JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

PBS broadcast a talk David Brooks gave at the Miller Center last night. It was not a recent broadcast – Brooks was speaking about our social selves and by indirection promoting his book, The Social Animal, as part of the project. The book had been published back in March. I don’t mean it was a cynical presentation, but it shows how discussion is framed in contemporary society.

I’d never watched Brooks in an extended presentation so it was interesting to see more of his character, beyond his gnomic assessments of politics. The generosity of his presentation struck me. Brooks wasn’t, as is the default, laboriously making a few points — the ideas spilled out of him — he wanted to give the audience an understanding about the ideas which excited him; he showed admirable wit and a warm, if a sometimes uncomfortably ingratiating side. This ingratiating side of Brooks is always in evidence, actually. Since he is a man of opinions, the self-deprecating demeanor can border on passive aggressive understatement.

The ideas he discussed circled the preeminence of intuition, emotion and what Hume called sentiment. Brooks quoted many studies as evidence of the primacy of our intuitive selves. All that we are grows out of that core of our intuitive life.

This is not a new premise, but in the current religio-science environment, that is, where science is seen as a religion, where people equate science and Truth, it had a cathartic quality. Science describes our best understanding about physical reality at the moment. It presents a small subset of human consciousness, or better, of being human. It provides no moral context nor meaningful insight about how to live a life. It simply helps set the stage for serious thinking. It does scare off the completely wacky, but too often welcomes the over wrought estimate it receives in a world where ideology vitiates the air. Unfortunately, science itself is subject to the same ideological bias (plate tectonics, “big bang” theory), and is not really meant to be the last word at any rate.

I’ve always thought we are principally emotional beings. Brooks’ tactic, of using reason to convince the audience that emotion is preeminent, and feeling the need to quote scientific studies to prove his point, can be seen to contradict the argument itself. The truth is that many studies about the more complex aspects of human nature are incredibly shallow and misleading. Sometimes they are cynically tendentious. The credulity Brooks ascribes to these studies speaks to media shallowness — the pool in which Brooks swims.

Brooks is a very decent individual, who values demeanor a bit too much, and puts way too much store in status markers. If you really want to understand the human enterprise read Shakespeare.

Jimmy Kimmel’s tribute to his uncle Frank was truly touching. It did not have to turn out that way…

The popular culture forces the audience to develop a cynical, thickened skin. Too often celebs claim great sympathy with a cause or person, but you end up feeling they are celebrating their own celebrity goodness. It’s about them. It’s about their agent telling them they have to have a cause. It’s about received notions repeated by a not too bright individual to win the approval of a political affinity group.

Kimmel is not like that. Actually he never has been a conventional talk show host. He mixes enormous confidence and self-deprecation. When you consider all the ways any talk show host can go wrong, with so much air time over a long stretch, Kimmel has managed to run the gauntlet with few glitches. He is easily the best of the talk show hosts. Kimmel appears to like people, without judgment or pretention.

That isn’t true about many in the media. Letterman has gone from a bright light to a pinched, sour performer; Leno is a disengaged performer, a craftsman. Craig Ferguson’s appearance after the death of his father rightly evoked sympathy in the audience, but Ferguson has less depth as a peformer, and in the end you felt his producer was right in telling Ferguson not to go on the air so soon after the loss of a loved one.

Don Rickles’ appearance on Kimmel underlined the moment. With Rickles’ unsympathetic comic persona, the antithesis of sentimentality, Rickles’ praise had special weight: “you made them laugh, but you moved the audience,” was a perfect summation. “You were magnificent,” said Rickles. It should not have worked, but it did.

A small shop of developers in Australia got treated unfairly on Amazon’s App Store and wrote about it on their blog; the post was carried by Gizmodo, which then generated a series of laugh out loud comments:

JonThomasDesigns
How is this even a Story ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Post i have Ever read

Matt Buchanan @JonThomasDesigns
How is you even a Commenter ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Comment i have Ever read.

Brian Barrett @Matt Buchanan
How is this even a Reply ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Reply i have Ever read

AgentRockstar @Brian Barrett
How is this even a Thread? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Threads i have Ever read

Joe Brown @Brian Barrett
How is you guys even have jobs? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Employment Situations i have Ever read.

Philip.J.Fry @AgentRockstar
How is this even internet? This is seriously the stupidest internet I’ve ever experienced.

In government Our Leader and a Republican party held hostage by ideologues have gone together from pathetic to disturbing.

Jon Stewart about President Obama’s…

…plea for Americans to make the case for compromise directly to their members of Congress.

“That’s your idea, call your congressman?” Stewart chortled. “Did the president just quit?”

Irresponsibly diddling with the fate of an already weakened economy, the pols appear to have lost their minds. Obama declared himself the “only adult in the room”; the self-sanctification characteristic of this paper thin narcissist. Boehner, not able to wrangle the extreme right wing in his own party eructed a proposal that said, “I give up”; the extreme right does not care if pedal-to-the-floor might not be wise as we approach the cliff. They have their principles. Obama is more worried about re-election (his own extreme left) than developing skills as a president. Obama has two birthday parties (for himself) scheduled for Wednesday — you can tell where his mind is…on Obama.

Finally, something watchable on Netflix. Breaking Bad is a Weeds derivative. But a good one. In fact, better. Weeds is a trifle coy.

Brian Cranston is the lead on Breaking Bad. He was Whatley on Seinfeld; the dentist who converted to Judaism for the jokes. Wonderful actor. He reminds me of Martin Mull in appearance  if you squint your eyes until they are almost shut.

Unlike many awards, the three Emmys Cranston has won for his portrayal of a high school teacher turned meth dealer are deserved. His character has lung cancer. His son has cerebral palsy. His wife is pregnant. He has a prognosis of two months without treatment. He was in line for a Nobel but something, as yet unexplained, derailed this life changing recognition.

It might therefore sound strange to say Breaking Bad is too grim. But it’s true: the show longs for better dialog. Structurally funny, like Weeds, but without the snap of humor and liveliness that it might have. What show, given the plot line, more needs the extravagances of graveyard humor?

Betty White was right when recently on Tavis Smiley she deflected compliments and said it is all in the script. It is. It gives the actors and directors room to display their wares. Writing is at the top of the heap in actual value, if not in consensus acclaim in media land. Who would think Hollywood could get their values’ hierarchy so wrong?

We’ve been listening to singer songwriter ladies’ man Leonard Cohen. A mention somewhere and we started listening via Spotify. Spotify seems it could establish a new standard for online listening. The prices seem high, but it is a nifty idea.

Who By Fire is our favorite song by Cohen. This piece, after some background checking, is based on the Unetanneh Tokef, an ancient Hebrew piyyut or hymn. Who shall live, and who shall die, the subtext. The excellent lyrics, as always with Cohen, performed with deep melancholy, truly resonate. His voice is not his strong point; it is the intelligence and poetic yearning that wins you over finally.

Cohen needs accompaniment, a good group of musicians behind him, and even some more subtle orchestration — something to give the work shape. The purity argument seldom works. We’re not talking Las Vegas glitz-ification here, although just such SNL satirical treatment springs to mind. Listen to Who By Fire in solo and accompanied version; the latter much rounder and more effective.

I wasn’t surprised to read Cohen is depressive. I was surprised to find he is a cult figure. Like Dylan, who has so much more range, Cohen gives pop music an honorable hook into traditional strains in human culture — both in poetry and music.

Cohen about the writing process:

…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.

In 1998 Cohen said:

I feel that we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”

Ahead of his time, was Cohen in that insight.

Since we are quoting: listening to that sensitive soul Anne Lamott, she quoted John Gardner about writing — about creative work as creating a dream,

Gardner said:

…the dream must be vivid and continuous.

All art shares that dream well spoken quality, because life has that quality.

Lamott also mentions Blake’s reminder, that we are here:

…to endure the beams of love.

The Philip Pearlstein of the Brits, the painter Lucian Freud, died July 21. His renown, usually judged — although never admitted as the metric — by price of work, was enormous. A true lone wolf — noble in his sense of dedicated mission and in his persistence of vision: realist, nudes (he called his subjects naked), small scale works. He was a serious artist who was viewed as a serious artist, a rarity in a contemporary world engorged with junk culture.

He was the grandson of Sigmund, and knew him. A man who told jokes, is the way Lucian remembered grandad.

I was happy Lucian Freud was celebrated if only because he had talent. I did not take to Freud’s images themselves. By the time you are eighteen you figure out that the process of gaining a reputation is filled with holes. At least Freud’s rep brought something to the table.

The excruciating treatment of his subjects was meant to convey a close-up lens: all warts. And more warts. Freud’s gaze could be said to be related to Van Gogh’s intense scrutiny, but Freud lacked the passion and joy. Human beings are more than their warts; sensuality and spiritual longings are also there to be seen. Those qualities were heavily manifest in Freud’s life — still a chick magnet in his 80s, with a reported tribe of offspring — but never made it to his work. Although I respected his work, I felt his vision had little scope. The fading shadows and enveloping compassion of Rembrandt were outside his ken.

Making the audience suffer the grimness of life might seem serious, because life is such a battle, and it is easy if adolescent to get cynical and angry, but such an approach presents only a thin slice of our human existence and so is fundamentally false. A true depth of vision takes in more.

So after trying to access Netflix streaming we were finally requested to reset our password. When that did not reconnect us we followed the Wizard of Trouble and found it was not Netflix that was to blame, but rather Samsung. So Netflix said. So, knowing that was unlikely, we kept trying and finally logged in via Sammy app. Or not. Because each device had to be reset. This covered, intermittently, a six hour period.

Now we’ve read today online that we were not the only ones with Netflix issues. In fact they are offering, via email, a whopping 3% refund. If you get the email. And if you click the link. This would amount to say, thirty cents. We never received the email.

Netflix has raised its prices in an ungainly fashion. They have raised those prices 3%. I mean 60%. Netflix made no online effort when there were problems to tell customers; let them eat cake and waste time. And today, the coup de grâce, we received a DVD which was cracked.

Stuff happens, but this begins to accrue to a bad smell.

iPad Sketchbook 4

This is the fourth in a series of digital sketchbooks containing expressive images created on the iPad. This is an enhanced eBook, with thirty images, and includes sped-up movies which depict the creation of two of the images.

This lively NYT book review considers the “addiction” of contemporary art to violence.

I admire the passion of the commentators in rebuking art conventions, author and reviewer alike, and the many points well-made, but I differ in some respects, and in emphasis.

I’ve thought about this issue of violence depicted in art over the years. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the many conformist defaults of contemporary art. But I wanted to meander a bit; to also briefly discuss some other things…first some disagreements with ideas in the article itself…

Kipnis, the NYT book reviewer, says:

The art of cruelty aestheticizes violence, in not necessarily scrupulous ways. It can be reckless and scattershot, provoked by the desire to make others feel as bad as the sufferers of injustice and trauma whose experiences are vicariously borrowed by artists shopping for shocks. It bludgeons audiences into getting the point.

This is all wrong. The motives of contemporary art as it pertains to violence has a simple etiology: it is expressing a transparent need for attention and desire for relevance. The audience is viewed as shallow and jaded, so their work, such artists figure, has to be like the pop culture. Such violence focused work is an act of self-flattery: “we are not like that”. The formula of the pop culture and that of the work under discussion is the same: titillate and deplore.

Also, a calculation about criticism:

Such grandiose condemnations about the horrors of life, or the exfoliations of injustice, often seek to insulate the artist. A cynical tactic, designed to make it seem that criticizing the work reflects insensitivity to the subject of injustice.

The art being discussed by Kipnis has given up on the audience and lusts now for the attention derived from cheap thrills. Museums and galleries often enable: they show and thus validate such work, themselves trying to compete with popular culture, rather than providing a context of understanding. The art bureaucracy does not realize that people go to museums to get away from the junk. Part of the problem are the gatekeepers lack of insight, part the cynical artists looking for market share.

When Pauline Kael wrote about the “poetry of violence” in Peckinpah’s movies she was trying to connect to and understand the audience’s need for catharsis and the artist’s conundrum when surrounded by popular culture; but in her effort to reject the snobby decorousness some think of as art, she enabled something worse.

It is not the depiction of violence that is deplorable. It is when violence is divorced in presentation from suffering and pain that it is immoral. Still worse, many works of art ask you to identify with the criminals, as if that is an act of solidarity in retribution against an unjust society. Robin Hood is transformed into a liberal fascist. What this NYT article misses is that sense of how successfully (or not) the art accomplishes the transformative experience, yielding empathy as the central metric, where before there was only sensationalism.

The author under review wants to change this aesthetic of violence,

[she] imagines [it] “might deliver us . . . to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth.”

Oy. Here comes Al Gore. But, to be fair, the reviewer gives the author her due:

…[the author is] wonderfully fearless when it comes to belittling the well meaning, as critical of the “idiot compassion” of social justice seekers (too often patronizing and ineffectual) as she is of the misogynist gore in exploitation films. She suspects that the human condition is suffering.

I think Zen Buddhism might, in that last suspicion, have beaten her to the punch. So to speak.

The world’s largest aggregation of B movies is raising prices and that is causing an online to do. Probably the distributors wanted more for licensing and Netflix had no choice. But they can’t say much because they don’t want to offend content providers. That is all a guess. Or DVD mailings are just too expensive. Or, who cares.

Netflix could have done a better job of introducing the changes. Long time subscribers should have been given some consideration. Corporate culture is such that when it leaves its hierarchical fort it treats the public the way it does its employees. By fiat. Corporations don’t know any better — they are big dumb beasties. Our streaming/DVD plan is going up 60% in September. Still the best deal around — around the rancid edges. We’ve been debating what we will do. Probably cancel out before September 1, wait for the DVDs of shows we would like to see, like Justified (Season 2) and Boardwalk Empire and Curb (Season 8), then rejoin.

The formula seems to be: TV is better than the movies and special effects are better than the TV shows they enhance.

Once in awhile Netflix, seemingly by accident, yields a good one. We found such in, God Is Great and I’m Not. Unpromising title, and chick flick admittedly, but sweet and diverting.

It is a remake really. It is Annie Hall with Audrey Tautou as Diane Keaton. Would the two movies had been merged with Audrey in there. Keaton was excellent but failed to communicate the warmth and human appeal of Tautou. Woody Allen captured the humor and melancholy of relationships; Tautou inhabits the part and makes it more. She smiles and laughs as she argues. A real charmer.

We’ve also been trudging through Season 3 of True Blood. A favorite in Season 2, with its maenad (Seinfeld) Big Salad actress. Season 3 meanders and in later episodes degenerates into Hollywood’s idea of deep-thinking politics. They have Vampires talking global warming. Vampire kings despising how badly humans have failed. The creators of True Blood think this is an ironic hoot, but they are confused in their message. Little do they realize the satire shifts to the makers when the irony falters…Why do people who manufacture entertainment think they are doing serious work and need to educate those who cling to their guns and religion? Can’t they focus on the entertainment? (One discovery in Season 3: Mariana Klaveno as Lorena Krasiki, a character who is now gone — a striking, charismatic presence.)

For a show affecting sophistication True Blood sure has an infantile obsession with slime, guts and faces smeared with blood. Season 3 is all about Sookie, but she is finally told what she is rather than discovering it. Isn’t that politically incorrect?