Category Archives: criticism

Porcelain Raft, Best Music Writing, Sara Levine, and more

Many things to report over here, including what looks to be a successful Kickstarter campaign for the 2012 edition of Best Music Writing. But many other things are in progress (including this reading, which all of you should check out), and so instead I’ll leave you with a link to this Porcelain Raft interview that I did for The L Magazine today. (Because the new Porcelain Raft album is, in fact, quite good. Hey, here’s a video from it.)

Unless You Speak From Your Heart from Porcelain Raft on Vimeo.

 

Reading on Reading: 18 June 2009

As I write this, I’m somewhat pressed for time, and thus don’t have the ability to write up an amazing line of thought connecting the three pieces linked below. However, I suspect that one could be created; were I more professorial, I would write this post up in the form of an essay question.

One: Christopher R. Weingarten on Twitter and music criticism.

Two: Warren Ellis on criticism, word counts, and media.

Three: Michael Antman on media evolution and how it will affect creative work.

Reading on Reading: 13 May 2009

One: At the excellent new Atlantic Correspondents blog, Hua Hsu discusses limited-edition books/magazines/art. It’s a good argument, and I’m glad to see it made in a high-profile place. (Odd case in point: I just ordered the upcoming issue of Yeti. It’s one of my favorite publications out there, both in the scope and quality of what it covers — but I also like the way it’s assembled: the digest size, the artwork, the way it fits together. And, I think, to an extent — a lot of that accounts for Yeti’s appeal and, dare I say, charm. Which is not to say that its editor, Mike McGonigal, is unaware of making work available for the web — quite the opposite, in fact.)

Two: Rudy Wurlitzer — whose The Drop Edge of Yonder is definitely worth your time — discusses the upcoming reissue of several of his novels.

Three: At The Rumpus, Peter Selgin explores Amazon’s customer reviews and shares some particularly memorable swings at modern classics.

Notes on Longform Music Writing: One

Recently, a press release arrived in my inbox noting that Skyscraper was making the shift from print to online effective immediately. One piece in particular stood out to me in a fairly encouraging way:

We will also no longer be restricted by word and page counts, meaning we can feature more content and go into more depth, not to mention publish content with much more regularity. We also envision the future skyscrapermagazine.com to be larger and more diverse than we were ever able to achieve with the print incarnation.

Recently, I’ve had music writing on the brain — being out at the Pop Conference definitely played a part in this, as does the fact that a number of people involved in/fond of music writing have been doing some very public thinking on the subject. One thing I’ve been especially curious about is how one might create a new outlet for longer-form prose pieces on artists. This isn’t meant as a criticism of interviews at all, but it does seem interesting to me that the majority of online* pieces on bands tend to fall into only one category.

***

This week, I’m going to be thinking out loud on this topic. For this post, I’m generally going to volley out a number of links; future posts will get more specific, and look at whether certain structures that have worked elsewhere can be applied to culture (specifically, music) writing. A very relevant discussion on the evolution of book criticism can be found at the fine literary blog The Millions. Their first part focuses on criticism and its connections to newspaper sections; the second, on Amazon.com and revenue and community; and the third, on potential downfalls to Amazon. While some of what’s said in that discussion applies specifically to the literary world, much of it, I’d argue, is relevant whether you’re following books, music, or film.

Also worth reading: Warren Ellis on bookazines (which brings to mind Stop Smiling‘s announcement of a shift from magazines to books**), and Carl Wilson on Blender and music magazines in general. Wilson comments:

I still think there is room in the market for one more readership-oriented music publication, one aimed at the same audience that buys books about music. Something close exists in the UK (Mojo and, to a degree, The Wire) but a North American one might bring less of that musty British muso feel – like a general-interest version of No Depression, a great mag that was hampered by the narrowness of its “alt-country” focus.

I don’t disagree. Though I also wonder whether the proper model for this wouldn’t be online, at least to begin with. I would argue that longer-form arts pieces — D.T. Max’s piece on David Foster Wallace, for instance, or John Wray’s on Sunn 0))) — are being read online, and Gerald Marzorati’s address on online readership*** references someone reading a New York Times Magazine feature on their iPhone — which, I’d say, upends the conventional wisdom of online readers opting for brevity.

An interview with Stephen Elliott on his work with The Rumpus offers one of the more interesting alternatives — and, I’d say, makes for a model to watch. Though given that it’s generally unpaid for all involved, I don’t know whether it’s a model that could be repeated. (The generally excellent Dusted does come to mind, though.) And, to bring things back around to music writing, I would argue that Rick Moody’s column contains some of the best music criticism out there right now.

More to come as the week continues…

*-more specifically: online in the sense of “pieces that originate online,” though I realize that this distinction is edging into moot territory as we speak.

**-scroll down to JC Gabel’s bio for this information. I haven’t seen much about this on the sites of either Melville House or Stop Smiling, oddly enough.

***-the address’s subsequent usage of “bloggers in pajamas!” imagery is, I’ll admit, a bit frustrating.

Recommended Music Writing: 31 January 2008

Doug Mosurock on Los Llamarada:

Trash rock drums pound out the sex beat. Vocals are delivered in a nasal monotony best likened to those of Mark E. Smith, pinning the tension between the instruments to taunting heights. The synths and piano provide some of the more delicate moments in an otherwise brusque album; creepy, spectral tones rise out of a bed of background din (“Ten to Dawn) or add a percussive element (the bone xylophone crossbeat of “I’ve Got Your Face”) to the thrash.

Review is well worth a read; album is well worth a listen.

pazz + jop + assorted musical thoughts

The Voice has posted 2008′s Pazz & Jop.

My ballot can be found right…here. I am pleased to see that I was again the sole voter for roughly half of my choices in the “Singles” category.

I think I’m also going to follow Reed Fischer’s lead and post what I jotted down at the time that I filled out my ballot, a month or so ago.

(And a quick aside, given that the link above references Pepi Ginsberg — having seen her read last weekend at the Hex Education Journal’s Volume 1 reading, she’s rapidly joining Will Sheff in the realm of songwriters whose tour diaries stand on their own as powerful travelogues.)

***

A lot of the records I liked this year came in on the noisier side of things, and a lot of the noisier records I liked this year hearkened back to my days standing in basements watching bands play through piecemeal sound systems, sweating uncontrollably and losing my hearing and grateful for the fact that I was there. It’s a strange thing, then, to see a band tailor-made for a tiny space playing to hundreds, if not more; given that I found the sight of No Age and High Places at the Bowery Ballroom disconcerting, I can only imagine what Deerhunter’s shows opening for Nine Inch Nails earlier this year must have been like. A running discussion that I had in 2008 involved asking which bands could make the transition from DIY spaces to concert halls and, in some cases, back again; at perhaps the apex of this was the Black Mountain/Bon Iver tour early in 2008, equally striking in the aforementioned Bowery Ballroom as it was in the tighter confines of Glasslands, though the divergent spaces brought out differing qualities from each artist.
This isn’t to claim that the days of basement shows and piecemeal sound systems are over. A couple of the better live sets I saw this year, including San Francisco’s Hank IV and Seattle’s The Dutchess and The Duke, took place below Brooklyn bar The Charleston, a space that’s a dead ringer for any number of late-90s New Brunswick basements. But it’s that push outward — not simply a case of groups moving from a more intimate location to a larger one, but a wholesale export of the fractured, explosive audio that one might hear through a speaker borrowed from a practice space and a decades-old, half-busted amplifier. (On his National Arts Journalism Project blog, Robert Christgau’s recent discussion of sound systems versus headphones as preferred methods for hearing music evolve seems directly connected to this.)
Adherents to the blown-out aesthetic generally start from punk rock and move outwards from there. In the case of some, that reaches out and begins to tweak other musical traditions: the degraded Spectorisms (which seem strangely apt these days) of Deerhunter’s Weird Era Cont.; the skewed baroque-pop that Oxford Collapse* applies on their single “Spike of Bensonhurst”. And while there’s a tendency to push the glorious clatter of noise-punk to its logical extension — see No Age’s “Eraser” for a high point of this — my vote ends up being in favor of the groups that go to places unexpected, that blend together a fractured, impressionist sound with some other quality, that blend and cross-pollinate rather than turn inward. (Sic Alps, Women, and Parts & Labor also come to mind as examples of this.) It’s hard to argue with unchecked momentum and transcendent noise, but to borrow from both and bring in a memorable hook or harmony — that, I suspect, is what I’ll still be listening to come 2009 and beyond.

*-full disclosure: friends of mine; I contribute to crowd vocals on their album “Bits”, which is why it’s not included on my albums ballot.

in which critics address the same cultural phenomenon from very different angles

Reading Manohla Dargis’s review of Tropic Thunder today, I found myself getting thematic echoes of the work of another acclaimed New York-based critic. The topic came in the review’s last paragraph, focusing on the character played by Tom Cruise:

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface.

Which has me wondering: can a Manohla Dargis/Jody Rosen discussion on this theme be far off?

talking polarization blues

Lately, I’ve been delving more and more into the TPMCafe Book Club — I’m pleased to see that they’re veering more and more into both books on politics from across the ideological spectrum, but also throwing in the occasional novel (specifically, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland). I have, though, noticed some hostility from the comments section when books or authors are discussed who don’t necessarily fall neatly into certain political categories. (Note some of the responses to the discussion of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort or Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party. I’m a fan of civil political debate, which is why it saddens me to see some of my fellow lefties doing their best to be uncivil.)

As a side note to my earlier post on responses to criticism, I wanted to volley out a general question: do you think there’s a connection between the two mindsets? Or, given that sites I read ranging from Brownstoner to The AV Club are beginning to regulate their comments sections more, is this more emblematic of a general unrest/rise in the desire to, well, talk shit?

moviegoing, critical responses, and responses to criticism

So I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday after work. Did I like it? That I did, though at times it seemed like a strange fusion of The Wire and The Long Halloween — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my book. It Batman Begins factored in an homage to the character’s pulp roots, this film incorporated more the feeling of more modern takes on the character — everything from the aforementioned Long Halloween to the overtly philosophical take Grant Morrison expanded on in Arkham Asylum. (And also, this.) And in some ways, it felt much more like Christopher Nolan‘s followup to The Prestige, thematically, than it did to his previous take on these characters. Did I think the film was perfect? Not really: while some of the action setpieces worked very well, others felt rushed or repetitive. And I’m still working out my feelings on the film’s — not politics per se, but at the very least, the implications of some of the questions it raises. (Spencer Ackerman offers up one interpretation.)

As I generally do once I’ve seen a film, I went back to take a look at the critical reaction. What I saw, honestly, rattled me a lot more than any amount of onscreen sociopaths. I’m not talking about the reviews — I’m referring to the reactions that reviews that didn’t argue that the film was the greatest thing ever received. Specifically, to those written by David Edelstein and Keith Uhlich — neither one exactly positive, but each one a lengthy response to the themes and imagery of the film. The amount of hostile, anti-intellectual vitriol embedded in the comments for each is unsettling.

It’s also strangely contradictory. To quote Edelstein, from his response to said vitriol:

They attack you for snobbery, for treating films like The Dark Knight as unworthy of serious discussion; then they call you a pretentious for engaging with those films beyond the level of “Wow!”

The question of the role of critics is a perennially ongoing one, as newspapers cut reviewers and pundits wax on the role of the internet on criticism. Something else that bothers me from this glut of angered commentary, though, is the question of just how many people are seeking a simple echo chamber from commentary — essentially, a one-to-one correlation between the films they like and the reviews they read. (A common theme in both comment threads involves disparaging the critics in question for films that they’ve liked, which is likewise problematic for any number of reasons.)

All of which raises the question: why exactly are the people responding so insecure about their taste in films that they feel the need to lash out at anyone who might question that. I don’t know that there’s any film that’s universally beloved by critics: hell, you can probably find an intelligent takedown of Citizen Kane if you look hard enough. My favorite film critics are Edelstein and The New Republic‘s Christopher Orr, and I try to seek out everything they’ve written. Does that mean that I agree with everything they write? No. Neither does it mean that if I enjoy a film one of them pans (for instance, The Prestige), I’m going to lie awake at night attempting to reconcile my feelings about said film with someone else’s less-than-glowing response to it.

Positive reviews by critics I trust have turned me on to films like Reprise and Kings and Queen that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise and that have, at their best, changed the way I think. But at the same time: it’s pretty essential to have enough faith in your own ability to watch and appreciate a film (or any other creative work) that you can feel secure in your own take on things.