Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 39
June 30, 2020
Syllabus: Situation Critical—Writing Arts & Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age, Online Workshop
Instructor
Overview
Interested in writing more effectively about the arts and culture in multiple modes, from traditional reviews to audio podcasting, videographic essays, social media approaches, multimedia formats, and other forms of critical engagement? In this workshop, we survey the history of arts and cultural criticism in America, with particular attention to diverse critical traditions and perspectives. Students will develop projects through collaborative workshops, ongoing dialogue, and videoconferences with established critics and editors for music, dance/theater, visual art, and more. Students can focus exclusively on drafting written criticism online through a simple WordPress website or explore the experimental digital approaches to arts and cultural criticism each day. Each student will leave the workshop with a webpage of work that can serve as the start of a portfolio of new modes of arts and cultural criticism. The majority of this online workshop will be asynchronous except for 1-2 hours per day for videoconference discussions with visiting critics.
How to Enroll
This workshop is available to participants at any level of interest or experience. No previous digital or critical expertise is required, just a willingness to explore. Students may take the course for 3 undergraduate or 2 graduate credit hours from SUNY Brockport. Click here to register online or contact tateshaw@vsw.org for more information to register by phone.
How the Workshop Works
The workshop is structured to get you started on writing about different forms of arts and culture.You can choose to focus exclusively on your writing.Or you can explore the optional digital experiments if you wish to probe new ways of pursuing arts and culture criticism online.Each day, we tackle a different form of arts and culture and different digital possibilities.The goal is not necessarily to complete a fully developed digital project (that takes more than a week most likely), but rather to experiment and start to think about possibilities, propose concepts and ideas, formulate plans, and do so through experimentation.Each morning your task is to read over the days schedule and make a plan for yourself. We gather from 10:30-11:15 on Zoom to check in. Then you can work on the day’s tasks. There are readings and proposed assignments, but if you wish to incorporate new ideas, write about something different, or try out a digital experiment of your own, you are welcome to do so.We reconvene from 4-5pm to check in about the day’s work. This is a drop-in Zoom session, so you can spend the whole time with us or pop online to say hi as you wish.Most evenings and a few afternoons, a special guest will join us for an hour of informal discussion about their career, their work, their ideas, and art and cultural criticism in general. Attendance required. You may conduct your work in the course in public, or you may complete your assignments just for the instructor and your fellow students by setting a password on your WordPress posts or website as a whole. Either is fine.It goes without saying (but I am saying it anyway) that while there is a very wide range of discourse one can engage in with arts and cultural criticism in our course, including difficult ideas and unpopular positions, no racist, sexist, or otherwise phobic writing is appropriate. Speak your truth, but be accountable to others, please.
Other Policies
Disabilities and Accommodations
As the father of a child with neuroatypicality, Professor Kramer recognizes that students may require to accommodations to learn effectively. In accord with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Brockport Faculty Senate legislation, students with documented disabilities may be entitled to specific accommodations. Brockport’s Office for Students with Disabilities makes this determination. Please phone the Office at (585) 395-5409 or e-mail at osdoffic@brockport.edu to inquire about obtaining an official letter for the instructor detailing any approved accommodations. You are responsible for providing the course instructor with an official letter. Faculty work with the Office for Students with Disabilities to meet the needs of students with disabilities.
Discrimination and Harassment
Sex and gender discrimination, including sexual harassment, are prohibited in educational programs and activities, including classes. Title IX legislation and College policy require the College to provide sex and gender equity in all areas of campus life. If you or someone you know has experienced sex or gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, or stalking, we encourage you to seek assistance and to report the incident through resources at https://www.brockport.edu/about/title.... Confidential assistance is available on campus at Hazen Center for Integrated Care and RESTORE. Faculty are NOT confidential under Title IX and will need to share information with the Title IX & College Compliance Officer. For these and other policies governing campus life, please see https://www.brockport.edu/support/pol....
Schedule
Monday
WordPress and Words
Today
Today we will get set up on the WordPress content management system. Each student will have a separate WordPress installation with which to experiment. If you have used WordPress before, you can explore more advanced settings. If you have not, this course will let you gain basic facility with the platform, which now runs approximately thirty percent of websites. We will also focus on writing about words today, whether that be an interest in novels, poetry, nonfiction, translation, or some other form of language.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Check-in
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” New York Review of Books, 20 November 2008 (pdf online)Thomas Mallon and Liesl Schillinger, “Should Critics Aim to Be Open-Minded or to Pass Judgment?,” New York Times Book Review, 29 August 2017Melina Delkic, “Reading Thoughtfully With The Times’s Nonfiction Critic, Jennifer Szalai,” New York Times, 18 April 2018Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Where Do Sentences Come From?,” New York Times, 13 August 2012
Additional Optional Materials:
Daniel Mendelsohn, “A Critic’s Manifesto,” New Yorker, 28 August 2012Dwight Garner, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” New York Times, 15 August 2012Various Authors, “Do We Need Professional Critics?,” New York Times, 7 October 2012“Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” Talks and other materials, Walker Arts Museum, 28-30 May 2015Matthew Mullins, “Are We Postcritical?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 December 2015Barry Schwabsky, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” The Nation, 9 March 2016Nicholas Dames, “Criticism in the Twilight,” The Nation, 16 November 2016Hua Hsu, “The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art,” New Yorker, 21 September 2016AO Scott, “Everybody’s a Critic. And That’s How It Should Be.,” New York Times 30 January 2016Edward Mendelson, “What Is the Critic’s Job?,” New York Review of Books, 28 September 2017Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” New York Times, 5 July 2019A.O. Scott, “A Critic Moves Between Literature and Film,” New York Times, 17 June 2020
Tools
WordPressAdvanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg pluginScanner or phone cameraAdobe Reader, Preview, Perusall, Hypothesis, NB, or another PDF application or web-based toolPowerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides, VoiceThread or another slideshow annotation tool
Project
Explore the WordPress tutorial.Pick out a favorite piece of writing or text.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the text. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you in the text. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use quotations to support your claims, or put another way, build your analysis out of key quotations. What are the keywords, key phrases, key moments in the text?Optional digital. Experiment with the following modes of multimedia narrative analysis:Text style. Upload and place an image in your post Install the Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg plugin (or search for other plugins). Explore different colors, background colors, line breaks, spacing, or other text stylings to emphasize your interpretation.Annotation. You can use annotation as either an analytic tool on the way to a polished piece of close reading or as a communication tool. For an example of the former, see examples of my history students’ work in “Writing on the Past, Literally (Figuratively).” For an example of the latter, one might think of image memes with text added as one new form of digital-era annotation. Using computers to annotate texts builds on a deep tradition of marginalia, but the digital medium might offer new approaches and possibilities too. For instance, does digital annotation help you build up inductively from specific parts of a document (better close reading)? As a communication tool, are there ways to bring a reader through your interpretation by annotating a text, or placing images of your annotations into your post either as one annotated document or a sequence of annotations? How might annotation relate to the narrative of a work of criticism?Scan or take a photo of the text you are critiquing.Print out a copy to annotate, draw upon, and mark up. Scan the annotated copies to create image files (jpg, png, gif) to upload to your post (you’ll need to export your pdf file annotation as an image for it to show up as an image in WordPress or you could experiment with using a pdf embedder plugin). Position in your post where you believe the annotations work best to deliver a compelling essay.Or, try using the comments/annotation tools in Adobe Reader, Preview, or another PDF reader to create your annotation images. You can annotate one image of the text or multiple images with different annotations depending on what narrative you want to express using annotation. Your annotations can be anything: arrows, sketches, drawings, other words, or something else. Export your annotations as image files (jpg, png, gif) rather than as a pdf. Upload to your post and position in your post where you believe the annotations work best to deliver a compelling essay.Or, send me a pdf of what you wish to annotate and I will upload to a course Perusall page for you to annotate.You can also try Hypothesis, which lets you and others directly annotate web documents (works best for annotating a document already published to the web).Or, try sequencing a set of annotations in Powerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or VoiceThread as a slideshow. Add text or even audio or video annotations?Your main goal is to think about criticism as an act of “writing in the margins.” What does it mean to write about someone else’s work? Is all arts and cultural criticism a kind of annotative act?!If you think of another mode of multimedia criticism of a text, try it out. For instance, perhaps you want to ask your reader to click from one post to another for some reason, or to refer to a source not in your own website. Add html links, experiment with the widgets tool or menu tool, sidebars, different WordPress themes, or some other concept. If you can’t get WordPress to quite do what you envision, that is ok. Sketch out your concept and upload that. The goal here is to come up with ideas for new modes of multimedia critical essay writing even if we can’t fully implement them in one day.Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas about particular texts, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guests
6-7pm. Dr. Alissa Karl, Department of English, SUNY Brockport, and Sarah Mesle, Editor, Los Angeles Review of Books and Avidly, Assistant Professor of Writing, USC.
Tuesday
Visual Arts
Today
Today we will explore visual arts analysis. What does it mean to look at something closely, in a sustained way that reveals details in the artwork? How does one then contextualize, analyze, connect those details to larger significance and meaning? Can you get your essay not to offer simple judgment of taste (good, bad, beautiful, ugly), but to explain why an artwork matters, what it has to tell us about itself, the artist, the time in which it was made, and/or why it matters now?
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Check-in
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Anya Ventura, “Slow Criticism: Art in the Age of Post-Judgement,” Temporary Art Review, 15 February 2016Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Power of Patience,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2013Jason Farago, “Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece,” New York Times, 28 May 2020
Additional Optional Materials:
Lucy Ives, “Renegade Art Historian Aby Warburg Challenged the Discipline’s Elitism with Photography,” Art in America, 8 June 2020Will Fenstermaker, “Towards a Critical Insurgency,” AICA Magazine, 2 August 2019Clay Matlin, “What is Art Criticism?,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2016-January 2017Kareem Estefan, “Reparative Criticism,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2016-January 2017Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79Lori Waxman, “60 Wrd/Min Art Critic”
Tools
WordPressAdobe Reader, Preview, Photoshop, or image editor
Project
Pick out a favorite work of visual arts (broadly conceived, it can be a painting, drawing, sculpture, conceptual art, whatever interests you).In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Experiment with cropping and other digital tactics of visual analysis. Use a photo editor to present a series of images and text that narrate your close reading of an object. Take us through a series of cropped images and/or annotations to unfold your critical interpretation and narrative. You may sketch out in words or drawings (on paper, then scan and upload) a concept for a sort of visual essay of criticism even if you do not fully complete the digital experiment (remember you only have one day, so concepts and ideas matter as much as realization of a project).Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Tempestt Hazel, Founder, Sixty Inches From Center and Program Officer, Field Foundation.
Wednesday
Music/Sound/Audial Criticism
Today
Today we will explore music, sound, and audio forms of art as well as criticism. What does it mean to write well about music? How might sonic and audial modes of criticism function to explore music, sound, and audio art itself? How might you use sound to explore other modes of art, bringing voice to silenced or silent art, people, communities, culture? Dive in, experiment, and I encourage you to describe concepts and ideas even if you cannot quite execute them in one day.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Check-in
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Ann Powers NPR Story ArchiveWesley Morris, “For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it,” New York Times, 14 August 2019 and Wesley Morris and Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619 Project Episode 3, The Birth of American Music podcast, 6 September 2019Oliver Wang and Morgan Rhodes, Heat Rocks podcastMali Obomsawin, “This Land Is Whose Land? Indian Country and the Shortcomings of Settler Protest,” Folklife Magazine, 14 June 2019Michael J. Kramer, “The sounds of American counterculture and citizenship: The Republic of Rock playlist essay,” Oxford University Press Blog, 8 October 2013
Tools
WordPressGutenberg audio player or plugin audio playerLook for Embeds blocks to embed links from a streaming serviceMicrophone (computer or phone mic is fine)Audacity, Garageband, Adobe Audition, LMMS, Reaper, or another audio editing programAny Video Converter, Audio Hijack, High Criteria, Handbrake, and other tools for preparing audio elementsSpotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube, or other streaming audio serviceSoundcite.js for inline audio quotations
Project
Pick out a favorite work of music, audio podcasting, or sound art.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Audio Podcast. Develop a script and record a brief audio prototype of your critical essay. Do not merely read a paper into the microphone. Rather, consider how to use spoken word, sound effects, sound samples, multiple voices, or other modes of audio storytelling to convey your essay. Your script and podcast can be provisional and a draft. The ideas and concepts are more important at this stage than the execution in one day of work.Annotated Playlist Essay. If you are working with music, experiment with an annotated playlist approach to your essay. How might you move between sound clips of songs and your own writing to develop close analysis and take your reader/listener through the music you are analyzing? You can either load MP3 files into the WP Gutenberg audio player or use Spotify or Apple Music or Bandcamp to embed tracks in your WP post.Again, ideas and concepts are more crucial at this stage than complete execution of idea. Experiment and see what you learn.Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Guest
1-2pm. David Hadju, music critic, historian, author, and editor, The Nation.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Ann Powers, music critic, historian, and author, National Public Radio.
Thursday
Performance/Film/TV
Today
Today we turn to performance, both on stage (dance, theater) and on screen (film, tv). How might digital modes of publication allow for new kinds of performance criticism, writing, analysis, and explication? There is plenty to explore, from multimedia essay writing to the new form of “videographic criticism,” in which the critical essay harnesses the very medium that it critiques. As with yesterday, dive in, experiment, and I encourage you to describe concepts and ideas even if you cannot quite execute them in one day.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Check-in
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Siobhan Burke, “Dancing Bodies That Proclaim: Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, 9 June 2020Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody blogAdam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen, Filmspotting podcastEmily Nussbaum, TV criticism at the New YorkerMichael J. Kramer, “Moving History: How The Seldoms Turn LBJ into Multimedia Dance Theater,” MCA Blog/Culture Rover, 31 march 2015Helen Shaw, “Building Trust After Inclusivity Failed: Lessons for the Theater,” Vulture (New York Magazine), 10 June 2020Jason Mittell, “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 224–42
Optional Additional Materials:
Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, The Videographic Essay: Practice and PedagogyNathan Heller, “Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews,” New Yorker, 14 October 2011
(read the five reviews too if you have time)
John Bresland, various video essaysMiguel Guitierrez, “The Perfect Dance Critic,” Movement Research Journal #25 Dance Writing (Fall 2002)Elizabeth Méndez Berry, “Why Cultural Critics of Color Matter,” 3 May 2018
Tools
WordPressGutenberg video player or other pluginVimeo, YouTube, or other cloud-based video serviceAny Video Converter, Handbrake, MDRP, or other software to extract videoiMovie, Adobe Premiere, or other video editing software
Project
Pick out a favorite work of performance (online or not), film, or tv.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Multimedia essay. Experiment with incorporating elements of video, audio, images, and text to create a review of a performance, film, or television program. Try out some versions, offer a conceptual plan for how you would develop a multimedia work of performance criticism more fully.Videographic essay. Experiment with recording a video essay of criticism. See if you can use one of the video extraction tools above to use video from an online or DVD source. Then try using iMovie, Adobe Premiere, or another video editing tool to create a video essay. You can create a very small pilot or prototype experiment and then develop a script draft and conceptual plan. What would your videographic essay accomplish? How would it use the video format to convey a critical analysis effectively?Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Siobhan Burke, Dance Critic, New York Times.
Friday
Revisions, Pitches, Social Media, and Conclusions
Today
For the final day of our workshop, an opportunity to do the all-important work of revision as well as to experiment with other tools for the digital cultural critic: the subscription newsletter and social media. It’s also time to work on the art of the pitch. How do you frame a story idea for an editor effectively? Finally, today is an opportunity to reflect upon the week’s worth in a short essay. We’ll convene at 4pm for a little online Zoom celebration of the week’s work, and a chance to reflect together on how the workshop has been, and what might be better if we do it again.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Check-in
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Steve Smith, Night After NightSiobhan Burke, Danceletter
Tools
WordPressSubstack, TinyLetter, or other newsletter serviceSocial media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.WordPress social media embed plugins
Project
Revision. Revise one work from the past week. Do not replace your old post. Repost a new version for today.Pitch. Develop three versions (iterations) of your story pitch for the story you are revising. How would you present it to a potential editor or publication succinctly? Try out a few versions. Post to your WordPress page. Your pitch should be no more than a paragraph (3-4 sentences). You can also experiment with bullet points if you wish.Peer Critique. Look at a project a fellow workshopper has done this week and offer a paragraph or two of commentary on it. Think about being constructively critical. Praise what impressed you, ask questions, tease out ideas.Reflection back/Projecting forward brief essay. What did you get the most out of this week? What was most frustrating? What was most satisfying? Take a moment to reflect on your work in the course this week. Then, what comes next? What would you like to keep working on, learning about, developing, and how might you go about doing so?Optional Digital.Newsletter. Conceptualize or even try to develop a subscription newsletter using Substack, TinyLetter, or other newsletter service.Social Media. Try creating an experimental social media feed on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or another platform. See if you can use a WordPress plugin to embed your social media feed in your WordPress website. More critically, address the conceptual questions: How might you develop an “essay” of cultural criticism using these sequential “feeds”? What are the possibilities? What are the challenges? Is social media merely a mode of publicizing arts and cultural criticism or can it be the form itself?
Guest
1-2pm. Becca Rafferty, Arts Entertainment Editor, Staff Writer, CITY Newspaper.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
5-6pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom. Reflect on the week’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general. Celebrate the conclusion of the workshop.
Go Deeper Into Art, Culture, and Criticism: A Very Selected Bibliography (With Items To Be Added)
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (originally published in The National Review, 1864; reprinted, Macmillan & Co., 1865), 9-36Walter Pater, “Preface” and “Conclusion,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (1893; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xix-xxv, 186-190Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Discussing Everything,” in Intentions (London: Methuen and Co., 1913), 95-220George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition Defined,” from Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 14-35Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” The Dial 64 (11 April 1918), reprinted in Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 165-180TS Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 1-14HL Mencken, “Footnote on Criticism,” in Prejudices, Third Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 84-105Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 217-252R.P. Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work” in Language As Gesture: Essays in Poetry (1933; reprinted, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 372-399C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” (1962), in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 134-44Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation (1966)Raymond Williams, “Criticism” and “Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), 84-93“Culture” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Bennett, Grossberg and Morris (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 63-69Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge, 1981): 227-39Charles Lemert, “What Is Culture? Amid the flowers, seeds, or weeds?” in Durkheim’s Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36-58T.S. Eliot, “The Three Senses of ‘Culture,’” in Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 21-34.Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light,” in Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1867-9), republished in Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58-80.Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947; reprint, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94-136Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, 5 (Fall 1939): 34-49.Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, ed. John Summers (New York: New York Review Book, 2011), 3-71, originally published in Partisan Review 27(Spring 1960): 203-233Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” Between Past and Future (1961; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993), 197-226Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2012)Clifford Geertz, “Ch. 1: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” “Ch. 8, Ideology as a Cultural System,” and “Ch. 15 , Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000)bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation” Video, 1997Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002)Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out? From Matter of Fact to Matter of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 225–48Jonathan Letham, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007)Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, 4 (Autumn 2011), 573-591Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, eds., Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015)Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon, eds., Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016)Gregory, Sholette, Chloë Bass, and Social Practice Queens, eds. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (New York: Allworth, 2018)C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, eds., Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020)
Syllabus: Situation Critical—Writing Arts & Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age Online Workshop
Instructor
Overview
Interested in writing more effectively about the arts and culture in multiple modes, from traditional reviews to audio podcasting, videographic essays, social media approaches, multimedia formats, and other forms of critical engagement? In this workshop, we survey the history of arts and cultural criticism in America, with particular attention to diverse critical traditions and perspectives. Students will develop projects through collaborative workshops, ongoing dialogue, and videoconferences with established critics and editors for music, dance/theater, visual art, and more. Students can focus exclusively on drafting written criticism online through a simple WordPress website or explore the experimental digital approaches to arts and cultural criticism each day. Each student will leave the workshop with a webpage of work that can serve as the start of a portfolio of new modes of arts and cultural criticism. The majority of this online workshop will be asynchronous except for 1-2 hours per day for videoconference discussions with visiting critics.
How to Enroll
This workshop is available to participants at any level of interest or experience. No previous digital or critical expertise is required, just a willingness to explore. Students may take the course for 3 undergraduate or 2 graduate credit hours from SUNY Brockport. Click here to register online or contact tateshaw@vsw.org for more information to register by phone.
How the Workshop Works
The workshop is structured to get you started on writing about different forms of arts and culture.You can choose to focus exclusively on your writing.Or you can explore the optional digital experiments if you wish to probe new ways of pursuing arts and culture criticism online.Each day, we tackle a different form of arts and culture and different digital possibilities.The goal is not to complete a fully developed digital project (that takes more than a week), but rather to experiment and start to think about possibilities, propose concepts and ideas, formulate plans, and do so through experimentation.Each morning your task is to read over the days schedule and make a plan for yourself. We gather from 10:30-11:15 on Zoom to check in. Then you can work on the day’s tasks. There are readings and proposed assignments, but if you wish to incorporate new ideas, write about something different, or try out a digital experiment of your own, you are welcome to do so.We reconvene from 4-5pm to check in about the day’s work. This is a drop-in Zoom session, so you can spend the whole time with us or pop online to say hi as you wish.Most evenings, a special guest will join us for an hour of informal discussion about their career, their work, their ideas, and art and cultural criticism in general. Attendance required.
Schedule
Monday
WordPress and Words
Today
Today we will get set up on the WordPress content management system. Each student will have a separate WordPress installation with which to experiment. If you have used WordPress before, you can explore more advanced settings. If you have not, this course will let you gain basic facility with the platform, which now runs approximately thirty percent of websites. We will also focus on writing about words today, whether that be an interest in novels, poetry, nonfiction, translation, or some other form of language.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” New York Review of Books, 20 November 2008 (pdf online)Thomas Mallon and Liesl Schillinger, “Should Critics Aim to Be Open-Minded or to Pass Judgment?,” New York Times Book Review, 29 August 2017Melina Delkic, “Reading Thoughtfully With The Times’s Nonfiction Critic, Jennifer Szalai,” New York Times, 18 April 2018Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Where Do Sentences Come From?,” New York Times, 13 August 2012
Additional Optional Materials:
Daniel Mendelsohn, “A Critic’s Manifesto,” New Yorker, 28 August 2012Dwight Garner, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” New York Times, 15 August 2012Various Authors, “Do We Need Professional Critics?,” New York Times, 7 October 2012“Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” Talks and other materials, Walker Arts Museum, 28-30 May 2015Matthew Mullins, “Are We Postcritical?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 December 2015Barry Schwabsky, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” The Nation, 9 March 2016Nicholas Dames, “Criticism in the Twilight,” The Nation, 16 November 2016Hua Hsu, “The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art,” New Yorker, 21 September 2016AO Scott, “Everybody’s a Critic. And That’s How It Should Be.,” New York Times 30 January 2016Edward Mendelson, “What Is the Critic’s Job?,” New York Review of Books, 28 September 2017Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” New York Times, 5 July 2019A.O. Scott, “A Critic Moves Between Literature and Film,” New York Times, 17 June 2020
Tools
WordPressAdvanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg pluginScanner or phone cameraAdobe Reader, Preview, or another PDF reader
Project
Explore the WordPress tutorial.Pick out a favorite piece of writing or text.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the text. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you in the text. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use quotations to support your claims, or put another way, build your analysis out of key quotations. What are the keywords, key phrases, key moments in the text?Optional digital. Experiment with the following modes of multimedia narrative analysis:Text style. Upload and place an image in your post Install the Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg plugin (or search for other plugins). Explore different colors, background colors, line breaks, spacing, or other text stylings to emphasize your interpretation.Annotation. Are there ways to bring a reader through your interpretation through annotating the text and placing images of your annotations into your post? What if you treat text as image to show what you are noticing?Scan or take a photo of the text you are critiquing.Print out a copy to annotate, draw upon, and mark up. Scan the annotated copies to create image files (jpg, png, gif) to upload to your post. Position in your post where you believe the annotations work best to deliver a compelling essay.Or, try using the comments/annotation tools in Adobe Reader, Preview, or another PDF reader to create your annotation images. You can annotate one image of the text or multiple images with different annotations depending on what narrative you want to express using annotation. Your annotations can be anything: arrows, sketches, drawings, other words, or something else. Export your annotations as image files (jpg, png, gif) rather than as a pdf. Upload to your post and position in your post where you believe the annotations work best to deliver a compelling essay.If you think of another mode of multimedia criticism of a text, try it out. For instance, perhaps you want to ask your reader to click from one post to another for some reason, or to refer to a source not in your own website. Add html links, experiment with the widgets tool or menu tool, sidebars, different WordPress themes, or some other concept. If you can’t get WordPress to quite do what you envision, that is ok. Sketch out your concept and upload that. The goal here is to come up with ideas for new modes of multimedia critical essay writing even if we can’t fully implement them in one day.Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas about particular texts, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Dr. Alissa Karl, Department of English, SUNY Brockport, and Michelle Chihara, editor, Los Angeles Review of Books (to confirm).
Tuesday
Visual Arts
Today
Today we will explore visual arts analysis. What does it mean to look at something closely, in a sustained way that reveals details in the artwork? How does one then contextualize, analyze, connect those details to larger significance and meaning? Can you get your essay not to offer simple judgment of taste (good, bad, beautiful, ugly), but to explain why an artwork matters, what it has to tell us about itself, the artist, the time in which it was made, and/or why it matters now?
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Anya Ventura, “Slow Criticism: Art in the Age of Post-Judgement,” Temporary Art Review, 15 February 2016Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Power of Patience,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2013Jason Farago, “Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece,” New York Times, 28 May 2020
Additional Optional Materials:
Lucy Ives, “Renegade Art Historian Aby Warburg Challenged the Discipline’s Elitism with Photography,” Art in America, 8 June 2020Will Fenstermaker, “Towards a Critical Insurgency,” AICA Magazine, 2 August 2019Clay Matlin, “What is Art Criticism?,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2016-January 2017Kareem Estefan, “Reparative Criticism,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2016-January 2017Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79Lori Waxman, “60 Wrd/Min Art Critic”
Tools
WordPressAdobe Reader, Preview, Photoshop, or image editor
Project
Pick out a favorite work of visual arts (broadly conceived, it can be a painting, drawing, sculpture, conceptual art, whatever interests you).In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Experiment with cropping and other digital tactics of visual analysis. Use a photo editor to present a series of images and text that narrate your close reading of an object. Take us through a series of cropped images and/or annotations to unfold your critical interpretation and narrative. You may sketch out in words or drawings (on paper, then scan and upload) a concept for a sort of visual essay of criticism even if you do not fully complete the digital experiment (remember you only have one day, so concepts and ideas matter as much as realization of a project).Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Tempestt Hazel (to confirm).
Wednesday
Music/Sound/Audial Criticism
Today
Today we will explore music, sound, and audio forms of art as well as criticism. What does it mean to write well about music? How might sonic and audial modes of criticism function to explore music, sound, and audio art? Dive in, experiment, and I encourage you to describe concepts and ideas even if you cannot quite execute them in one day.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Ann Powers NPR Story ArchiveWesley Morris, “For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it,” New York Times, 14 August 2019 and Wesley Morris and Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619 Project Episode 3, The Birth of American Music podcast, 6 September 2019Oliver Wang and Morgan Rhodes, Heat Rocks podcastMali Obomsawin, “This Land Is Whose Land? Indian Country and the Shortcomings of Settler Protest,” Folklife Magazine, 14 June 2019Michael J. Kramer, “The sounds of American counterculture and citizenship: The Republic of Rock playlist essay,” Oxford University Press Blog, 8 October 2013
Tools
WordPressGutenberg audio player or plugin audio playerMicrophone (computer or phone mic is fine)Audacity, Garageband, Adobe Audition, or another audio editing programSpotify, Soundcloud, or other cloud audio service
Project
Pick out a favorite work of music, audio podcasting, or sound art.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Audio Podcast. Develop a script and record a brief audio version of your critical essay. Do not merely read a paper into the microphone. Rather, consider how to use spoken word, sound effects, sound samples, multiple voices, or other modes of audio storytelling to convey your essay. Your script and podcast can be provisional and a draft. The ideas and concepts are more important at this stage than the execution in one day of work.Annotated Playlist Essay. If you are working with music, experiment with an annotated playlist approach to your essay. How might you move between sound clips of songs and your own writing to develop close analysis and take your reader/listener through the music you are analyzing? You can either load MP3 files into the WP Gutenberg audio player or use Spotify or Apple Music or Bandcamp to embed tracks in your WP post.Again, ideas and concepts are more crucial at this stage than complete execution of idea. Experiment and see what you learn.Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Ann Powers, Music Critic, National Public Radio.
Thursday
Performance/Film/TV
Today
Today we turn to performance, both on stage (dance, theater) and on screen (film, tv). How might digital modes of publication allow for new kinds of performance criticism, writing, analysis, and explication? There is plenty to explore, from multimedia essay writing to the new form of “videographic criticism,” in which the critical essay harnesses the very medium that it critiques. As with yesterday, dive in, experiment, and I encourage you to describe concepts and ideas even if you cannot quite execute them in one day.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Siobhan Burke, “Dancing Bodies That Proclaim: Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, 9 June 2020Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody blogAdam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen, Filmspotting podcastEmily Nussbaum, TV criticism at the New YorkerMichael J. Kramer, “Moving History: How The Seldoms Turn LBJ into Multimedia Dance Theater,” MCA Blog/Culture Rover, 31 march 2015Helen Shaw, “Building Trust After Inclusivity Failed: Lessons for the Theater,” Vulture (New York Magazine), 10 June 2020Jason Mittell, “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 224–42
Optional Additional Materials:
Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, The Videographic Essay: Practice and PedagogyNathan Heller, “Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews,” New Yorker, 14 October 2011
(read the five reviews too if you have time)
John Bresland, various video essaysMiguel Guitierrez, “The Perfect Dance Critic,” Movement Research Journal #25 Dance Writing (Fall 2002)Elizabeth Méndez Berry, “Why Cultural Critics of Color Matter,” 3 May 2018
Tools
WordPressGutenberg video player or other pluginVimeo, YouTube, or other cloud-based video serviceAny Video Converter, Handbrake, MDRP, or other software to extract videoiMovie, Adobe Premiere, or other video editing software
Project
Pick out a favorite work of performance (online or not), film, or tv.In a WP post, Develop a close reading of the artwork. Explain what it is about it you admire (or do not admire if you want to critique it). Develop an argument about what moves you. Most of all, why does it matter? What are its larger stakes culturally, politically, or socially? Use specific references to aspects of the work to support your claims. Or, put another way, build your analysis out of particular details in the artwork.Optional digital.Multimedia essay. Experiment with incorporating elements of video, audio, images, and text to create a review of a performance, film, or television program. Try out some versions, offer a conceptual plan for how you would develop a multimedia work of performance criticism more fully.Videographic essay. Experiment with recording a video essay of criticism. See if you can use one of the video extraction tools above to use video from an online or DVD source. Then try using iMovie, Adobe Premiere, or another video editing tool to create a video essay. You can create a very small pilot or prototype experiment and then develop a script draft and conceptual plan. What would your videographic essay accomplish? How would it use the video format to convey a critical analysis effectively?Send in 1-2 questions for our guest this evening about cultural criticism.
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom, discuss the day’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general.
Guest
6-7pm. Siobhan Burke, Dance Critic, New York Times.
Friday
Revisions and Conclusions
Today
For the final day of our workshop, an opportunity to do the all-important work of revision as well as to experiment with one other tool for the digital cultural critic: the subscription newsletter. Finally, today is an opportunity to reflect upon the week’s worth in a short essay. We’ll convene at 4pm for a little online Zoom celebration of the week’s work, and a chance to reflect together on how the workshop has been, and what might be better if we do it again.
Map out your plan for the day
9-10am
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
10:30-11:15am Zoom Check-in
Readings
Steve Smith, Night After NightSiobhan Burke, Danceletter
Tools
WordPressSubstack, TinyLetter, or other newsletter service
Project
Revision. Revise one work from the past week. Do not replace your old post. Repost a new version for today.Newsletter. Conceptualize or even try to develop a subscription newsletter using Substack, TinyLetter, or other newsletter service.Reflection back/Projecting forward brief essay. What did you get the most out of this week? What was most frustrating? What was most satisfying? Take a moment to reflect on your work in the course this week. Then, what comes next? What would you like to keep working on, learning about, developing, and how might you go about doing so?
Zoom Drop-in Hangout
4-5pm. Drop in to join Professor Kramer and other students on Zoom. Reflect on the week’s work, ideas, observations, digital experimentation, and cultural criticism and the arts in general. Celebrate the conclusion of the workshop.
Go Deeper Into Art, Culture, and Criticism: A Very Selected Bibliography (With Items To Be Added)
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (originally published in The National Review, 1864; reprinted, Macmillan & Co., 1865), 9-36Walter Pater, “Preface” and “Conclusion,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (1893; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xix-xxv, 186-190Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Discussing Everything,” in Intentions (London: Methuen and Co., 1913), 95-220George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition Defined,” from Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 14-35Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” The Dial 64 (11 April 1918), reprinted in Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 165-180TS Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 1-14HL Mencken, “Footnote on Criticism,” in Prejudices, Third Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 84-105Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 217-252R.P. Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work” in Language As Gesture: Essays in Poetry (1933; reprinted, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 372-399C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” (1962), in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 134-44Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation (1966)Raymond Williams, “Criticism” and “Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), 84-93“Culture” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Bennett, Grossberg and Morris (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 63-69Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge, 1981): 227-39Charles Lemert, “What Is Culture? Amid the flowers, seeds, or weeds?” in Durkheim’s Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36-58T.S. Eliot, “The Three Senses of ‘Culture,’” in Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 21-34.Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light,” in Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1867-9), republished in Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58-80.Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947; reprint, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94-136Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, 5 (Fall 1939): 34-49.Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, ed. John Summers (New York: New York Review Book, 2011), 3-71, originally published in Partisan Review 27(Spring 1960): 203-233Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” Between Past and Future (1961; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993), 197-226Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2012)Clifford Geertz, “Ch. 1: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” “Ch. 8, Ideology as a Cultural System,” and “Ch. 15 , Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000)bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation” Video, 1997Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002)Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out? From Matter of Fact to Matter of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 225–48Jonathan Letham, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2007)Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, 4 (Autumn 2011), 573-591
June 29, 2020
Janis Joplin at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival
Janis Joplin moved from local to national, and indeed international, fame through her performances at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, captured on film in D.A. Pennebaker’s famous documentary about the event. But, it wasn’t her first time performing at Monterey. In this photograph from the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection, Janis performs in 1963 at the Monterey Folk Festival. Anyone know who is accompanying her on guitar and bass?
Janis Joplin, Monterey Folk Festival, 1963, Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.Here is Janis performing that same year, 1963, at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco.
June 21, 2020
Folk Songs Containing Multitudes
I wonder if the significance of Bob Dylan’s late career, say since the fittingly titled “Love and Theft” in 1997, is less the lyrics or Nobel Prizes or Never Ending Tour than his expansion of his approach to the “folk tradition” to include not only old Elizabethan balladry, but also mid-twentieth century blues and rhythm and blues. Just as he found his voice early in his career using older tunes to which he set new lyrics, often with bits of older lyrical references also scattered throughout, in the twenty-first century he has often taken old blues and rhythm and blues songs as scaffolding for new lyrics (with lots of lyrical fragments turning up too).
There were intimations of this broader repertoire of borrowing from the earliest moments of his musical career, but one thinks especially of many recent songs such as “Rollin’ and Tumblin'” on 2006’s Modern Times or “My Wife’s Hometown” on 2009’s Together Through Life. If in the early 1960s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” drew its power partly from the melody and harmonic setting of “Lord Randall,” then now “False Prophet” on the new My Rough and Rowdy Ways album gets its mojo from Billy Emerson’s 1954 Sun Records single “If Lovin’ Is Believin’.”
The approach Dylan uses for these songs suggests we might most accurately not think of him alongside other classic rockers from the 60s, but rather he is more like earlier classical music composers. They turned to folk music for source material and often outright appropriation that they then reset in art songs. So too does Dylan. In other words, he is up to something more like what Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Britten, and Bartok pursued with regard to traditional music, only now he has broadened the category of tradition to include blues composers and musicians such as Billy “The Kid” Emerson, Hambone Willie Newbern, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Minne, and Willie Dixon.
What’s most intriguing about this is that those songwriters themselves might also be considered alongside Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Britten, and Bartok. They too adapted vernacular sounds and lyrics for the art songs that we call pop music. They themselves were folk-inspired composers hiding out—or forced into—the recording studios of the independent label music business from the 1920s to the 1950s. So perhaps we might think of Dylan’s more recent compositional tactics as art song settings of art song settings of folk material.
At what point do these categories no longer make sense? The dials start to go into the red and we find the terms folk and art, traditional and commercial, the created and the appropriated, starting to bust out the speaker cones, distort the signal, and create new ambiguous overtones and rumblings. There’s something gnarly in that rough and rowdy feedback, indeed, but also something artful and slippery and beautiful.
June 19, 2020
Rovings
Sounds
Keep Your Mind Free: Damon Locks, Tomeka Reid [videos by: Nzingha Kendall, Foolish Mortal and Lucie Romero], Nicole Mitchell, & Jeff ParkerBethany Ryker’s A440 / Stochastic Hit Parade with Bethany RykerMike Seeger interview by Chris Strachwitz, KPFA, 30 March 1986 Sandbox PercussionRob Mazurek, Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Sequesterfest (Vol. 3)Little Richard, “Goodnight Irene”
Words
Dan Schindel, “The ‘Dancing Pallbearers’ Meme Is a Danse Macabre for the Time of COVID,” Hyperallergic, 23 April 2020Viet Thanh Nguyen, The SympathizerJenny Offill, Department of Speculation and WeatherTony Conrad, WritingsRey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about CaptureMatt Mehlan, Archive Dive Experimental Sound Studio Newsletter on Cecil Taylor unpublished manuscript and Experimental Music Instruments journal, 29 May 2020
“Stages”
Different Voices 2016: Paul Matteson and Jenn Nugen, Note The Self, Bates Dance FestivalPina Bausch, Palermo PalermoDance On! An Evening with the Mark Morris Dance Group
Screens
Beastie Boys Story Billions, Season 5 Down Home Music A Journey Through the Heartland 1963
June 17, 2020
Shelter in Place
Anna Martine Whitehead’s short dance video, Questions of Home, part of Pivot Arts’ (Un)Touched – Artists in Quarantine series, begins with her body wrapped in a Mylar space emergency blanket as if it were a shawl. Soon the emergency blanket becomes many other suggestive props: an abstract shape, a nest, a banner, a wave, a shaft of light, a telescope, a tunnel, a roof, a blindfold, a trap, a trap door, a lean-to shelter, a cottage, the wind itself. The emergency blanket asks a question of home, and perhaps poses the proposition that home is necessarily something unfixed, an answer only whispered on the wind, a restless place, a flag flickering, planted paradoxically on the perpetual motion of inquiry.
At first, she walks backward, slowly, in a circle, getting a sense of things. In rolled-up blue jeans and red sandals, she keeps the silver side of the emergency blanket to her body, the golden side to the empty lot around her. She stares out from the wrapped blanket, focused, maybe even defiant. CTA “L” tracks frame the shot on one side, blue dumpsters on the other, a lone Chicago apartment building, parked cars, and a chain link fence serve as backdrop.
A woman speaks on the soundtrack, non-diagetically, discussing grief as something she feels in her eyeballs, an “aimless focus.” As the woman discusses this “aimlessness,” Whitehead wraps the blanket around her, stretches out her right hand from the side, her face and upper body covered in gold, the silver side fluttering behind her in the wind. She leans back.
Then she suddenly begins to unfurl the blanket in the wind. She turns to her left, holding the flag aloft behind her, vertically, chewing gum, confident, and begins to walk backward. A male voice enters the soundtrack. “I felt like I really connected to the idea of home,” the voice posits, “this place where you are always moving toward or away from, but it kind of like clicks in.”
Whitehead picks up the pace, pivots and turns, turning the flag parallel to the ground, from vertical to a horizontal plane now, gold side up, silver side down. Something remarkable happens. She seems to want to take the emergency blanket one way, into the wind, but the wind picks up and blows a wave through the blanket in the other direction. Rather than fight the new force that has entered the dance, Whitehead responds to it by letting the blanket lead the way, following closely the forms the wind runs through it.
She lets the wave of air flow through her body, not fighting the wind’s energies so much as letting them enter her as well, from toe to head. Or perhaps more accurately put, she moves her body in similitude to the wind, recognizing and acknowledging the energies coming her way on the air, giving the wind credence, familiarizing herself with its resistances, making agreements and having dialogues between herself and the air through the blanket’s shape-shifting forms and her body.
Always holding the blanket, she flows, twists, turns, raises a foot, then drops it back down, pivots, see-saws her weight. She pulls the blanket around her, tightly, and then lets it soar up above her head. At times, she asserts control. She holds sway. In other moments, she lets the wind take charge. In one exhilarating set of moves, she pulls the blanket around her body and it curls like a snake, wrapping almost arm-like around her torso and ankle before Whitehead spins herself out from its grasp.
Whitehead places her head in the blanket as if it were a tunnel. She crouches low, and peers up through it as if it were a telescope. Then, she lets the wind push the blanket up around her head. It clings to her, as if to blind her, or knock her over. Slowly, she pulls it down around her. The blanket transforms from a seeming emergency into a shelter, a lean-to, a cottage, a residence on the unused lot. She has pulled all sides around her body and lies low, out of sight, concealed within its walls. Then, she rises to her knees, holding the blanket aloft like a flag again. Eventually she stands up fully: regal, rigid, upright in the wind.
By the end of the four minute video, the blanket has begun to appear more as an expression of the emergent rather than to be used for an emergency. Never once does it touch the ground. Its gold and silver sides shimmer but they are nothing compared to Whitehead herself, who, while never leaving the empty lot, seems on the move. She is full of actions and reactions, ideas, motions, and emotions.
Questions of Home suggests at least one potential answer to its title: that home might not be so much the move to settle, but rather a staying agile.
June 10, 2020
Life During Covid-19 Digital Pop-Up Exhibition
My spring 2020 course HST 380: Digital Methods for Historical Projects shifted from our intended goal of creating oral histories, audio podcasts, and multimedia webpages about the history of SUNY Brockport itself to a digital pop-up exhibition that presents “reports from the field” about life during the early months of the COVID-19 crisis.
Each student created a narrative for the exhibition, based on at least one artifact. That one object could be a photograph, video, music, something from the news, any kind of detail that felt meaningful.
Here are the results: a strikingly prescient early observation of police brutality in New York City; an honest accounting of what it was like to search for one’s first post-college job during a pandemic; ruminations on finding ways of connecting during a time of social distancing, quarantine, and lockdown; a harrowing account of surviving COVID-19 itself; and more.
Life During Covid-19 Digital Pop-Up Exhibition
June 7, 2020
Resounding Truth
Two new podcasts, Wind of Change and The Last Archive, focus on unlikely histories to address questions of how we perceive truth in our own so-called “post-truth” era. Each has an air of conspiracy to it, which is fitting for our conspiratorial times, however they also differ in important ways. Wind of Change speaks to the longing many have for something highly unlikely to be true; The Last Archive is about how much we long for something historically true not to have happened the way it did.
On Wind of Change, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe takes us into his own obsession with the unlikely idea that the CIA secretly wrote the song “Wind of Change” by the German band Scorpions. Written at the end of 1990, released in 1991, which was after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, “Wind of Change” became perhaps the anthem that announced the end of communism. Could it really have been written by the CIA? It’s an absurd claim, but a tantalizing one. Wouldn’t it make so much sense as a form of covert soft power working, as a brilliant Cold War cultural campaign winning the day for the USA? The chaotic, surprising, world-changing moment would click into place, its many contingencies understood in retrospect as inevitable, engineered rather than erupting spontaneously.
The plot unfolds at first like a political thriller. Given a lead by an old friend with CIA contacts, Keefe seeks out the truth. He meets with CIA analysts, tight-lipped spies and spooks, former drug smuggling music business managers, Ukrainian rock fans, skeptical Russian journalists, and, at last, Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine. It’s a funny tale at times, but also a creepy one, a kind of absurdist, kitschy John Le Carré novel of a story that ultimately becomes a sort of shaggy dog—or should we say shaggy Scorpion—story.
Keefe’s journey into the conspiracy collapses in on itself eventually. In the quest to discover the truth, is he in fact spreading more lies? By contrast, The Last Archive, hosted by historian Jill Lepore, begins with the question of, as she playfully puts it, “how we know what we know.” What is historical evidence, she asks? And what has it come to mean in a contemporary moment some call a “post-truth” era?
The Last Archive adopts a retro-radio gumshoe noir tone (say, pal, that’s a good way to go at the topic). As Lepore puts it, playing the role of Sam Spade as historical inquirer, the first season is “trying to solve a crime: who killed truth?” Based on a course she has taught and various essays and books she has written as well as new material, The Last Archive looks to colorful, mysterious stories from the past—the origins of Wonder Woman, the making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a 1919 who-done-it in the rural town of Barre, Vermont—to connect history to current dilemmas of relativism and skepticism.
Sometimes the show is too quaint by half, but Lepore’s vocal delivery, which is full of bemusement, sly wit, and expressively musical dips, turns, twists, and almost giggles, cuts through to speak to the listener directly—one might even say truthfully—about the big stakes of the theme at the center of the show. These include especially and recurringly the shift she notices from a premodern focus on only God’s ability to know the truth to a democratization of judgment among “the people” as modernity unfolded. First, only the divinity new if you were guilty. Now a jury of peers might make the call. What did they use to do so? Evidence.
So where does that evidence—the search for it, the consideration of it—lead Lepore? Repeatedly, her stories follow leads that reflect not only a wish to know the truth, to get to the bottom of things, but also, just as often, a tinge of regret, a wish that fate might have worked out differently. If Wind of Change proposes that the truth remains concealed, nothing more than a whistle on the breeze, redacted and classified, The Last Archive reminds us that when it comes to the bitter certainties of the American past we may not always really want to hear just the facts, ma’am.
May 14, 2020
Rovings
Sounds
Live @ National SawdustEES Quanrantine ConcertsZeena ParkinsIkue MoriClare ChaseOtis Redding, The SinglesTatsu Aoki and Friends, Hothouse GlobalJean Lambert-Wild, “Jazz Dispute”Big Thief, Two Hands and Topanga Canyon Demos, Vol. 1Brad Farberman, Listening to Sun RaFrontera Collection
Words
Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters From an American”Matthew Frye Jacobson, The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American PresentGavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds., Remapping Sound StudiesDeborah Kapchan, ed., Theorizing Sound Writing
“Walls”
Jan Sawka: The Place of Memory (The Memory of Place), The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art-SUNY New Paltz and Golden West? Jan Sawka’s California Dream, RAFFMA-Robert & Frances Fullerton Museum of ArtCranach: Artist & Innovator, Compton Verney Art Gallery and ParkQuentin Blake: We Live in Worrying Times, Hastings ContemporaryDuro Olowu: Seeing Chicago Virtual Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
“Stages”
Medhi Walerski, Garden, danced by Nederlands Dans TheaterPina Bausch, Palermo PalermoAnna Teresa de Keersmaeker, En AtendantGate Theatre, Unknown Island
Screens
Tokyo StoryEarly SpringEarly SummerLate Autumn 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki The Kingdom of Dreams and MadnessLarry’s GarageHang the DJEcho in the Canyon
April 15, 2020
The Utopian Moment of the Coronavirus Pandemic
It may sound counterintuitive, but the coronavirus pandemic is a utopian moment, maybe even a revolutionary one.
In one fell swoop, the virus provided a clinical x-ray of society, of how it has been. Simultaneously, it also profoundly challenges the repeated insistence that the way things have been is normal, that they must be understood as inevitable. Suddenly, one could see the con. Supply chains stretched to the breaking point; so-called “essential” workers treated, in what can only be understood as Orwellian doublethink, as the most disposable among us; the enormously unequal impact of coronavirus on the most vulnerable populations, such as African Americans; prisoners, the elderly; ridiculous partisan Supreme Court rulings; absurd daily briefings from a delusional, farcical dictator; “how are you going to pay for that?” complaints about Medicare for All vanishing overnight, replaced by a massive, unprecedented federal relief package. One now sees the supposed normal of pre-pandemic world structures for what they were: a manufactured reality. Nothing inevitable about them.
So one wonders, why go back to that? What if instead of getting back to normal, we moved forward to a new normal? The temptation to “return to normal” is understandable, of course. We all long for some sense normality in our intimate relationships and our sense of safety, our feelings of finding community in face-to-face interaction and enjoying maximum liberty to move about and socialize. Yet I, for one, have also found myself asking lots of shelter-in-place questions: why do we pay rent and mortgages, student debts and more? Why do we stick our money in 401Ks and private health insurance? Why have our schools, public services, arts, and infrastructure been underfunded, privatized, reduced, and gutted? Who really has been cashing in on those arrangements? To hell with them. What good were they really doing us? What other ways could we design the structures of our economic life and social reproduction for the common good and for individual liberty?
Quarantine make one philosophical, but the abstractions suddenly seem immediate, real, and pressing. Quarantine clarifies. Suddenly history is alive, unfixed, uncertain. If we have been living in what amounts to a reality show in our politics these last few years—call it The Apprentice Goes to Washington—suddenly the plot is no longer canned or formulaic. What new reality, show or not, could we create?
Who, or what, gets saved from the fiasco of the response to coronavirus and who doesn’t? On what terms? The powers that be have been scrambling to keep us believing that things should go back to how they have been, to insist that recovery looks like a return to the recent past. Gangsters and racketeers that they are, Donald Trump, the Trumpublicans, and their cronies seek to profit behind the scenes while they distract with chaos, outlandishness, and attacks before the cameras in the society of the spectacle. The pandemic, like all crises, is but an opportunity to enrich themselves and accrue more power while feeding one brutal reward after another (federal dollars, conservative judges, regulation rollbacks) to the minority coalition keeping them in place. Religious fundamentalists, Wall Street bankers, white supremacist Nazis, ideologists for conservative jurisprudence, and an aggrieved white petite bourgeoisie on the receiving end of their patronage will go along with this.
But even a solid hero of the pandemic such as New York governor Andrew Cuomo reminds us of the urgency to make things new, not retreat back to the way things were. When the unfolding pandemic made it clear that the norms that had been in place were breaking down, what did Cuomo do? He reasserted the carceral capitalism that we have been putting up with for decades now. No hand sanitizer on the market anymore? Where to turn? Why not to prison workers, forced labor? They might not be allowed to use the stuff themselves, even as jails become major hot spots of COVID-19, but hey why not exploit them? Cuomo even bragged about the pleasant floral scents their sanitizer could produce.
And who continues to work the fields, the grocery checkout counter, the hospitals, the public transportation (over fifty MTA workers dead of coronavirus in New York City), the Amazon “fulfillment centers” while the rest of us are sheltered in place? Those who were already being exploited, destroyed, being killed not only by the way things are now, in the coronavirus moment, but also by the way things were then, prior to the pandemic.
It’s easy to yearn for a return to normalcy. But that normalcy was insane. It was abnormal. Why go back to that? Coronavirus revealed the nightmare that has been reality. In response, it asks us to realize a different dream.
*********
I owe some of these ideas to conversations with Robert Cantwell, Alissa Karl, and Ben Grant, among others. They may well disagree with what I have written, so blame any errors of fact or interpretation on me, not them.
In various tones of alarm, hope, dismay, and anger, many are noticing the theme I identify as well. Among them (just a sampling):
Michael J. Sandel, “Are We All in This Together?,” New York Times, 13 April 2020Sam Adler-Bell, “Coronavirus Has Given the Left a Historic Opportunity. Can They Seize It?,” The Intercept, 14 April 2020Ben Tarnoff, These Are Conditions in Which Revolution Becomes Thinkable, Commune, 07 April 2020Jeet Heer, The Coronavirus Class War Has Already Started, The Nation, 1 April 2020Carl Rosen, Andrew Dinkelaker and Gene Elk, “We Need the Labor Movement To Organize Worker Fightback in the Face of the COVID-19 Crisis,” In These Times, 10 April 2020David Kurtz and “FL,” “Why Return To Normal After COVID?,” Talking Points Memo, 15 April 2020Harmony Goldberg with Grassroots Policy Project, “Stepping into the Moment: The Corona-Crisis,” Organizing Upgrade, 08 April 2020Stephanie Luce, “Essential Work,” Organizing Upgrade, 15 April 2020
