Interesting. You’ve floated your own balloon so you can shoot it down. Who cares whether Susan Sontag had a great sense of humour? She had a great intellect and huge insight, rather like Hannah Arendt, another woman famous for her stand-up comedy. Ted Gioia’s argument is very well made. He’s describing the difference between art made by artists, the products of their imagination and hands, and the product made by companies. One has meaning, the other wastes your time.
Now I have a visual of Hannah Arendt cracking jokes at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, with her German accent, making fun of totalitarian goose-steppers.
Man, Glenn, Arendt as stand-up is such a provocative image. She was so canny and so tuned to the ironic that if she were working today I could see her doing it. Writing would be her side gig. Come to think of it, stand-up is one of the most authentic art forms. When it bombs, it really bombs, when it kills, it really kills.
I think what stood out for me in Ted’s analysis was fake. In that we are not trying to connect or engage in an authentic. Being unserious is a part of the symptom of being fake. If we are all fake we don’t have to truly connect or take each other serious. If we can dismiss all of the world’s problems, America’s problems as being fake - then we don’t have to be serious about them. We don’t have to wake up and own our participation in all of these problems.
I have found people often claim “jokes” when they say something disgusting and offensive for this exact reason… they want to dismiss that they and their views are a problem so they don’t have to be held accountable.
Spot on! I’ve seen this more often lately with my kids and their friends. When you suddenly realize you’ve made an unpopular statement, it’s easier to say “Oh it was a joke, I was just joking…” than to own it and have to explain and defend your view.
I wonder how much of that comes with the gradual decline in people's ability to handle a statement or opinion that differs from their own. Falling back on "it was a joke" is a defense mechanism against someone who is about to become triggered by a statement that 10 years ago would have been taken in stride.
I hear you but I think this is kinda a weird way of looking at it. What was ok 10 years ago does not have to be nor should be in all cases ok now. That’s development, that’s change, that’s evolution, that’s understanding.
Plus convos are always two-sided. It’s not just that one person can’t handle an opinion different from their own. Of course they can. People handle it everyday. No one combusts just hearing a different opinion.
But it’s also that the person offering the opinion hasn’t thought through the various ways the opinion could offend, annoy, goud someone and when they’re met with that resistance, instead of being open to learning/understanding where the other person is coming from, they say oh it was a joke to relieve them of any of the hard work it takes to rethink your opinion with new information.
It would seem to me that if you say something not meant to offend, and then it actually does offend, you would be apologetic and interested in understanding why so you don’t offend again.
But that rarely happens, this openness. And I assume (so maybe it’s not true) that’s because most ppl actually do know that the comments have the potential to offend but feel that they should be able to offend. And the truth is, you do have the right to offend. You just don’t have the right to offend and then expect no consequences.
Thank you for this. I think the crisis of unseriousness in modern American culture is a very real problem. From social media memes proclaiming "Good Vibes Only" and "Selfcare = Netflix Binges & Bubblebaths," to the current state of popular music and film. It feels like we're mostly drowning in white noise. I want more signals. I want more seriousness.
I have read somewhere that humour is also used to deal with stuff that one can't deal. So it could be that people can't deal with the real world and thus make fun of it.
Though there are times for fun and play, it becomes tiring when everything is made fun of. Especially stuff that you take seriously. It is especially annoying when you are being serious and people think that you are joking (because they can't fathom it being serious) and thus the respond in jest and then get butthurt if you took their jest as a serious thought.
Yes to all that. One of the reasons I stopped going to repertory theaters to see old films was due to the audience's unserious behavior. Half the audience would spend their time laughing inappropriately at the screen during a film like Casablanca, which has some funny moments I suppose but it is not a comedy. The audience was treating Casablanca as if they were watching a Charlie Chaplin film.
While the internet and technology in general has shredded our attention spans, the lack of seriousness stems from postmodernism. 70's cinema was so serious because it was a reaction to the the malaise of the time in which everything sucked. "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." We're in a similar time now. Few people are happy with how things are going. Incumbent heads of government are getting the boot no matter what their ideology. America just went from left to right. UK went from right to left. France went from the center to both the left and the right. The difference between the 70's and now is the lack of focus. Instead of Network, we have Everything Everywhere All at Once.
We've moved from recursive to discursive. Instead of finding hidden connections and meaning in life (like in The Glass Bead Game), we can flit from topic to topic without any real introspection. Obviously, the glut of entertainment has made this easier. It was almost compulsory to be more serious in the 60's when the only thing to watch during dinner was the nightly news. Still, the deconstruction of trust and meaning was the prerequisite to our unserious present and it happened long before the internet and movie special effects. The lack of seriousness is older than I am. The lack of focus is the newer problem.
I have spent (misspent?) over twenty of my seventy-six years trying to convince the mechanistic materialists that Goethe’s advocacy of the primacy of relationships over the objects and properties of materialist reductionism was a more inclusive epistemology. The scientists, mathematicians, and engineers would have none of it. What I saw as grossly pathetic was the adoption of nihilism and a perverse form of physics envy among people in the humanities. Post modernism is a glaring example. Carl Jung and William James showed that there was a valid alternative to the sycophants who chose to worship the Sheldon Coopers of the world. B. F. Skinner is a disgusting example of how the putrefaction of the humanities set in during the early 20th century. Reductionism has shown its utility in the physical sciences but it is in a crash and burn phase now in the life sciences and the humanities. Sure, there are diehards who will be Kuhnian exemplars of science progressing one funeral at a time. Timidity has never won in the long term. All life suckers is no way to live a life worth living. To hell with cowardly addictions!
I think those years spent trying to convince the materialists were well-spent, for what that's worth. Now on my twenty-seventh, I have come to think the heart of society's issues as a whole are essentially epistemological in nature, relating to our understanding of what is knowledge, and I would say also to mind-consciousness which are the filter all knowledge must pass through. If I didn't listen to the wisdom of people much older than I talking philosophy and epistemology, like you, there is no way I would have ever come to these conclusions!
Recently I've been slowly getting through the long but excellent book "Voltaire's Bastards" by John Ralston Saul, about "the dictatorship of reason in the West." He makes a very convincing argument that it is essentially this materialist reductionism and the emphasis of reason over all other qualities of the mind that have led to many present problems in society as a whole. The methods of physical science never made sense to apply to other fields like the humanities. It is no wonder, considering that reality, that the physical sciences have been so overemphasised over all else, and it's ironic that the lack of interest in philosophy has struck a terrible blow against the physical sciences themselves as such.
Physics itself has been falling apart because of this lack of epistemological rigour, and in lacking a good philosophical foundation like the physicists of old had, "reason" has become a kind of philosophy or religion of its own, which is not its purpose and makes no sense. One book I read years ago, "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, looked at this; ironic that physics has made little progress in decades due in part to this, and because scientists, mathematicians, and engineers can fall victim to the same psychological biases as anyone else. The obvious "physics envy" has never had less reason to exist.
I go on too much. Thank you for your comment, Charles. I'm going to have to finally get around to reading Goethe, since what you wrote left me intrigued. One of many names I recognise and have yet to get to!
I've really enjoyed your comments on Ted's article; they're insightful and thought-provoking. But (here's the but...), when you start a sentence with "Physics itself has been falling apart..." And what is "physics envy?" I'm not offended, but I am confused.
I'm a registered architect whose job is dependent on understanding physics, and being able to create attractive structures (when the client actually wants that) within those inherent boundaries. No one likes a building to collapse, believe it or not. I love beautiful cars that perform well, and airplanes, and rocket ships (a nod to Musk's self-parking space vehicle booster), and trees and animals which are all designed to deal with physics required by their inherent purposes. The planets and stars and galaxy and the universe. Especially the human body, which is the ultimately designed machine with its pumps and tubes, and heat and light and olfactory and auditory and auditory sensors. An otherworldly CPU and musculoskeletal structure. Physics is life, and life is physics. And it's beautiful.
I ordered a copy of "Voltaire's Bastards" immediatly after reading what you wrote. Reading Goethe's ideas on science is not very easy but if you are really interested you might check out this wiki article
I read Goethe's critique of materialism while a high school senior(1966). For some reason I have always approached new knowledge as an object of curiosity with no desire to have a final answer. The story of the blind men and the elephant has been my preferred paradigm as far back as I can remember. I had been studying science and math more to get my father's attention than as some self chosen pursuit. At age nine I told my father I wanted to become a novelist. He said I would never make a living doing that. The subtext was that if I wanted to continue to get what little dribles of attention and affection I was getting at the time I would continue being daddy's little scientist. Hi life's dream was to have become a theoretical quantum physicist but he graduated from high school in 1929. His family was middle class and the only sibling who went to college was a bbrother who majored in business which had some chance of a return on investment. My life has been dominated by curiosity, so studying math and science was alot of fun for me but I also had a deep love for the profounder parts of religion. I share that with Carl Jung. When Goethe pointed out the limitations of reductionist materialism, I saw immediately that he was right. This fact has been one of the most difficult aspects of the holism vs reductionism debate. For me, holism is obviously superior in understanding nature and humanity's place in nature. Trying to get many people who are professionals in the STEM areas is close to a hopeless quest. Ecology really only makes sense from a holistic perspective. In spring of 2015, I was auditing a course on Daoism taught by Roger Ames at the University of Hawaii Manoa. One of the students in the course loaned me his copy of "The Master and his Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist.
This was a major event in my life because it helpedto explain why so many STEM people simply couldn't get the holistic perspective. Iain McGilchrist is a Burkean conservative, so we don't see eye to eye on politics but his work on the lateralization of cognition is a major breakthrough. Recently he published a follow up on TMAHE titled "The Matter with Things"
Iain McGilchrist has YouTube videos that are hard to count, there are so many.My point is that checking out McGilchrist is a worthwhile endeavor. Many British intellectuals are enamored of Edmund Burke. I have spent more than two decades studying political psychology. I agree with William James and Friedrich Nietzsche who point out that a person's character draws them to the philosophical view that is most appealing to them. Maybe some people are born right brain dominant and are drawn inexorably to people like William James and Carl Jung. I really don't know. The nature nurture debate is one of my primary areas of curiosity. It seems like people in the creative arts are naturally drawn to a holistic perspective. I learned about Ted Gioia from Rick Beato whom I listen to fairly regularly. My true home is in the arts and humanities but I hope to see the end of the wars between the two cultures sometime soon.
Ok - I'm having trouble with all the generalizations. I can name serious films like GATTACA which was released in 1997 and funny stuff like Blazing Saddles which was released in 1974. So the question I have is do you really have data on a change in film types or are we just generalizing based on a particular point of view?
In addition, how do you define serious vs. not serious? I'm a fan of science fiction because it allows exploration of topics which may hit a little too close to home. Does sci-fi count as fake?
There's always been a place for unserious comedies. Most comedic movies are more in line with Animal House or Step Brothers than Dr. Strangelove or Idiocracy. What I'm saying is that in an era of general malaise where most people feel unsatisfied, the cultural response seems much more hollow than during the 60's and 70's. But yes, there is data. The percentage of remakes, reboots, sequels, spinoffs (RRSS) amongst the top 20 movies has risen sharply. Here's the link to the radio times piece about it if you want.
The TL:DR version is there were 6 RRSS movies among the top 20 box office earners in 1983 down to 2 in 1993 and up to 14 in 2013. It hasn't gotten better since then.
I looked at the top 20 domestic box office from last year and Oppenheimer and Sound of Freedom were the only scripted movies that weren't sequels or from established IP. There were 4 comic book movies, 2 video game movies, and 2 remakes. Then there were 8 sequels in the Avatar (2), John Wick (4), Indiana Jones(5), Mission: Impossible (7), Hunger Games(5), Transformers (7), Creed (3), and Fast and Furious (11) franchises. That's 16 of the top 20. The other four were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, and Sound of Freedom.
There are still good movies being made that have something relevant to say about modern society. However, it's abundantly clear that Hollywood is using the vast majority of it's money and bankable star power on stale retreads and silly escapism instead of challenging new ideas. The same is true in music although Ted has already written about that at length and he can do so much better than me.
This is longish and rambling and not even on topic, but it is what immediately sprang to mind as I read this thought provoking piece. When I was a young lass, I wanted to be a filmmaker and did my first internship with a lovely documentarian. One of the things he taught me was to cut actual 16mm film on a Steenbeck. Decades later, after the video revolution, I went to meet a friend who was editing a show for a cable channel (pre-steaming) and, in the edit suite, watched her shut down the Avid computer editing system and disconnect her keyboard and stick it in a tote. (A freelancer, she preferred her own keyboard.) Technology had revolutionized film to the point no one used it anymore. (Or even video tape. She worked completely from digitized files). Final Cut Pro wasn’t far off. And what was gone was the creative environment of film editing. When we had both started, film editing was a physical thing. You held film in your hands. It had a smell. You could(and we did) tape film clips to the wall of the cutting room and we really did just throw outtakes on the floor. Film made noise as it wound back and forth on the Steenbeck. You could lick it if you needed to figure out which side was the emulsion side. It was a full sensory experience. There were even rituals. The first time I “popped a core” was a noteworthy moment in my fledgling career. Now, all those years later, while the art of editing still existed, its environment was a hard drive, monitors and keyboard. And moving film production from out of the physical world to inside a computer is accelerating. All this rambling, old person nostalgia is to say you can walk by almost any room today and have zero idea of what happens in it. No accountant is surrounded by ledgers. Few writers are wadding up a page and throwing it at a trash can and just missing. At my library, I check out my own books on a computer while the librarian sits at a different computer. Often, we don’t speak. Years ago, my library deaccessioned almost half its collection, including all of its paperbacks. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there is no there there almost everywhere. People like to tell others to “touch grass.” But they ignore what is happening to their creative and even everyday environments. How they are being stripped of the physical elements that fill the senses. Those films of the ‘70s have characters fully in the world and impacted by it. Throwing a wad of cash at the cab driver is a human and environmental interaction. Paying via app is not. (When is the last time you touched money, which has a look and a feel and art that represents its people and place.) What kinds of stories will people be able to tell in a world where humans have been stripped of an environment that requires them to interact with it and each other at even a mundane level?
That reminds me of my career in a blood testing laboratory. When I started in 1981 we mixed up our own chemicals and solutions and visually observed things like color changes and bacterial growth. By the time I retired, all we had to do was put the samples in a tray and push a button on the computer. It really felt different.
Or developing and printing film with cannisters and trays of chemicals, and "dodging" to darken or lighten the developing image... analogue all the way ;-)>
Because I’m older, the change has been so dramatic. Now, I don’t even need an office (I’m not in production anymore). I just haul my laptop around in a backpack. I have pens and a notebook because I’m old and still like to use them, but one of my young colleagues mentioned she doesn’t think she’s written anything down in years. Just types notes in her phone or on her laptop.
Has she actually tried to use any file she wrote even a few years ago? Tried to access a backup? It is more than terrifying. Or maybe she doesn’t even backup…
Rambling means on and on without a point, like the Orange One is prone to do. That is not what you are doing when you reminisce to illustrate and explain what you are thinking. Thank you.
I teach high school, and for a few years I’ve opened classes with a fun icebreaker question, just to engage students in dialogue. One question I’ve used with several different groups is “what invention would you un-invent and why?”
The most interesting thing happened this fall. For the first time, several students answered social media, citing its addictive quality. These are 11th graders.
I mean... I hate Apple sincerely but one can't deny their success at design... but that advert? What on earth were they thinking - why not have the tablet like a doorway, welcoming all of that creative stuff into a cosy firelit room beyond - like a TARDIS. I mean - I woudl have told them that for free if I had been watching the beta test or whatver they do with adverts before they run them.
oh - and a very interesting article - sorry the horror of the advert just took over everything else for a few minutes
Funny, for me, I thought the great uproar at that Apple ad showed how shallow we’ve become because we weren’t capable of seeing that it was an abstract way of showing how much can be done with some of this tech. It is black and white thinking to suggest that it was saying all physical instruments must vanish.
I say this as a person who very much uses physical instruments (acoustic guitar, voice…) and works with human musicians. I thought the ad was extremely creative.
I'm sure I will invite heaps and heaps of scorn for mentioning it, but the serious candidates in the presidential election were all running outside the two party system. Jill Stein, Cornel West, Claudia de la Cruz, Chase Oliver -- all of them were far more authentic and issues-driven than either of the two fake candidates 99% of Americans apparently believed they had to choose from.
I pray that your vision of a more authentic and serious future is correct, but yesterday was beyond depressing in terms of the inability of virtually all Americans to imagine a world beyond the artificial one smashed into their faces by media (social, news & entertainment). F is for Fake as Orson Welles put it.
If Russian puppet Jill Stein is your idea of real and authentic I'll take a fake Democrat. I wonder how the Arab-Americans in Dearborn who voted for her are going to feel when they see what happens to Gaza under Trump's presidency?
and i will add it is absolutely racist to scold an immigrant population in one city when we all can see the statistics of who is voting for trump across gender lines. kamala is the worst presidential candidate in history and the gaza genocide is her baby just as much as bidens
I’m not scolding Arab Americans in Dearborn. They have as much right to vote for who they want as everyone else. I’m just saying that I think the ones who voted for Trump are likely to be disappointed with the outcome
Note that he wrote "far more authentic and issues-driven," and given that the authenticity of the main candidates measured as a number would be practically zero, that statement can still be true even if you don't think the third party candidates are especially authentic. It would seem that your aversion to Jill Stein is greater than your attraction to authenticity, considering that's only one out of four people listed in the comment you're replying to and your desire to attack her outweighed your regard for the overall point. The two party system is by design limiting and fake, how can you ever hope for something else if you choose to stay inside the box?
As far as I’m concerned Jill Stein is a Russian tool and is the very opposite of authentic.
How is a two-party system “fake” by design? That’s one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about politics. It’s imperfect as is every other system. I think we could improve it through things like ranked choice voting, which would allow third parties a little more space to advocate their positions in a formal way. That would be good but you’d still have a two party system?
The fact is we live in a country with lots of people who very different viewpoints, and reconciling that is always going to be tough and messy. There is no way around that.
As imperfect as the US is, we have made progress over the years. Given that we were founded as a fragile coalition between states, some of which thought it was OK to enslave people and some who thought it wasn’t, our system hasn’t done too badly.
You're correct regarding your "silly" statement, but rank choice voting is a miserable failure when one party is dominant. Remember, the Whigs were part of the "two party" system, until they weren't. The only constant is change, but without historical reference, that's a truism that is a moot point. That applies to many of today's issues, including politics and, particularly, "climate change."
Until such time as we amend our constitution and transition to a parliamentary system, we are not going to have a viable 3rd party in the United States. Anybody who thinks they are going to effect change by voting for 3rd parties is deluding themselves.
Do you think we’re better off because Nader helped Gore lose?
OK. That's worked so well for western European countries, right? At lease we still have a chance when our "leaders" actually understand and observe the Constitution. Few do, on either side.
What was their choice? They didn't have anything compared to those who wanted to kill them and their relatives. A drowning man will clutch at a straw. The fact that they, and all who want to see something different, won't get it is a well-known, and, among their rulers, well-celebrated fact. You may be enjoying it yourself.
They had an imperfect choice between a party that while they will continue to support Israel will at least attempt to influence them to moderate their conduct, and one that will likely tell Netanyahu to do whatever the hell he wants.
I won’t take any pleasure in seeing what will happen in Gaza, although as I am pro-Israel I would remind everyone that none of this would be happening if Hamas hadn’t attacked Israel. The Palestinians have rejected every opportunity to find a peaceful solution to the situation and as a result, Israel has become more radicalized. But being surrounded by hostile nations that want to destroy you has a way of doing that.
Americans are having a hysterical freak out because Mexicans are crossing the border illegally so they can contribute to our economy and create a better life for themselves. What would our reaction be if Canada and Mexico regularly launched rockets at us and openly stated that their eternal mission was to wipe us off the face of the earth? I can guarantee you it would be less restrained than Israel has been over the years.
No one should tell Netanyahu what to do but his citizens by dint of those who were elected to serve. If he asks for assistance we should give it if we are actually Israel's allies.
They might have been issue driven but they represent extreme views. For the first time in history, a republican has now sought advice and council from our modern day founder, Ron Paul, who has out authenticated almost every politician in the last 100 years. We're good.
I think Trump will do what he's said and find a way to end the proxy war against Russia. He's not going to pull a Bush because he understands we can't afford it, and Ukraine can't either.
You’d have to include the two-party system (regardless of media influence) as the main driver of choice because of “electability” - most people don’t want to throw away a vote on an unelectable candidate even if they prefer the candidate.
The presidency became a media personality job with FDR on the radio with his Fireside Chats. Then it became a television job. Now it’s a 24/7 multimedia/social media job.
My point being that our current political climate was maybe 80-90 years in the making, following the rise and evolution of electronic media.
Ted thank you great piece. And I apologize for AGAIN mentioning the late great David Foster Wallace and his monumental novel "Infinite Jest" where the overarching theme is addiction (to everything but entertainment being portrayed as the most lethal) and the answer to our malaise which - in Wallace's world - could be a new sincerity.
Geezuz, I found that book to be intolerable. Bailed at about page 250 after running into yet another supposed sentence that I just could not parse. I did get the theme but man, brutal (and recommended to me by Ted, by the way).
I agree. I’ve read and enjoyed “Junky.” Heck, even something like “Gravity’s Rainbow” was more enjoyable. I like Wallace’s non-fiction stuff. He essay about going on a cruise ship was hilarious.
And, just for fun, here’s the “sentence” that convinced me to drop “Jest.” It’s just ridiculous:
Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back Bay-edge brownstone she had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to the Molly Notkin, today's party's guest of honor and hostess in one, as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge theory at M.I.T., having cleared the notorious hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so herself devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxists Film-Cartridge Theory from the point of view of Marx himself, Marx as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar.
Was "Harold and Maude" unserious? I didn't think so. I mean it's a little shocking which turns into surprising, and then uses its goofiness to get at some pretty serious aspects of existentialism, living, growing and loving. All this without shying away from a few extremely serious details. Maude is such an effervescent character, and yet there's a moment with a quick lens zoom to a tattoo on her arm informing us she is survivor of the Holocaust. It's never spoken of but informs the audience that her message about living and about love come from somewhere serious. I can't easily see a movie like this being made today.
When life gets serious, entertainment is SUPPOSED to relieve the strain. Movies and radio in the 1930s were funny and trivial. In the 50s when life was smoother for most people, TV and music got serious. Lots of moral complexity and psychological twists even in programs like Gunsmoke. The Kingston Trio were popular. Listen closely to It Takes a Worried Man. Damn, that's hard stuff!
Since 1980 when Wall Street started fucking us over AGAIN, we've been back in 1933..
Well, a big factor in all this is that there is a huge gray area between "real" and "fake". This reminds me of a large systemic phenomenon which I'll call the MP3 Effect, though it's not about music specifically.
The MP3 Effect is when the quality of certain aspects of a thing is compromised as a trade-off for some other aspects being greatly improved. With MP3's, sound quality is compromised in favor of storage savings. Here are some other examples of the MP3s of other domains off the top of my head:
* A movie with beautiful cinematography watched on a phone
* Fluorescent lights
* Stouffer's lasagna
* $5 wine
* Silk plants
* Amazon
All these are examples of something which is acknowledged to be inferior to what is considered "the real thing", yet are consumed in great quantities nevertheless, to a point where the "real thing" may be considered unnecessarily fancy, because we don't appreciate the qualities lost in favor of the qualities gained. Fluorescent lights are ubiquitous, and their light is way less attractive than most other types of light, yet they are cheaper, so we put up with them, and most of the time don't notice. With Amazon, we have lost the serendipity of discovery when shopping, the marriage of the act of the purchase with the thing itself, the smile of the salesperson -- all the value that is added to a thing when there is some friction in the process of acquisition - but we can also get that pretty bowl with a twitch, and so who wouldn't?
Yet I wonder if perhaps the cumulative effect of these many compromises doesn't cause us to experience a somehow significantly lesser world all up. Stouffer's is ALMOST as good, a silk plant is ALMOST as pretty, etc., so aren't we splitting hairs here? The fact we can get all these things so easily in the first place surely makes us the kings of history, right? Yet, though eating Stouffer's lasagna next to a silk plant under fluorescent lighting while watching "2001" on a 5-inch screen may feel like we have it all, perhaps what we really have is merely a cheap imitation of "it all". Stouffer's is pretty good still, silk plants are indistinguishable unless you're paying attention, Kubrick's storytelling still comes through on a small screen, so though we all still believe it would be better watching 2001 on a big 4K screen eating mom's lasagna next to a healthy dieffenbachia by the glow of sunset, who has time, money and patience for all that? So we are content with the MP3s of them.
In finding examples that contradict this, things in which cheaper, more convenient, "easier" versions of something simply won't do for the majority of us, any I come up with inevitably fall into the "afficionado" category. Only audiophiles care about MP3 quality, only foodies disdain frozen food, only green thumbs care that the plant is fake, etc. The people who care about these quality differences are the "fringe", the "geeks". And while most everything has its fringe geeks who care deeply about the highest quality of given thing, it's never across the board. A cinephile insisting on watching movies in the most pristine environment may do so in a room with a $59 oriental rug they got at Target, which his next door neighbor wouldn't be caught dead owning, and who disdains anyone who doesn't appreciate the clearly superior $800 rug of the same size, but who is watching a Transformers sequel on their laptop, while another neighbor is watching their crap movie on a laptop on a cheap rug, eating a dinner which took an hour to painstakingly create with their own hands using only organic, farm-fresh ingredients, accompanied by wine that goes for $50 a bottle.
When I ask myself, what's my fringe geek thing, for which middling quality is unacceptable, it would be composition, songwriting, lyric writing, arrangement, those are my $800 rugs. But I understand they are not everyone else's. Sitting here as I am under fluorescent lightning on plastic furniture eating Triscuits and powdered lemonade, I could hear Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" via MP3 on cheap earbuds and be utterly transported by its genius. And if I swap all those MP3s for the real deals (artisan crackers by candlelight and a top-flight sound system) but am listening to a mediocre song -- nothing.
So maybe the truth is we seek the WAV files in life where we will appreciate them, and put up with MP3 versions of everything else, and while we don't really have it all, we mostly don't care.
Fantastic comment. Re: MP3s, I was willing to forego LPs for CDs, even though digital recordings simply can't reproduce their infinite auditory capabilities, simply because I hated the fact that my brand new LP, which was only going to be played once on a linear tracking turntable in order to record it on a cassette, still had pops and crackles, and the fact that I could play the CD on my home sound system as well as on my car's really good sound system. I don't listen to MP3s, except when I'm listening to Spotify at work in my office on good quality bookshelf speakers, which are simply limited at reproducing extremely high quality sound. And I do still listen to LPs on the linear tracker upstairs in the living room. The description of having a "warmer" sound is a real thing.
While it's true that there were skads of Rom-coms that year, 1996 also brought us Deadman, Deadman Walking, Trainspotting, Fargo, Jane Eyre, and Stonewall. The times were very heady then, and that's reflected in the way people lived and the things they liked. Whether this solidified into a frivolous culture that pervaded the next 30 years is debatable. What could have been more sobering than 9/11?
I think the 90s were the last good hey day for film. So many gems like the ones you mentioned. Even on the "entertainment" end of film, the thrillers and crime movies were more interesting and fun: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Miller's Crossing, Menace II Society... In the ought's films started to suck just a bit more, and by the 2010s everything was moving into the Marvel Multiverse and Disney, and from there it all just has gotten more bland and tasteless in general. Sure, there are some good things, but not on par.
Serious work: 1999 saw Chungking Express—a ground-breaking film, and Matrix, another one that has become a cultural icon. Miller’s Crossing is from my favorite period of the Coen’s work. Absolutely brilliant, and I would say, serious. I think it was Matt Damon who talked about the demise of mid-budget films. 2010 probably marks the trend towards franchises, but he also talked about the cost of marketing and promotion that around that time began to skyrocket. Later ofc you have streaming, where quality just finally gives over to quantity. And finally, the general public’s taste…a population of which 54% can’t read above 6th grade level. (source: the National Literacy Institute) I mean …Gah… crisis of seriousness, indeed…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Chungking Express. I’ll add it to the list. All those mid-budget films were where a lot of them gems were, and you are right, they have disappeared for the most part, except for a few things here and there.
I was very impressed by the fakery and showbiz around 9/11, which started about 24 hours after it happened, if it took that long. I had to pass by or over the site to get to work. Some people couldn't stand it: a passer-by grabbed and smashed a disaster tourist's camera on the bridge over it. But nothing could stop the exploitation, which continues to this day, as far as I know.
The fakery and showbiz were pushed by the government that pushed the DHS, TSA, and Patriot Act on us. I've been a conservative for over fifty years, but just because Bush was rumored to be a republican doesn't mean he was or is. And yes, the exploitation continues with hopes that it can now begin to be abolished. We'll see.
I don't understand how "bands wearing masks" is fakery or lack of seriousness. Performance art has always deployed masks.
Anyway regarding Sontag, I find it amusing that Bull Durham, a 1988 romantic comedy about minor league baseball, has a scene where Kevin Costner breaks down and starts ranting his true feelings to Susan Sarandon, including, "I find Susan Sontag pretentious."
I love both the idea of an American baseball movie referencing Susan Sontag, AND settling on the character deciding she's pretentious. This would be indicative of a time when Susan Sontag would have to be familiar enough to the audience of a baseball movie for the reference to land.
Right, it's a good moment because it's a guy letting go of things he's actually thought about. It works in terms of those two character's attraction because, for instance, Ebby (Tim Robbins) is frustrated by Annie's (Susan Sarandon) poetry reading, showcasing his youthful lack of patience which she is purposefully teasing him with, but Crash (Costner) actually happens to be what Ebby is looking for and doesn't expect to find BECAUSE she specializes in teasing these young bucks. The book / reading references are the dialog equivalent to the visual of Ebby struggling with Annie's garter clasps and Crash deftly snapping them right off.
You know the funny thing is that I hated Bull Durham, it was a movie my parents enjoyed watching a lot when I was growing up and to be clear, I just found it boring and talky, but now I feel like I need to revisit it as an adult.
Hi Ted, what a serious and insightful post. I'll looking forward to reading the follow-up. Thanks for putting words on that vague feeling I have in the back of my mind.
Interesting. You’ve floated your own balloon so you can shoot it down. Who cares whether Susan Sontag had a great sense of humour? She had a great intellect and huge insight, rather like Hannah Arendt, another woman famous for her stand-up comedy. Ted Gioia’s argument is very well made. He’s describing the difference between art made by artists, the products of their imagination and hands, and the product made by companies. One has meaning, the other wastes your time.
Now I have a visual of Hannah Arendt cracking jokes at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, with her German accent, making fun of totalitarian goose-steppers.
I guess she left that to Charlie Chaplin.
She did!
Man, Glenn, Arendt as stand-up is such a provocative image. She was so canny and so tuned to the ironic that if she were working today I could see her doing it. Writing would be her side gig. Come to think of it, stand-up is one of the most authentic art forms. When it bombs, it really bombs, when it kills, it really kills.
I think what stood out for me in Ted’s analysis was fake. In that we are not trying to connect or engage in an authentic. Being unserious is a part of the symptom of being fake. If we are all fake we don’t have to truly connect or take each other serious. If we can dismiss all of the world’s problems, America’s problems as being fake - then we don’t have to be serious about them. We don’t have to wake up and own our participation in all of these problems.
I have found people often claim “jokes” when they say something disgusting and offensive for this exact reason… they want to dismiss that they and their views are a problem so they don’t have to be held accountable.
Spot on! I’ve seen this more often lately with my kids and their friends. When you suddenly realize you’ve made an unpopular statement, it’s easier to say “Oh it was a joke, I was just joking…” than to own it and have to explain and defend your view.
I wonder how much of that comes with the gradual decline in people's ability to handle a statement or opinion that differs from their own. Falling back on "it was a joke" is a defense mechanism against someone who is about to become triggered by a statement that 10 years ago would have been taken in stride.
I hear you but I think this is kinda a weird way of looking at it. What was ok 10 years ago does not have to be nor should be in all cases ok now. That’s development, that’s change, that’s evolution, that’s understanding.
Plus convos are always two-sided. It’s not just that one person can’t handle an opinion different from their own. Of course they can. People handle it everyday. No one combusts just hearing a different opinion.
But it’s also that the person offering the opinion hasn’t thought through the various ways the opinion could offend, annoy, goud someone and when they’re met with that resistance, instead of being open to learning/understanding where the other person is coming from, they say oh it was a joke to relieve them of any of the hard work it takes to rethink your opinion with new information.
It would seem to me that if you say something not meant to offend, and then it actually does offend, you would be apologetic and interested in understanding why so you don’t offend again.
But that rarely happens, this openness. And I assume (so maybe it’s not true) that’s because most ppl actually do know that the comments have the potential to offend but feel that they should be able to offend. And the truth is, you do have the right to offend. You just don’t have the right to offend and then expect no consequences.
Excellent point.
Thank you for this. I think the crisis of unseriousness in modern American culture is a very real problem. From social media memes proclaiming "Good Vibes Only" and "Selfcare = Netflix Binges & Bubblebaths," to the current state of popular music and film. It feels like we're mostly drowning in white noise. I want more signals. I want more seriousness.
I have read somewhere that humour is also used to deal with stuff that one can't deal. So it could be that people can't deal with the real world and thus make fun of it.
Though there are times for fun and play, it becomes tiring when everything is made fun of. Especially stuff that you take seriously. It is especially annoying when you are being serious and people think that you are joking (because they can't fathom it being serious) and thus the respond in jest and then get butthurt if you took their jest as a serious thought.
Yes to all that. One of the reasons I stopped going to repertory theaters to see old films was due to the audience's unserious behavior. Half the audience would spend their time laughing inappropriately at the screen during a film like Casablanca, which has some funny moments I suppose but it is not a comedy. The audience was treating Casablanca as if they were watching a Charlie Chaplin film.
While the internet and technology in general has shredded our attention spans, the lack of seriousness stems from postmodernism. 70's cinema was so serious because it was a reaction to the the malaise of the time in which everything sucked. "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." We're in a similar time now. Few people are happy with how things are going. Incumbent heads of government are getting the boot no matter what their ideology. America just went from left to right. UK went from right to left. France went from the center to both the left and the right. The difference between the 70's and now is the lack of focus. Instead of Network, we have Everything Everywhere All at Once.
We've moved from recursive to discursive. Instead of finding hidden connections and meaning in life (like in The Glass Bead Game), we can flit from topic to topic without any real introspection. Obviously, the glut of entertainment has made this easier. It was almost compulsory to be more serious in the 60's when the only thing to watch during dinner was the nightly news. Still, the deconstruction of trust and meaning was the prerequisite to our unserious present and it happened long before the internet and movie special effects. The lack of seriousness is older than I am. The lack of focus is the newer problem.
I have spent (misspent?) over twenty of my seventy-six years trying to convince the mechanistic materialists that Goethe’s advocacy of the primacy of relationships over the objects and properties of materialist reductionism was a more inclusive epistemology. The scientists, mathematicians, and engineers would have none of it. What I saw as grossly pathetic was the adoption of nihilism and a perverse form of physics envy among people in the humanities. Post modernism is a glaring example. Carl Jung and William James showed that there was a valid alternative to the sycophants who chose to worship the Sheldon Coopers of the world. B. F. Skinner is a disgusting example of how the putrefaction of the humanities set in during the early 20th century. Reductionism has shown its utility in the physical sciences but it is in a crash and burn phase now in the life sciences and the humanities. Sure, there are diehards who will be Kuhnian exemplars of science progressing one funeral at a time. Timidity has never won in the long term. All life suckers is no way to live a life worth living. To hell with cowardly addictions!
I think those years spent trying to convince the materialists were well-spent, for what that's worth. Now on my twenty-seventh, I have come to think the heart of society's issues as a whole are essentially epistemological in nature, relating to our understanding of what is knowledge, and I would say also to mind-consciousness which are the filter all knowledge must pass through. If I didn't listen to the wisdom of people much older than I talking philosophy and epistemology, like you, there is no way I would have ever come to these conclusions!
Recently I've been slowly getting through the long but excellent book "Voltaire's Bastards" by John Ralston Saul, about "the dictatorship of reason in the West." He makes a very convincing argument that it is essentially this materialist reductionism and the emphasis of reason over all other qualities of the mind that have led to many present problems in society as a whole. The methods of physical science never made sense to apply to other fields like the humanities. It is no wonder, considering that reality, that the physical sciences have been so overemphasised over all else, and it's ironic that the lack of interest in philosophy has struck a terrible blow against the physical sciences themselves as such.
Physics itself has been falling apart because of this lack of epistemological rigour, and in lacking a good philosophical foundation like the physicists of old had, "reason" has become a kind of philosophy or religion of its own, which is not its purpose and makes no sense. One book I read years ago, "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, looked at this; ironic that physics has made little progress in decades due in part to this, and because scientists, mathematicians, and engineers can fall victim to the same psychological biases as anyone else. The obvious "physics envy" has never had less reason to exist.
I go on too much. Thank you for your comment, Charles. I'm going to have to finally get around to reading Goethe, since what you wrote left me intrigued. One of many names I recognise and have yet to get to!
I've really enjoyed your comments on Ted's article; they're insightful and thought-provoking. But (here's the but...), when you start a sentence with "Physics itself has been falling apart..." And what is "physics envy?" I'm not offended, but I am confused.
I'm a registered architect whose job is dependent on understanding physics, and being able to create attractive structures (when the client actually wants that) within those inherent boundaries. No one likes a building to collapse, believe it or not. I love beautiful cars that perform well, and airplanes, and rocket ships (a nod to Musk's self-parking space vehicle booster), and trees and animals which are all designed to deal with physics required by their inherent purposes. The planets and stars and galaxy and the universe. Especially the human body, which is the ultimately designed machine with its pumps and tubes, and heat and light and olfactory and auditory and auditory sensors. An otherworldly CPU and musculoskeletal structure. Physics is life, and life is physics. And it's beautiful.
I ordered a copy of "Voltaire's Bastards" immediatly after reading what you wrote. Reading Goethe's ideas on science is not very easy but if you are really interested you might check out this wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science
I read Goethe's critique of materialism while a high school senior(1966). For some reason I have always approached new knowledge as an object of curiosity with no desire to have a final answer. The story of the blind men and the elephant has been my preferred paradigm as far back as I can remember. I had been studying science and math more to get my father's attention than as some self chosen pursuit. At age nine I told my father I wanted to become a novelist. He said I would never make a living doing that. The subtext was that if I wanted to continue to get what little dribles of attention and affection I was getting at the time I would continue being daddy's little scientist. Hi life's dream was to have become a theoretical quantum physicist but he graduated from high school in 1929. His family was middle class and the only sibling who went to college was a bbrother who majored in business which had some chance of a return on investment. My life has been dominated by curiosity, so studying math and science was alot of fun for me but I also had a deep love for the profounder parts of religion. I share that with Carl Jung. When Goethe pointed out the limitations of reductionist materialism, I saw immediately that he was right. This fact has been one of the most difficult aspects of the holism vs reductionism debate. For me, holism is obviously superior in understanding nature and humanity's place in nature. Trying to get many people who are professionals in the STEM areas is close to a hopeless quest. Ecology really only makes sense from a holistic perspective. In spring of 2015, I was auditing a course on Daoism taught by Roger Ames at the University of Hawaii Manoa. One of the students in the course loaned me his copy of "The Master and his Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
This was a major event in my life because it helpedto explain why so many STEM people simply couldn't get the holistic perspective. Iain McGilchrist is a Burkean conservative, so we don't see eye to eye on politics but his work on the lateralization of cognition is a major breakthrough. Recently he published a follow up on TMAHE titled "The Matter with Things"
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/
Iain McGilchrist has YouTube videos that are hard to count, there are so many.My point is that checking out McGilchrist is a worthwhile endeavor. Many British intellectuals are enamored of Edmund Burke. I have spent more than two decades studying political psychology. I agree with William James and Friedrich Nietzsche who point out that a person's character draws them to the philosophical view that is most appealing to them. Maybe some people are born right brain dominant and are drawn inexorably to people like William James and Carl Jung. I really don't know. The nature nurture debate is one of my primary areas of curiosity. It seems like people in the creative arts are naturally drawn to a holistic perspective. I learned about Ted Gioia from Rick Beato whom I listen to fairly regularly. My true home is in the arts and humanities but I hope to see the end of the wars between the two cultures sometime soon.
The only remedy for that is to read books - including comic novels! - written by real authors, and to write longer pieces than social media posts.
He’s fantastic !
Postmodern and post-truth walk hand in hand.
Ok - I'm having trouble with all the generalizations. I can name serious films like GATTACA which was released in 1997 and funny stuff like Blazing Saddles which was released in 1974. So the question I have is do you really have data on a change in film types or are we just generalizing based on a particular point of view?
In addition, how do you define serious vs. not serious? I'm a fan of science fiction because it allows exploration of topics which may hit a little too close to home. Does sci-fi count as fake?
GATTACA!!! Why does no one talk about how truly prophetic and wonderful this film was? I think of it every month or so.
There's always been a place for unserious comedies. Most comedic movies are more in line with Animal House or Step Brothers than Dr. Strangelove or Idiocracy. What I'm saying is that in an era of general malaise where most people feel unsatisfied, the cultural response seems much more hollow than during the 60's and 70's. But yes, there is data. The percentage of remakes, reboots, sequels, spinoffs (RRSS) amongst the top 20 movies has risen sharply. Here's the link to the radio times piece about it if you want.
https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/hollywood-sequels-remakes/
The TL:DR version is there were 6 RRSS movies among the top 20 box office earners in 1983 down to 2 in 1993 and up to 14 in 2013. It hasn't gotten better since then.
I looked at the top 20 domestic box office from last year and Oppenheimer and Sound of Freedom were the only scripted movies that weren't sequels or from established IP. There were 4 comic book movies, 2 video game movies, and 2 remakes. Then there were 8 sequels in the Avatar (2), John Wick (4), Indiana Jones(5), Mission: Impossible (7), Hunger Games(5), Transformers (7), Creed (3), and Fast and Furious (11) franchises. That's 16 of the top 20. The other four were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, and Sound of Freedom.
There are still good movies being made that have something relevant to say about modern society. However, it's abundantly clear that Hollywood is using the vast majority of it's money and bankable star power on stale retreads and silly escapism instead of challenging new ideas. The same is true in music although Ted has already written about that at length and he can do so much better than me.
I meant this as a reply to Brett. Apologies for any confusion it's been a rough week.
This is longish and rambling and not even on topic, but it is what immediately sprang to mind as I read this thought provoking piece. When I was a young lass, I wanted to be a filmmaker and did my first internship with a lovely documentarian. One of the things he taught me was to cut actual 16mm film on a Steenbeck. Decades later, after the video revolution, I went to meet a friend who was editing a show for a cable channel (pre-steaming) and, in the edit suite, watched her shut down the Avid computer editing system and disconnect her keyboard and stick it in a tote. (A freelancer, she preferred her own keyboard.) Technology had revolutionized film to the point no one used it anymore. (Or even video tape. She worked completely from digitized files). Final Cut Pro wasn’t far off. And what was gone was the creative environment of film editing. When we had both started, film editing was a physical thing. You held film in your hands. It had a smell. You could(and we did) tape film clips to the wall of the cutting room and we really did just throw outtakes on the floor. Film made noise as it wound back and forth on the Steenbeck. You could lick it if you needed to figure out which side was the emulsion side. It was a full sensory experience. There were even rituals. The first time I “popped a core” was a noteworthy moment in my fledgling career. Now, all those years later, while the art of editing still existed, its environment was a hard drive, monitors and keyboard. And moving film production from out of the physical world to inside a computer is accelerating. All this rambling, old person nostalgia is to say you can walk by almost any room today and have zero idea of what happens in it. No accountant is surrounded by ledgers. Few writers are wadding up a page and throwing it at a trash can and just missing. At my library, I check out my own books on a computer while the librarian sits at a different computer. Often, we don’t speak. Years ago, my library deaccessioned almost half its collection, including all of its paperbacks. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there is no there there almost everywhere. People like to tell others to “touch grass.” But they ignore what is happening to their creative and even everyday environments. How they are being stripped of the physical elements that fill the senses. Those films of the ‘70s have characters fully in the world and impacted by it. Throwing a wad of cash at the cab driver is a human and environmental interaction. Paying via app is not. (When is the last time you touched money, which has a look and a feel and art that represents its people and place.) What kinds of stories will people be able to tell in a world where humans have been stripped of an environment that requires them to interact with it and each other at even a mundane level?
That reminds me of my career in a blood testing laboratory. When I started in 1981 we mixed up our own chemicals and solutions and visually observed things like color changes and bacterial growth. By the time I retired, all we had to do was put the samples in a tray and push a button on the computer. It really felt different.
Or developing and printing film with cannisters and trays of chemicals, and "dodging" to darken or lighten the developing image... analogue all the way ;-)>
This was my uncle’s experience with his lab job and why he ultimately quit and chose a teaching career.
Because I’m older, the change has been so dramatic. Now, I don’t even need an office (I’m not in production anymore). I just haul my laptop around in a backpack. I have pens and a notebook because I’m old and still like to use them, but one of my young colleagues mentioned she doesn’t think she’s written anything down in years. Just types notes in her phone or on her laptop.
Has she actually tried to use any file she wrote even a few years ago? Tried to access a backup? It is more than terrifying. Or maybe she doesn’t even backup…
I haven’t asked her.
The point being: touchable media endures; digital can disappear in a poof.
Yes! It has impacted so many fields.
Rambling means on and on without a point, like the Orange One is prone to do. That is not what you are doing when you reminisce to illustrate and explain what you are thinking. Thank you.
Thank you!
I teach high school, and for a few years I’ve opened classes with a fun icebreaker question, just to engage students in dialogue. One question I’ve used with several different groups is “what invention would you un-invent and why?”
The most interesting thing happened this fall. For the first time, several students answered social media, citing its addictive quality. These are 11th graders.
I can feel a tide turning.
Ask them if they want to write cursive letters to their grandparents! I am thinking yes, if they knew how…
I mean... I hate Apple sincerely but one can't deny their success at design... but that advert? What on earth were they thinking - why not have the tablet like a doorway, welcoming all of that creative stuff into a cosy firelit room beyond - like a TARDIS. I mean - I woudl have told them that for free if I had been watching the beta test or whatver they do with adverts before they run them.
oh - and a very interesting article - sorry the horror of the advert just took over everything else for a few minutes
Funny, for me, I thought the great uproar at that Apple ad showed how shallow we’ve become because we weren’t capable of seeing that it was an abstract way of showing how much can be done with some of this tech. It is black and white thinking to suggest that it was saying all physical instruments must vanish.
I say this as a person who very much uses physical instruments (acoustic guitar, voice…) and works with human musicians. I thought the ad was extremely creative.
I'm sure I will invite heaps and heaps of scorn for mentioning it, but the serious candidates in the presidential election were all running outside the two party system. Jill Stein, Cornel West, Claudia de la Cruz, Chase Oliver -- all of them were far more authentic and issues-driven than either of the two fake candidates 99% of Americans apparently believed they had to choose from.
I pray that your vision of a more authentic and serious future is correct, but yesterday was beyond depressing in terms of the inability of virtually all Americans to imagine a world beyond the artificial one smashed into their faces by media (social, news & entertainment). F is for Fake as Orson Welles put it.
If Russian puppet Jill Stein is your idea of real and authentic I'll take a fake Democrat. I wonder how the Arab-Americans in Dearborn who voted for her are going to feel when they see what happens to Gaza under Trump's presidency?
and i will add it is absolutely racist to scold an immigrant population in one city when we all can see the statistics of who is voting for trump across gender lines. kamala is the worst presidential candidate in history and the gaza genocide is her baby just as much as bidens
I’m not scolding Arab Americans in Dearborn. They have as much right to vote for who they want as everyone else. I’m just saying that I think the ones who voted for Trump are likely to be disappointed with the outcome
Whoops....
Note that he wrote "far more authentic and issues-driven," and given that the authenticity of the main candidates measured as a number would be practically zero, that statement can still be true even if you don't think the third party candidates are especially authentic. It would seem that your aversion to Jill Stein is greater than your attraction to authenticity, considering that's only one out of four people listed in the comment you're replying to and your desire to attack her outweighed your regard for the overall point. The two party system is by design limiting and fake, how can you ever hope for something else if you choose to stay inside the box?
As far as I’m concerned Jill Stein is a Russian tool and is the very opposite of authentic.
How is a two-party system “fake” by design? That’s one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about politics. It’s imperfect as is every other system. I think we could improve it through things like ranked choice voting, which would allow third parties a little more space to advocate their positions in a formal way. That would be good but you’d still have a two party system?
The fact is we live in a country with lots of people who very different viewpoints, and reconciling that is always going to be tough and messy. There is no way around that.
As imperfect as the US is, we have made progress over the years. Given that we were founded as a fragile coalition between states, some of which thought it was OK to enslave people and some who thought it wasn’t, our system hasn’t done too badly.
You're correct regarding your "silly" statement, but rank choice voting is a miserable failure when one party is dominant. Remember, the Whigs were part of the "two party" system, until they weren't. The only constant is change, but without historical reference, that's a truism that is a moot point. That applies to many of today's issues, including politics and, particularly, "climate change."
Until such time as we amend our constitution and transition to a parliamentary system, we are not going to have a viable 3rd party in the United States. Anybody who thinks they are going to effect change by voting for 3rd parties is deluding themselves.
Do you think we’re better off because Nader helped Gore lose?
OK. That's worked so well for western European countries, right? At lease we still have a chance when our "leaders" actually understand and observe the Constitution. Few do, on either side.
What was their choice? They didn't have anything compared to those who wanted to kill them and their relatives. A drowning man will clutch at a straw. The fact that they, and all who want to see something different, won't get it is a well-known, and, among their rulers, well-celebrated fact. You may be enjoying it yourself.
They had an imperfect choice between a party that while they will continue to support Israel will at least attempt to influence them to moderate their conduct, and one that will likely tell Netanyahu to do whatever the hell he wants.
I won’t take any pleasure in seeing what will happen in Gaza, although as I am pro-Israel I would remind everyone that none of this would be happening if Hamas hadn’t attacked Israel. The Palestinians have rejected every opportunity to find a peaceful solution to the situation and as a result, Israel has become more radicalized. But being surrounded by hostile nations that want to destroy you has a way of doing that.
Americans are having a hysterical freak out because Mexicans are crossing the border illegally so they can contribute to our economy and create a better life for themselves. What would our reaction be if Canada and Mexico regularly launched rockets at us and openly stated that their eternal mission was to wipe us off the face of the earth? I can guarantee you it would be less restrained than Israel has been over the years.
No one should tell Netanyahu what to do but his citizens by dint of those who were elected to serve. If he asks for assistance we should give it if we are actually Israel's allies.
Please explain your comment to the Arab Muslim community in Hamtramck, MI. who supported Trump.
Good luck with that.
the 7 million arab americans in dearborn whose vote would have made the difference in the election. lol
Did I say that I thought their votes would have made a difference in the outcome?
They might have been issue driven but they represent extreme views. For the first time in history, a republican has now sought advice and council from our modern day founder, Ron Paul, who has out authenticated almost every politician in the last 100 years. We're good.
The same Ron Paul who has called the invasion of Ukraine by Russia the result of a proxy war between the US and Russia, or a different Ron Paul?
I think Trump will do what he's said and find a way to end the proxy war against Russia. He's not going to pull a Bush because he understands we can't afford it, and Ukraine can't either.
You’d have to include the two-party system (regardless of media influence) as the main driver of choice because of “electability” - most people don’t want to throw away a vote on an unelectable candidate even if they prefer the candidate.
The presidency became a media personality job with FDR on the radio with his Fireside Chats. Then it became a television job. Now it’s a 24/7 multimedia/social media job.
My point being that our current political climate was maybe 80-90 years in the making, following the rise and evolution of electronic media.
Not from me. Lol. I couldn't agree more.
No, not heaps of scorn, at least so far. Some profound disagreement,though...
Thanks, Ted, for your serious writing.
Ted thank you great piece. And I apologize for AGAIN mentioning the late great David Foster Wallace and his monumental novel "Infinite Jest" where the overarching theme is addiction (to everything but entertainment being portrayed as the most lethal) and the answer to our malaise which - in Wallace's world - could be a new sincerity.
Geezuz, I found that book to be intolerable. Bailed at about page 250 after running into yet another supposed sentence that I just could not parse. I did get the theme but man, brutal (and recommended to me by Ted, by the way).
I agree. I’ve read and enjoyed “Junky.” Heck, even something like “Gravity’s Rainbow” was more enjoyable. I like Wallace’s non-fiction stuff. He essay about going on a cruise ship was hilarious.
And, just for fun, here’s the “sentence” that convinced me to drop “Jest.” It’s just ridiculous:
Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back Bay-edge brownstone she had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to the Molly Notkin, today's party's guest of honor and hostess in one, as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge theory at M.I.T., having cleared the notorious hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so herself devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxists Film-Cartridge Theory from the point of view of Marx himself, Marx as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar.
Agreed. A more liberal use of punctuation would likely have helped.
Greetings from Munich, Germany btw, hence your late night posts arrive in the morning :)
Was "Harold and Maude" unserious? I didn't think so. I mean it's a little shocking which turns into surprising, and then uses its goofiness to get at some pretty serious aspects of existentialism, living, growing and loving. All this without shying away from a few extremely serious details. Maude is such an effervescent character, and yet there's a moment with a quick lens zoom to a tattoo on her arm informing us she is survivor of the Holocaust. It's never spoken of but informs the audience that her message about living and about love come from somewhere serious. I can't easily see a movie like this being made today.
Hardly any good movies are being made today. 70's-90s is my own sweet spot for films, plus a few classics from the noir era.
When life gets serious, entertainment is SUPPOSED to relieve the strain. Movies and radio in the 1930s were funny and trivial. In the 50s when life was smoother for most people, TV and music got serious. Lots of moral complexity and psychological twists even in programs like Gunsmoke. The Kingston Trio were popular. Listen closely to It Takes a Worried Man. Damn, that's hard stuff!
Since 1980 when Wall Street started fucking us over AGAIN, we've been back in 1933..
TV and music got serious in the 50s? Like, say, Ozzie & Harriet and Blue Suede Shoes?
Those hardly represent TV in the 1950s.
Well, a big factor in all this is that there is a huge gray area between "real" and "fake". This reminds me of a large systemic phenomenon which I'll call the MP3 Effect, though it's not about music specifically.
The MP3 Effect is when the quality of certain aspects of a thing is compromised as a trade-off for some other aspects being greatly improved. With MP3's, sound quality is compromised in favor of storage savings. Here are some other examples of the MP3s of other domains off the top of my head:
* A movie with beautiful cinematography watched on a phone
* Fluorescent lights
* Stouffer's lasagna
* $5 wine
* Silk plants
* Amazon
All these are examples of something which is acknowledged to be inferior to what is considered "the real thing", yet are consumed in great quantities nevertheless, to a point where the "real thing" may be considered unnecessarily fancy, because we don't appreciate the qualities lost in favor of the qualities gained. Fluorescent lights are ubiquitous, and their light is way less attractive than most other types of light, yet they are cheaper, so we put up with them, and most of the time don't notice. With Amazon, we have lost the serendipity of discovery when shopping, the marriage of the act of the purchase with the thing itself, the smile of the salesperson -- all the value that is added to a thing when there is some friction in the process of acquisition - but we can also get that pretty bowl with a twitch, and so who wouldn't?
Yet I wonder if perhaps the cumulative effect of these many compromises doesn't cause us to experience a somehow significantly lesser world all up. Stouffer's is ALMOST as good, a silk plant is ALMOST as pretty, etc., so aren't we splitting hairs here? The fact we can get all these things so easily in the first place surely makes us the kings of history, right? Yet, though eating Stouffer's lasagna next to a silk plant under fluorescent lighting while watching "2001" on a 5-inch screen may feel like we have it all, perhaps what we really have is merely a cheap imitation of "it all". Stouffer's is pretty good still, silk plants are indistinguishable unless you're paying attention, Kubrick's storytelling still comes through on a small screen, so though we all still believe it would be better watching 2001 on a big 4K screen eating mom's lasagna next to a healthy dieffenbachia by the glow of sunset, who has time, money and patience for all that? So we are content with the MP3s of them.
In finding examples that contradict this, things in which cheaper, more convenient, "easier" versions of something simply won't do for the majority of us, any I come up with inevitably fall into the "afficionado" category. Only audiophiles care about MP3 quality, only foodies disdain frozen food, only green thumbs care that the plant is fake, etc. The people who care about these quality differences are the "fringe", the "geeks". And while most everything has its fringe geeks who care deeply about the highest quality of given thing, it's never across the board. A cinephile insisting on watching movies in the most pristine environment may do so in a room with a $59 oriental rug they got at Target, which his next door neighbor wouldn't be caught dead owning, and who disdains anyone who doesn't appreciate the clearly superior $800 rug of the same size, but who is watching a Transformers sequel on their laptop, while another neighbor is watching their crap movie on a laptop on a cheap rug, eating a dinner which took an hour to painstakingly create with their own hands using only organic, farm-fresh ingredients, accompanied by wine that goes for $50 a bottle.
When I ask myself, what's my fringe geek thing, for which middling quality is unacceptable, it would be composition, songwriting, lyric writing, arrangement, those are my $800 rugs. But I understand they are not everyone else's. Sitting here as I am under fluorescent lightning on plastic furniture eating Triscuits and powdered lemonade, I could hear Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" via MP3 on cheap earbuds and be utterly transported by its genius. And if I swap all those MP3s for the real deals (artisan crackers by candlelight and a top-flight sound system) but am listening to a mediocre song -- nothing.
So maybe the truth is we seek the WAV files in life where we will appreciate them, and put up with MP3 versions of everything else, and while we don't really have it all, we mostly don't care.
What a great comment. Really thoughtful. Thank you.
Fantastic comment. Re: MP3s, I was willing to forego LPs for CDs, even though digital recordings simply can't reproduce their infinite auditory capabilities, simply because I hated the fact that my brand new LP, which was only going to be played once on a linear tracking turntable in order to record it on a cassette, still had pops and crackles, and the fact that I could play the CD on my home sound system as well as on my car's really good sound system. I don't listen to MP3s, except when I'm listening to Spotify at work in my office on good quality bookshelf speakers, which are simply limited at reproducing extremely high quality sound. And I do still listen to LPs on the linear tracker upstairs in the living room. The description of having a "warmer" sound is a real thing.
While it's true that there were skads of Rom-coms that year, 1996 also brought us Deadman, Deadman Walking, Trainspotting, Fargo, Jane Eyre, and Stonewall. The times were very heady then, and that's reflected in the way people lived and the things they liked. Whether this solidified into a frivolous culture that pervaded the next 30 years is debatable. What could have been more sobering than 9/11?
I think the 90s were the last good hey day for film. So many gems like the ones you mentioned. Even on the "entertainment" end of film, the thrillers and crime movies were more interesting and fun: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Miller's Crossing, Menace II Society... In the ought's films started to suck just a bit more, and by the 2010s everything was moving into the Marvel Multiverse and Disney, and from there it all just has gotten more bland and tasteless in general. Sure, there are some good things, but not on par.
Serious work: 1999 saw Chungking Express—a ground-breaking film, and Matrix, another one that has become a cultural icon. Miller’s Crossing is from my favorite period of the Coen’s work. Absolutely brilliant, and I would say, serious. I think it was Matt Damon who talked about the demise of mid-budget films. 2010 probably marks the trend towards franchises, but he also talked about the cost of marketing and promotion that around that time began to skyrocket. Later ofc you have streaming, where quality just finally gives over to quantity. And finally, the general public’s taste…a population of which 54% can’t read above 6th grade level. (source: the National Literacy Institute) I mean …Gah… crisis of seriousness, indeed…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Chungking Express. I’ll add it to the list. All those mid-budget films were where a lot of them gems were, and you are right, they have disappeared for the most part, except for a few things here and there.
Influenced so many Filmmakers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Express
I was very impressed by the fakery and showbiz around 9/11, which started about 24 hours after it happened, if it took that long. I had to pass by or over the site to get to work. Some people couldn't stand it: a passer-by grabbed and smashed a disaster tourist's camera on the bridge over it. But nothing could stop the exploitation, which continues to this day, as far as I know.
The fakery and showbiz were pushed by the government that pushed the DHS, TSA, and Patriot Act on us. I've been a conservative for over fifty years, but just because Bush was rumored to be a republican doesn't mean he was or is. And yes, the exploitation continues with hopes that it can now begin to be abolished. We'll see.
Trump's second election triumph, perhaps?
I don't understand how "bands wearing masks" is fakery or lack of seriousness. Performance art has always deployed masks.
Anyway regarding Sontag, I find it amusing that Bull Durham, a 1988 romantic comedy about minor league baseball, has a scene where Kevin Costner breaks down and starts ranting his true feelings to Susan Sarandon, including, "I find Susan Sontag pretentious."
I love both the idea of an American baseball movie referencing Susan Sontag, AND settling on the character deciding she's pretentious. This would be indicative of a time when Susan Sontag would have to be familiar enough to the audience of a baseball movie for the reference to land.
Bravo, and funny, and NOT one of those times where "pretentious" means "that makes me uneasy"...
Right, it's a good moment because it's a guy letting go of things he's actually thought about. It works in terms of those two character's attraction because, for instance, Ebby (Tim Robbins) is frustrated by Annie's (Susan Sarandon) poetry reading, showcasing his youthful lack of patience which she is purposefully teasing him with, but Crash (Costner) actually happens to be what Ebby is looking for and doesn't expect to find BECAUSE she specializes in teasing these young bucks. The book / reading references are the dialog equivalent to the visual of Ebby struggling with Annie's garter clasps and Crash deftly snapping them right off.
You know the funny thing is that I hated Bull Durham, it was a movie my parents enjoyed watching a lot when I was growing up and to be clear, I just found it boring and talky, but now I feel like I need to revisit it as an adult.
Yes, the garter clasps, and Annie’s delighted gasp 🥰
I was just young enough when I saw Bull Durham that I was only vaguely aware of Susan Sontag. You can bet I looked her up after that!
Hi Ted, what a serious and insightful post. I'll looking forward to reading the follow-up. Thanks for putting words on that vague feeling I have in the back of my mind.