Scott Timberg's Blog, page 16

“In Praise of Difficulty”

DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I’ve been hearing for most of my life — I came of age in the ’80s — that we don’t. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob.

James Joyce by Djuna Barnes

But a very fine, reasonably long essay by my Yale editor Steve Wasserman tackles the sources of American anti-intellectualism and shallowness and argues for the importance of complexity. I’m quoted briefly in there; these issue are the subtext, in some ways, to my book Culture Crash.

The piece, in The American Conservative, will appear in longer form in an anthology that comes out this spring.

Dueling With the Dean: Rock Crit Robert Christgau

ON the occasion of his new memoir, Going Into the City, which chronicles the roots of a rock critic and in some ways an entire generation of American pop-culture journalists, I spoke to Christgau about childhood, politics, fellow scribe Ellen Willis, pop, and the lost promise of the ’60s.

Christgau, who I have been reading since I was as teenager, hails from roughly the same lower-middle-class Queens milieu my father does. I found him both one of the easiest and one of the most difficult people I have ever spoken to.

 

Here is my piece.

Does Quality Exist? Does it Matter?

THE novelist Rick Moody tracked me down recently and asked me to go back and forth with him over the issue of aesthetic quality. He — as an emissary of the literary blog The Rumpus — was especially interested in the notion of art that was “born to be bad.”

We chewed on this issue for a while — connecting the argument of my book with Bob Dylan’s new album of Sinatra covers, which Rick considers bad in profound and glorious ways. Here’s part of one of his questions:

So the question is: does quality exist? This is a funny question, because it is an immemorial question, and, as such, it is a question that in some ways appears to have been solved since Aristotle.

My conversation with the Ice Storm novelist is here.

 

Six Questions: Where Do We Go Fom Here?

THE American Scholar magazine recently asked me to lay out some of the questions I was left with upon completing my book, Culture Crash. I was glad they asked me for questions rather than answers; the plight of the arts, humanism, the middle class, and art for art’s sake seem so complex and impacted that it’s a lot harder to solve in 800 words. In any case, here’s how they set it up, and my first question:

Freelance journalist Scott Timberg lives in Los Angeles and blogs about art, music, and literature. His new book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class , prompted us to urge him to pose questions, based on his research, about the future of American culture.

1. In the three decades after World War II, we saw a movement to elevate culture for the masses. The middlebrow consensus, we could say, tracked with the upheaval of the modern movement in art, architecture, literature, and music. It meant publication of paperbacks of classic novels, the Great Books push, Leonard Bernstein on television, Thelonious Monk on the cover of Time, an expanding English major in colleges and universities, and so on. These days, it all seems like ancient history. Do we have a new, fruitful way to think about culture that goes beyond midcentury middlebrow?

My questions are in the spring issue — see the piece here.

Pop Songs and the Novel: Against Vanguardism

THE writer and critic Nick Hornby, who has a new novel out, wrote this a few years back in discussing the songs of Ben Folds:

There is an argument that says pop music, like the novel, has found its ideal form, and in the case of pop music it’s the three- or four-minute verse/chorus/verse song. And if this is the case, then we must learn the critical language that allows us to sort out the good from the bad, the banal from the clever, the fresh from the stale; if we simply sit around waiting for the next punk movement to come along, then we will be telling our best songwriters that what they do is worthless, and they will become marginalized.

I’m not sure he’s right about pop music, or about the novel, but he’s got me thinking. Anyone else?

 

Culture Crash and the 21st C Musician

ONE of my favorite discussions of the new world of the arts and culture — the economic, technological, sociological changes I describe in my book — comes in this conversation I had with an editor at the new 21st C Musician site. (I’ve written several pieces for the site on the transformation of classical music.)

Considering both the human costs and the unintended consequences for America, culture writer and 21CM contributor Scott Timberg’s new book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, explores the very real repercussions for society if the people who create and support culture cannot stay in the middle class. Published by Yale University Press, the book has received superlative reviews from national publications including The Wall Street Journal, Times of London and New Republic. Culture Crash clearly speaks to the core of the 21CM readership and its experiences, and we wanted to know more.

Here‘s the Q&A.

Lucinda Williams at the Troubadour

I’M rushing out of town — remember that Powell’s Books reading Sunday! — but want to rave for a moment about the show I caught Wednesday night. It’s been a good few weeks for music — Martha Argerich with LA Phil at Disney Hall, solo-acoustic Lloyd Cole at Largo, Joe Henry with Sam Phillips at Largo, and now this one.

I’ve seen Lucinda five or six times previously, but rarely in a club as small (or acoustically great) as the Troubadour. (I can’t use the word “intimate” for this show — she was raw, direct and raunchy.) And rarely have I heard her in such good voice — kicking off with “Right in Time,” working though newish material from “When the Spirit Hits the Bone” (including “Foolishness” and the song “Compassion,” based on a poem by her late father), and including a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World.”

Her backup band was Buick 6, who opened; I missed them, but they were focussed and forceful, and Nashville-based guitarist Stuart Mathis is one of my new heroes.

The show wasn’t perfect — one of her very best songs, “Essence,” sounded like it could have used an extra voice, like a slide or country fiddle — but was exhilarating almost all the way through. Lucinda has so many great songs at this point — like Elvis Costello, Wilco, or Sonny Rollins, there’s such a great batch of work that she can surprise you and bring out gem after gem.

HERE is her and the boys playing an ACDC song, “It’s a Long Way to the Top.” (Shot by fellow scribe Steve Hochman.) By this point in the show she was, as you can tell, pretty ornery. The best song of the night? Nah, I’d take one of hers. But this should give folks a flavor of the evening.

Music For the Rich — Only

THE Brits have been more comfortable discussion notions of social/ economic class than we are here in this classless paradise. (Was it Rick Santorum who called “middle class” a Marxist term?) In any case, a new report from the British press asks, “is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?” The article, in I-D, is about a dust-up between a Labour culture minister and the “posh” musician James Blunt, and more broadly, the fact that “a disproportionate number of leading musicians come from the 7% of the population who are lucky enough to receive a private education.”

The apologists, of course, will say, Music and culture has always been easier for people with wealthy families. Well, sure, everything is easier if you are rich (it reminds me of what James Baldwin said about how expensive it is to be poor.) But there’s still a disturbing change over time. From the story:

For musicians, the means to pursue the thing that you love for longer without pay, can be make or break, the difference between success and failure. And for Labour’s shadow culture secretary to point out that exceptions to this rule have become few and far between is hardly the politics of envy, it’s just stating what we know to be true: that music has become increasingly dominated by those free from the pressure of having to work for a living.

James Blunt: Toff ?

And this isn’t just affecting music. A report carried out on unpaid internships by Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that in 1990, journalists came from families only 6% richer than average. Today, they are from families 42% better off. By excluding those whose parents cannot afford to rent them a house in London as they go from unpaid internship to unpaid internship, we are airbrushing an entire voice out of our media and, with that, dictating the types of stories that are written.

This reminds me of what a fellow scribe said about Columbia journalism school: It was now so expensive, in relation to the ensuing salaries, that those who attended needed to either do something else (“crisis PR”!) or must have a trust fund and thus live a great distance from the people and issues they need to cover.

As a middle-class kid still paying off his journalism degree and my years of unpaid internships, this is an issue that hits me and those I know very directly.

 

The Future of the Arts

OKAY, nobody really knows what’s coming. But a pretty good stab comes in a new book by veteran arts manager Michael M. Kaiser (Alvin Ailey, Kennedy Center, etc) , who is both hopeful and brutally honest. His opening section on the building of an arts infrastructure (including an audience) in the postwar U.S. is as clear and succinct and explanation as I’ve ever seen, and his description of what went wrong at the beginning of the 21st is also well focussed.

Here’s how I lead off my review of Curtains? The Future of the Arts in America : 

Crisp, pragmatic and genial, Michael M. Kaiser smiles earnestly from the jacket photo of his new book, the latest in a series on how to adapt to the changing landscape of 21st century culture. A longtime arts manager – he’s helmed the Kennedy Center, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and Britain’s Royal Opera House – with a reputation for turning around troubled cultural institutions, this neck-tied gentleman seems likely to regale us with the usual get-with-it-folks pep talk of neoliberal, corporate-model board presidents: Sure, there are “challenges” to today’s arts world, but it’s nothing “efficiency,” “innovation,” “knowing your audience,” “branding,” and other sorts of bootstrapping can’t solve. No less than three of his books have “practical” in their subtitles, and the very name of the new book — Curtains? The Future of the Arts in America – seems to shrug off any serious storm clouds.

I’ve been struck by the mixed feelings arts folk I know seem to have for Kaiser’s work — he’s been likened (not as a compliment) to both Oprah and Richard Florida.

My review, for ArtsFuse, is here.

Fear of Music, Then and Now

VIOLENT, authoritarian and fascist regimes often target artists, musicians, and the arts themselves — this is something we see East and West, ancient and modern. The latest outbreak of what Talking Heads called “Fear of Music” seems to be taking place in the Middle East, where the Islamic State is destroying drums and other musical instruments because they are somehow “un-Islamic.”

The site Epic Times has a photo and brief description. (I think the story was broken by the UK’s Daily Mail.)

Instrumental music, it appears, is not music to the ears of ISIS. In one of the group’s almost daily releases of propaganda imagery, black-clad militants in eastern Libya are shown presiding over the destruction of a number of musical instruments. Saxophones and drums go up in smoke as the group torches them in the open, drumming up fear in the process.

This is — let me be clear — appalling. It’s especially weird since some of my favorite musicians are soulful Sufis (see RT, right) or other kinds of Muslim sect. (Ted Gioia’s new book Love Songs looks at how the music of Andalucian Moors shaped the contemporary Western love song.)

But this censorious spirit exists in our own Judeo-Christian and Anglo-American world. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans were violent religious fanatics who smashed the stained glass in churches and tore out the pews where chorale groups sang psalms. (The aesthetic was considered idolatry or “Roman.”)

The Nazi’s chilled expression with their Degenerate Art show; Stalin nearly destroyed Shostakovich. I’m old enough to (barely) remember the record-burnings of the “disco sucks” movement. American Christian maniacs burned Beatles records after John Lennon’s Beatles-are-bigger-than-Jesus remark.

These were all reasonably brief movements. But one lasted significantly longer: The early Christian war on secular music, which lasted for hundreds of years. I spend a lot of time digging into this for my book — it’s an almost literary example of “the killing of the creative class” — though very little made it into the final Culture Crash. Here’s a bit of it, though:

Jupiter-worshipping imperial Rome was often suspicious of artists, but the early Christians could be downright hostile. As Christ’s following spread from a small cult in the Levant into the Roman mainstream – becoming the official religion in the 4th century – its value system and roots in the very different Hebrew culture, created a tension with Roman’s public spirit.

Clement of Alexandria, in the late 2nd century, warned of the “indecency and rudeness” that musical instruments deliver, and condemned the man who “rages about with the instruments of an insane cult. We completely forbid the use of these instruments at our temperate banquet.” And it wasn’t just public performances of music that upset the early Christians: Because music often accompanied pagan sacrifice and religion, those performing music at home were suspected of worshipping idols.

Saint Jerome, the Roman Christian priest, made no secret of his attitudes in his writing. “Drive out the singer like a criminal,” he wrote in one of his epistles. “Cast from your house all women lyricists and harpists, the devil’s choir whose songs are the deadly ones of sirens.” His attitude toward writers shows how far things had come from the Golden Age: “The songs of the poets,” he wrote, “are the food of demons.”

Much of the creative class, then, began to be exiled from respectable society as Christianity takes over the Roman empire in the fourth century. “Whoever performs in a theater or is a wrestler or a runner, or a music teacher or a comic actor,” reads a canon of Hippolytus, “or who teaches savagery or a priest of the idols – none of these may be permitted to attend a sermon until they have been purified from these unclean works. After forty days they hear a sermon. When they prove themselves worthy they will be baptised.” Dancers, actors, and especially a “woman who dances in taverns and allures people by her beautiful singing and her deceitful melody” – as the Canons of Basil put it – didn’t fare much better.

… For hundreds of years – until the 12th century – Christian fathers forbade the use of every instrument but the church organ. Other instruments – especially the lyre and pipes – were associated with the very paganism that the Catholic leadership was trying to stamp out. For much of the Middle Ages, all secular music was forbidden.

Are all these repressive Christians — like the rocker disco-sucks crowd — as bad as ISIS? Of course not. Do our Western bad deeds excuse theirs? No, again.

But let’s remember that the anti-aesthetic impulse is not unique to Middle Eastern fanatics: We’ve experienced — and perpetrated — it too.

UPDATE: Now these dipshit fanatics are burning books and sacred manuscripts, here.