Treasurer ROHRBAUGH, PAUL 6612 77TH AVE CT NW
GIG HARBOR, WA 98335
Vice President BROWN, JOEL 4009 N 12TH ST
TACOMA, WA 98406
RESURRECTION CHURCH
UBI Number 603450878
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/10/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name JOEL BROWN
Address 4102 N BENNETT ST
City TACOMA
State WA
ZIP 98407
President JENNINGS, BUBBA 5238 DAHL DR
TACOMA, WA 98406
Secretary,Treasurer ROHRBAUGH, PAUL 6612 77TH AVE CT NW
GIG HARBOR, WA 98335
Vice President BROWN, JOEL 4009 N 12TH ST
TACOMA, WA 98406
from Mars Hill Spokane to Redemption Church Spokane
Mars Hill Spokane
Redemption Spokane
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
REDEMPTION CHURCH SPOKANE
UBI Number 603448302
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 10/29/2014
Expiration Date 10/31/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name MILES ROHDE
Address 2824 W EZRA LN
City SPOKANE
State WA
ZIP 99208
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Featherstone, Paul 4615 S Myrtle St
SPOKANE, WA 99223
Director Rohde, Miles 212 S Division St
SPOKANE, WA 99202
Redemption Spokane
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
REDEMPTION CHURCH SPOKANE
UBI Number 603448302
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 10/29/2014
Expiration Date 10/31/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name MILES ROHDE
Address 2824 W EZRA LN
City SPOKANE
State WA
ZIP 99208
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Featherstone, Paul 4615 S Myrtle St
SPOKANE, WA 99223
Director Rohde, Miles 212 S Division St
SPOKANE, WA 99202
from Mars Hill Shoreline to Sound City Bible Church
Mars Hill Shoreline
Sound City Bible Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
UBI Number 603453436
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/18/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name AARON GRAY
Address 2800 NE 200TH ST
City SHORELINE
State WA
ZIP 98155
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Day, Joseph 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Smead, William 2800 NE 200th St
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Jones, Cienna 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Kaemingk, Dale 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Freyberg, Doug 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Gray, Aaron 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Sound City Bible Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
UBI Number 603453436
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/18/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name AARON GRAY
Address 2800 NE 200TH ST
City SHORELINE
State WA
ZIP 98155
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Chairman Day, Joseph 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Smead, William 2800 NE 200th St
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Jones, Cienna 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Kaemingk, Dale 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Freyberg, Doug 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
Director Gray, Aaron 2800 NE 200th St.
Shoreline, WA 98155
from Mars Hill Rainier Valley to Rainier Valley Church
Mars Hill Rainier Valley
Rainier Valley Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
RAINIER VALLEY CHURCH
UBI Number 603451090
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/10/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name JEREMY CULUMBER
Address 3800 S OTHELLO ST
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98118
Special Address Information
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Director Choi, Ed 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
Director Porter, Nate 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
Director Culumber, Kari 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
Rainier Valley Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
RAINIER VALLEY CHURCH
UBI Number 603451090
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/10/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name JEREMY CULUMBER
Address 3800 S OTHELLO ST
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98118
Special Address Information
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Director Choi, Ed 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
Director Porter, Nate 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
Director Culumber, Kari 3800 S Othello St Seattle
SEATTLE, WA 98118
from Mars Hill Portland to Redeemer Church
http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_web_name_srch_inq.show_detl?p_be_rsn=1516831&p_srce=BR_INQ&p_print=FALSE
http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_web_name_srch_inq.show_detl?p_be_rsn=1516831&p_srce=BR_INQ&p_print=FALSE
There is not necessarily a Redeemer Church registered with the Oregon Secretary of State office.
If anyone happens to know the UCC/UBI code and listings for whatever Redeemer Church in Portland actually is as a corporate entity, contribute away.
http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_web_name_srch_inq.show_detl?p_be_rsn=1516831&p_srce=BR_INQ&p_print=FALSE
There is not necessarily a Redeemer Church registered with the Oregon Secretary of State office.
If anyone happens to know the UCC/UBI code and listings for whatever Redeemer Church in Portland actually is as a corporate entity, contribute away.
from Mars HIll Olympia to Harbor Church
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
http://www.sos.wa.gov/
HARBOR CHURCH
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/07/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Charity This corporation is also a charity. View Info »
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name SETH WINTERHALTER
Address 819 OLYMPIA AVE NE
City OLYMPIA
State WA
ZIP 98506
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Director Winterhalter, Seth 1806 15th Ave SW
OLYMPIA, WA 98502
Director Downen, Rich 2801 Wiggins Rd SE
OLYMPIA, WA 98501
Director Bennett, John 204 Euclid Ave
SHELTON, WA 98584
http://www.sos.wa.gov/
HARBOR CHURCH
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/07/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Charity This corporation is also a charity. View Info »
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name SETH WINTERHALTER
Address 819 OLYMPIA AVE NE
City OLYMPIA
State WA
ZIP 98506
Governing Persons
Title
Name
Address
Director Winterhalter, Seth 1806 15th Ave SW
OLYMPIA, WA 98502
Director Downen, Rich 2801 Wiggins Rd SE
OLYMPIA, WA 98501
Director Bennett, John 204 Euclid Ave
SHELTON, WA 98584
from Mars Hill Bellevue to Doxa Church - Eastside
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
DOXA CHURCH - EASTSIDE
UBI Number 603448198
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 10/29/2014
Expiration Date 10/31/2015
Chairman Molvar, Roger 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Director Ghioni, Alex 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Director Cox, Dave 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
President Vanderstelt, Jeff 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Secretary Patton, Timothy 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
DOXA CHURCH - EASTSIDE
UBI Number 603448198
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 10/29/2014
Expiration Date 10/31/2015
Chairman Molvar, Roger 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Director Ghioni, Alex 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Director Cox, Dave 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
President Vanderstelt, Jeff 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
Secretary Patton, Timothy 620 106th Ave. NE
BELLEVUE, WA 98004
from Mars Hill Ballard to Cross and Crown
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/
CROSS AND CROWN CHURCH
UBI Number 603452575
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/14/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name ADAM CHRISTIANSEN
Address 1401 NW LEARY WAY
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98107
Chairman Haeusel, Matthias 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Christiansen, Adam 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Huxford, Thomas Cameron 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Harris, Scott 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Langley, Kirby 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
CROSS AND CROWN CHURCH
UBI Number 603452575
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 11/14/2014
Expiration Date 11/30/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name ADAM CHRISTIANSEN
Address 1401 NW LEARY WAY
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98107
Chairman Haeusel, Matthias 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Christiansen, Adam 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Huxford, Thomas Cameron 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Harris, Scott 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Director Langley, Kirby 1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107
from Mars Hill Albuquerque to North Church
New Mexico isn't into just having a search engine available to pull up the UCC/UBI code for corporations registered in the state. You apparently have to go find someone who does that searching for you.
Andrew Durkin on the ideologies of authorship and authenticity corrupting our understanding of art, but this would not be his endorsements of Taylor Swift and Michael Bay
http://uglyrug.blogspot.com/
...Moreover, “free culture” (or, in my own, more broadly-defined term, “decomposition”) is still the best way of critiquing the real issue: the ideology of authorship and authenticity. (For what it's worth, here's how I define those terms in my book, and in terms of music: authorship is the idea that works are created by solitary individuals, and authenticity is the idea that there is a “singularly true, ideal experience of music that trumps all others, disregarding the variability of audience perception, and accessible only to those with ‘correct’ knowledge and ‘proper’ understanding.”) It’s still the best way, for instance, to undermine the celebrity worship that propels our interactions on the network. Taylor’s point that Web 2.0 has led to the consolidation of superstars as a class is instructive here; superstars are now both fewer and wealthier. In a world of aesthetic abundance, the veritable “celestial jukebox” we were promised, why should that be? I blame our willingness to believe in putatively objective hierarchies of quality—the individual god-like artists and reified expressions of music that we are all supposed to agree are among “the best that has been said and thought in the world” (to use Matthew Arnold’s famously narrow definition of culture). As belief systems, authorship and authenticity create powerful cultural cliques; they have a tendency to pull audiences toward an arbitrary center of gravity, to work against a more haphazard and chaotic process of taste formation, and to stomp down the so-called long tail in favor of a disproportionately large head.
But not only do authorship and authenticity corrupt our understanding of art—they also drive the free market system that makes the techno-utopian mega-corporations possible in the first place. They are crucial to private property (see John Locke). They are crucial to advertising (see trademark law). They are crucial to planned obsolescence (see the parade of new devices, each made possible by an updated slate of proprietary technology). They inform our understanding of the techno-utopian mega-corporations themselves (see the cult of Steve Jobs). So it is actually not that these corporations have truly embraced the “free culture” philosophy they benefit from, or done away with authorship and authenticity, as some purveyors of the regret narrative would have it. Instead, they have claimed authorship (this brand made this product!) and authenticity (it is objectively the best; buy it!) for themselves. What is Mark Zuckerberg now if not, legally, the “author” of a significant chunk of the Internet—a rights holder of the donated experiences and expressions of the enormous number of people who use his network? If “free culture” had really come to pass, that kind of ownership would be impossible.
Given this continuity, the danger of the regret narrative is its propensity for engendering a feeling of nostalgia—not a critique of the system itself, but a critique of the current manifestation of the system. Taylor is better at avoiding this trap than most, but even she betrays an occasional fondness for the more dubious aspects of what we have lost. She repeats, for instance, the problematic notion that one of the benefits of the old label ecosystem is that its pop hits functioned to “funnel revenues from more successful acts to less successful ones.” She calls that dynamic “cross-subsidies,” but to me, it sounds a lot like trickle-down economics: nice if you happen to be one of the fortunate few to get some of the windfall. More broadly, if free market capitalism is the problem, why would changing the elite beneficiaries of that system—subbing in the big record labels or movie studios for any of the major technology companies—be the solution?
http://uglyrug.blogspot.com/
My friends complain about modern pop all the time. I wish I could evaluate it in aesthetic terms. But I feel like I can’t even hear it. It sounds like money to me. I hear the money that went into the production. I hear the money that went into the promotion. I hear the money that is being exchanged every time it is performed. I hear the money that is expected as a kind of birthright. Lord help me, I can’t get past the money.
Call me crazy, but I think that’s a problem.
Dismantling categories of "authorship" and "authenticity" doesn't accomplish anything. It doesn't change the role of Taylor Swift in popular music or of Michael Bay in tentpole cinema. In fact, if anything arguing against authorship and authenticity can be construed as arguments for modern pop. Yet here is Durkin, having confessed he can't even hear modern pop music as music because it just sounds like money to him. The trouble is that Durkin's not going to go Dwight Macdonald and get all "Masscult and Midcult" because he loves Stevie Wonder (and why not, I adore Stevie Wonder's music). The problem is that if we're not going to commit to explicitly formalized aesthetic values the cult of authenticity as an extra-musical imputation of intra-cultural credibility is what we have left. Cue up Sherman Alexie's assertion that all good art is explicitly tribal and to be part of the tribe you have to pass muster on a set of criteria for membership, don't you? Either that or you're literally born into that privilege.
Durkin wants to defang the ideological commitments to authorial uniqueness and authenticity without actually dismantling the entire ideological foundation of Romanticism. The trouble is that in the last century the alternatives to individualistic Romanticism as an ideology have tended to veer toward a more social/collective sense of identity that Americans, particularly those of a progressive type, have tended to explicitly conflate with fascism.
And one of the other problems is that Leonard B Meyer called it half a century ago when he said that already by that time (1967) artistic creation had stopped being seen as the result of a solitary genius and the popular arts of the time, whether popular songs by rock bands or films, were literally seen as the products of collaborative activity, team review and group distribution. Think of all those 'fifth Beatles'. Durkin pays lip service to the idea of subverting the legitimacy of the categories of "authorship" and "authentic" but his heart is as far as can be from embracing the reality of such an abjection, because if his heart was in it, he'd embrace modern pop.
...Moreover, “free culture” (or, in my own, more broadly-defined term, “decomposition”) is still the best way of critiquing the real issue: the ideology of authorship and authenticity. (For what it's worth, here's how I define those terms in my book, and in terms of music: authorship is the idea that works are created by solitary individuals, and authenticity is the idea that there is a “singularly true, ideal experience of music that trumps all others, disregarding the variability of audience perception, and accessible only to those with ‘correct’ knowledge and ‘proper’ understanding.”) It’s still the best way, for instance, to undermine the celebrity worship that propels our interactions on the network. Taylor’s point that Web 2.0 has led to the consolidation of superstars as a class is instructive here; superstars are now both fewer and wealthier. In a world of aesthetic abundance, the veritable “celestial jukebox” we were promised, why should that be? I blame our willingness to believe in putatively objective hierarchies of quality—the individual god-like artists and reified expressions of music that we are all supposed to agree are among “the best that has been said and thought in the world” (to use Matthew Arnold’s famously narrow definition of culture). As belief systems, authorship and authenticity create powerful cultural cliques; they have a tendency to pull audiences toward an arbitrary center of gravity, to work against a more haphazard and chaotic process of taste formation, and to stomp down the so-called long tail in favor of a disproportionately large head.
But not only do authorship and authenticity corrupt our understanding of art—they also drive the free market system that makes the techno-utopian mega-corporations possible in the first place. They are crucial to private property (see John Locke). They are crucial to advertising (see trademark law). They are crucial to planned obsolescence (see the parade of new devices, each made possible by an updated slate of proprietary technology). They inform our understanding of the techno-utopian mega-corporations themselves (see the cult of Steve Jobs). So it is actually not that these corporations have truly embraced the “free culture” philosophy they benefit from, or done away with authorship and authenticity, as some purveyors of the regret narrative would have it. Instead, they have claimed authorship (this brand made this product!) and authenticity (it is objectively the best; buy it!) for themselves. What is Mark Zuckerberg now if not, legally, the “author” of a significant chunk of the Internet—a rights holder of the donated experiences and expressions of the enormous number of people who use his network? If “free culture” had really come to pass, that kind of ownership would be impossible.
Given this continuity, the danger of the regret narrative is its propensity for engendering a feeling of nostalgia—not a critique of the system itself, but a critique of the current manifestation of the system. Taylor is better at avoiding this trap than most, but even she betrays an occasional fondness for the more dubious aspects of what we have lost. She repeats, for instance, the problematic notion that one of the benefits of the old label ecosystem is that its pop hits functioned to “funnel revenues from more successful acts to less successful ones.” She calls that dynamic “cross-subsidies,” but to me, it sounds a lot like trickle-down economics: nice if you happen to be one of the fortunate few to get some of the windfall. More broadly, if free market capitalism is the problem, why would changing the elite beneficiaries of that system—subbing in the big record labels or movie studios for any of the major technology companies—be the solution?
http://uglyrug.blogspot.com/
My friends complain about modern pop all the time. I wish I could evaluate it in aesthetic terms. But I feel like I can’t even hear it. It sounds like money to me. I hear the money that went into the production. I hear the money that went into the promotion. I hear the money that is being exchanged every time it is performed. I hear the money that is expected as a kind of birthright. Lord help me, I can’t get past the money.
Call me crazy, but I think that’s a problem.
Dismantling categories of "authorship" and "authenticity" doesn't accomplish anything. It doesn't change the role of Taylor Swift in popular music or of Michael Bay in tentpole cinema. In fact, if anything arguing against authorship and authenticity can be construed as arguments for modern pop. Yet here is Durkin, having confessed he can't even hear modern pop music as music because it just sounds like money to him. The trouble is that Durkin's not going to go Dwight Macdonald and get all "Masscult and Midcult" because he loves Stevie Wonder (and why not, I adore Stevie Wonder's music). The problem is that if we're not going to commit to explicitly formalized aesthetic values the cult of authenticity as an extra-musical imputation of intra-cultural credibility is what we have left. Cue up Sherman Alexie's assertion that all good art is explicitly tribal and to be part of the tribe you have to pass muster on a set of criteria for membership, don't you? Either that or you're literally born into that privilege.
Durkin wants to defang the ideological commitments to authorial uniqueness and authenticity without actually dismantling the entire ideological foundation of Romanticism. The trouble is that in the last century the alternatives to individualistic Romanticism as an ideology have tended to veer toward a more social/collective sense of identity that Americans, particularly those of a progressive type, have tended to explicitly conflate with fascism.
And one of the other problems is that Leonard B Meyer called it half a century ago when he said that already by that time (1967) artistic creation had stopped being seen as the result of a solitary genius and the popular arts of the time, whether popular songs by rock bands or films, were literally seen as the products of collaborative activity, team review and group distribution. Think of all those 'fifth Beatles'. Durkin pays lip service to the idea of subverting the legitimacy of the categories of "authorship" and "authentic" but his heart is as far as can be from embracing the reality of such an abjection, because if his heart was in it, he'd embrace modern pop.
the end of the American Songbook and the end of American jazz
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/the-end-of-jazz/309112/?single_page=true
John Lewis, the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, noted: “Jazz developed while the great popular music was being turned out. It was a golden age for songs. They had a classic quality in length and shape and form and flexibility of harmony. The jazz musicians were drawn to this music as a source of material.” The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular, sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the crucial wellspring of jazz. Both jazz and its progenitor are worthy of radical—indeed, reactionary—efforts to preserve them. But despite Gioia’s ardency, there is no reason to believe that jazz can be a living, evolving art form decades after its major source—and the source that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment—has dried up. Jazz, like the Songbook, is a relic—and as such, in 2012 it cannot have, as Gioia wishes for it, an “expansive and adaptive repertoire.”
What has been interesting to consider about the musical vocabulary of the 19th and 19th centuries and the 20th centuries on the one hand, and the evolution of popular music in the U.S. in the 21st is a question, a pragmatic and practical question. What we can see in music in the West is that harmony plays an unprecedented role in defining musical language, in ways that are not the case elsewhere and that aren't even the case prior to about the 1700s.
The major/minor key system we have taken for granted is only a few centuries old at most and what happened in 18th and 19th century art music that doesn't seem to happen much in contemporary popular music (perhaps?) is modal mutation, shifting from C major to C minor or from C minor to C major. When jazz musicians find contemporary popular music wanting it may be in part because once the chords for a new song are laid down there's nothing more to add than just playing the songs and if you try to play the changes the changes may not let you change mode without doing violence to the fabric of the song.
John Lewis, the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, noted: “Jazz developed while the great popular music was being turned out. It was a golden age for songs. They had a classic quality in length and shape and form and flexibility of harmony. The jazz musicians were drawn to this music as a source of material.” The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular, sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the crucial wellspring of jazz. Both jazz and its progenitor are worthy of radical—indeed, reactionary—efforts to preserve them. But despite Gioia’s ardency, there is no reason to believe that jazz can be a living, evolving art form decades after its major source—and the source that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment—has dried up. Jazz, like the Songbook, is a relic—and as such, in 2012 it cannot have, as Gioia wishes for it, an “expansive and adaptive repertoire.”
What has been interesting to consider about the musical vocabulary of the 19th and 19th centuries and the 20th centuries on the one hand, and the evolution of popular music in the U.S. in the 21st is a question, a pragmatic and practical question. What we can see in music in the West is that harmony plays an unprecedented role in defining musical language, in ways that are not the case elsewhere and that aren't even the case prior to about the 1700s.
The major/minor key system we have taken for granted is only a few centuries old at most and what happened in 18th and 19th century art music that doesn't seem to happen much in contemporary popular music (perhaps?) is modal mutation, shifting from C major to C minor or from C minor to C major. When jazz musicians find contemporary popular music wanting it may be in part because once the chords for a new song are laid down there's nothing more to add than just playing the songs and if you try to play the changes the changes may not let you change mode without doing violence to the fabric of the song.
Sherman Alexie on the new billionaires lacking the philanthropic drive of their slave-owning, Indian-killing evil bastard predecessors.
http://www.
...
You know that is not how the United States works anymore. It used to be this country had a stronger sense of social responsibility, that the difference between upper-class income and lower-class income was not exponential like it is now. You think of all the philanthropy that rich people did. Sure, they were slave-owning, Indian-killing, evil bastards, but they were philanthropic in a way that today’s people are not. The ironies are astounding in that. I mean, have you heard of the Google Foundation? Have you heard of the Facebook Foundation for Social Change? Have you heard of the Apple Foundation for Social Change? The Steve Jobs Foundation?
JN: No, but I’ve seen the iPad.
SA: The only one is Bill Gates. So the only one behaving like an old-time, morally responsible billionaire in the United States right now is Bill Gates, and the fact that he is doing it while he’s alive is also very different. So, they’re not going to do anything about it. The whole government now is set up—the way people get elected now, Democrats and Republicans—to ensure that the rich stay rich.
...
You know that is not how the United States works anymore. It used to be this country had a stronger sense of social responsibility, that the difference between upper-class income and lower-class income was not exponential like it is now. You think of all the philanthropy that rich people did. Sure, they were slave-owning, Indian-killing, evil bastards, but they were philanthropic in a way that today’s people are not. The ironies are astounding in that. I mean, have you heard of the Google Foundation? Have you heard of the Facebook Foundation for Social Change? Have you heard of the Apple Foundation for Social Change? The Steve Jobs Foundation?
JN: No, but I’ve seen the iPad.
SA: The only one is Bill Gates. So the only one behaving like an old-time, morally responsible billionaire in the United States right now is Bill Gates, and the fact that he is doing it while he’s alive is also very different. So, they’re not going to do anything about it. The whole government now is set up—the way people get elected now, Democrats and Republicans—to ensure that the rich stay rich.
Sherman Alexie on the arts, "No good art comes out of assimilation. All great art is very specifically tribal. Not just the Indian tribes. All the tribes." a prelude to Decomposition
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 1998
...
"Movies have never allowed us to be fully functioning members of the national consciousness and society. This movie shows that we are just as influenced by our own particular tribe of cultures as we are pop cultures. That's how we live our lives. That's who we are."
On the other hand, Alexie says, "Nothing good comes out of assimilation. No good art comes out of assimilation. All great art is very specifically tribal. Not just the Indian tribes. All the tribes. I think European Americans would do themselves a great favor by reattaching themselves to their culture – there's just so much beauty they're missing."
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 1998
...
"Movies have never allowed us to be fully functioning members of the national consciousness and society. This movie shows that we are just as influenced by our own particular tribe of cultures as we are pop cultures. That's how we live our lives. That's who we are."
On the other hand, Alexie says, "Nothing good comes out of assimilation. No good art comes out of assimilation. All great art is very specifically tribal. Not just the Indian tribes. All the tribes. I think European Americans would do themselves a great favor by reattaching themselves to their culture – there's just so much beauty they're missing."
Paul Hindemith on the inadequacies of Western musical notation and interpretation--a prelude to Decomposition
Wenatchee The Hatchet has the old paperback edition from the 1960s so it seems useless to include page numbers from such an old edition of the book.
A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations
Paul Hindemith
ISBN-10: 3795700248
ISBN-13: 978-3795700249
Although our system of notation can give them no more than approximations of the composer’s intentions, they are supposed to understand his written symbolism and by means of their own interpretational liberties and changes add merely what is the minimum requirement for a realization of the composition in sound.
from chapter 3, Perceiving Music Emotionally
It is obvious that a composer, during the long period the notation of his work requires, is always in danger of losing the original vision of it.
from chapter 4, Musical Inspiration
The invention — or at least what he thought was his invention, similar experiments having actually been made before — was our notation, and the writer is Guido of Arezzo, who lived around the year 1000. Even at that early time the discrepancy between the composer's demands and the singers' inefficiency was not a recent discovery. But if despair over the singers' incompetence led Guido to his invention, as he tells us, it was the first time in music history that dullness was the cause of something very useful and intelligent, and we might as well be grateful for the fact that among the singers of the tenth and eleventh centuries there were a number of stupid ones.
from chapter 7, Performers
Ignorance in architectural or sculptural technique cannot remain cloaked. Thus our applicant turns to the gratifying mysterious symbolism of musical notation, gets doped by writing down his uncontrolled inventions, and uses notation’s imperfection as the mask that deceives not only his amazed family, but first and permanently himself — and frequently the teacher and, later on, possible audiences.
from chapter 9, Education
A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations
Paul Hindemith
ISBN-10: 3795700248
ISBN-13: 978-3795700249
Although our system of notation can give them no more than approximations of the composer’s intentions, they are supposed to understand his written symbolism and by means of their own interpretational liberties and changes add merely what is the minimum requirement for a realization of the composition in sound.
from chapter 3, Perceiving Music Emotionally
It is obvious that a composer, during the long period the notation of his work requires, is always in danger of losing the original vision of it.
from chapter 4, Musical Inspiration
The invention — or at least what he thought was his invention, similar experiments having actually been made before — was our notation, and the writer is Guido of Arezzo, who lived around the year 1000. Even at that early time the discrepancy between the composer's demands and the singers' inefficiency was not a recent discovery. But if despair over the singers' incompetence led Guido to his invention, as he tells us, it was the first time in music history that dullness was the cause of something very useful and intelligent, and we might as well be grateful for the fact that among the singers of the tenth and eleventh centuries there were a number of stupid ones.
from chapter 7, Performers
Ignorance in architectural or sculptural technique cannot remain cloaked. Thus our applicant turns to the gratifying mysterious symbolism of musical notation, gets doped by writing down his uncontrolled inventions, and uses notation’s imperfection as the mask that deceives not only his amazed family, but first and permanently himself — and frequently the teacher and, later on, possible audiences.
from chapter 9, Education
midnight proverb (a haiku)
heroes are monsters
whose use for their cause outweighs
their well-known vices.
whose use for their cause outweighs
their well-known vices.
Saturday, August 08, 2015
some links for the weekend
Over at Salon (no surprise), a theory that evangelical obsessions with sexual purity aren't about sexual purity or women so much as about white evangelicals fretting about the loss of their hegemonic death grip on culture.
...
Sexual purity movements, past and present, are not ultimately about promoting a biblical view of sexuality. They are about explaining large-scale culture crises (e.g. Anglo-Saxon decline, the Cold War, changing gender roles and sexual mores) and providing a formula for overcoming those crises.
Today’s movement is laden with a therapeutic rhetoric that presents these choices as the best choices for those who seek to conform their behaviors to God’s will. It promises that those who conform will enjoy spiritual, physical, and emotional satisfaction in their marriage relationships. Other scholars have parsed these claims in more sophisticated ways than I do and many other writers have demonstrated that these expectations are anything but a path to personal well being. What I’m saying is that sexual purity has never been about personal well-being for evangelical adolescents— or anyone.
Each historical example I analyze demonstrates that purity work and rhetoric has emerged at moments when socially conservative evangelicals seek to assert and maintain their political power.
For some reason Coates writing at The Atlantic on organic black conservatism comes to mind ...
Rolling Stone getting a new managing editor.
David Byrne (remember him?) "Open the Music Industry's Black Box"
This weekend is the opening for yet another Fantastic Four film that is probably just another reason to watch Brad Bird's The Incredibles again.
What was going to be a review of Andrew Durkin's Decomposition has mutated into more an incubating series of posts inspired by the book that are reacting to shortfalls in the book. Since I'm taking the book as meant to be a conversation-inspiration rather than either an actual philosophy of music or a manifesto the failure of the book to be either of those things does not need to be held against it.
And there's some more stuff incubating about Legend of Entitlement (more officially known as Legend of Korra). There's this thing in genre fiction known as retroactive continuity and seeing as we've hit the tenth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender this year, it seems worth blogging about how the success of the earlier series highlights the travesties of the successor. Way to go transforming Asami Sato from the Q for James Bond (Korra) to the Bond girl, folks. Take away the muscular woman of color character design and focus on the scripting and character arc and you find you get a "Korra" who acts like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. The reward for saving the day is the hero gets to go on a vacation and have sex with the hottest woman on the planet as a reward. Why were people claiming the Korrasami pairing was progressive? Korra has come across as Tom Cruise's Maverick with ovaries and is about as likeable (and, in case you hadn't spotted this earlier, I don't like the character Tom Cruise played). Korra's more likeable than Maverick in a whole lot of ways but she embodies the Maverick trope.
If we were to describe Korra in Jedi terms she's easily seduced by quick and obvious results, i.e. the Dark Side of the Force ... but we'll have to get to that some time later.
...
Sexual purity movements, past and present, are not ultimately about promoting a biblical view of sexuality. They are about explaining large-scale culture crises (e.g. Anglo-Saxon decline, the Cold War, changing gender roles and sexual mores) and providing a formula for overcoming those crises.
Today’s movement is laden with a therapeutic rhetoric that presents these choices as the best choices for those who seek to conform their behaviors to God’s will. It promises that those who conform will enjoy spiritual, physical, and emotional satisfaction in their marriage relationships. Other scholars have parsed these claims in more sophisticated ways than I do and many other writers have demonstrated that these expectations are anything but a path to personal well being. What I’m saying is that sexual purity has never been about personal well-being for evangelical adolescents— or anyone.
Each historical example I analyze demonstrates that purity work and rhetoric has emerged at moments when socially conservative evangelicals seek to assert and maintain their political power.
For some reason Coates writing at The Atlantic on organic black conservatism comes to mind ...
Rolling Stone getting a new managing editor.
David Byrne (remember him?) "Open the Music Industry's Black Box"
This weekend is the opening for yet another Fantastic Four film that is probably just another reason to watch Brad Bird's The Incredibles again.
What was going to be a review of Andrew Durkin's Decomposition has mutated into more an incubating series of posts inspired by the book that are reacting to shortfalls in the book. Since I'm taking the book as meant to be a conversation-inspiration rather than either an actual philosophy of music or a manifesto the failure of the book to be either of those things does not need to be held against it.
And there's some more stuff incubating about Legend of Entitlement (more officially known as Legend of Korra). There's this thing in genre fiction known as retroactive continuity and seeing as we've hit the tenth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender this year, it seems worth blogging about how the success of the earlier series highlights the travesties of the successor. Way to go transforming Asami Sato from the Q for James Bond (Korra) to the Bond girl, folks. Take away the muscular woman of color character design and focus on the scripting and character arc and you find you get a "Korra" who acts like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. The reward for saving the day is the hero gets to go on a vacation and have sex with the hottest woman on the planet as a reward. Why were people claiming the Korrasami pairing was progressive? Korra has come across as Tom Cruise's Maverick with ovaries and is about as likeable (and, in case you hadn't spotted this earlier, I don't like the character Tom Cruise played). Korra's more likeable than Maverick in a whole lot of ways but she embodies the Maverick trope.
If we were to describe Korra in Jedi terms she's easily seduced by quick and obvious results, i.e. the Dark Side of the Force ... but we'll have to get to that some time later.
Alastair Roberts on sacralizing personal narratives, WtH has a suggestion for why a Rachel Held Evans was never going to match Mark Driscoll for bluntly manipulative personal narratives as argument
https://alastairadversaria.
The fact that scriptural narrative, in contrast to much preaching upon it, is not typically focused upon the subjective states, inner lives, and autonomous identities of its protagonists is seldom properly recognized. While Scripture speaks of many particular persons, it does not share the type of emphasis that our culture places upon individuality and personal narratives. Where we have elevated ‘personality’, often to the neglect of ‘character’, Scripture presents us with limited clues to the ‘personalities’ of its characters and seems to have little interest in the matter. In God’s eternal wisdom, he did not choose to reveal Jesus’ MBTI personality type.
In Scripture, individuals find much of their significance within the larger stories to which they contribute and in terms of the typological roles that they perform. Biblical characters are pretty ‘flat’, rather than possessing the ‘rich internal life’ that the self-reflection encouraged by such things as widespread diary-writing and the modern novel has accustomed us to. First person autobiographical narratives are not the norm. Rather, biblical narrative situates people within a story that is not their own and speaks of them from a third person perspective that clearly relativizes their self-accounts.
...
Personal stories can have the most profoundly distorting effect upon our moral judgment. By playing up the ‘luxurious’ details of personality and the ‘depth’ of individual character, we can blind ourselves to the true ethical nature of actions. Žižek’s phraseology is important—‘the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing’—and captures a number of important matters. First, ‘our story’ is not some eternal truth, but an account told by interested and unreliable narrators—ourselves—and should be handled very carefully as a result. Second, not only are we the narrators of our own stories but we are also the primary hearers—it is a story we ‘tell ourselves about ourselves.’ We are the ones most easily and typically deceived (usually willingly) by our own unreliable narration. Third, it is a story told ‘in order to account for what we are doing.’ As such it is a story typically designed to help us live with ourselves and our actions. It is usually a rationalization, an attempt to make sense of our actions retrospectively, in a manner that acts as a defence against the harshness of the ethical or rational judgment that they might otherwise provoke.
short, we need to be a lot more critical of our own stories and a lot more cautious when it comes to those of others. We have been practicing our wilfully distorting and self-exculpating narrations on ourselves for our entire lives and are past masters at it. [emphasis added]
...
Recognizing the way that the personal narrative can function, we should appreciate the pernicious way in which it can often be used as a trump card, to close down debate. The personal story, especially if it is a painful one, is immune to challenge and is thus a convenient way to advance positions in a manner that prevents others from calling them into question, for to do so would be cruel and insensitive (I have addressed some of the dynamics of this here).
While this piece was not necessarily an explicit sequel to "The Ad Man's Gospel", nor was it addressing the situation in Seattle, Roberts' observation opens up the reason why someone like Rachel Held Evans was incapable, at the most basic level, of meaningfully addressing a Mark Driscoll.
By way of a comment:'
The Man Who Was . . . says:
In other words, Rachel Held Evans and Mark Driscoll can both be said to leverage personal narrative as something sacred, inviolable. You can't be allowed to question the narrative because it makes the personal political, even if the rhetorical flourish would have it the other way. People who have attempted to leverage the personal narrative as a counter to anything Mark Driscoll has said or done have failed to account for the fact that if Mark Driscoll has mastered anything at all it's leveraging personal narrative as the way to frame any and all potential discussion of what he says and does. An Evans will never present a personal narrative that can provide a plausible counter-argument to a Driscoll. Driscoll's clearly been better at leveraging the personal narrative to a base than Evans, even if Evans' star-power in leveraging the personal narrative may be on the rise.
Driscoll's reputation did not crumble because of questions about personal narrative, although that came up, too. To the extent that the abrupt shift from the pre-Real Marriage narrative and the post-Real Marriage narrative suggested the pre-2012 public narrative was some kind of spin, it depended on documenting what the narrative was and to what end it was used. Because Driscoll uses personal narrative as a framing device for propositional declarations about applied ethics, the shift in the narrative frame all but destroyed the credibility of practical application. If Mark Driscoll's defenders had up until 2012 or 2013 conceded that Mark Driscoll was what's colloquially known as an asshole, the defense was he was an authentic asshole, he was not putting on a show.
But the narrative shift from pre-2012 to post-2012 invited questions as to whether this was the case. Ironically Driscoll's predilection to frame his polemical and practical proclamations on ethics depended so much on the personal narrative frame that the 2012 shift did two things. The first and most crucial thing the narrative shift did was ultimately raise doubts about the veracity and legitimacy of the emotionally charged personal narrative as a public propaganda campaign. If it turned out the Driscoll marriage was kinda miserable for a decade that made the thing seem like a sham. Not that it was a sham, really, because plenty of Christians can have mediocre or even awkward and unpleasant marriages and get them to work. Contrary to the ideals of American popular imagination people don't have to be happily married to be ethically married. Mark Driscoll had spent so much of his public ministry conflating being happily married with being ethically married in his public personal narrative the fracture introduced to that public narrative by Real Marriage was substantial. For longtime attenders or members of Mars Hill it made the whole personal narrative begin to smell like a long con.
But the second was equally important and it was the plagiarism controversy that erupted with Janet Mefferd's 2013 interview that brought this second element to light--if the personal narrative Driscoll was literally selling raised questions about the continuity of the personal narrative, what about the content for which that personal narrative was invoked? The personal story was the "how" of the sales pitch, and previously a reliable one, but what about the "what" of what he was selling, the program of ideas and ideals he was saying we should live by?
The plagiarism controversy opened up the question of what Mark Driscoll was selling. To the extent that the ideas seemed good it began to seem suspiciously like those good ideas were gained second-hand. To the extent that ideas formulated by Mark Driscoll were bad, those seemed like the original ideas. Paradoxically and tragically for the sake of what Mark Driscoll was selling, he never needed a personal narrative to sell marriage advice. You can go through sermon after sermon by a John Donne or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones and never find personal narratives. In Mark Driscoll's sell, the personal was part of an image, an authentication process--the authenticity of the bad boy image needed to be retained, it seemed. When Driscoll temporarily tried to shift to the father-figure-Doug-Wilson-knock-off image it came across as fake because it has never been who Mark Driscoll is, for one, and for two the image management was too abrupt and too obvious. The facial hair and suits, really? It would have made more sense if Driscoll had abruptly and suddenly announced he likes the show Archer. No, don't look it up, but if Hollywood wanted to do a movie about the life and times of Mark Driscoll H. Jon Benjamin would be someone to cast as Mark Driscoll.
Anyway ...
it seems Mark Driscoll's going the charismatic/word-faith/prosperity route. He's courting the influence and aid of the kinds of people he was denouncing as heretical wingnuts seven years ago. That gets into the other risk of counting on the personal narrative, it means you can and will be measured by the continuity of that narrative. I.e. watch your life and doctrine closely, because in the case of a Mark Driscoll the galactic contrast between the kind of submitted and loyal church membership he's enjoined "you" to live by for nearly two decades and the kind of "God says I can quit" narrative he's only trotted out in 2015 when talking to more charismatic-than-Reformed conference scenes is too big to ignore.
Mark Driscoll can't escape the legacy he's been building for himself over the last 18 years in the public sphere. Like it or not, his daughter Ashley Driscoll lives in a world where with a few clicks of a mouse she could end up reading Mark Driscoll's old "Using Your Penis" ramble. There can be questions about the 2015 stories Mark Driscoll's been sharing on the road at Thrive or with Brian Houston. If Mark Driscoll heard a voice saying a trap had been set on a Monday night, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday (his account to Houston) then why was it (in the Thrive conference) did the Driscoll kids not learn the news until Wednesday via social media?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-diachronic-survey-of-driscoll.html
The thing about legacies is that if we even have a legacy it is not necessarily ever under our control. A good name is worth more than riches, though. It is better to be a poor person who walks in integrity than to be wealthy and crooked.
Mark Driscoll can keep leveraging personal narrative as he moves forward, but he must do so in a setting where he warned for the record to be careful of men who recycle their old sermons, just as he's begun to recycle his decades old approach to Ecclesiastes as if he were doing something in any way new. Driscoll has to live with the reality that once you've published it in mass media you have to consider it may never go away. His kids will, probably mostly for worse, live in a world that can remember the bit about "penis homes".
And for those like Rachel Held Evans who thought they could "stand up" to Mark Driscoll, you can't stand up to Mark Driscoll by weaponizing personal narrative in lieu of a consistently worked out theological position if you want to debate matters of Christian teaching and applied ethics. The problem with sacralizing the personal narrative is that anybody can do it, whether a Rachel Held Evans or a Mark Driscoll. One of the reasons Christians have a canonical text is because it lets us debate the meaning of the stories we agree are literally sacred scripture while people ranging from Driscoll to Evans want us to treat their personal narratives like sacred scripture. Thankfully we're under no obligation to comply for either of them.
The fact that scriptural narrative, in contrast to much preaching upon it, is not typically focused upon the subjective states, inner lives, and autonomous identities of its protagonists is seldom properly recognized. While Scripture speaks of many particular persons, it does not share the type of emphasis that our culture places upon individuality and personal narratives. Where we have elevated ‘personality’, often to the neglect of ‘character’, Scripture presents us with limited clues to the ‘personalities’ of its characters and seems to have little interest in the matter. In God’s eternal wisdom, he did not choose to reveal Jesus’ MBTI personality type.
In Scripture, individuals find much of their significance within the larger stories to which they contribute and in terms of the typological roles that they perform. Biblical characters are pretty ‘flat’, rather than possessing the ‘rich internal life’ that the self-reflection encouraged by such things as widespread diary-writing and the modern novel has accustomed us to. First person autobiographical narratives are not the norm. Rather, biblical narrative situates people within a story that is not their own and speaks of them from a third person perspective that clearly relativizes their self-accounts.
...
Personal stories can have the most profoundly distorting effect upon our moral judgment. By playing up the ‘luxurious’ details of personality and the ‘depth’ of individual character, we can blind ourselves to the true ethical nature of actions. Žižek’s phraseology is important—‘the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing’—and captures a number of important matters. First, ‘our story’ is not some eternal truth, but an account told by interested and unreliable narrators—ourselves—and should be handled very carefully as a result. Second, not only are we the narrators of our own stories but we are also the primary hearers—it is a story we ‘tell ourselves about ourselves.’ We are the ones most easily and typically deceived (usually willingly) by our own unreliable narration. Third, it is a story told ‘in order to account for what we are doing.’ As such it is a story typically designed to help us live with ourselves and our actions. It is usually a rationalization, an attempt to make sense of our actions retrospectively, in a manner that acts as a defence against the harshness of the ethical or rational judgment that they might otherwise provoke.
short, we need to be a lot more critical of our own stories and a lot more cautious when it comes to those of others. We have been practicing our wilfully distorting and self-exculpating narrations on ourselves for our entire lives and are past masters at it. [emphasis added]
...
Recognizing the way that the personal narrative can function, we should appreciate the pernicious way in which it can often be used as a trump card, to close down debate. The personal story, especially if it is a painful one, is immune to challenge and is thus a convenient way to advance positions in a manner that prevents others from calling them into question, for to do so would be cruel and insensitive (I have addressed some of the dynamics of this here).
While this piece was not necessarily an explicit sequel to "The Ad Man's Gospel", nor was it addressing the situation in Seattle, Roberts' observation opens up the reason why someone like Rachel Held Evans was incapable, at the most basic level, of meaningfully addressing a Mark Driscoll.
By way of a comment:'
The Man Who Was . . . says:
I have noted before how a lot of progressive Christians relies heavily on the form of the memoir: Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rachel Held Evans, and Sarah Bessey are all primarily memoirists, and pretty good at it. But their writing tends to fall off a cliff when it comes to explicit theological argument
In other words, Rachel Held Evans and Mark Driscoll can both be said to leverage personal narrative as something sacred, inviolable. You can't be allowed to question the narrative because it makes the personal political, even if the rhetorical flourish would have it the other way. People who have attempted to leverage the personal narrative as a counter to anything Mark Driscoll has said or done have failed to account for the fact that if Mark Driscoll has mastered anything at all it's leveraging personal narrative as the way to frame any and all potential discussion of what he says and does. An Evans will never present a personal narrative that can provide a plausible counter-argument to a Driscoll. Driscoll's clearly been better at leveraging the personal narrative to a base than Evans, even if Evans' star-power in leveraging the personal narrative may be on the rise.
Driscoll's reputation did not crumble because of questions about personal narrative, although that came up, too. To the extent that the abrupt shift from the pre-Real Marriage narrative and the post-Real Marriage narrative suggested the pre-2012 public narrative was some kind of spin, it depended on documenting what the narrative was and to what end it was used. Because Driscoll uses personal narrative as a framing device for propositional declarations about applied ethics, the shift in the narrative frame all but destroyed the credibility of practical application. If Mark Driscoll's defenders had up until 2012 or 2013 conceded that Mark Driscoll was what's colloquially known as an asshole, the defense was he was an authentic asshole, he was not putting on a show.
But the narrative shift from pre-2012 to post-2012 invited questions as to whether this was the case. Ironically Driscoll's predilection to frame his polemical and practical proclamations on ethics depended so much on the personal narrative frame that the 2012 shift did two things. The first and most crucial thing the narrative shift did was ultimately raise doubts about the veracity and legitimacy of the emotionally charged personal narrative as a public propaganda campaign. If it turned out the Driscoll marriage was kinda miserable for a decade that made the thing seem like a sham. Not that it was a sham, really, because plenty of Christians can have mediocre or even awkward and unpleasant marriages and get them to work. Contrary to the ideals of American popular imagination people don't have to be happily married to be ethically married. Mark Driscoll had spent so much of his public ministry conflating being happily married with being ethically married in his public personal narrative the fracture introduced to that public narrative by Real Marriage was substantial. For longtime attenders or members of Mars Hill it made the whole personal narrative begin to smell like a long con.
But the second was equally important and it was the plagiarism controversy that erupted with Janet Mefferd's 2013 interview that brought this second element to light--if the personal narrative Driscoll was literally selling raised questions about the continuity of the personal narrative, what about the content for which that personal narrative was invoked? The personal story was the "how" of the sales pitch, and previously a reliable one, but what about the "what" of what he was selling, the program of ideas and ideals he was saying we should live by?
The plagiarism controversy opened up the question of what Mark Driscoll was selling. To the extent that the ideas seemed good it began to seem suspiciously like those good ideas were gained second-hand. To the extent that ideas formulated by Mark Driscoll were bad, those seemed like the original ideas. Paradoxically and tragically for the sake of what Mark Driscoll was selling, he never needed a personal narrative to sell marriage advice. You can go through sermon after sermon by a John Donne or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones and never find personal narratives. In Mark Driscoll's sell, the personal was part of an image, an authentication process--the authenticity of the bad boy image needed to be retained, it seemed. When Driscoll temporarily tried to shift to the father-figure-Doug-Wilson-knock-off image it came across as fake because it has never been who Mark Driscoll is, for one, and for two the image management was too abrupt and too obvious. The facial hair and suits, really? It would have made more sense if Driscoll had abruptly and suddenly announced he likes the show Archer. No, don't look it up, but if Hollywood wanted to do a movie about the life and times of Mark Driscoll H. Jon Benjamin would be someone to cast as Mark Driscoll.
Anyway ...
it seems Mark Driscoll's going the charismatic/word-faith/prosperity route. He's courting the influence and aid of the kinds of people he was denouncing as heretical wingnuts seven years ago. That gets into the other risk of counting on the personal narrative, it means you can and will be measured by the continuity of that narrative. I.e. watch your life and doctrine closely, because in the case of a Mark Driscoll the galactic contrast between the kind of submitted and loyal church membership he's enjoined "you" to live by for nearly two decades and the kind of "God says I can quit" narrative he's only trotted out in 2015 when talking to more charismatic-than-Reformed conference scenes is too big to ignore.
Mark Driscoll can't escape the legacy he's been building for himself over the last 18 years in the public sphere. Like it or not, his daughter Ashley Driscoll lives in a world where with a few clicks of a mouse she could end up reading Mark Driscoll's old "Using Your Penis" ramble. There can be questions about the 2015 stories Mark Driscoll's been sharing on the road at Thrive or with Brian Houston. If Mark Driscoll heard a voice saying a trap had been set on a Monday night, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday (his account to Houston) then why was it (in the Thrive conference) did the Driscoll kids not learn the news until Wednesday via social media?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-diachronic-survey-of-driscoll.html
The thing about legacies is that if we even have a legacy it is not necessarily ever under our control. A good name is worth more than riches, though. It is better to be a poor person who walks in integrity than to be wealthy and crooked.
Mark Driscoll can keep leveraging personal narrative as he moves forward, but he must do so in a setting where he warned for the record to be careful of men who recycle their old sermons, just as he's begun to recycle his decades old approach to Ecclesiastes as if he were doing something in any way new. Driscoll has to live with the reality that once you've published it in mass media you have to consider it may never go away. His kids will, probably mostly for worse, live in a world that can remember the bit about "penis homes".
And for those like Rachel Held Evans who thought they could "stand up" to Mark Driscoll, you can't stand up to Mark Driscoll by weaponizing personal narrative in lieu of a consistently worked out theological position if you want to debate matters of Christian teaching and applied ethics. The problem with sacralizing the personal narrative is that anybody can do it, whether a Rachel Held Evans or a Mark Driscoll. One of the reasons Christians have a canonical text is because it lets us debate the meaning of the stories we agree are literally sacred scripture while people ranging from Driscoll to Evans want us to treat their personal narratives like sacred scripture. Thankfully we're under no obligation to comply for either of them.
Kyle Gann on the status-mongering dynamic of academic musicology "the musicology ladder", and a question from Wenatchee The Hatchet
http://www.artsjournal.com/
...
Still, while I haven’t spent much time consorting with musicologists, I have spent enough to learn what a strict composer-based hierarchy the world of musicology is. I was once on a panel with some big names, and highly complimented a famous scholar on his book on Muzio Clementi, which had been a great help to me. He seemed almost irritated that I had brought it up, as though it were some secret from his past that he didn’t want mentioned in front of his colleagues. He had now written a book on Beethoven, which meant he had climbed a couple dozen steps up the musicology ladder. And I have learned in that world that to have written the first book on Nancarrow was a miniscule accomplishment, almost negligible, compared to writing the 67th book on Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. In the world of music historians, your stature is exponentially proportional, not to the quality of your research and writing, but to the prestige of the composer you can claim to be an expert on.
So this gets me wondering, has anyone, ever, in the history of musicology, published a dedicated monograph on sonatas and sonata form composed and published by the early 19th century guitar masters? Because it's Wenatchee The Hatchet's belief that the step from the themes and styles of early 19th century guitar composers to early 20th century ragtime is a very simple set of evolutionary steps. As often as the canard has come up that European art music and American popular music are somehow separated by a vast chasm in the imaginations of some musicologists, theorists and philosophers, for any open-minded and practical musician this is nonsense.
Wenatchee The Hatchet would be interested to find a book discussing the sonatas of the early guitar masters. Barring the existence of such a book it'd be fun to write such a book, if it didn't seem that musicology as a whole and even the guitar world in particular has had no interest in such a project for decades.
But then that's what blogs can be for.
...
Still, while I haven’t spent much time consorting with musicologists, I have spent enough to learn what a strict composer-based hierarchy the world of musicology is. I was once on a panel with some big names, and highly complimented a famous scholar on his book on Muzio Clementi, which had been a great help to me. He seemed almost irritated that I had brought it up, as though it were some secret from his past that he didn’t want mentioned in front of his colleagues. He had now written a book on Beethoven, which meant he had climbed a couple dozen steps up the musicology ladder. And I have learned in that world that to have written the first book on Nancarrow was a miniscule accomplishment, almost negligible, compared to writing the 67th book on Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. In the world of music historians, your stature is exponentially proportional, not to the quality of your research and writing, but to the prestige of the composer you can claim to be an expert on.
So this gets me wondering, has anyone, ever, in the history of musicology, published a dedicated monograph on sonatas and sonata form composed and published by the early 19th century guitar masters? Because it's Wenatchee The Hatchet's belief that the step from the themes and styles of early 19th century guitar composers to early 20th century ragtime is a very simple set of evolutionary steps. As often as the canard has come up that European art music and American popular music are somehow separated by a vast chasm in the imaginations of some musicologists, theorists and philosophers, for any open-minded and practical musician this is nonsense.
Wenatchee The Hatchet would be interested to find a book discussing the sonatas of the early guitar masters. Barring the existence of such a book it'd be fun to write such a book, if it didn't seem that musicology as a whole and even the guitar world in particular has had no interest in such a project for decades.
But then that's what blogs can be for.
Friday, August 07, 2015
D. G. Hart "... American believers vacillate between thinking they live in the greatest nation on God's green earth or have been sent to the Soviet Gulag."
HT Jim West whose post opens with a different pull-quote than Wenatchee has selected from the piece, which is:
http://eerdword.com/2015/08/
...
Perhaps because of an overly realized eschatology — the kingdom of God is breaking out here and now — American believers vacillate between thinking they live in the greatest nation on God’s green earth or have been sent to the Soviet Gulag.
http://eerdword.com/2015/08/
...
Perhaps because of an overly realized eschatology — the kingdom of God is breaking out here and now — American believers vacillate between thinking they live in the greatest nation on God’s green earth or have been sent to the Soviet Gulag.
a piece over at Charisma features mentioning Driscoll, "I don't have enough information to truly speak to the issues on either side ... " like that's ever stopped Charisma from publishing stuff anyway.
Technically the article is titled "5 Lessons We Can Learn from the Mark Driscoll controversy" but as Driscoll seems set on leaning more charismatic than Reformed and relaunching a career, the following excerpt seems most germane to Charisma coverage in general these days:
http://www.charismanews.com/
... I don't have enough information to truly speak to the issues on either side, but I want to remind all of us that Christians are fallible and make mistakes. We should consider the total portrait of one's life, character and ministry and evaluate on that basis. ...
By all means don't let your ignorance keep you from publishing stuff.
http://www.charismanews.com/
... I don't have enough information to truly speak to the issues on either side, but I want to remind all of us that Christians are fallible and make mistakes. We should consider the total portrait of one's life, character and ministry and evaluate on that basis. ...
By all means don't let your ignorance keep you from publishing stuff.
Tuesday, August 04, 2015
John Piper's paradox (1999-2015): natural disasters are God's gentle warnings, Mark Driscoll resigning is a victory for Satan.
http://www.desiringgod.org/
August 18, 1999No earthquakes in the Bible are attributed to Satan. Many are attributed to God ...
http://www.desiringgod.org/
September 2, 2005...God sent Jesus Christ into the world to save sinners. He did not suffer massive shame and pain because Americans are pretty good people. The magnitude of Christ’s suffering is owing to how deeply we deserve Katrina—all of us.
Our guilt in the face of Katrina is not that we can’t see the intelligence in God’s design, but that we can’t see arrogance in our own heart. God will always be guilty of high crimes for those who think they’ve never committed any.
http://www.desiringgod.org/
August 1, 2007...When I sat on her bed and tucked her in and blessed her and sang over her a few minutes ago, I said, “You know, Talitha, that was a good prayer, because when people ‘blame’ God for something, they are angry with him, and they are saying that he has done something wrong. That’s what “blame” means: accuse somebody of wrongdoing. But you and I know that God did not do anything wrong. God always does what is wise. And you and I know that God could have held up that bridge with one hand.” Talitha said, “With his pinky.” “Yes,” I said, “with his pinky. Which means that God had a purpose for not holding up that bridge, knowing all that would happen, and he is infinitely wise in all that he wills.”
Talitha said, “Maybe he let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”
http://www.desiringgod.org/
August 19, 2009...The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction.
http://www.desiringgod.org/
March 17, 2011Earthquakes are ultimately from God. Nature does not have a will of its own. And God owes Satan no freedom. What havoc demons wreak, they wreak with God’s permission.
ahem
http://www.newyorker.com/
So should a vast swath of the west coast of the United States crumble along the Cascade subduction zone when the "big one" hits that'd be a "gentle reminder", based on John Piper's public theology of catastrophe, that we don't deserve life. But one guy quits being a pastor at the church he co-founded after years of controversy surrounding plagiarism and rigging the NYT best seller list and being an abusive leader who demonizes dissent and all of a sudden that turns into a triumph for Satan? Didn't Piper tell the world what havoc demons wreak, they wreak with God's permission? Where's the John Piper who habitually used catastrophes the caused the deaths of tens of thousands over the last fifteen years as a springboard for reminders that none of us deserve life and we should repent?
August 18, 1999No earthquakes in the Bible are attributed to Satan. Many are attributed to God ...
http://www.desiringgod.org/
September 2, 2005...God sent Jesus Christ into the world to save sinners. He did not suffer massive shame and pain because Americans are pretty good people. The magnitude of Christ’s suffering is owing to how deeply we deserve Katrina—all of us.
Our guilt in the face of Katrina is not that we can’t see the intelligence in God’s design, but that we can’t see arrogance in our own heart. God will always be guilty of high crimes for those who think they’ve never committed any.
http://www.desiringgod.org/
August 1, 2007...When I sat on her bed and tucked her in and blessed her and sang over her a few minutes ago, I said, “You know, Talitha, that was a good prayer, because when people ‘blame’ God for something, they are angry with him, and they are saying that he has done something wrong. That’s what “blame” means: accuse somebody of wrongdoing. But you and I know that God did not do anything wrong. God always does what is wise. And you and I know that God could have held up that bridge with one hand.” Talitha said, “With his pinky.” “Yes,” I said, “with his pinky. Which means that God had a purpose for not holding up that bridge, knowing all that would happen, and he is infinitely wise in all that he wills.”
Talitha said, “Maybe he let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”
http://www.desiringgod.org/
August 19, 2009...The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction.
http://www.desiringgod.org/
March 17, 2011Earthquakes are ultimately from God. Nature does not have a will of its own. And God owes Satan no freedom. What havoc demons wreak, they wreak with God’s permission.
ahem
http://www.newyorker.com/
So should a vast swath of the west coast of the United States crumble along the Cascade subduction zone when the "big one" hits that'd be a "gentle reminder", based on John Piper's public theology of catastrophe, that we don't deserve life. But one guy quits being a pastor at the church he co-founded after years of controversy surrounding plagiarism and rigging the NYT best seller list and being an abusive leader who demonizes dissent and all of a sudden that turns into a triumph for Satan? Didn't Piper tell the world what havoc demons wreak, they wreak with God's permission? Where's the John Piper who habitually used catastrophes the caused the deaths of tens of thousands over the last fifteen years as a springboard for reminders that none of us deserve life and we should repent?
Monday, August 03, 2015
John Piper on the debacle in Seattle ... but if it was a defeat for Reformed theology why did it seem so many of Driscoll's most persistent public critics have actually been Reformed?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yhn_4mmowU&app=desktop
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/john.piper.mark.driscolls.fall.was.a.colossal.satanic.victory/60878.htm
"The debacle in Seattle is a tragedy, from untold angles," said Piper, who is best known for authoring the book 'Desiring God' and his conservative Calvinist theological stance. "It was a defeat for the gospel, it was a defeat for Mark, it was a defeat for evangelicalism, for Reformed Theology, for complementarianism. It was a colossal Satanic victory.
A little tough to say the Driscoll situation was a defeat for Reformed theology. Evangelicalism? Well, maybe. Defeat for Mark? He's said this year God gave him permission to quit, basically. Sure, Driscoll never mentioned a word of that last year when he actually resigned, but to go by what he's been saying at charismatic conferences this year, it was all part of the plan.
The thing about the claim of a satanic victory is that spirits of calamity bringing torment or devastation on the reigns of corrupt and self-serving rulers is a trope in Old Testament literature. Whether Abimelech or King Saul or King Ahab, the handful of cases where a spirit of calamity or "an evil spirit" hits a leader among God's people can be construed as a divine commission, a judgment against those who arrogated to themselves a type of rule that subjugated rather than served the common good of God's people.
But let's focus a little on the defeat for Reformed theology part. Now maybe Piper doesn't count folks who aren't Calvinist Baptist but let's consider who some of the more familiar public voices providing a critique of Mark Driscoll's doctrine, biblical interpretation and conduct have been over the years.
Let's start with Janet Mefferd, does she seem not-Reformed to John Piper?
How about R. Scott Clark?
How about D. G. "I don’t know why people are not debating whether Driscoll should even be writing books" Hart?
Or, oh, Carl Trueman?
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-nameless-one.php
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/03/mark-driscolls-problems-and-ours
At the risk of mentioning some others, how about Wendy Alsup?
And finally, Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Notice any patterns there? Like, say, how many of them have self-identified as Reformed, and particularly if there are associations with OPC or PCA? For those not already familiar with this, Wenatchee The Hatchet is Presbyterian, as is Wendy Alsup. Trueman is OPC, Mefferd, too (I think). Clark is Reformed.
What Piper seems to have utterly missed is that Mark Driscoll's decline is not really a defeat for Reformed theology because what a number of us in the Reformed camp have been trying to point out for years now is that if you look at what Driscoll's actual doctrinal approach and practice has been he's only been "Reformed" in the sense that religion reporters who were too theologically ignorant or lazy took Mark Driscoll at his word (a matter that seems increasingly dubious, to put it politely) when he kept describing himself as Reformed.
Yet there's not a whole ton of evidence that Driscoll's sacramentology or ecclesiology seems very Reformed. He doesn't even register as charismatic or Pentecostal in a mid-20th century sense. If you pegged him as maybe closer to a Latter Rain or associated camp then, sure, okay, maybe.
But let the record show that if Mark Driscoll's most vocal and persistent critics in the public sphere predominantly hail from the Reformed camp the defeat Reformed theology had was when Mark Drsicoll was ever taken seriously as allegedly a member of "our team" to begin with.
That it took a concerted and conscientious effort on the part of those within the Reformed camp to publicly critique Driscoll before things began to change ... it seems that after a decade of secular/progressive criticism of Driscoll not a whole lot happened. Driscoll was playing to the people who thought he was on their team. Since secular and progressive coverage tended to not dig deep enough to go beyond a "yuck" reaction, it was apparently left to the Reformed and to evangelicals to provide an insider critique.
That Mark Driscoll's advocates might be tempted to claim "all" critics of Driscoll were liberals or progressives is their own failure of imagination. It's not like John MacArthur could be accused of being hugely liberal by anybody. For the majority of a decade Driscoll could and did ignore criticism from anybody he considered to the theological or political right of where ever he decided he was because they didn't matter and he probably had better numbers than they had anyway.
The foundational failure of secular critique to do anything other than bolster Driscoll's image with his fans could be instructive if secularists and progressives were open to that. Unfortunately they may not be, and so it's easier to fixate on the misogyny stuff than to consider what the sociological appeal of the dynamics of Mars Hill may have been so as to replicate elements of that to prevent such a dynamic from taking shape further. Think of all the young guys who have been Driscoll's target demographic as at risk youth, at risk of getting a sales pitch for legacy.
There's still time, Driscoll could prove to be a great uniter of groups that otherwise might not have a chance to learn from each other. Maybe secular progressives and Reformed sticks in the mud have an opportunity for doing something we could both enjoy, a scholastic survey of the sociological dynamics of how this stuff played out. A whole lotta single guys joined Mars Hill in the hopes they'd land a wife. Some of them joined bcause they were idealistic enough to think it could be a positive contribution to theregion. Others were interested in the idea of an evangelical quasi-artists collective. There's a lot that could be studied for those who have not concluded, like guys like John Piper, that everything has been discovered.
If we want history to not repeat itself so quickly next time around we need to not presume that we have nailed down what it was we saw. It isn't ignorance that is the enemy of wisdom, it's assuming you already know.
If Driscoll in any way signals a defeat for Reformed theology it's that we ever took seriously the assertion that he was meaningfully on our team to begin with.
POSTSCRIPT
Ironically, if there was someone who was given an opportunity to address the situation with Mark Driscoll and the leadership culture of Mars Hill years ago it was John Piper.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/jonna-mhc-story-29.pdf
After multiple appeals were continually rejected by Mark and Jamie, we discreetly implored some local and then national leaders, who Mark said he respected, to help us, including John Piper and C.J. Mahaney. No one was willing to get involved. I was shocked and heartbroken again. You’re kidding? The whole Body of Christ and no one is willing to step in, judge the matter, and attempt to make things right? How can Matthew 18 be carried out if not one Christian leader will stand in to bring peace and reconciliation?
Piper can say he wished he had more of an influence but one can ask whether he ever had any influence at all; what if what he had was not influence but a halo effect, a way to lend his credibility to Driscoll in exchange for seeming more relevant to younger guys? If the Driscoll situation does signal a defeat, it might signal a defeat for John Piper in having failed (for whatever reasons) to address the situation years ago when he was invited to intervene.
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/john.piper.mark.driscolls.fall.was.a.colossal.satanic.victory/60878.htm
"The debacle in Seattle is a tragedy, from untold angles," said Piper, who is best known for authoring the book 'Desiring God' and his conservative Calvinist theological stance. "It was a defeat for the gospel, it was a defeat for Mark, it was a defeat for evangelicalism, for Reformed Theology, for complementarianism. It was a colossal Satanic victory.
A little tough to say the Driscoll situation was a defeat for Reformed theology. Evangelicalism? Well, maybe. Defeat for Mark? He's said this year God gave him permission to quit, basically. Sure, Driscoll never mentioned a word of that last year when he actually resigned, but to go by what he's been saying at charismatic conferences this year, it was all part of the plan.
The thing about the claim of a satanic victory is that spirits of calamity bringing torment or devastation on the reigns of corrupt and self-serving rulers is a trope in Old Testament literature. Whether Abimelech or King Saul or King Ahab, the handful of cases where a spirit of calamity or "an evil spirit" hits a leader among God's people can be construed as a divine commission, a judgment against those who arrogated to themselves a type of rule that subjugated rather than served the common good of God's people.
But let's focus a little on the defeat for Reformed theology part. Now maybe Piper doesn't count folks who aren't Calvinist Baptist but let's consider who some of the more familiar public voices providing a critique of Mark Driscoll's doctrine, biblical interpretation and conduct have been over the years.
Let's start with Janet Mefferd, does she seem not-Reformed to John Piper?
How about R. Scott Clark?
How about D. G. "I don’t know why people are not debating whether Driscoll should even be writing books" Hart?
Or, oh, Carl Trueman?
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-nameless-one.php
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/03/mark-driscolls-problems-and-ours
At the risk of mentioning some others, how about Wendy Alsup?
And finally, Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Notice any patterns there? Like, say, how many of them have self-identified as Reformed, and particularly if there are associations with OPC or PCA? For those not already familiar with this, Wenatchee The Hatchet is Presbyterian, as is Wendy Alsup. Trueman is OPC, Mefferd, too (I think). Clark is Reformed.
What Piper seems to have utterly missed is that Mark Driscoll's decline is not really a defeat for Reformed theology because what a number of us in the Reformed camp have been trying to point out for years now is that if you look at what Driscoll's actual doctrinal approach and practice has been he's only been "Reformed" in the sense that religion reporters who were too theologically ignorant or lazy took Mark Driscoll at his word (a matter that seems increasingly dubious, to put it politely) when he kept describing himself as Reformed.
Yet there's not a whole ton of evidence that Driscoll's sacramentology or ecclesiology seems very Reformed. He doesn't even register as charismatic or Pentecostal in a mid-20th century sense. If you pegged him as maybe closer to a Latter Rain or associated camp then, sure, okay, maybe.
But let the record show that if Mark Driscoll's most vocal and persistent critics in the public sphere predominantly hail from the Reformed camp the defeat Reformed theology had was when Mark Drsicoll was ever taken seriously as allegedly a member of "our team" to begin with.
That it took a concerted and conscientious effort on the part of those within the Reformed camp to publicly critique Driscoll before things began to change ... it seems that after a decade of secular/progressive criticism of Driscoll not a whole lot happened. Driscoll was playing to the people who thought he was on their team. Since secular and progressive coverage tended to not dig deep enough to go beyond a "yuck" reaction, it was apparently left to the Reformed and to evangelicals to provide an insider critique.
That Mark Driscoll's advocates might be tempted to claim "all" critics of Driscoll were liberals or progressives is their own failure of imagination. It's not like John MacArthur could be accused of being hugely liberal by anybody. For the majority of a decade Driscoll could and did ignore criticism from anybody he considered to the theological or political right of where ever he decided he was because they didn't matter and he probably had better numbers than they had anyway.
The foundational failure of secular critique to do anything other than bolster Driscoll's image with his fans could be instructive if secularists and progressives were open to that. Unfortunately they may not be, and so it's easier to fixate on the misogyny stuff than to consider what the sociological appeal of the dynamics of Mars Hill may have been so as to replicate elements of that to prevent such a dynamic from taking shape further. Think of all the young guys who have been Driscoll's target demographic as at risk youth, at risk of getting a sales pitch for legacy.
There's still time, Driscoll could prove to be a great uniter of groups that otherwise might not have a chance to learn from each other. Maybe secular progressives and Reformed sticks in the mud have an opportunity for doing something we could both enjoy, a scholastic survey of the sociological dynamics of how this stuff played out. A whole lotta single guys joined Mars Hill in the hopes they'd land a wife. Some of them joined bcause they were idealistic enough to think it could be a positive contribution to theregion. Others were interested in the idea of an evangelical quasi-artists collective. There's a lot that could be studied for those who have not concluded, like guys like John Piper, that everything has been discovered.
If we want history to not repeat itself so quickly next time around we need to not presume that we have nailed down what it was we saw. It isn't ignorance that is the enemy of wisdom, it's assuming you already know.
If Driscoll in any way signals a defeat for Reformed theology it's that we ever took seriously the assertion that he was meaningfully on our team to begin with.
POSTSCRIPT
Ironically, if there was someone who was given an opportunity to address the situation with Mark Driscoll and the leadership culture of Mars Hill years ago it was John Piper.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/jonna-mhc-story-29.pdf
After multiple appeals were continually rejected by Mark and Jamie, we discreetly implored some local and then national leaders, who Mark said he respected, to help us, including John Piper and C.J. Mahaney. No one was willing to get involved. I was shocked and heartbroken again. You’re kidding? The whole Body of Christ and no one is willing to step in, judge the matter, and attempt to make things right? How can Matthew 18 be carried out if not one Christian leader will stand in to bring peace and reconciliation?
Piper can say he wished he had more of an influence but one can ask whether he ever had any influence at all; what if what he had was not influence but a halo effect, a way to lend his credibility to Driscoll in exchange for seeming more relevant to younger guys? If the Driscoll situation does signal a defeat, it might signal a defeat for John Piper in having failed (for whatever reasons) to address the situation years ago when he was invited to intervene.
trope alerts in music: just going through the scale like that's an idea (not that it can't work)
You may have read axioms about how music tames the savage beast or how music is some great mystery of expression and soul.
Yeah, well ... kinda.
See, music is also stuff you can build and sometimes a musical work draws such blunt-force attention to the nature of its construction you can't really miss it.
This post was originally going to get called "the downward dog in music" but then at the last moment a counterexample came to mind. So first we'll just get a couple of things out of the way.
Just outlining the notes of whatever scale you're writing your music in, in a straight line, is something that can only work (if that) when you rely on a asteady pulse. nobody's getting any sense that you're going anywhere exciting just going down the scale unless there is at least a pittance of rhythmic activity somewhere in that musical presentation of a scale.
Quite possibly the lamest way to announce the scale of things to come is starting at the tonic.
Witness Lita Ford ... in "Kiss Me Deadly".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioiiMuKkMTU
Yup ... straight down the scale, introduced with an upbeat note.
hoo-ray
Lest you snort that this is a weakness so typical of rock and roll Pachelbel beat Lita by centuries.
Follow that first fiddle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=090BIg0mlcY
Pachelbel at least had the sense to recognize that you can't just go straight down the scale from the tonic if you've got no initial rhythmic spark. You at least start at the third or fifth of your tonic chord, which is a strategy also endorse by ....
Weezer, in "Hash Pipe".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9BGLtqqkVI
Start on the fifth of the chord, but jump up to the third and then downward dog.
Of course if you want to be drastically fancier in how you just roll down the scale there are other examples.
Try about 1:55 with this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPh0l7yKE8
The subject of the closing fugue for Beethoven's "Hammerklavier". Sounds pretty complicated and all, but he is, in a way, just taking an unusually fancy path down a scale.
Of course there's no reason you have to always go DOWN a scale. You can go up a scale, too.
It can also sound totally awesome. Take it away Stevie Wonder ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY2fz5RBgvQ
Thus endeth the musical trope alert post for today.
Yeah, well ... kinda.
See, music is also stuff you can build and sometimes a musical work draws such blunt-force attention to the nature of its construction you can't really miss it.
This post was originally going to get called "the downward dog in music" but then at the last moment a counterexample came to mind. So first we'll just get a couple of things out of the way.
Just outlining the notes of whatever scale you're writing your music in, in a straight line, is something that can only work (if that) when you rely on a asteady pulse. nobody's getting any sense that you're going anywhere exciting just going down the scale unless there is at least a pittance of rhythmic activity somewhere in that musical presentation of a scale.
Quite possibly the lamest way to announce the scale of things to come is starting at the tonic.
Witness Lita Ford ... in "Kiss Me Deadly".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioiiMuKkMTU
Yup ... straight down the scale, introduced with an upbeat note.
hoo-ray
Lest you snort that this is a weakness so typical of rock and roll Pachelbel beat Lita by centuries.
Follow that first fiddle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=090BIg0mlcY
Pachelbel at least had the sense to recognize that you can't just go straight down the scale from the tonic if you've got no initial rhythmic spark. You at least start at the third or fifth of your tonic chord, which is a strategy also endorse by ....
Weezer, in "Hash Pipe".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9BGLtqqkVI
Start on the fifth of the chord, but jump up to the third and then downward dog.
Of course if you want to be drastically fancier in how you just roll down the scale there are other examples.
Try about 1:55 with this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPh0l7yKE8
The subject of the closing fugue for Beethoven's "Hammerklavier". Sounds pretty complicated and all, but he is, in a way, just taking an unusually fancy path down a scale.
Of course there's no reason you have to always go DOWN a scale. You can go up a scale, too.
It can also sound totally awesome. Take it away Stevie Wonder ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY2fz5RBgvQ
Thus endeth the musical trope alert post for today.
Atlantic, a few years back, "History is Beautiful Things Made by People with Ugly Ideas", a problem the internet age will keep running into
Something in the age of the internet that can make it feel truly unique, but in a terrible way, is what Wenatchee The Hatchet has called imputing comprehensive guilt by tangential association. Another way of putting it is to forget that, as someone at the Atlantic put it a couple of years ago "History is Beautiful Things Made by People with Ugly Ideas".
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/history-is-beautiful-things-made-by-people-with-ugly-ideas/276328/
...
Imagine medical residents refusing to mimic a surgical technique pioneered by a racist doctor, or English majors declining to recite any poems written by sexists. Imagine people in all fields being made to feel as if opposing racism or sexism requires that sort of boycott. What a waste that would be in a world where there is a perfectly good alternative, one that hardly requires airbrushing history or human pathologies. It is to say that some people, Whitman hardly unique among them, had wrongheaded, offensive beliefs on some subjects, but still managed, through the best of what they produced, to render things so wonderful that generations of people have seen fit to pass them on.
That isn't to say that everyone must appreciate Whitman, or any larger than life figure from the past. It is to say that 25-year-olds like McNair, along with 33-year-olds like myself, would be wise to stay open to the possibility that inhabiting the art of someone whose aesthetics or personal moral beliefs we find abhorrent might nevertheless end in our gleaning something valuable from the experience. The opportunity to learn in that way won't survive, for most students, in a world where rejecting bigotry is thought to require rejecting everything produced by every dead bigot. Let's reject that standard, and the attendant fantasy that it's possible to shun the part of our cultural inheritance contributed by people who held ugly ideas. To really confront the horrific scale of bigotry, and American racism in particular, is to know that is impossible. Too much would have to be shunned. The timber of humanity is too crooked. We'd have nothing left.
But it seems to be a sign of our times ... yesterday's measure of beauty can be today's measure of ugliness.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/history-is-beautiful-things-made-by-people-with-ugly-ideas/276328/
...
Imagine medical residents refusing to mimic a surgical technique pioneered by a racist doctor, or English majors declining to recite any poems written by sexists. Imagine people in all fields being made to feel as if opposing racism or sexism requires that sort of boycott. What a waste that would be in a world where there is a perfectly good alternative, one that hardly requires airbrushing history or human pathologies. It is to say that some people, Whitman hardly unique among them, had wrongheaded, offensive beliefs on some subjects, but still managed, through the best of what they produced, to render things so wonderful that generations of people have seen fit to pass them on.
That isn't to say that everyone must appreciate Whitman, or any larger than life figure from the past. It is to say that 25-year-olds like McNair, along with 33-year-olds like myself, would be wise to stay open to the possibility that inhabiting the art of someone whose aesthetics or personal moral beliefs we find abhorrent might nevertheless end in our gleaning something valuable from the experience. The opportunity to learn in that way won't survive, for most students, in a world where rejecting bigotry is thought to require rejecting everything produced by every dead bigot. Let's reject that standard, and the attendant fantasy that it's possible to shun the part of our cultural inheritance contributed by people who held ugly ideas. To really confront the horrific scale of bigotry, and American racism in particular, is to know that is impossible. Too much would have to be shunned. The timber of humanity is too crooked. We'd have nothing left.
But it seems to be a sign of our times ... yesterday's measure of beauty can be today's measure of ugliness.
http://www.artsjournal.com/curves/2015/06/being-the-sea.html
Baby boomers inherited a world that believed deeply in the value of the Western canon, and now inhabit a world that holds that canon responsible for many of our culture’s ills. One belief for childhood, the opposite for adulthood.
Baby boomers inherited a world that believed deeply in the value of the Western canon, and now inhabit a world that holds that canon responsible for many of our culture’s ills. One belief for childhood, the opposite for adulthood.
Scott Timberg's invective against the old patronage system skips over a not-so-mundane detail about how and why an absent artist could be jailed, it's called a technically military contract relationship, elucidated by H. C. Robbins Landon back in the 1980s
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/
Talk to techno-utopians and well-meaning libertarians about the crisis in culture today – the increasing demand for musicians, artists, and scribes to work for free or almost nothing – and you’ll hear a cheery solution. Patronage! If everything else that used to help creatives get paid has fallen through, what about the tribe of noble rich people – especially those groovy, socially progressive folks in Silicon Valley who just love music and culture — dialing it up directly?
...
The composer Joseph Haydn invented the symphony and the string quartet. The bulk of his career was spent with the House of Esterhazy, where he wore livery and dined with the servants. Monteverdi wrote the most important early opera, “L’Orfeo”; when he left royal service in Lombardy after two decades of labor, he had about enough money to buy himself lunch. Velasquez was responsible for painting the portrait of Spain’s King Philip IV as well as overseeing the royal janitors.
Musicians and artists who left their posts could be thrown into prison.
Now, we could see the moguls in Silicon Valley loving to have an artist or jester on a string. Some of their culture love may be sincere. “Musicians, comedians, writers,” a character in Dave Eggers’s Silicon Valley novel “The Circle” says of one of the founder’s passion project, “to bring them here to get exposure, especially given how rough it is out there for them.” This artsy founder brings artists in to the Google-like campus: He just doesn’t pay them.
Timberg's article would make it seem like it was arbitrary and nasty for a duke or prince to have some artist arrested for deserting a post but let's not skip over the thing Timberg so conspicuously skipped over. There's this decades old lecture given by H. C. Robbins Landon about Haydn's time within the patronage system of his age. The lecture starts off with a grim but matter-of-fact observation that artists of various types, but particularly composers and musicians, dying in abject poverty was more the norm than the exception:
http://tannerlectures.utah.
In recent years we have become ever more fascinated and horrified by the fate of Mozart, whose earthly remains were buried in an anonymous grave outside the city walls of Vienna. That event, the indignity of which gradually became infamous, took place in 1791, not quite a decade before the eighteenth century came to an end. But Mozart’s death - though particularly appalling in view of his special genius- was by no means unique. Thousands of more modest composers and performers were igno-anonymous overnight. A roll call chosen at random might include:
Antonio Vivaldi, once the astonishment of settecento Europe, died in abject poverty at Vienna in 1741. His grave is unknown, and for many years it was not even known that he had died in Austria.
Carlos d’Ordoñez, a then well-known composer of Austro- Spanish parents, died in penury at Vienna in 1786.
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, once the most popular composer of German-language operas, died at Neuhof in Bohemia in 1799, his desk drawer full of symphonies that no one wanted to perform or publish.
Anton Huberty, once a celebrated Parisian music publisher and string player, who had issued Haydn’s first symphonies in Paris in the 1760s, died at Vienna in 1791. His effects were hardly enough to keep his daughters from starvation.1
Luigi Boccherini, the Italian composer once famous throughout Europe, died ‘in dire poverty’ at Madrid in 1805, his music no longer fashionable.
The anonymous and already-forgotten deaths of many musicians and composers is the way the world works under normal circumstances.
It's important to bear in mind what Robbins Landon pointed out in this lecture, that Esterhazy musicians were engaged as OFFICERS. Technically, a musician in the court there was engaged in a military capacity. So while Timberg may have wanted to highlight how disastrously bad it would be for a musician who left a post or was not at post for a patron, he didn't necessarily give a reason WHY this would happen. Omitting that "why" is a big omission. Think about this for even one second and it becomes abundantly clear that if you're on contract in a military role and you weren't at your post without prior permission you could and would get punished on the basis of the contract. Court martial and arrest and so on.
The other thing that is worth noting, for those who haven't already familiarized themselves with the Robbins Landon lecture, is that Haydn wasn't exactly being compensated on the basis of mechanical royalties but for services and labor. This can help explain why old Lefties like Dwight Macdonald could in all seriousness assert that the old aristocratic patronage system for the arts was more humane and human than the corporate enterprise variations of the 20th century. You can disagree, of course, but it helps to get a clearer understanding of what the patronage systems entail before you do.
Timberg's lament rings so hollow because whether he'll admit it or not we've had a patronage system in the last century and it's been the corporations that constitute the music publishing and broadcasting industry.
Talk to techno-utopians and well-meaning libertarians about the crisis in culture today – the increasing demand for musicians, artists, and scribes to work for free or almost nothing – and you’ll hear a cheery solution. Patronage! If everything else that used to help creatives get paid has fallen through, what about the tribe of noble rich people – especially those groovy, socially progressive folks in Silicon Valley who just love music and culture — dialing it up directly?
...
The composer Joseph Haydn invented the symphony and the string quartet. The bulk of his career was spent with the House of Esterhazy, where he wore livery and dined with the servants. Monteverdi wrote the most important early opera, “L’Orfeo”; when he left royal service in Lombardy after two decades of labor, he had about enough money to buy himself lunch. Velasquez was responsible for painting the portrait of Spain’s King Philip IV as well as overseeing the royal janitors.
Musicians and artists who left their posts could be thrown into prison.
Now, we could see the moguls in Silicon Valley loving to have an artist or jester on a string. Some of their culture love may be sincere. “Musicians, comedians, writers,” a character in Dave Eggers’s Silicon Valley novel “The Circle” says of one of the founder’s passion project, “to bring them here to get exposure, especially given how rough it is out there for them.” This artsy founder brings artists in to the Google-like campus: He just doesn’t pay them.
Timberg's article would make it seem like it was arbitrary and nasty for a duke or prince to have some artist arrested for deserting a post but let's not skip over the thing Timberg so conspicuously skipped over. There's this decades old lecture given by H. C. Robbins Landon about Haydn's time within the patronage system of his age. The lecture starts off with a grim but matter-of-fact observation that artists of various types, but particularly composers and musicians, dying in abject poverty was more the norm than the exception:
http://tannerlectures.utah.
In recent years we have become ever more fascinated and horrified by the fate of Mozart, whose earthly remains were buried in an anonymous grave outside the city walls of Vienna. That event, the indignity of which gradually became infamous, took place in 1791, not quite a decade before the eighteenth century came to an end. But Mozart’s death - though particularly appalling in view of his special genius- was by no means unique. Thousands of more modest composers and performers were igno-anonymous overnight. A roll call chosen at random might include:
Antonio Vivaldi, once the astonishment of settecento Europe, died in abject poverty at Vienna in 1741. His grave is unknown, and for many years it was not even known that he had died in Austria.
Carlos d’Ordoñez, a then well-known composer of Austro- Spanish parents, died in penury at Vienna in 1786.
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, once the most popular composer of German-language operas, died at Neuhof in Bohemia in 1799, his desk drawer full of symphonies that no one wanted to perform or publish.
Anton Huberty, once a celebrated Parisian music publisher and string player, who had issued Haydn’s first symphonies in Paris in the 1760s, died at Vienna in 1791. His effects were hardly enough to keep his daughters from starvation.1
Luigi Boccherini, the Italian composer once famous throughout Europe, died ‘in dire poverty’ at Madrid in 1805, his music no longer fashionable.
The anonymous and already-forgotten deaths of many musicians and composers is the way the world works under normal circumstances.
It's important to bear in mind what Robbins Landon pointed out in this lecture, that Esterhazy musicians were engaged as OFFICERS. Technically, a musician in the court there was engaged in a military capacity. So while Timberg may have wanted to highlight how disastrously bad it would be for a musician who left a post or was not at post for a patron, he didn't necessarily give a reason WHY this would happen. Omitting that "why" is a big omission. Think about this for even one second and it becomes abundantly clear that if you're on contract in a military role and you weren't at your post without prior permission you could and would get punished on the basis of the contract. Court martial and arrest and so on.
The other thing that is worth noting, for those who haven't already familiarized themselves with the Robbins Landon lecture, is that Haydn wasn't exactly being compensated on the basis of mechanical royalties but for services and labor. This can help explain why old Lefties like Dwight Macdonald could in all seriousness assert that the old aristocratic patronage system for the arts was more humane and human than the corporate enterprise variations of the 20th century. You can disagree, of course, but it helps to get a clearer understanding of what the patronage systems entail before you do.
Timberg's lament rings so hollow because whether he'll admit it or not we've had a patronage system in the last century and it's been the corporations that constitute the music publishing and broadcasting industry.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
Hal Foster reviewed NoBrow, pop cultural consumption as identity marker and how "without pop culture to build your identity around, what have you got?"
http://www.abcnorio.org/about/
...
What are the bearings that Seabrook takes? Even though he is a self-declared ‘hegemonoculous’ (a wonderful-horrible appellation meant as a homage to a traumatic seminar with Raymond Williams at Oxford in the early 1980s), he knows that the old map of oppositions – high and low culture, Modernist and mass art, uptown and downtown – no longer corresponds to the world. So he makes a chart of his own, and devises a lexicon to go along with it: ‘Nobrow’ (where ‘commercial culture is a source of status’, not of disdain); ‘the Buzz’ (‘a shapeless substance into which politics and gossip, art and pornography, virtue and money, the fame of heroes and the celebrity of murderers, all bleed’); ‘Townhouse’ and ‘Megastore’ (‘in the Townhouse there was content and advertising; in the Megastore there was both at once’); ‘Small-Grid’ and ‘Big-Grid’ (‘the America of you and me’ and ‘the America of 200 million’; ‘what lies between is a void’). In the end, as Seabrook sees it, the law of Nobrow is simple: the Arnoldian criterion of ‘the best that is known and thought’ is long gone, and what rules is the Buzz principle of whatever is hot. No more ‘is it good?’ or even ‘is it original?’, only ‘does it work in the demo?’ – ‘demo’ as in ‘demographics’, not to be confused with ‘democracy’, much less ‘demonstration’. Incidentally, for Seabrook Clinton is ‘the perfect steward’ of this ‘numbers and spin construct’ of ‘polls, focus groups and other forms of market research’ – he was, after all, the first President to appear on MTV – though George W. could make Slick Willy look positively unkempt.
Not surprisingly, Seabrook’s findings boil down to hypotheses about identity and class. ‘Once quality is deposed’, he argues, identity is ‘the only shared standard of judgment’. For Seabrook this identity must be ‘authentic’ (somehow authenticity survives as a value), and it can only be made so through a personal sampling of pop goods at the Megastore: ‘without pop culture to build your identity around, what have you got?’ [emphasis added] For an old guard of American highbrows like Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, this statement would be grotesque: mass culture is the realm of the inauthentic, and there is no more to be said. For Seabrook (and here he has learned from cultural studies since Williams), it is not absurd at all – in large part because he views pop culture not as mass culture but ‘as folk culture: our culture’. Yet this semi-paradoxical turn of phrase doesn’t solve a basic problem: given his account of the Megastore, is the ‘sampling’ of an identity à la hiphop any different from the ‘branding’ of an identity à la George Lucas? British cultural studies gave us the notions of ‘resistance through rituals’ and ‘subversive subcultures’; American cultural studies has given us the Post-Modern subject that is ‘performative’ in its construction. But with the near-instantaneous time to market from margin to Megastore (or from Small to Big Grid), how much resistance or subversion can subcultures offer today? And is the Post-Modern subject so different from the consumerist subject, that ‘perfect hybrid of culture and marketing’, as Seabrook calls it, ‘something to be that was also something to buy’? This approach represents one of several recoupings of critical positions in Nobrow: call it the revenge of the hegemonoculous on the identity-line in cultural studies.
In an eagerness to not stake out any claims that there might be aesthetic criteria in themselves that the arts could endorse, what do we get? That's another element of the high, mid, low cultural question and the matter of consumption of cultural artifacts as identity can have. What a shared aesthetic may lack in being able to unite those who don't share that aesthetic value it can make up for in being something that can be agreed upon regardless of social strata. Thus for a leftist like John Halle "Nothing is Too Good for the Working Class" can be a defense of why classical music isn't too good for working class people. But then if that's the case what about the high/low divide as an actual class divide? One of the tropes in high culture is that the learning curve required just to appreciate the stuff can be pretty big. It's one of the problems of thinking of the high and low as too fixed and why there may always be some middle.
Without a set of agreed on aesthetic ideals in the arts for an arts community what else would be left but the slipperiest and slimiest of buzzwords, authenticity? Something we'll be playing with a bit in future blog posts.
...
What are the bearings that Seabrook takes? Even though he is a self-declared ‘hegemonoculous’ (a wonderful-horrible appellation meant as a homage to a traumatic seminar with Raymond Williams at Oxford in the early 1980s), he knows that the old map of oppositions – high and low culture, Modernist and mass art, uptown and downtown – no longer corresponds to the world. So he makes a chart of his own, and devises a lexicon to go along with it: ‘Nobrow’ (where ‘commercial culture is a source of status’, not of disdain); ‘the Buzz’ (‘a shapeless substance into which politics and gossip, art and pornography, virtue and money, the fame of heroes and the celebrity of murderers, all bleed’); ‘Townhouse’ and ‘Megastore’ (‘in the Townhouse there was content and advertising; in the Megastore there was both at once’); ‘Small-Grid’ and ‘Big-Grid’ (‘the America of you and me’ and ‘the America of 200 million’; ‘what lies between is a void’). In the end, as Seabrook sees it, the law of Nobrow is simple: the Arnoldian criterion of ‘the best that is known and thought’ is long gone, and what rules is the Buzz principle of whatever is hot. No more ‘is it good?’ or even ‘is it original?’, only ‘does it work in the demo?’ – ‘demo’ as in ‘demographics’, not to be confused with ‘democracy’, much less ‘demonstration’. Incidentally, for Seabrook Clinton is ‘the perfect steward’ of this ‘numbers and spin construct’ of ‘polls, focus groups and other forms of market research’ – he was, after all, the first President to appear on MTV – though George W. could make Slick Willy look positively unkempt.
Not surprisingly, Seabrook’s findings boil down to hypotheses about identity and class. ‘Once quality is deposed’, he argues, identity is ‘the only shared standard of judgment’. For Seabrook this identity must be ‘authentic’ (somehow authenticity survives as a value), and it can only be made so through a personal sampling of pop goods at the Megastore: ‘without pop culture to build your identity around, what have you got?’ [emphasis added] For an old guard of American highbrows like Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, this statement would be grotesque: mass culture is the realm of the inauthentic, and there is no more to be said. For Seabrook (and here he has learned from cultural studies since Williams), it is not absurd at all – in large part because he views pop culture not as mass culture but ‘as folk culture: our culture’. Yet this semi-paradoxical turn of phrase doesn’t solve a basic problem: given his account of the Megastore, is the ‘sampling’ of an identity à la hiphop any different from the ‘branding’ of an identity à la George Lucas? British cultural studies gave us the notions of ‘resistance through rituals’ and ‘subversive subcultures’; American cultural studies has given us the Post-Modern subject that is ‘performative’ in its construction. But with the near-instantaneous time to market from margin to Megastore (or from Small to Big Grid), how much resistance or subversion can subcultures offer today? And is the Post-Modern subject so different from the consumerist subject, that ‘perfect hybrid of culture and marketing’, as Seabrook calls it, ‘something to be that was also something to buy’? This approach represents one of several recoupings of critical positions in Nobrow: call it the revenge of the hegemonoculous on the identity-line in cultural studies.
In an eagerness to not stake out any claims that there might be aesthetic criteria in themselves that the arts could endorse, what do we get? That's another element of the high, mid, low cultural question and the matter of consumption of cultural artifacts as identity can have. What a shared aesthetic may lack in being able to unite those who don't share that aesthetic value it can make up for in being something that can be agreed upon regardless of social strata. Thus for a leftist like John Halle "Nothing is Too Good for the Working Class" can be a defense of why classical music isn't too good for working class people. But then if that's the case what about the high/low divide as an actual class divide? One of the tropes in high culture is that the learning curve required just to appreciate the stuff can be pretty big. It's one of the problems of thinking of the high and low as too fixed and why there may always be some middle.
Without a set of agreed on aesthetic ideals in the arts for an arts community what else would be left but the slipperiest and slimiest of buzzwords, authenticity? Something we'll be playing with a bit in future blog posts.
Richard Taruskin on how the high arts world in America took the gravy train for granted
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/books-the-musical-mystique
...
Especially in New York, then, the period roughly from the founding of Lincoln Center to Black Monday in 1987 was a golden age for art producers. Major organizations used public subsidies to supplement private donations and vastly improve the working conditions of their employees. Tiny groups, including several in which I then participated as a performing musician, proliferated. And I have not even mentioned the corporate foundations, which also mushroomed both in number and in lavishness of largesse. The Ford Foundation, the biggest one pre-Gates, had been founded in 1936 to "strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation and advance human achievement." It took up the cause of the arts, including classical music, in the late 1950s. The Rockefeller Foundation, a much older organization, got on the arts bandwagon in connection with Lincoln Center. In the 1980s, the big name was Citicorp. During this period, as Tindall comments, "most performing arts groups were subsidized by unearned donated income, as well as tax incentives, and therefore did not always have to link revenue to the quantity, quality, or type of product they offered."
As long as this gravy train lasted, the attrition of the audience could be overlooked. The result of living for three decades in a fool's paradise was a vast overpopulation of classical musicians as many more were trained, and briefly employed, than a market economy could bear. The cutbacks that seemed to imply the sudden cruel rejection of classical music were really more in the nature of a market correction, reflecting the present scarcity of patronage and a long-deferred confrontation with the changed realities of demand.
...
Especially in New York, then, the period roughly from the founding of Lincoln Center to Black Monday in 1987 was a golden age for art producers. Major organizations used public subsidies to supplement private donations and vastly improve the working conditions of their employees. Tiny groups, including several in which I then participated as a performing musician, proliferated. And I have not even mentioned the corporate foundations, which also mushroomed both in number and in lavishness of largesse. The Ford Foundation, the biggest one pre-Gates, had been founded in 1936 to "strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation and advance human achievement." It took up the cause of the arts, including classical music, in the late 1950s. The Rockefeller Foundation, a much older organization, got on the arts bandwagon in connection with Lincoln Center. In the 1980s, the big name was Citicorp. During this period, as Tindall comments, "most performing arts groups were subsidized by unearned donated income, as well as tax incentives, and therefore did not always have to link revenue to the quantity, quality, or type of product they offered."
As long as this gravy train lasted, the attrition of the audience could be overlooked. The result of living for three decades in a fool's paradise was a vast overpopulation of classical musicians as many more were trained, and briefly employed, than a market economy could bear. The cutbacks that seemed to imply the sudden cruel rejection of classical music were really more in the nature of a market correction, reflecting the present scarcity of patronage and a long-deferred confrontation with the changed realities of demand.
Martha Rosler on the self-ascribed messianic status of artists as a necessary, if imaginary, corrective to their dependance on the big money of patrons.
...
A great deal has been asked of artists, in every modern age. In previous eras artists were asked to edify society by showing forth the good, the true, and the beautiful. But such expectations have increasingly come to seem quaint as art has lost its firm connections to the powers of church and state. Especially since the romantics, artists have routinely harbored messianic desires, the longing to take a high position in social matters, to play a transformative role in political affairs; this may be finally understood as a necessary—though perhaps only imaginary—corrective to their roles, both uncomfortable and insecure, as handmaidens to wealth and power. Artists working under patronage conditions had produced according to command, which left them to express their personal dimension primarily through the formal elements of the chosen themes. By the nineteenth century, artists, now no longer supported by patronage, were free to devise and follow many different approaches both to form and to content, including realism and direct social commentary.19 Still, the new middle-class customers, as well as the state, had their own preferences and demands, even if a certain degree of transgression was both anticipated and accepted, however provisionally (the Salon des Refusés was, after all, established by Napoléon III). ...
There are armies of books that could be written on Romanticism as an ideology that sacralized the arts as an end unto itself, but since Leonard B Meyer wrote a fantastic book about that already that was published decades ago we'll just try to get to blogging about that at some point.
One of the percolating ideas I'm hoping to blog about in what was supposed to be a review of Andrew Durkin's Decomposition is that Durkin failed to accomplish much by attacking what he identifies as the ideology of authorship and authenticity in music without aiming to dismantle the entire ideological paradigm of Romanticism going back centuries. This would potentially be because he doesn't want to dismantle the ideology of romanticism at all and perhaps even embraces it but finds it problematic in the sense that it has been co-opted by the market. What else was going to happen? The Authenticity Hoax covered that breezily enough and not without a few pretty good points along the way.
n+1 on the free and the anti-free: "antifree was a small group of interested artisans speaking up for the dignity of being gainfully employed", although the question of whether there "should" be gainful employment in the arts may be its own question
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/the-intellectual-situation/the-free-and-the-antifree/
...
By the mid-aughts, a day job was no longer an inconvenience but an aspiration, and attitudes toward it changed. The work writers could get at corporations—as listings editors or fact-checkers—may have remained secondary to artwork in their minds, but that work, so much less reliably available than before, demanded a new level of effort to find and to keep. Not only one’s position but one’s entire department could, without much warning, disappear.
These writers and copy editors were among the many who, faced with limited resources and their own cultural omnivorousness, came home each night eager to download MP3s, PDFs, and other digital copies of artworks and research they would otherwise be unable to access. Around the reality of these thefts a powerful ideological movement emerged, taking as its inspiration not just facts on the ground but also the libertarian, antigovernment, “hacker” spirit of the earliest personal computing and internet communities. The apostles of the Free Culture movement, as it came to be called, argued that stealing digital content was a progressive politics and should be brought into the open. Some of these apostles were hucksters and profiteers, others were merely hypocrites (who preached the virtues of free from their perches as well-paid magazine editors or college or law school professors), but still others, like the freeware hacker Aaron Swartz, were true believers. Congress had allowed copyright protections to be rewritten by huge corporations (most notably Disney) to become a parody of a law. If what was being illegally downloaded was some of the best that had been thought or said by human beings, and the downloaders were people who couldn’t afford the purchase price of the books or movies (some of which were expensive)—wasn’t that a good thing?
Free Culture ideology appeared to be approaching mainstream consensus when the 2008 recession made users feel, both rightly and perversely, that culture–producing corporations were fragile. In book publishing that year, hundreds of midcareer editors, writers, publicists, and other industry workers were pushed out. In the first week of December alone, the Observer reported a “massive reorganization” with layoffs to follow at Random House; a reorganization and layoffs at Macmillan; layoffs at Simon & Schuster; and an acquisitions freeze and layoffs at Houghton Mifflin. Some of these people eventually found new publishing jobs, but the industry had contracted. Many were the twentysomethings who had sold out in the Nineties and now, a decade later, ran up against the possibility that they no longer had anything to sell.
What could a no-longer-young person do in this situation? Many turned to the digital platforms that, even before the recession, had been putting magazines and newspapers out of business. So it came to happen that postrecession digital startups were helmed not only by young people and risk takers but also out-of-work publishing veterans. ...
The Free movement had a few professorial spokespeople and millions of adherents; antifree was a small group of interested artisans speaking up for the dignity of being gainfully employed. As antifree grew beyond the small world of left-wing blogs, it attracted 25-year-olds who objected to being paid $50 by a corporate website that presumed them lucky to get the experience. It attracted veteran journalists who balked at being asked to write for a large, profitable magazine’s website for chump change. And it attracted unpaid interns, who at profitable media corporations (ranging from Condé Nast to Gawker), actually filed suit for violations of labor laws. These were individual stories, but they added up. The entities that had once supported journalists and writers were now doing their best not to pay them for the simplest of reasons: they could get away with it.
What's been interesting to read is how different strands of the Left have differed on whether or not the decline of the middlebrow is even a bad thing. This may be a category mistake because TV and film and mass media haven't gone anywhere. We live in an era in which it's easy to highlight how six ostensibly different country songs all kinda sound the same.
Absent financial compensation artists and writers don't just make work for free, they functionally make it at their own expense and at a loss unless there is what people call "cultural capital". Another way of putting it is that an artist who isn't paid in money might gain some form of exposure or prestige or a recognized role within a social unit.
...
By the mid-aughts, a day job was no longer an inconvenience but an aspiration, and attitudes toward it changed. The work writers could get at corporations—as listings editors or fact-checkers—may have remained secondary to artwork in their minds, but that work, so much less reliably available than before, demanded a new level of effort to find and to keep. Not only one’s position but one’s entire department could, without much warning, disappear.
These writers and copy editors were among the many who, faced with limited resources and their own cultural omnivorousness, came home each night eager to download MP3s, PDFs, and other digital copies of artworks and research they would otherwise be unable to access. Around the reality of these thefts a powerful ideological movement emerged, taking as its inspiration not just facts on the ground but also the libertarian, antigovernment, “hacker” spirit of the earliest personal computing and internet communities. The apostles of the Free Culture movement, as it came to be called, argued that stealing digital content was a progressive politics and should be brought into the open. Some of these apostles were hucksters and profiteers, others were merely hypocrites (who preached the virtues of free from their perches as well-paid magazine editors or college or law school professors), but still others, like the freeware hacker Aaron Swartz, were true believers. Congress had allowed copyright protections to be rewritten by huge corporations (most notably Disney) to become a parody of a law. If what was being illegally downloaded was some of the best that had been thought or said by human beings, and the downloaders were people who couldn’t afford the purchase price of the books or movies (some of which were expensive)—wasn’t that a good thing?
Free Culture ideology appeared to be approaching mainstream consensus when the 2008 recession made users feel, both rightly and perversely, that culture–producing corporations were fragile. In book publishing that year, hundreds of midcareer editors, writers, publicists, and other industry workers were pushed out. In the first week of December alone, the Observer reported a “massive reorganization” with layoffs to follow at Random House; a reorganization and layoffs at Macmillan; layoffs at Simon & Schuster; and an acquisitions freeze and layoffs at Houghton Mifflin. Some of these people eventually found new publishing jobs, but the industry had contracted. Many were the twentysomethings who had sold out in the Nineties and now, a decade later, ran up against the possibility that they no longer had anything to sell.
What could a no-longer-young person do in this situation? Many turned to the digital platforms that, even before the recession, had been putting magazines and newspapers out of business. So it came to happen that postrecession digital startups were helmed not only by young people and risk takers but also out-of-work publishing veterans. ...
The Free movement had a few professorial spokespeople and millions of adherents; antifree was a small group of interested artisans speaking up for the dignity of being gainfully employed. As antifree grew beyond the small world of left-wing blogs, it attracted 25-year-olds who objected to being paid $50 by a corporate website that presumed them lucky to get the experience. It attracted veteran journalists who balked at being asked to write for a large, profitable magazine’s website for chump change. And it attracted unpaid interns, who at profitable media corporations (ranging from Condé Nast to Gawker), actually filed suit for violations of labor laws. These were individual stories, but they added up. The entities that had once supported journalists and writers were now doing their best not to pay them for the simplest of reasons: they could get away with it.
What's been interesting to read is how different strands of the Left have differed on whether or not the decline of the middlebrow is even a bad thing. This may be a category mistake because TV and film and mass media haven't gone anywhere. We live in an era in which it's easy to highlight how six ostensibly different country songs all kinda sound the same.
Absent financial compensation artists and writers don't just make work for free, they functionally make it at their own expense and at a loss unless there is what people call "cultural capital". Another way of putting it is that an artist who isn't paid in money might gain some form of exposure or prestige or a recognized role within a social unit.
Rock and roll as the real opiate of the masses, an old polemic about it from half a century ago courtesy of The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/
...
So powerful was the rock beat that all other attributes of the music were presented as secondary, or totally inconsequential. “‘Positive’ lyrics are mostly a sop to minds that do not want to know what they are thinking,” he wrote, before describing a rock-gospel vocalist futilely singing praises to God even as the “the music itself rocked on and out away from the words into a new wild night of nihilism.” This nihilism, he said, allowed rock to placate adolescent angst, not by channeling it toward the outer world but by making it a pleasure in itself: [emphases added] “Through exposure to rock ‘n’ roll, teen-agers learn to handle their aggressions and discontents—not through understanding, criticism, and self-conscious social rebellion, but through surrendering them to manufactured purgative.”
“Manufactured” is a key word here. Larner devoted a lot of words to the major-label songwriting machine, the practice of payola, and the trend of white artists making money by covering black songwriters. Rock wasn’t art, it was product, designed to transfix through its brute effect on human physiology. In the most devastating passage, he made the medium sound like aural toothpaste:
And if I felt like invoking Taruskin's sprawling treatise on Stravinsky I might mention how there are aesthetes and decadents who can define the arts by virtue of formalism. But that gets into Leonard B Meyer stuff that would ideally be saved for some other post.
You're going to find that's a pattern here.
...
So powerful was the rock beat that all other attributes of the music were presented as secondary, or totally inconsequential. “‘Positive’ lyrics are mostly a sop to minds that do not want to know what they are thinking,” he wrote, before describing a rock-gospel vocalist futilely singing praises to God even as the “the music itself rocked on and out away from the words into a new wild night of nihilism.” This nihilism, he said, allowed rock to placate adolescent angst, not by channeling it toward the outer world but by making it a pleasure in itself: [emphases added] “Through exposure to rock ‘n’ roll, teen-agers learn to handle their aggressions and discontents—not through understanding, criticism, and self-conscious social rebellion, but through surrendering them to manufactured purgative.”
“Manufactured” is a key word here. Larner devoted a lot of words to the major-label songwriting machine, the practice of payola, and the trend of white artists making money by covering black songwriters. Rock wasn’t art, it was product, designed to transfix through its brute effect on human physiology. In the most devastating passage, he made the medium sound like aural toothpaste:
What teen-agers need in music is more or less what modern adults need too: not music to be listened to but background music as they hurry through their appointed activities. The background may be throbbing RnR or tinkly Muzak, but it all comes from the same package. On opening the package, the buyer finds a clearly labeled, constant stream of facile stimulant, factory guaranteed to jazz you up, smooth you out, purge your violence, and leave you kissing-sweet and ready for maudlin love.But it is here that a rift between an Old Left and a New Left can be observed before long. The Matthew Arnold/Adorno ideal of art as for-betterment and whether you're entertained by it be damned is not the only way people have approached the arts. What's funny is that whether we're looking at a Kyle Gann for the Left or a Terry Teachout for the Right (bear with me, I'm simplifying based on a few online polemics you may not already know about), it's interesting that there are those who are self-described as not seeing a necessary divergence between the pleasure art gives as entertainment and its capacity to engage and embrace more substantial metaphysical and epistlemological values.
And if I felt like invoking Taruskin's sprawling treatise on Stravinsky I might mention how there are aesthetes and decadents who can define the arts by virtue of formalism. But that gets into Leonard B Meyer stuff that would ideally be saved for some other post.
You're going to find that's a pattern here.
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