"I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago."
Some trivialities:
- Absurd as it may sound, one of the pleasures I derived from watching old films as a lad was the ability to *date* a picture by its mise-en-scène; the clothes the actors wore, the cars they drove, lighting, camera angles, etc. Without any prior knowledge, one can easily discern that e.g. VERTIGO is late 1950s and THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE is mid-1970s. I first experienced severe aesthetic dissonance around this issue when I saw L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997); the set dressing is impeccably early 1950s, but the cinematography and pacing are echt 1990s.
- Re fashion: The male business suit has remained utterly static for 20 years. Double-breasted jackets made a brief comeback in the 1990s and three-buttons around the turn of the century, but both have since vanished from the racks. The baroque trends of the 1970s -- wide lapels and flared trouser cuffs -- are oft-mocked, but they were at least distinctive.
- If shown a random scene from a contemporaneously set Hollywood film with which I have no prior familiarity, I will be hard pressed to identify it as being from any particular year between 2000 and 2020. There's a flat nullity to mass popular culture now, a sense of being stuck in time, recycling over innovation.
- It's not as if period costume drama ever fell out of fashion, exactly, but the subgenre now seems to dominate especially longform television (e.g. MAD MEN and its successors/imitators). It may be that it's foisted on the viewing public for reasons unknown, but it seems possible also that people are desperate to see anything different from what is around them, something with a concrete sense of time and place.
Fashion is incredibly boring now. There will never be another Alexander Mcqueen. Nothing really even goes out of fashion now. Nothing new and exciting, it’s just endless and random rehashing. Not even creative rehashing. No discernible style change each season, just random crap.
Interesting thoughts here- I would say there's always good books, music and video being made somewhere, but it's both buried in subcultures and ubiquitous at the same time, making it really hard to sift through all the crap. And even subcultures (or especially them in some cases) are poisoned by politics and ideology as well, if not in the art then at least in the conversations and writing that surrounds it. It's all so suffocating
And there's definitely something to permanence that gives you the space to make art, especially music. When I was in high school, having a band was easy, we were all stuck together! But then college and the idea we all had to disperse as far away from our hometowns as possible just threw wrenches into all that. It's only been in the last couple years being settled down and lucky enough to have like-minded friends nearby that I've been able to pick that up again. Of course being a one-man solo project is easier than ever...but that's so much less fun
For music as a specific example (I can't speak as much to books or movies), we're in the situation that there are so many sub-genres and sub-sub-genres in every style and scene that anyone could find a niche they like and hear something great. The difficulty is that there's just SO MUCH that gets created and released now that jumping in as an outsider is like walking into a store with every type of apple imaginable but most varieties taste like red delicious (i.e., bad).
This balkanization of styles also leads to a similar stratification of audiences. There's a rotting husk of the mainstream that is able to sustain legacy acts and a few giant megastars, but very little that's interesting, cool or worth remembering even 6 months later. Creativity is therefore dispersed in a giant mess of small audiences that don't form enough of a critical mass to propel something really great into the mainstream (vs. 1991..or example). There's only enough for desperate record executives to peel off into the homogenized mess of whatever's popular to give it some sort of branded "edge." Think of how pop music, of all styles, post-2013 had to sound vaguely like EDM or have "wooohhhooohhh" vocals in the chorus (I swear to god Glenn Danzig is owed millions for this lol).
This has always been true in some way. In the modern era of pop music, there's always been a mainstream, semi-mainstream and underground. But in past decades, alongside singular pop star entities, you would have acts that went mainstream who provided a gateway into the scenes they came from. The late 80s and early 90s saw labels take real risks, which brought so much cool stuff to the regular, everyday kid (who didn't know about the tape-trading circuit or other avenues of cult art). And it worked backwards as well- fertilizing the underground with new faces and even helping indie labels do incredibly well for themselves (Epitaph, Metal Blade, etc.). The stadium-packing megastar band created the interest that filtered down to the band playing the 1000-person hall.
This is almost inconceivable now.
A longwinded way of saying: You can find it for yourself, in whatever niche suits you the most. But it'll be a lonely hunt, sifting through artist pages on Bandcamp, and most other people won't know who you're talking about. When you've existed in a niche for decades you're used to it, but it's saddening in terms of a common culture we can all connect with.
In a way it's analogous to social/cultural/political writing. "If you like [music style X], well, here are five bands you might be into, not many people know about them, but they're still great." vs. "Well yea most writers are hacks and psychos now ... but hey, there's this great substack I follow ..."
And yet I get the sense, thanks to thinkers as diverse as Mary Harrington and Adam Curtis, that we are due a new period of high romantic aesthetics as a way out of our current predicament. I do so hope that’s the case.
I hope so too- perhaps the emerging 'meta-modern' movement will call us all back to surer ground....?It's hard not to think of Kierkegaard's 'Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom' here....The need for stability of ground-cultural and other has to be feeding into current reversions to Nationalism and 'strongman' leaders Being metaphysically and culturally un-moored is causing massive unease and sense of dis-equilibrium among many as cultural ground feels shifting and quicksanding these days...Perhaps its not so much the shift and change but the frightening pace of it in the last two decades that leave us reeling....Then again, what about 'negative capability'? The early part of the 20th century hardly in itself a time of stability, produced great art and culture from shift-eg Yeats' response to modernity- and if any artist required conservation and even restoration of order it was he- or the peripatetic Joyce and Picasso in visual arts? The cinema is in an interesting case for sure- one feels it may be an art form past its heyday of the late 60/s- and l70/s where several times a year you came out of the cinema feeling stimulated, moved, provoked, awed....now we are at sea in a Marvel/DC never ending cineverse that spawns prequels, sequels, offshoots and reshoots in over long, over big empty spectacles....anyway...feel the pain there!
Angela, I’m sure folks would be interested (well, I would be) in any contemporary books, tv, film, music etc that you feel DO achieve what you feel is missing in general?
Two recent pieces of "culture" I've enjoyed and felt authentic and like they had some depth -- the movie "Minari" (was shocked by how good and resonant this was compared to the rest of the trash in theaters) and the album "Purple Mountains" by Richard Berman formerly of the Silver Jews. That last might be the exception that proves the rule since it's depressing as hell and Berman killed himself shortly after releasing it.
But anyway, despite exceptions I buy Angela's thesis. I don't think it's about economics or social organization though, I think it's directly related to technology. Digital reproduction and its accessibility through the internet demystifies culture and the act of cultural production like no other human creation ever has. We're all swimming in a giant sea of cultural fragments which can all be summoned up in perfect fidelity and infinite variety and abundance 24/7. The death of cultural scarcity, the death of cultural context (since any cultural product can be ripped from its home context) -- the death of a lot of things. The lack of rootedness, of place that Angela refers to is just the digital sphere which has occupied our imagination and restructured our means of perception.
Angela, I completely agree with this critique and you can see it in the way that students are "taught" how to write in Creative Writing programs (something I know a little bit about). While many instructors still live by the "write what you know" mantra (I would argue this mantra as a defense of placed-based writing), many students think that this type of writing is pedestrian, bordering on the parochial, and reject it. Like so much of the discussion that has been happening on the "good-side" of Twitter (my favorite euphemism for what many called the "post-left"), this seems to be a generational issue with Gen X. and cusp-Millennials (born between 79-86?) coming up against a different set of artistic values among younger writers. Anyway, the two poetry collections I'm working on now are both VERY place based and I have no idea how to bring these types of books to a market that already has no place for my genre. Not a very thorough response, but things I have been thinking about.
"We are not rooted anywhere and everything is temporary. There is no continuity with the future to which a love letter can be written."
This is a tad pessimistic. Yes, the "anywheres" floating around without true commitments or obligations are many. But putting down roots and building still remains an ultimate goal
in life. Without this holy grail, we are just another cog in the grinding machine.
Thanks for reminding us of Kenneth Clarke. He is an antidote to the ever present Now of the current era - like a snake wound around to eat its tail.
Thank goodness I live in a forest and can walk down to a river just to witness the continuity, to watch the clear waters pass by. This is a personal antidote to human folly.
"I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago."
Some trivialities:
- Absurd as it may sound, one of the pleasures I derived from watching old films as a lad was the ability to *date* a picture by its mise-en-scène; the clothes the actors wore, the cars they drove, lighting, camera angles, etc. Without any prior knowledge, one can easily discern that e.g. VERTIGO is late 1950s and THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE is mid-1970s. I first experienced severe aesthetic dissonance around this issue when I saw L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997); the set dressing is impeccably early 1950s, but the cinematography and pacing are echt 1990s.
- Re fashion: The male business suit has remained utterly static for 20 years. Double-breasted jackets made a brief comeback in the 1990s and three-buttons around the turn of the century, but both have since vanished from the racks. The baroque trends of the 1970s -- wide lapels and flared trouser cuffs -- are oft-mocked, but they were at least distinctive.
- If shown a random scene from a contemporaneously set Hollywood film with which I have no prior familiarity, I will be hard pressed to identify it as being from any particular year between 2000 and 2020. There's a flat nullity to mass popular culture now, a sense of being stuck in time, recycling over innovation.
- It's not as if period costume drama ever fell out of fashion, exactly, but the subgenre now seems to dominate especially longform television (e.g. MAD MEN and its successors/imitators). It may be that it's foisted on the viewing public for reasons unknown, but it seems possible also that people are desperate to see anything different from what is around them, something with a concrete sense of time and place.
"and three-buttons around the turn of the century, but both have since vanished from the racks"
I would count the disappearance of the three-button suit as a net positive
Fashion is incredibly boring now. There will never be another Alexander Mcqueen. Nothing really even goes out of fashion now. Nothing new and exciting, it’s just endless and random rehashing. Not even creative rehashing. No discernible style change each season, just random crap.
Interesting thoughts here- I would say there's always good books, music and video being made somewhere, but it's both buried in subcultures and ubiquitous at the same time, making it really hard to sift through all the crap. And even subcultures (or especially them in some cases) are poisoned by politics and ideology as well, if not in the art then at least in the conversations and writing that surrounds it. It's all so suffocating
And there's definitely something to permanence that gives you the space to make art, especially music. When I was in high school, having a band was easy, we were all stuck together! But then college and the idea we all had to disperse as far away from our hometowns as possible just threw wrenches into all that. It's only been in the last couple years being settled down and lucky enough to have like-minded friends nearby that I've been able to pick that up again. Of course being a one-man solo project is easier than ever...but that's so much less fun
“I would say there's always good books, music and video being made somewhere.” Where is it though?
For music as a specific example (I can't speak as much to books or movies), we're in the situation that there are so many sub-genres and sub-sub-genres in every style and scene that anyone could find a niche they like and hear something great. The difficulty is that there's just SO MUCH that gets created and released now that jumping in as an outsider is like walking into a store with every type of apple imaginable but most varieties taste like red delicious (i.e., bad).
This balkanization of styles also leads to a similar stratification of audiences. There's a rotting husk of the mainstream that is able to sustain legacy acts and a few giant megastars, but very little that's interesting, cool or worth remembering even 6 months later. Creativity is therefore dispersed in a giant mess of small audiences that don't form enough of a critical mass to propel something really great into the mainstream (vs. 1991..or example). There's only enough for desperate record executives to peel off into the homogenized mess of whatever's popular to give it some sort of branded "edge." Think of how pop music, of all styles, post-2013 had to sound vaguely like EDM or have "wooohhhooohhh" vocals in the chorus (I swear to god Glenn Danzig is owed millions for this lol).
This has always been true in some way. In the modern era of pop music, there's always been a mainstream, semi-mainstream and underground. But in past decades, alongside singular pop star entities, you would have acts that went mainstream who provided a gateway into the scenes they came from. The late 80s and early 90s saw labels take real risks, which brought so much cool stuff to the regular, everyday kid (who didn't know about the tape-trading circuit or other avenues of cult art). And it worked backwards as well- fertilizing the underground with new faces and even helping indie labels do incredibly well for themselves (Epitaph, Metal Blade, etc.). The stadium-packing megastar band created the interest that filtered down to the band playing the 1000-person hall.
This is almost inconceivable now.
A longwinded way of saying: You can find it for yourself, in whatever niche suits you the most. But it'll be a lonely hunt, sifting through artist pages on Bandcamp, and most other people won't know who you're talking about. When you've existed in a niche for decades you're used to it, but it's saddening in terms of a common culture we can all connect with.
In a way it's analogous to social/cultural/political writing. "If you like [music style X], well, here are five bands you might be into, not many people know about them, but they're still great." vs. "Well yea most writers are hacks and psychos now ... but hey, there's this great substack I follow ..."
And yet I get the sense, thanks to thinkers as diverse as Mary Harrington and Adam Curtis, that we are due a new period of high romantic aesthetics as a way out of our current predicament. I do so hope that’s the case.
I hope you’re right. I can’t stand the absence of it any longer.
I hope so too- perhaps the emerging 'meta-modern' movement will call us all back to surer ground....?It's hard not to think of Kierkegaard's 'Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom' here....The need for stability of ground-cultural and other has to be feeding into current reversions to Nationalism and 'strongman' leaders Being metaphysically and culturally un-moored is causing massive unease and sense of dis-equilibrium among many as cultural ground feels shifting and quicksanding these days...Perhaps its not so much the shift and change but the frightening pace of it in the last two decades that leave us reeling....Then again, what about 'negative capability'? The early part of the 20th century hardly in itself a time of stability, produced great art and culture from shift-eg Yeats' response to modernity- and if any artist required conservation and even restoration of order it was he- or the peripatetic Joyce and Picasso in visual arts? The cinema is in an interesting case for sure- one feels it may be an art form past its heyday of the late 60/s- and l70/s where several times a year you came out of the cinema feeling stimulated, moved, provoked, awed....now we are at sea in a Marvel/DC never ending cineverse that spawns prequels, sequels, offshoots and reshoots in over long, over big empty spectacles....anyway...feel the pain there!
"a Marvel/DC never ending cineverse"
Even that used to be fun with some of the original run of films in the early 2000s, now it just feels so tedious
Angela, I’m sure folks would be interested (well, I would be) in any contemporary books, tv, film, music etc that you feel DO achieve what you feel is missing in general?
Two recent pieces of "culture" I've enjoyed and felt authentic and like they had some depth -- the movie "Minari" (was shocked by how good and resonant this was compared to the rest of the trash in theaters) and the album "Purple Mountains" by Richard Berman formerly of the Silver Jews. That last might be the exception that proves the rule since it's depressing as hell and Berman killed himself shortly after releasing it.
But anyway, despite exceptions I buy Angela's thesis. I don't think it's about economics or social organization though, I think it's directly related to technology. Digital reproduction and its accessibility through the internet demystifies culture and the act of cultural production like no other human creation ever has. We're all swimming in a giant sea of cultural fragments which can all be summoned up in perfect fidelity and infinite variety and abundance 24/7. The death of cultural scarcity, the death of cultural context (since any cultural product can be ripped from its home context) -- the death of a lot of things. The lack of rootedness, of place that Angela refers to is just the digital sphere which has occupied our imagination and restructured our means of perception.
Angela, I completely agree with this critique and you can see it in the way that students are "taught" how to write in Creative Writing programs (something I know a little bit about). While many instructors still live by the "write what you know" mantra (I would argue this mantra as a defense of placed-based writing), many students think that this type of writing is pedestrian, bordering on the parochial, and reject it. Like so much of the discussion that has been happening on the "good-side" of Twitter (my favorite euphemism for what many called the "post-left"), this seems to be a generational issue with Gen X. and cusp-Millennials (born between 79-86?) coming up against a different set of artistic values among younger writers. Anyway, the two poetry collections I'm working on now are both VERY place based and I have no idea how to bring these types of books to a market that already has no place for my genre. Not a very thorough response, but things I have been thinking about.
Cheers, ~jrg
"We are not rooted anywhere and everything is temporary. There is no continuity with the future to which a love letter can be written."
This is a tad pessimistic. Yes, the "anywheres" floating around without true commitments or obligations are many. But putting down roots and building still remains an ultimate goal
in life. Without this holy grail, we are just another cog in the grinding machine.
S.R.V.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGPx-ekqZEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ogmwH5MMRg
Thanks for reminding us of Kenneth Clarke. He is an antidote to the ever present Now of the current era - like a snake wound around to eat its tail.
Thank goodness I live in a forest and can walk down to a river just to witness the continuity, to watch the clear waters pass by. This is a personal antidote to human folly.