A Double-Feature of Cultural Context and Implied Elitism!

As a film, Grindhouse is a three-hour homage to paracinema, a genre-classification tool that, prior to a week ago, was the province of college film classes and video-store geek collectives. Important within this distinction is that the term "grindhouse" used to describe a location as much as a common filmic structure or aesthetic: specifically, the scuzzy, low-rent theatres that showed scratchy versions of no-budget, crazy-violent exploitation movies. While they wanted to pay homage to a specific viewing context, Tarantino and Rodgriguez made sure their films were as accessible as possible to a large audience, and didn't weigh their respective contributions down with obscure minutae, eliminating casual viewers from enjoying them. Essentially, Planet Terror is a ramped-up, From Dusk ‘til Dawn sci-fi/action/horror flick (that Rose McGowan: talk about Restless Leg Syndrome amirite?), and Death Proof has enough overt lecherousness, roundtable diner conversations about pop culture, and obscure rock songs to qualify as a Tarantino pastiche par excellence. Most filmgoers are not freakishly devoted to subcultural film studies, and no doubt went to see two rather expertly executed films from two cultishly admired directors, connecting with Grindhouse on a purely affective level, not an intellectual one.

Seeing Grindhouse last night reminded me of another novel cultural event that played with notions of location-as-art-enjoyment-context, but less successfully so. Reknowned classical violinist (and IU grad/Bloomington native!) Joshua Bell was commissioned by the Washington Post to perform as a street musician in a subway kiosk. He played Massenet and Bach and Schubert, and was largely ignored by passersby, making about 30 bucks for a morning’s work. Writer Gene Weingarten's point, and it’s a valid (if not overly obvious) one, is that “context matters,” and Bell’s beautiful renditions were essentially “art without a frame.” One of my professors alerted me to the story, and then I noticed that Carl had also donated his two cents, so here are mine. I’ve been very interested for a while now in theories of listening contexts for music (this piece, for instance, came from this fascination), but I feel it necessary to quickly comment here not only on the locational context of the music, but the author’s rather elitist glossing over the idea of cultural capital, more specifically his seeming wonder at the ignorance of the passersby.

It's certainly one thing to offer that any work of art is only as potent as the context it's presented within, and Weingarten goes out of his way to reference Kant, Hume and Leibniz when discussing what "beauty" is, and how it's not uniform, but created in the mind of the observer. Fine enough, but the author also falls into the trap of essentializing these "observers" (despite his reporterly man-on-the-street interviews) as being all cut from the same intellectual and cultural cloth as Bell, classical music-lovers, and well, Weingarten himself (or so he wants us to think). He makes the wrongheaded assumption that those busy morning commuters who didn't take the time to stop and enjoy the beautiful music being played on a centuries-old violin were (pardon me for this) pedestrian. While he wraps up his piece by backing off the "unsophisticated" undercurrent, Weingarten does offer, quoting author John Lane, that they might have the "wrong priorities." Oy. He continues, "if we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written...then what else are we missing?" For starters, we're missing an anachronistic, elitist appreciation of what makes something "good." It's not just that classical music is inherently better, but Weingarten apparently despises the iPod, taking the tone of a father trying to get his son to take piano lessons. For the author, the iPod has "perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences." Like Carl from above, I am always fond of seeing huge newspapers make an attempt to engage with aesthetic theory in any form or fashion. But Weingarten's elitist and classist distinction between what's intellectually stimulating to listen to in public (classical music, professionally performed) and what's merely "Just Like Heaven" on an iPod (sorry, but put me in this camp if I'm trying to make it to work on time) is far more regressive than it appears at a glance. The century-plus-old distinction, dating back to the earliest days of recorded music, is that "live" is inherently better than canned. That one can't possibly, seriously be enjoying life to its fullest if only listening to an mp3. It's a fun and novel experiment, to be sure, and the piece certainly can't be faulted for bringing issues like this into public discourse. But for an article that poses (at least a little) as an expose on the failure of society to stop and enjoy high culture, it traps itself in the same haughty gallery mentality it's supposed to reveal.

ALSO: Big ups to the WIUX folks who revived the recently dormant Bloomington tradition known as this Culture Shock festival this past weekend, in spite of some nasty weather. They set up two stages with tents and centralized heaters, limiting the atmospheric nastiness significantly. I only caught two entire sets, but they were both great: Black Moth Super Rainbow, which I wrote about here, stunned me with their short, hugely rhythmic bursts and "Kelly Watch the Stars" vocal modulations. Richard Swift, whom I wrote about here, put on a Letdown heavy set, but closed with an extended, psychedelic version of "Holiday" that also managed, coincidentally enought, to work in a vocoder.

TONIGHT: If you're in the area, come out to Landlocked and party with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Seriously.

Nature is Magic on the Discovery Channel

At a time when polluting corporations skate by unscathed by regulation and the effects of global warming equals an Oscar win, one might think that documentaries like Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth could be a form of unintentional protest, right? Showing how gorgeous and sublime the world around us that we never see is, increasing the level of repressed guilt in its viewers (which wears off by dinner, but whatever), and helping to cement an environmentally progressive discourse in the American cultural imagination and stuff? Well, if the show wasn’t so completely enamored with its own grandeur, maybe. The series, which takes a BBC approach to science and nature by lovingly filming them and then edting them into high-concept narrative vignettes, debuted last night. Instantly, I was reminded of Winged Migration and That Other One About Penguins, as well as the recent bio-film-about eco-art Rivers and Tides, which lovingly displays Andy Goldsworthy’s scupture au naturel with gorgeously patient cinematography. I still don’t know which part of the film I enjoyed more—his art, which was made from and in nature and which lasted only as long as its environment would let it, or the way in which it was essentially archived with brilliant photography. The style has its progenitor in the (Coppola-produced) Koyaanisqatsi, but the technology for motion pictures has finally managed to develop the ability to fetishize the natural, non-human world the same way it envisions the people who share it (even moreso than PBS' Nova has been doing forever---Planet Earth is like Nova on Creatine, standing in front of the gym mirror, flexing and telling itself how buff it is), and these shows and documentaries are creating a new genre of scientertainment-ence non-fiction-ish. And, to its debit, Planet Earth doesn’t want you to forget how they do it, and how cool they thus are.

Like every cable television documentary, it has wall-to-wall voice over narration, and the woman here takes care to mention often how totally unique and cool and never-before-done the photography we’re seeing is. After about 15 minutes, I started expecting to see product placement, as if the show were just one big ad for Canon HD lenses or hangglider camera attachments, or the executive producer’s wide-eyed imagination. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of documentaries (or other hybrid shows that just call themselves documentaries) that use the camera as a scientific tool, capable of revealing some sort of irrefutable truth unreachable otherwise, and there are certainly reservations I have about the claims toward objectivity lots of documentarians offer. But wow…did you see this show? I know they Disney-fy the holy hell out of these beasts, but come on. On the first episode, they capture on film two wolves chasing a monstrous pack of caribou, attempting to frighten the calves away from their mother. One of the wolves scares off some prey and chases it for what seems like miles. I found myself rooting for that poor baby, valiantly outrunning the wolf forever. But then it turns ugly, the wolf wins, and Discovery fades to black and cuts to commercial as he settles down to dinner. No matter whether it’s an animal, human or what, actually watching a living thing die on network television is a strange and distressing experience, but one I also got a thrill from, and I'm not fully sure why. Tom Gunning, a professor at the University of Chicago, has written a lot on the effects the earliest motion pictures had on many audiences, most of whom were still amazed by the representational abilities of still photography. Far from the mythical naive, horrified spectators, they sat in shock of the potency of the technology they were witnessing, and reveled in its novel ability to render objects and actions so lifelike (and out-of-context). Not that I would infer that Planet Earth et al's technologized naturalist-maximalism inspires anything relating to what audiences around the turn of the century felt about trains leaving the screen and coming into the theatre, but I for one was certainly able to suspend disbelief for a minute last night and stare at pretty pictures. Until that woman started telling me how great they were again, and then I came over here and wrote this.