Archive | November, 2008

Good Choice: The Filth and the Fury

10 Nov

I’ve been sick for the past few days, which means when I haven’t been sleeping I’ve been watching TV. Lots of TV. The Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury was paired with 24 Hour Party People on IFC this weekend and I watched them both twice. Facking brilliant!

I’d seen 24HPP before, but TFATF was new to me. I highly recommend it, especially in light of the recent post about primary source research. The trailer (see below) tries to sell you on punk rock sensationalism, but in reality this film is a nerd’s paradise of found footage, meticulous research, and curatorial choice. You don’t have to care a fig about the music or the subculture to appreciate (and learn from) TFATF’s artistry.

Director Julien Temple also gets huge marks for making one of the best creative choices I’ve seen in a documentary in years: Everyone who is interviewed for the film remains in shadow. All the surviving Sex Pistols participated in the doc, and while you see the silhouettes of their bodies and hear their voices, you never see their faces.

As a result you stay in period. It’s 1977. England is falling apart. Johnny Rotten is fresh and feral. The other guys are . . . well, other guys. (But at least they’re other guys who don’t ruin the mood by looking bloated and saggy.) Toward the end of the film you expect (and maybe even want) the light to finally come on so you can see them now. But it never happens. Nice.

It’s easy to get caught up in the Big Idea. But sometimes it’s small, brave choices like this one that make a piece gel in surprising ways. Next time you sit down to whatever you’re working on, look for an opportunity to make a choice like this. What can you take away? What might its absence add?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the trailer for The Filth and the Fury:

President . . . of the Arts?

6 Nov

Interesting article in the Toronto Star about the artistic legacy of the Bush administration. The idea is that presidents “cast distinctive shadows” over the culture made during their tenure. The piece connects JFK’s “testicular adventurism” to early James Bond movies, Nixon’s Watergate to the paranoid thriller, and Reagan’s “don’t-worry-be-happy paternalism” to 80s wish fulfillment fantasies like Back to the Future.

Meanwhile, W. gets credit for the rise of the liberal op-ed documentary (Super Size Me), the superhero as conflicted loner (Batman Returns), and making fiction irrelevant. (I would have also mentioned “torture porn” movies like the Saw series.)

Let us assume this is all true. If so, then what can we kind of culture can we expect to be made under President Obama?

1. Snark detuned

It’s hard to imagine Gawker and The Soup going away, but it’s possible that their stock takes a hit. When you have a secretive, bullying, uncaring president, then reactionary cynicism provides relief and self-protection. If our public life becomes more open, communicative and hopeful, then being a crank may become (slightly) less cool.

2. The return of screwball

On the other hand, sh*ts still f*cked up and probably will be for a while. Just because snark loses it’s appeal doesn’t mean that the world is going to go all Jedediah Purdy. But breezy escapism doesn’t have to mean dumb avoidance. That’s why I like shows like 30 Rock to do well. It’s frantic, sharp, (a little) mean but ultimately humanistic and engaged.

3. Crypto-racial stories

Electing our first African American president is a wonderful milestone, but we’re still lousy about talking about race in this country. Be on the lookout for deeply coded stories that explore race while also maintaining plausible deniability about the true subject matter. (Personally, I think this could be both artistically and politically interesting, not to mention useful. At the same time, I fear the rise of crypto-racist work, which would be f*cked up and wrong.)

4. The Emporer’s New Clothes?

Given the cult of personality surrounding Obama, it’s inevitable that people start telling stories that question whether or not there is substance behind the rhetoric. Expect some lame “empty suit” cautionary tales, but hope for some thoughtful explorations of how leadership works in our image-driven culture.

5. Utilitarian traditional

Solving our collective problems will require more collective thinking and action, but how do you pull that off in a starkly individualistic culture? I could see generic rebellion (a la Thomas Frank’s Conquest of Cool) getting a slight downgrade. It’s even possible that conformity loses its oppressive connotations and gets an update that highlights how useful it is in getting things done. I don’t know about you, but I’d wear a grey flannel suit for change.

We Did It!

5 Nov

Election Day Link (and Lesson) Dump

4 Nov

Election Day. Going to make this quick. A little link-and-lesson:

History’s Greatest Fictional Presidential Candidates (Slate slide show)

Multimedia doesn’t have to be fancy. Slate, Forbes, Wired, etc. all do slide shows, and whether you do it for love or for money it’s a worthwhile form to explore.

Obama: The Musical (BBC article)

Is it too soon? Of course. Is there such a thing as “too soon” any more? Of course not!

The End of the Satirical Industrial Complex? (Salon)

If Obama wins, how will professional comedians make fun of him? Is this the end of political satire? Classic speculative trend piece. You can read a piece like this for fun, but as crystal balls go it’s cracked and cloudy.

More interesting is the fact that someone will figure it out how to make fun of Obama, and it will probably be someone new or relatively unknown, and their accomplishment will make (and perhaps undo) their career.

The Primary Source . . . of Flavor

3 Nov

As a writer and journalist, I couldn’t be happier with all the research options at my digital fingertips. There are days when the Great Almighty Screen provides all the information I could possibly want, information that used to require that I get off my ass, leave the house and talk to people.

But for my latest project I’ve started to get physical. One of the books I’m working on is set in 1954, and I’ve started to collect artifacts (mostly magazines) from that time. There is something about the Gestalt of an old issue of Cosmopolitan that is even more illuminating than the article about a man who put his wife in a mental hospital because for some reason she didn’t like being a suburban housewife (this happened a lot more than you think).

I’m talking about how the paper feels, and the art direction of the advertisements, and the strange causes of outrage in the letters to the editor, and the sensation of holding something that someone else held a long time ago and picking up the echo of their heart and of their mind.

Take, for example, this Wired photo essay of classic instruction manuals. Even though the subject matter isn’t dear to my heart, I got a thrill at seeing the binder for the first civilian nuclear energy plant in the US, as well as the Project Gemini “familiarization manual” (image left). The people who used these booklets didn’t give them a second thought, and yet from where we stand they witnessed a partial core meltdown and a trip to space.

Ideally you’ll put your mitts on the real thing, but in a pinch a picture or a snippet of video will do. I now make a Google images search and a YouTube search a mandatory part of everything I’m working on. Doing a Google blogs search is another way to pick up thoughts, images and impressions. You never know what you’ll find.

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