Just kidding, I don’t go to the Oscars (but, since moving to LA, I can claim some friends who do). Never fear, dear reader, even without actually going to the Oscars, I can still have strong opinions about the films nominated. Specifically, this year, the 2, count ‘em 2, films by women directors – An Education and The Hurt Locker – which are nominated for Best Picture. (The Hurt Locker is also nominated for Best Director. Which, for those keeping track, a woman has never won. I’m just saying.)
Now, there is lots of talk about What it Means for a woman to be a film director. Apparently, if you’re Nancy Meyers, it means making movies where Meryl Streep does a lot of this.
Whereas if you’re Nora Ephron, it means making movies where Meryl Streep does a lot of this.
But, use of Meryl aside, is there some definitive quality to lady-directed films, particularly when, as with the two films this year, those films are written by men?
Manohla Dargis, who has done way more research into this than me, follows the money in the New York Times, and follows the relationships, more colloquially on Jezebel, and she answers the “female director sensibility” question by saying that:
“Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. That’s all we need to say about that.”
But is it, Manohla? Is it? When there is a MediaUnbound blargh out there?
I understand the reticence to attribute a gendered lens to art-making – but I think the quality The Hurt Locker and An Education have most in common is not their girliness, or even their womanliness, but their rejection of the standard movie version of – yes you again, Nancy Meyers – What Women (and People) Want. To talk about this entails a lot of talking about endings, so if you haven’t seen these movies – and seriously, you should – maybe stop reading right . . about . . now.
Okay, so The Hurt Locker is an action movie, almost exclusively about men and, as best as I can tell, it vividly captures the experience of going through daily life when your mortality is in constant question and your morality is none too sure. In scenes like this . . .
. . . you’re on the edge of your seat because the characters are on the edge of their seat, and then you follow them back to their camp and watch them have to deal with what living like this does to them. In the final 10 minutes of the movie, the main character, William James (no not that William James) finally finishes his tour and gets to go home. To his beautiful wife, his cute baby, to peace and domesticity and all the things that movies tell us people – and especially women – like. And you know what? He freaking hates it. He’s back on the next plane to Iraq. He loves his family, yeah, but he loves his job more.
Now, An Education.
The plot couldn’t be more different, right? British schoolgirls in 1962 wearing little bow ties, having romances with dashing Peter Sarsgaard, nothing at all like Explosive Ordance Disposal. Except for, it kind of is. Because, again, at the film’s end, the main character doesn’t pick love, or family, or the mushy Bride Wars crap that even smart movies like to show as women’s major concern. She picks herself, her schooling, and, we’re left to believe, having finished An Education can now embark on A Career.
One of my biggest beefs with movies written/directed/staring/about men is that male characters have lives and women characters have men. This can be summed up no more perfectly than in this exchange in the annoying-yet-charming-just-like-its-pointless-parantheses (500)Days of Summer. (Cute dance sequence, though).
Main boy, Tom, meets up with main girl, Summer, after not seeing her for, oh let’s say a couple hundred days.
Summer: You’re not working at the greeting card company anymore.
Tom: No, I’m working as an architect. You’re married.
And boom! That’s it. End of scene. That’s all they need to know about each other. He has a career life (and of course he also has a love life – it’s a romantic comedy) and she has just a love life. She’s not working for the company either, she quit before he did, but she doesn’t need to find a job because . . .she’s got a man, apparently.
See how differently this goes with a small adjustment:
Summer: You’re not working at the greeting card company anymore.
Tom: No, I’m working as an architect. Where do you work now?
Summer: Oh, you know, I got a job cutting bangs.
Tom: Cool. And you’re married. Because one can do both.
If there’s any trait that having a female director encourages, maybe it’s this: the realization that life’s work can be really important, worth sacrificing over, and ultimately deeply meaningful. I would guess that women who have worked hard enough to end up directing films of this caliber know from important work. And I mean, hell, even Julie and Julia got that part right.
I have a million records by George Clinton and his satellites. In 1997, I produced an Orgy ™ for Harvard’s WHRB radio station which consisted of 55 hours of the music of George Clinton. (I staffed all the air myself. At one point a caller complained that I had broken in and talked over a “lovely Michael Hampton guitar solo”; at another point I dozed off and let the sound of the needle on the trailoff groove saturate the air for fifteen minutes) I’m a fan – thus I was wicked psyched when Frances pulled out the first two Clinton “solo” albums, Computer Games and You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish (if you don’t know the official story, it’s this: he “dissolved” his band”s” Parliament and Funkadelic [which mostly had the same people in them] at the dawn of the 80s, and continued to do the same thing he’d been doing for the past twelve years: write songs, make records with the same people, shake his butt, talk about shaking his butt, and probably lots of drugs. The only thing that changed was the names of the artists credited on the albums – “George Clinton”, “the P-Funk All-Stars”, and “George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars” replaced “Parliament” and “Funkadelic”). The generally favored part of the discography is the “classic” 70s output of Parliament and Funkadelic – but all I want to listen to these days is the non-classics.
This happens with all my favorite artists. I overplay all the famous records and then all I’m left with is the late-career masterpieces that only I appreciate. I’m always going on about how, say, Greendale is so worth it, man (I saw the tour – he did a rock opera! A ROCK OPERA!!!), and no really, you should check out Weird Revolution (Gibby co-wrote a song with Kid Rock! Called “The Shame of Life”!!!). Don’t even get me started on Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner’s Celebrity Avalanche.
Same goes for the Mothership. Everyone thinks the 80’s records are the crappy records. No one hears “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends” and says “Oh man I need to rush out right now and get everything this guy ever did!!!” Actually, no one ever hears “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends”, period. Which is kind of the point – the people that play the music are too busy playing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” to get around to the Urban Dancefloor Guerillas album. But say you’re George Clinton, and it’s 1981. You have to do something, right? You already made all the good records.
(I just need to put in a plug here for Trombipulation, the final album released as Parliament, in 1980. If you know it at all, it’s probably for the hook in “Let’s Play House” which was made famous by Digital Underground in their 1988 hit “The Humpty Dance”. If you don’t know it, you need it, serious. It’s eight tracks of cocaine-sheen funk that came from another planet. The cover, too – a gatefold that just shimmers with dark silvery blue, George and the Sphinx with prosthetic elephant trunks. Mmmm. What a gem. But I digress.)
Yes. What to do when the fame monster casts is gaze elsewhere? Here’s an answer: “Lord, bless this fish,” as George Clinton intones at the close of You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish. The title track, it’s “filler”: a funky place-holder beat that George just kind of freestyles over for almost nine minutes, working on some whacked-out metaphor for the human race and how we’re like fishes in the race to nuclear annihilation. I think it’s something to do with “bit off more than you can chew” or maybe “be careful when you play with fire” but he’s created a new idiom to express the thought: “you shouldn’t-nuf bit fish”. Is that metonymy, when you are talking about one thing but you use an unrelated thing as a symbol/placeholder for it? I think that’s closer to what he’s doing here than metaphor. Because the human race isn’t really like a fish, as far as I can tell.
Both Fish and Computer Games are totally great, start to finish. In the last couple weeks I’ve been playing them over and over, and the hooks have done their job – I’m a gibbering fanboy all over again. “Quickie” (co-written by dirty-blues icon and sometime P-Funk contributor Andre Williams) features an unstoppable guitar groove and a lovely Michael Hampton guitar solo (well actually it might be Williams, DuWayne McKnight, or even Eddie Hazel – they all get guitar credit on the album – but anyway it’s super dirty and grimy); “Pot Sharing Tots” delivers on the promise of being a synth-marimba-driven number that answers the question “If we were babies, would I share drugs with you?” (the answer is yes); even the least cohesive selection, “Silly Millameter”, is a huge funk monster with glittering little horn twinkles and sort of a Heatwave quote (ok maybe that’s just a coincidence) that pull you in and keep you rocking.
And, “Atomic Dog”. Holy crap.
What I love about Clinton and his discography is that he just keeps trying stuff, and he works with it till it sounds good. He doesn’t care if it’s not going to start an ass-based revolution like Mothership Connection – he’s done with that (except that people still want to hear it so he plays it live). Exhaustion might play a role (he’s only released five studio albums in the last 20 years, most recently an album of mostly cover material), but artistic paralysis? Not that I can hear. (Ok, I confess I haven’t listened to anything he’s done in the last fifteen years. But the records still get good reviews – except the most recent one – and Dope Dogs was awesome!)
Before long, I’ve overplayed everything in the Clinton catalog, from America Eats Its Young all the way through Hey Man… Smell My Finger, and I’m left where I was back in 1997: Clinton fatigue. I’ve identified this pattern in my life. I find out about some artist I’m really into and then I get everything. It’s almost a sense of relief, an obvious but reliable recommendation: play Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon. Repeat till you’re sick of it. Move on to Animals and Ummagumma. God help you if you can’t stop before The Division Bell is all that’s left. Why a relief? Because if you don’t happen to have thousands of albums and a toddler, you need a way to keep yourself going. Recommendations aren’t as easy as they seem.
Incidentally, in case it wasn’t obvious, the same stuff is true in lots of other contexts. Brand loyalty keeps me buying the same kind of dish soap and eating at the same restaurants over and over again. The careers of film directors, bloggers, politicians and authors live and die on their ability to attract and retain a loyal fanbase. Trivial recommendations get their power from this obviousness, and it’s their pitfall. When an artist inevitably makes a clunker (it always happens) the fandom just feels so betrayed. Emotionally injured, almost. Fortunately, there’s always the old records, and if you get really, really sick of those, you can convince yourself to like the new one – or maybe you should just find a recommendation engine to tell you something you didn’t already know about.
The album I’ve been asked to examine by my beautiful daughter Frances today is none other than Clearing, a 37-year-old album that I briefly mentioned in my last blog post. It was sitting right in the open spot next to where she had picked the previous album, so I guess she figured, why mess with a winning formula? She can’t read, so she didn’t know that my brief blog-mention of the record was to dismiss it as “awful”. Upon a number of subsequent listens, I can now safely report that it is in fact as awful as I remembered, but of course as with anything, awful doesn’t tell you the whole story.
Now, taste is all about what you think is awful. You like some awful stuff. Maybe you’re embarrassed to like it, or maybe you revel in its badness. Maybe you like to be bad. Even before I decided to write about Clearing, it had already logged more spins on my turntable than lots of records that I don’t think are awful. I guess I’m like that teenager who’s all “O my god I hate this song!!!!” but if it comes on the radio they don’t change the station and furthermore they know all the words and yeah you know that story. You do it too, I think, but instead of Lady Gaga it’s something else. Peter Frampton maybe, or James Taylor, or Alanis Morissette, or the Doors, R. Kelly, Bush, Madonna, Rush, Nine Inch Nails, Paula Abdul, Garth Brooks, Aqua, Abba… whatever touched a lot of hearts without over-challenging a lot of brains when you were a teenager; whatever was on the radio and had the hooks and the production and the demographic heft to get you to swallow the insipid lyrics; whatever made you feel like a grown-up before you grew up and discovered your Dead Prez and your Guided by Voices and your Husker Dus and your Mountain Goats and your Fela Kutis.
Clearing is one of the thousand-and-one albums that came out below the mainstream radar under the influence of the Dream of the Sixties, back when there were gentle people who didn’t do all kinds of drugs and didn’t want to start a revolution and were just really into all the Peace and Love on a personal level. This is the demographic that gave us Jim Henson and Sesame Street, Montessori schools and Free to Be You and Me. It’s all about kids and gentle, gentle love. Ok, I’m kind of a hippy, and I’m comfortable with that, but if I’m gonna be really true to that, I should be all “O my god I hate this song!!!” when, like, “Cats in the Cradle” or “Wild World” comes on the radio. And those songs just don’t interest me that much. For me to think it’s awful, really truly awful, I’ve gotta be invested in some way. It’s got to touch me. I bet that’s how it is for you too – what do you really hate? The annoying pop music that plays in the background in the mall, or the artist that takes the aesthetic you love and tweaks in a direction you can’t follow?
Why do I hate this record? Because I live in a fantasy world, where Clearing was the biggest album of 1973, and Jeff Brewer, Sara Benson and Joan Minkoff were huge rock stars, bigger than Elton John or Peter, Paul and Mary. In my world, obscure artists that made go-nowhere records on tiny labels just because they loved the music they were making are always gonna make it into the rotation ahead of the ones that I’m supposed to like. In my world, “Morning Light” plays on “The Drive” (Chicago’s lame excuse for a classic rock station) between Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen. O my god I hate this song!!!! “Now when I see your face / I see the sun rise clear and bright / Soft as a meadow-green / Where children play in morning light…” I know right? So bad! La la la la la…
In my world, these records are the important ones, BECAUSE no one else wants to hear them. When a record like this sucks, it hurts me, because I need to listen to it all the time. Perhaps as a defense, I’ve gotten to the point where the pain of cringing is part of my aesthetic.
But really, how could anyone not want to listen to Clearing? It starts off with a bang – the one song that’s the hallmark of any truly awful record in the genre that I’ve just now decided to call Gentlefolk. Anyone care to hazard a guess? It’s a lovely song, a really beautiful melody paired with some deeply touching lyrics about the beauty of creation on display in all the large and small works of nature. If you’re of a certain age (mine) and had a certain kind of parents (lots of you did) you heard a lot of this song when you were little, sitting cross-legged in a circle with other perfect little Creatures of God, learning the words along with “Kumbaya”, “Dona Nobis Pacem”, “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Land Is Your Land”. Anyone? A Christian hymn, but everyone thought Cat Stevens wrote it? Right. “Morning Has Broken”. (The distinctive piano arrangement in the Cat Stevens version, incidentally, was by Rick Wakeman, previously derided in this space; a fact that I’m ever so slightly bummed out to have learned. Curse you Wikipedia!) Now you know when a record opens with “Morning Has Broken”, you’re in for some seriously gentle music.
They give the unaccompanied verse that opens the song (as well as most of the other lead vocals on the album) to Sara, whose voice is what you might call very annoying. You might call it that, and maybe I would too if she hadn’t set the standard for singers in my fantasy world, the same way that Simon Le Bon did for the real world. This bit of genius is the first, and so far only, inkling of the musical atrocity in store; otherwise the song is merely a competent and well-played arrangement where guitar and harpsichord tinkle away beneath a tasteful three-part harmony vocal.
The follow-up, an original (as are all the rest of the songs, unusual for a record of this vintage) by Clearing’s friend Victoria Fraser (who goes by “Vici” – you only wish you knew how to pronounce that) called “Morning Light”, is innocuous, pretty and of course, gentle. Just a pretty little song like a million others, competing for ears, and no one ever saying they hate it or love it or anything about it. In the real world. In my fantasy, though, the words I quoted above (that stuff about the meadow-green etc.)? That is gold! As nothing compared with the best songs of the 70s: “All your life you’ve never seen woman / Taken by the wind…” Sorry, Stevie, you’ve got nothing on “I never saw a heart that’s searching / I never saw a puppy’s tear / Now I can see what was once in darkness / And all because you’re here.”
Wow.
And so it goes. The really stunning thing about Clearing is the variety of kinds of badness it offers. “Sunshine Man”. How do I get the feel of this song into this text? What’s it like? It’s minimal! Sara sings in unison with a single high guitar line, punctuated with bongo hits. It’s deep! “I used to think the hours told time / That distance was measured by space / But time and space disappear / In the love I see in your face.” It’s… perky! “Good mornin’ sunshine man in me, good mornin’ sunshine man in me.” Ok! It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re like, ok this is my song (actual song that Frances made up): “Happy chicken! Happy chicken! Whooooaaaa!” except actually you’re an adult and adult ickiness has crept into the joy and you didn’t just let it slide – instead you convinced your friends to add a bluesy melody to the verse and practice it till it was super-tight and record it and release it on “Aberdeen-Acme Records”. Oh Clearing, how do you out-write yourselves every time?
“She’s Leavin’” is another solo Sara number, this one with Joan accompanying her on the piano (I think that’s the case – it’s a little hard to tell from the liner notes. Anyway it’s just voice and piano). The lyrics say, “Hey friend that just got divorced and moved to California, I still like you even though I’m friends with your husband too. Let’s still be friends, ok?” The music says, “You know that Joni Mitchell record Blue that came out a couple years ago? You know the song ‘Blue’ that’s on there? O my god I hate that song!!!!”
“The First Time” comes close to renewing the joy of “Sunshine Man”, with the cringe-inducing poetry of Jeff’s lyrics (“I told her that I loved her and that she / Knew what was best for her and best for me / I knew that I would someday love again / And that was the first time I knew pain”) The First Time – get it? It’s a breakup song about the girl he “lost it” to. Classy! But don’t forget the innovative harmony: on the final “I knew pain” in each chorus, Jeff and Joan nail this dissonant interval so reliably each time, you start out thinking they are just off-key, but by the end you realize that they are experimenting with a microtonal sonority.
“Seth” is a particular flavor of awful familiar to anyone that loves Jim Henson – Jeff even kinda sounds like Rowlf, especially on the “ba da ba da” part. It’s a fantasy piece – inspired by an actual event perhaps? – about someone named Seth – maybe Jeff’s actual kid? – going on a balloon trip in the sky. “To think of being up there with nothing to see / But the world and the face of God.” Ok does anyone else think it’s just a little weird that this one came out almost 40 years before that Heene nonsense? Leaving that alone. But yeah you know how you’ll be watching the Muppets and laughing and slapping your knees and stuff, and then all of a sudden this unapologetically cheesy, sentimental number will come on and you’re like, ok if this wasn’t being sung by a blue caterpillar with ping-pong balls for eyes then I would be so outta here – and then you’re like, ok but it’s Jim Henson, I mean the childlike wonder and total commitment to cheesiness at all costs is what I respect about him so I guess I can deal – but if it wasn’t Jim Henson then man, this would be lame! So this is that song if someone else wrote it, and yes it is that lame and no, there’s no excuse.
The thing is, Jeff, Joan and Sara seem like they are super-nice, regular baby-boomer type folks. The music is competent, Sara can’t help her annoying voice (she can carry a tune just fine, it’s the timbre that’s the problem), and the lyrics are lame but who’s never humiliated themselves in public with some schlocky sentiment? Of course they loved Blue, millions of people did. Blue is an amazing album, why not try to make more music like it? It gets me to thinking, what do I really mean when I say I hate a record? If I click the one-star rating, do I mean, never show me any more stuff like this, or do I mean, this music really bothers me because it teases me by sounding like stuff I like but it sucks? I don’t know. I don’t know if Clearing is Love to Hate or Hate to Love. Such a thin line!
Lest I appear unduly resentful toward this record for stealing so much of my time (who’s making my decisions for me anyway? Oh right. Frances is) let me state for the record that “The Church Where We Got Married (Is an Auto Showroom Now)”, which opens Side Two, is genuinely charming and witty and even kind of fun. It’s also my least favorite track on the record. What can I say? I love to cringe. “Sunshine Man” hits it out of the park.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING:Up in the Air, Juno, and… uh… 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Up in the Air is a really good movie. You should go see it. George Clooney is admirably crinkly and Vera Farmiga is sexy and Anna Kendrick is several of my college roommates put together (or maybe several of my put-together college roommates).
Now, that that’s out of the way, there’s something else you should know. Jason Reitman is sad Judd Apatow. This is okay, Judd Apatow is also really talented, but the movies these two men are making are odd inverses of each other, and somebody should let them know.
First, to the delay the placement of spoilers: Juno is sad Knocked Up. In both cases, they’re movies about couples composed of a focused women (Jennifer Garner, Katherine Heigl) and a charming man-child (Jason Bateman, Seth Rogen) dealing with a baby. Yes, Jennifer Garner is focused on a getting a baby and initially Katherine Heigl is focused on her career but they’re both up-tight and down-to-business, while their partners wear ratty old t-shirts and either smoke or really wish they could smoke a serious joint while playing a guitar/video game. Knocked Up is an all-out comedy, so in the end the couple has the baby and stays together, growing to accept each other along with their unexpected blessing. In Juno, not so much. The man-child splits and stays split. The focused women’s lesson in acceptance comes to be about acceptance of single parenthood. Which is a sadder (and probably more statistically common) end to what happens when you add a baby to a profoundly mismatched couple. P.S. Just in case you’re wondering, Juno is not about Ellen Page or Michael Cera. I mean, they’re cute and all, but it’s really not. It’s about the grownups and the poster is a charming lie. I don’t know if screenwriter Diablo Cody knows it, but the heart-hitting punches come to the adults in the movie and the teenagers get away blessedly unscathed with their stripey stocks still up. Though, as she is a divorced person, I bet she does.
Now, to current releases. Up in the Air is sad 40 Year Old Virgin. “What?” you say. “But George Clooney is not a virgin! He is silvery and foxy and . . . and crinkly!” Indeed. But he is, in this movie, an emotional virgin. He’s a grown up who never grew up, traveling to avoid settling down, and surrounded by – you guessed it – competed, well-organized, slightly-dead-inside women. Again, paired up with an older, wiser women (Vera Farmiga instead of Apatow’s Catherine Keener), this half-man/half-boy gets a chance to truly grow up. Although because Jason Reitman makes the sad version, Clooney’s character (spoiler alert) doesn’t end up with the comedic happy ending given to Steve Carell, and the possibility remains that if one spends one’s putative adulthood racing around, one might, in fact, miss the chance to become a man.
Finally, just in case you are uninterested in either Jason Reitman or Judd Apatow, because, I don’t know, maybe you’re five years old, there is another version of this exact story in theaters now. It’s about a driven woman and her immature lover and it’s called The Princess and the Frog. Don’t worry, it works out for them okay.
My wife had an interesting experience yesterday. Here’s her account of what happened:
“I met up with an old lady who asked me to walk her to the gas station and back across the street. I was watching her cross and she just barely made it. Then when I crossed and met up with her she asked me to help her – so I walked with her to the gas station. She was telling me that she has a cataract and she wasn’t able to fill out her forms to get her food stamps before Christmas – things like that, hard to get around, cold and icy, etc.
Then we went in and the guy was giving her a little bit of a hard time. I was thinking, does he know her or is he a jerk? I guess it was both. So he said, who’s this, and she said that she found a girl to help her across the street, and he said I can’t believe you’re making her late for work, and I said it’s not a problem, and he said, does she know why you’re here, and she turned and said do you know why I’m here? and I said no, and he said, she doesn’t know why you come here every day, and I said, I guess it’s for something she needs, and she asked if she could give him pennies. He said no and made a fuss. She counted out quarters instead (he said that 100 pennies is not even a dollar – I thought that was funny).
Anyway, she got 2 boxes of cigarettes, 2 cans of coke and a can of 7-up, which I guess she needs – it was over $20.
So I was just thinking, what am I supposed to take from this? I still don’t know.”
Frances chose a record for me a few weeks ago – Bruiseology, the second and final album by the amazing new-wave band the Waitresses, from Akron, OH – and I’ve been listening to it a lot. I could write and write about the Waitresses, their leader Chris Butler, their original label Clone Records, and their spunky little scene of like-minded Akron bands out to mix rock and avant-garde musics and thereby change the world – but, I’m not going to because I don’t need to right now. It’s Christmastime here in the West and I’m thinking about what I need, vs. what I want. What I need to do with the Waitresses is listen to them.
Logging lots of turntable time is not always what happens with the records Frances chooses for me. Some I listen to out of a sense of obligation, and some I can’t bring myself to play. By some people’s definition, these are records that I don’t “need” – but if I think about selling a record like, say, The Hands of God Reached Out and Touched Me by Sister Mattie Moss Clark and the South Michigan State Community Choir, I come up against a million reasons to keep it on the shelf (between another Mattie Moss Clark record, That’s Christ, and the awful self-titled early 70s album by Newton, MA’s psych-folk trio Clearing). I’m a record collector, so there are things about these objects that appeal to me beyond their ostensible utility as preservers of sound. They feel like connections to people and times long gone, portraits of unavailable landscapes, maps of people’s minds.
A record is just what the name implies – a document that records a piece of the past. The long-playing record album (LP for short – the handle “album” is a holdover from the early days of recorded sound, when 3-5 minutes was all you could fit on a record, and if you wanted to have, say, a whole opera in recorded form, you needed to store a bunch of fragile 78-rpm shellac monstrosities in an album) is to me the zenith of the medium; its development is to the art of music what the novel was to the art of narrative. If you’re a musician, once you make your statement in the form of an LP, it’s unalterable – a perfect communication to the world of today and tomorrow.
I have a hard time separating form from content in art. I think both need to be solid to make the art stick – how you say a thing plays as much of a role in transmitting it as what the thing is that you’re actually saying (a favorite satire of mine on this dichotomy, bringing the form into violent conflict with the content, has always been this cartoon by B. Kliban). Sister Mattie Moss Clark and the producers of her albums have one central message – it says it right on the back of the album in the notes by Evangelist Maria Gardner and Anthony Flowers: “Sister Clark’s continuing prayer is for a deeper consecration, a deeper devotion and most of all a closeness with the Lord so that she may continue to reach the hearts of both young and old.” They have deployed the best technology they have available to them in the service of this message: the LP. The biggest, brightest lights in the world are shining on this message of spreading the gospel throughout the land.
This message, as it always does with LPs, starts with the cover. A deep, rich red background frames a head shot of Sister Clark, a staring lovingly out towards us, and a group photo of the choir, thirty-nine beautiful young men and women in white robes that give their faces the appearance of angels floating in the clouds. The backgrounds of the photos are faded out, giving the jacket a feel that’s both old-fashioned and timeless, floating in an eternal moment where the only solid things are the steps and brick wall of what I imagine to be their home church.
Beckoned inside, we go deeper: the needle drops. Within moments, we’re floating on an unquiet sea of sound, an ocean of feeling surging beneath the unmoving surface. The first song, “God So Loved the World”, is all choir; Sister Clark doesn’t take a solo till track 2, “He Satisfies”. When she does, her rich alto wraps around the text: “My lonely heart is singin’, singin’ singin’…” while the band keeps her afloat on waves of sound. The choir comes in at key points, lifting her vocal on angels’ wings. This song ascends to about the middle of the air, leaving the remaining tracks on side one to first whip up the winds (“Try Him Right Now”) and let the storm break forth (“I Found Him to Be Alright”).
Gospel isn’t a genre I’ve historically had any interest in (which one might guess from reading my older posts in this space), nor is it something I still spend very much (or any) time listening to, or even thinking about – so I don’t have any idea how or why I bought (or otherwise came into possession of) this gospel record. I must have had it for at least ten years, and thinking about what I was into in the 90s, there’s only one way this record could have fit in – the tiny, hypnotically abstract Westbound Records logo in the lower left-hand corner. Westbound connects to the earliest days of my musical awakening: the home of Funkadelic, whose monstrous Maggot Brain forever repositioned the 10 on my musical scale of 1-10 when I discovered it as a teenager in the basement of this 30-something dude who lived up the street from me.
You can tell there’s a connection, even without knowing the label. Those fringe-wearing freaks obviously came out of this same soul-soaked community: it’s all Detroit, churches, organ, funk, funk and funk. Some of the Hammond licks played on this album by organist “Twinkie” Clark (quotes not mine), particularly in the first seconds of “Try Him Right Now” and “I Can’t Give Up Now”, make it obvious where Bernie Worrell came up; bassist Tommy (no last name provided) is all over the fretboard and the choir wails away in the background in a way that’s completely familiar to anyone that’s worn out the grooves of a George Clinton production or two.
I guess I must have bought the record based on the Westbound connection, but I can’t have ever listened to it – it doesn’t really sound or even look all that familiar. The knowledge of the connection and the ownership seems to have been enough for me, until now. Musing on the reasons I have the record brings me back to the question of what I want vs. what I need. I’m a guy with way too many records – my problem is one of choice. It’s a problem felt acutely by those of us lucky enough to have experienced the great demystification and bounty of music that the last ten years of digital availability have brought on. The response of many artists has been to recombine, rethink and re-contextualize previously obscure forms like Afro-pop and Balkan party music; the response of many consumers has been to become overloaded and short-circuited, desensitized to the beauty and majesty of creation inherent in each recording, and unable to love on an individual level the products of the recording industry.
I’m luckier than many: I have lots of choices. In the absence of choice, though, we all face the problem of existence. I have no idea if that lady my wife met yesterday needed what she got at the store, but I can reasonably conclude that something about that trip, either the cigarettes and soda that she bought or the chance to get out of the house or some detail I missed, was a strong enough motivator for her to risk life and limb in the icy Chicago December and scrape together change for overpriced, health-wrecking products of our choice-laden society. In that sense, she needed whatever she got. When I buy records, or books, or MP3s, or anything really, I express my choice and desire in terms of need – if I’ve got finite cash to spend and a store full of stuff to explore, I can’t get it all. I’ve got finite time on this earth, and I can’t listen to all the records or read all the books, so I need to make a choice. My greatest need at this time is to live the best life I can, and for me that means in part choosing my media carefully, and trying to minimize my exposure to mediocre art, like Mannheim Steamroller. It also means finding something to take away from the art that I’m exposed to – making sure my time’s not “wasted”.
It seems my problem of separating form from content has a parallel incarnation: want vs. need. Again, I turn to the great artist B. Kliban for a pithy illumination of this dilemma: the Only Show in Town. In the absence of choice or in its overabundance, want becomes need and vice versa – the most strongly felt desire is to need something enough to feel its absence.
The sight of Ed O’Neil struggling to connect to his dopey son and hot blond daughter, under the watchful eye of his grating sexpot wife is, if you are a member of my generation, comforting – like macaroni and cheese for the TV-watching soul.
At first glance, the new ABC sitcom Modern Family seems a clever update of our old familiar ’80s friend, it’s Married with Children, for the 21st century and post-Arrested Development: Remarried with Children meets Gay-Married with Children. It’s a single-camera, faux-documentary show set in the suburbs about the trials and travails of family life. And Ed O’Neil gets to be grumpy-but-loveable and put-upon, like when he attempts to welcome the adopted baby daughter of his son and son’s partner. Or when he sorts out a family misunderstanding by pushing his whole brood into the pool.
You know, just like sitcoms used to be . . . except, wait, I’m sorry, they have a pool? Like a giant, marble Olympic-sized pool? Yes, because here’s the unspoken thing about this show: everyone on Modern Family is rich. They live in big houses and do expensive things, like, for example adopt babies from Vietnam (average cost of international adoption = $25,000). Maybe not rich like Gossip Girl but definitely rich like Brothers and Sisters, and – here’s where I really get weirded out – no one notices or cares.
There have always been rich characters on TV shows, from The Beverly Hillbillies to Beverly Hills 90210, so it’s not their wealth that’s surprising, it’s the fact that it’s not of interest to any of the characters, primary or secondary – or presumed to be of interest to the viewer. You’re supposed to accept that we’re in a TV world where Ed O’Neil can say things like, “But we’re supposed to go to wine country”, and be taken seriously, or an episode can revolve around the planning of an extravagantly elaborate birthday party with no inclusion of its inherent expense.
On some level, watching such unrepentant consumption and upper-middle-class privilege can be kind of soothing – like, say, eating $15 truffled mac and cheese – but it also leaves out several chances for this family to grapple with wealth the way they would in real life. Don’t worry faux-documentarians – you traffic in the humor of your characters’ pain . . . it will only be funny when Phil Dunphy (Ed O’Neill’s son-in-law) goes bankrupt because the Southern California real estate market collapses, leaving his stay-at-home wife blond Claire to go back to work. Hijinks will ensue! I promise. Kind of like the time when Al told Peggy, Kelly and Bud to get jobs.
Except probably Claire won’t end up as a rock slut in a music video. Because no one watches music videos anymore. [editor's note - Ouch! Some of our finest customers still get their users to watch music videos. . . And YouTube would probably beg to differ with that sentiment. . .]
Our fearless CEO/Co-Founder (pictured right) moments ago moderated a panel at SFMusicTech on the super sexy topic of music metadata.
While many attendees were at a Goo(Key)Note where we assume participants talked about the revolutionary idea of including links in search results, we are proud to announce that the metadata panel solved all industry problems and will be adjourning to the cocktail hour early.
Michael was joined by Rob Kaye (MusicBrainz [@musicbrainz], Founder & Lead Developer), Maureen Droney [@maureendroney] (Sr Executive Director, Producers & Engineers Wing, The Recording Academy), Ron Suarez [@DrRon] (LoudFeed, CEO & President), Stephen White (Vice President, Product and Content Management at Gracenote). This marked the first time MusicBrainz and Gracenote shared the same stage.
Twelve years ago pundits like Mark Hardie, Eric Scheirer and Jim Griffin were predicting a commercial boom in digital music. While digital music in 2009 is an everyday object in the lives of regular consumers, it has taken much longer to get here than predicted and there are still many open issues behind the monetization of digital content. One of the major stumbling blocks has been lack of standardized and open content metadata. Lack of standardization has created massive headaches and overhead expense for royalty tracking, license compliance and feature development. The panel exposed the metadata mishap in all its ugly misspelled, mismatched and proprietary glory.
The first 20 minutes of the panel featured an overview of the problem. Interestingly, there was more agreement than disagreement amongst the panelists. Everyone agreed that the creation of a universal, unique ID system for music content was essential. Furthermore, the panel was united in its belief that while government (US or other) could provide the prodding to get the industry to cooperate, solutions must come from the industry participants themselves and not imposed by a government agency (c.f. the webcasting recordkeeping debacle).
Interestingly, we learned that while MusicBrainz and Gracenote have similar solutions and different philosophies, they both favor a solution where proprietary and opensource metadata databases can coexist.
The panel ended promptly at 2pm with all metadata problems solved—except MediaUnbound’s proposal to officially exclude John Mayer from all metadata repositories was tabled for further study.
A few months back we asked you to vote for us. We weren’t running to impersonate Ted Kennedy in the US Senate, just a chance to participate in the yearly music funfest known as “SXSW” (”South-By” for the uber-hip.)
Our proposed panel was/is “The History of Music Recommendations”. Description of the panel is below.
But now – the news. WE WON. We’re going to Austin baby! Packed right in there in the list between IODA (Global Music Marketing: How to Reach Fans Worldwide with Adam Rabinovitz) and United Record Pressing (How to Make Money with Vinyl with Jay Millar) you’ll find us.
Michael Papish (our fearless CEO & Founder) will be circus ringleader for the panel, currently slated for March 17. They’ll be discussing the general history of recommendations. From our submission:
Mention “music recommendations” and talk of algorithms, genomes, visualizations and widgets ensues. But, the concept of making music recommendations is far older than the tech industry can imagine. Beginning with traveling minstrels of the middle ages who sow songs like seed to legendary freeform DJs of the 60s, we present a history of the music recommendation.
How did people ever learn about music without the Internet? Is this even possible?
What was the role of music performer in introducing audiences to new music?
How can songwriters teach listeners about music?
What is the place of the “cover version” in song discovery?
Was there a time when terrestrial radio helped people discover music? What different radio formats worked best for music discovery?
What is the current state of music discovery via radio (terrestrial, satellite, internet, interactive, etc.)?
Can record labels and music publishers create trusted relationships with listeners that allow them to find new and interesting music? Has this worked in the past? Are there groups doing this successfully today?
What about movie soundtracks?
Do people actually read music criticism?
What is the history of listener-to-listener music sharing?
Also, some additional information on this panel:
Many people in the “recommendation technology industry” think that music, movie and entertainment recommendation systems are completely revolutionizing the way we consume culture. Some have even gone so far as to portray sites like TheSixtyOne as radical experiments in music recommendations because they bring together like-minded music fans to discuss and discover culture together — an activity which has been happening for hundreds of years before the internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.
We want this panel to be a broad discussion looking at the different ways humans have historically learned about music. From friends? From musicians? From DJs/curators? From writers?
We’ll be sure to let you know when the panelists have been finalized. If you have any questions or suggestions for the panel, please drop us a line.
Okay, okay, writing staff of Glee you heard me (kind of) and at least gave some of your minor (cough not-white or in a wheelchair) characters some stuff to do in recent weeks, and you even included a moment of not totally unearned tenderness for Sue Sylvester, who’s, you know, a lady. I’m still waiting for some actual plot development on the Mercedes/Artie/Tina front – and, based on last week, I think that one guy is now just going to be known forever as “other Asian” – but my real beef is that you’ve gone squishy. I know I worried about your getting all hateful, but now you’ve got characters tossing their whole, erm, character out the window so as to advance heartwarming plot points. What are you, television?
Like, two weeks ago when Sue was being her normal evil self right up until mysteriously adding a girl with Down’s Syndrome to the cheerleading squad. The final reveal is that Sue herself has sister with Down’s Syndrome whom she visits at the end of the episode. So far, so believable. Grumpy people sometimes have complicated families . . .or so I hear . . . I’m with you, Sue. And then she starts to read.
Little Red Riding Hood.
And just when the writers have this chance to show her being the Sue we have come to love and hate and show us something new, they whiff. She just reads the book, sweetly, like everyone’s idea of how you behave around a disabled person, unless you’ve enough experience to realize that you mostly behave like your damn self.
My ending? Sue picks up the book, looks at her sister (who’s also in bed, weirdly – like, did she break her leg, too?) and starts to read.
SUE:
Little Red Riding Hood was a degenerate tramp who should have known better than to walk in the woods at night wearing an outfit like that, and got what we all knew was coming to her.
Or, last week, when after Quinn gets kicked out in a pretty moving and real-for-TV-on-an-essentially-campy-show way, her glee-mates sing “Lean on Me” to her and Finn. Oh wow, I just got that. Finn and Quinn. Anyway, annoying hokey song for annoying hokey purposes aside, Puck (real baby daddy and arch-rival to Finn and closest thing to a boy-villain around) joins in.
What? No he doesn’t! He stands in the hallway glowering and looking in menacingly through the window. Because he won’t stand by them – oops, lean on them – oops, offer himself to be leaned upon. Soaps, people, soaps!
One of our employees is married to a playwright. As they watch TV, they talk about what makes them good and how they could be better. She makes very interesting connections, which we’ve used in some of our video work. And now, we’re passing the goods directly from the manufacturer to you. Take it away, Dorothy.
Everybody loves “Glee.” Or, at least, way way more people love “Glee” than could reasonably have been expected – it’s like the United States is a giant college campus and we’ve just been waiting, without even knowing it, for a televised evening a cappella concert. An album of songs from the show – yes, that’s right, a quirky mix of pop standards in choral form – is number 1 at iTunes, and, at least based on my friends’ Facebook updates, “Glee” is the new black on Wednesdays. Or something.
After eight episodes this fall, it’s been on a brief hiatus, and, while we all wait eagerly to see how long a fake pregnancy can stretch if no one knows what month it is in TVtime, some suggestions for “Glee”:
1) Repeat after me: “against type.”
I know you’re all post-modern and self-referential and stuff, but it can be hard to distinguish a show with narrowminded characters from a show that’s just narrow-mindedly lazy. If Sue Sylvester (yes, Jane Lynch, you’re a genius, you’re fabulous, moving along) calls two of the kids “Asian” and “other Asian” – it’s only really a “joke” if the characters have distinguished themselves as anything else during 8 episodes. And, no, having one of the Asian characters also stutter doesn’t equal plot. Characters who are anything other than white and straight are pretty much asked to do things that line up with their non-white and non-straightness – for Mercedes and Kurt, this means a lot of “being a diva” in a C storyline. (For the guy in the wheelchair it means, er, being a guy! In a wheelchair!) Not only does “impotent fierce” not propel the action in surprising ways, it also cuts out a lot of chances for genuine musical surprise. There’s a whole cannon of songs to chose from – try letting some of your nonlead actors sing them (and no Mr. Schuster doing “Bust a Move” doesn’t count. Really. My suggestion: What if Mercedes had a real, non-impossible romance, and then sang “Fifteen” when her heart got broken? For example, by “other Asian?”
2) Keep being gay. Keep being so gay. Watch the misogayny.
A primer: Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show is gay. Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show and sing “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret (the movie, not the play, going full Liza) is so gay. Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show and sing “Maybe This Time” as a delusional doomed alcholic is so gay as to approach what I call misogayny. Or what my darling friend Josh at Tarhearted describes in this way:
This probably isn’t very politically correct, but I wonder: do gay men hate women? Look at the women who are gay icons. They are universally over-the-top and often unkind or laughably vain. Sometimes even alcoholics or drug addicts. I wonder why that is. Do gay men idolize a strong woman and a dramatic story, or do we like laughing at train wrecks? Or is it both?
Look, by all means, fill your shows with terrible people. It makes for more drama, I understand it. You’re a third of the way through your first season and you’re already at mid-Melrose levels of lunacy. I get the need, I do. But, I’m saying, hey – your crazies are, um, largely ladies. And they lie, um, constantly, about really big deal things, like marriage and babies. And the men – Mr. Schuster, Finn, even Puck – are sweet and dopey and eager to believe the lies that the crazy women tell. I know you don’t want anyone to be too happy because you’d run out of story, but Kurt got to come out, dance to Beyonce, win the football game and his father’s acceptance in ONE EPISODE. Maybe something good could happen to or by a girl. Or even both.
By combining the numerical power of computers with knowledge from teams of human analysts,
MediaUnbound helps people find, discover and interact with large catalogs of entertainment
content to deliver an exciting entertainment experience. Every day people receive music,
video, concert and image recommendations generated by MediaUnbound through customers
such as eMusic, Ericsson, Napster, MTVN / Viacom, Terra Networks, NTT DoCoMo, HMV,
and TransWorld Entertainment.
About our Corporate Blog:
The Social Web Community 2.0 Network marketing gurus all agree: Every corporation needs a corporate blog. Ours gives an inside peak into the people, opinions and activities at MediaUnbound.
What to expect: our thoughts on media recommendation technology; occasional customer and product announcements; in-depth discussions on whether MilkMoneyMaffia is best band from Greenland, or best band ever.
What not to expect: multiple posts every day; corporate babble-speak
Contact Info:
Please direct feedback on blog posts to blargh@mediaunbound.com. For further information about MediaUnbound or other questions please see the Contact page on our main site.
Before long, I’ve overplayed everything in the Clinton catalog, from America Eats Its Young all the way through Hey Man… Smell My Finger, and I’m left where I was back in 1997: Clinton fatigue. I’ve identified this pattern in my life. I find out about some artist I’m really into and then I get everything. It’s almost a sense of relief, an obvious but reliable recommendation: play Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon. Repeat till you’re sick of it. Move on to Animals and Ummagumma. God help you if you can’t stop before The Division Bell is all that’s left. Why a relief? Because if you don’t happen to have thousands of albums and a toddler, you need a way to keep yourself going. Recommendations aren’t as easy as they seem.
Now, taste is all about what you think is awful. You like some awful stuff. Maybe you’re embarrassed to like it, or maybe you revel in its badness. Maybe you like to be bad. Even before I decided to write about Clearing, it had already logged more spins on my turntable than lots of records that I don’t think are awful. I guess I’m like that teenager who’s all “O my god I hate this song!!!!” but if it comes on the radio they don’t change the station and furthermore they know all the words and yeah you know that story. You do it too, I think, but instead of Lady Gaga it’s something else. Peter Frampton maybe, or James Taylor, or Alanis Morissette, or the Doors, R. Kelly, Bush, Madonna, Rush, Nine Inch Nails, Paula Abdul, Garth Brooks, Aqua, Abba… whatever touched a lot of hearts without over-challenging a lot of brains when you were a teenager; whatever was on the radio and had the hooks and the production and the demographic heft to get you to swallow the insipid lyrics; whatever made you feel like a grown-up before you grew up and discovered your Dead Prez and your Guided by Voices and your Husker Dus and your Mountain Goats and your Fela Kutis.
But really, how could anyone not want to listen to Clearing? It starts off with a bang – the one song that’s the hallmark of any truly awful record in the genre that I’ve just now decided to call Gentlefolk. Anyone care to hazard a guess? It’s a lovely song, a really beautiful melody paired with some deeply touching lyrics about the beauty of creation on display in all the large and small works of nature. If you’re of a certain age (mine) and had a certain kind of parents (lots of you did) you heard a lot of this song when you were little, sitting cross-legged in a circle with other perfect little Creatures of God, learning the words along with “Kumbaya”, “Dona Nobis Pacem”, “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Land Is Your Land”. Anyone? A Christian hymn, but everyone thought Cat Stevens wrote it? Right. “Morning Has Broken”. (The distinctive piano arrangement in the Cat Stevens version, incidentally, was by Rick Wakeman, previously derided in this space; a fact that I’m ever so slightly bummed out to have learned. Curse you Wikipedia!) Now you know when a record opens with “Morning Has Broken”, you’re in for some seriously gentle music.
And so it goes. The really stunning thing about Clearing is the variety of kinds of badness it offers. “Sunshine Man”. How do I get the feel of this song into this text? What’s it like? It’s minimal! Sara sings in unison with a single high guitar line, punctuated with bongo hits. It’s deep! “I used to think the hours told time / That distance was measured by space / But time and space disappear / In the love I see in your face.” It’s… perky! “Good mornin’ sunshine man in me, good mornin’ sunshine man in me.” Ok! It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re like, ok this is my song (actual song that Frances made up): “Happy chicken! Happy chicken! Whooooaaaa!” except actually you’re an adult and adult ickiness has crept into the joy and you didn’t just let it slide – instead you convinced your friends to add a bluesy melody to the verse and practice it till it was super-tight and record it and release it on “Aberdeen-Acme Records”. Oh Clearing, how do you out-write yourselves every time?
Logging lots of turntable time is not always what happens with the records Frances chooses for me. Some I listen to out of a sense of obligation, and some I can’t bring myself to play. By some people’s definition, these are records that I don’t “need” – but if I think about selling a record like, say, The Hands of God Reached Out and Touched Me by Sister Mattie Moss Clark and the South Michigan State Community Choir, I come up against a million reasons to keep it on the shelf (between another Mattie Moss Clark record, That’s Christ, and the awful self-titled early 70s album by Newton, MA’s psych-folk trio Clearing). I’m a record collector, so there are things about these objects that appeal to me beyond their ostensible utility as preservers of sound. They feel like connections to people and times long gone, portraits of unavailable landscapes, maps of people’s minds.
Gospel isn’t a genre I’ve historically had any interest in (which one might guess from reading my older posts in this space), nor is it something I still spend very much (or any) time listening to, or even thinking about – so I don’t have any idea how or why I bought (or otherwise came into possession of) this gospel record. I must have had it for at least ten years, and thinking about what I was into in the 90s, there’s only one way this record could have fit in – the tiny, hypnotically abstract Westbound Records logo in the lower left-hand corner. Westbound connects to the earliest days of my musical awakening: the home of Funkadelic, whose monstrous Maggot Brain forever repositioned the 10 on my musical scale of 1-10 when I discovered it as a teenager in the basement of this 30-something dude who lived up the street from me.
Our fearless CEO/Co-Founder (pictured right) moments ago moderated a panel at 
