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.
- Sontag became far *too* serious. Did she ever write about comedy or satire? I met her once. She was extremely serious. And not easy to deal with. (She was reading at a bookstore where I worked, when her novel The Volcano Lover had just come out, in 1994.) I've never seen a sense of playfulness or a hint that there's such a thing as "fun" in her work.
- Ted, there was just as much shlock being released when Sontag was in her heyday than was the case in 1996. I feel sometimes like you pull things out of context, to the detriment of your points in many posts. In this post, for example.
- We *all* need "unserious" stuff to help us get through the very hard business of living our lives. And, hopefully, giving to others.
- the films you cite as great works are so violent and cruel that I've only ever seen one of them. Neither Taxi Driver nor Raging Bull are my cuppa. I think you're confusing your personal taste with some kind of objective criteria for "good films."
- if we don't maintain a sense of humor, the next however many years will destroy us.
- light, even goofy, movies can be good for the soul.
- please, please, don't tell us we need to watch the complete works of Ingmar Bergman. Talk about bleak! They sure as hell were hard to take when i was struggling with clinical depression and taking a film course, back in undergrad.
- i think we're about to get a crash course in both "serious" and "bleak" whether we want it or not.
- it's entirely possible for lightheartedness and seriousness to coexist in one and the same work, whether film, a book, music... or a video game.
- this trashing of popular entertainment as a sign of intellectual vacuousness is not OK. it *is* OK to say "This is how I see it," but you implicate our entire society in doing so.
I think Ted is referring to 'systemic' goofiness .. though Sontag may have been unfunloving.. the work of Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death ' I think best reflects the argument that Ted is proposing. Comfort, access, tech, makes us compliant and soft.. and we no longer make the effort to tackle understanding.. we live on a diet of distraction and dopamine... and prefer to be right all the time and not bothered with perspectives. I enjoyed Ted's take and I think he has a very healthy sense of humour !
Postman along with his elder Prog mentor George Seldes are superb and focused mass media critics from earlier eras of the Global Village. Postman became my pride and joy cribbed from my hometown, the outer boroughs of Manhattan island on Long Island in the borough of Queens. One generation back in German blue-collar contracting Fred Trump's choice of home to build a BIG government. Thanks Cold War for making that possible compared to decades since of ScareCity Principle driving up value of quickly and cheaply built (if over-billed) subsidized Low Income Housing.
All spent to win the Cold War v. Commies & anything with a whiff of Socialism, except for our life-saving Social Security. Also, bailing out Wall Street and corporate conquistadors that could not digest all that they'd hoarded of Public Health and Privatized Wealth. Include in all who were private contracting in the publicly financed building boom to house their new working muddle classes, impoverished and overworked, but housed compared with the Normalization of Homeless here in the Western Christian Empire. With our barely mentioned before a live broadcast camera or microphone ever wealth-concentrating family values fortune:
Back then it was a WASP and Irish, Italian, Slovak and German Catholic shades of white blue collar working class collection of 'hoods with small villages within where Caribbean, Puerto Rican & Dominican, Haitian, some various denominations of Jewish either from Eastern Europe or Muddle Eastern mother tongues alongside Flushing and Jamaica Bays.
2 decades ago when China loosened its controls and actually encouraged emigration for the return of U.S. employed emigrant dollars sent back to families in Neo-Liberal E-CON bedazzled control-mad China our outer borough became an inner province of Beijing where so many Han Chinese emigrated to find opportunities and access to all the merch that glitters on our corporate-captured Surveillance and 'Scapism Mass Technology arm of the Marketing bid-net:
Then of course you can spend some Public Interest viewing time watching long-teaching Linguist by academic trade and engaged political and mass media critic Noam Chomsky (tenured & revered beyond Massachusetts Institute of Technology around Boston) while mostly shunned by U.S. Land of Free corporate-captured broadcast and BIG mainstream Press media.
Chomsky was invited to speak and teach at seemingly every educational campus in the world though. And in most nations and states beyond these United States his simply spoken English has been translated into a global polyglot reference library interconnected with the many scholars he agreed or disputed often for decades on other countries Public Interest broadcasters (of which we have had zero in these Lands of the Free and Home of the Knave:
Media and philosophy, part 7. A virtual lecture on Noam Chomsky.
#NoamChomsky #media #philosophy
"Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of the recently published You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity".
For more quips and a distinctly U.S. sit-com sense of humor with sharper & more insightful quips check out the late great and hysterically funny Molly Ivins, who taught and did some serious news-papering of the commercial variety and academic book publishing and campus lecture variety.
Dip and dive into the "seep and creep" unified theory of corporate capture and her Texas back-slap way of defending her Free Thought and Defended Critique space wherever she met to discuss or to lecture. Needless to say student and faculty Q&A always best part of her speaking tours. Prof and Journalist Ivins was rarely as welcome on U.S. broadcast system as in nations that had set-aside broadcast spectrum for PUBLIC INTEREST broadcasting.
Sorry; not convinced. Especially on "compliant and soft." That phrase contains two words that were things demanded of women by our socirty, ever since the Victorians came up with their "seperate spheres" dictum for the well-heeled: men go out into the cold, hard world to earn $ so that women can stay home, culyivate "womanyly" things like "gracious living," not waste their precious time on fripperies like real education... and boss the servants around. There's plenty of reading to be gound that will bear thid out - t the point of nausea. It's treacly b.s.
I think you missed the point. Roger Water's album "Amused Themselves to Death" came out about then too. That's exactly what's happening in our society. You're confusing fun with banality. The powers that be want us to be distracted while they pillage us and bomb people into dust. Perhaps the phrase bread and circuses sums it up best.
compliant here, meaning passive and even gullible, ..no reference to Victorians or women was inferred. It's about how people engage less now than before in challenging texts, films, music, conversations ( they text and are in relationships with their phones ) and are preset to need special effects and game-like stimulus.. even 'treacly' ; )
You realise both the words "compliant" and "soft" have definitions outside of whatever Victorian use you are talking about...? Trying to connect casual usage of those words to usage two centuries prior as if the understanding today is the same as then comes across as confused to me.
The Victorian era I know as the one with the greatest degree of scientific progress and invention in history, the great liberal era where feminism emerged and women made gains in every era of society, but again, you can choose to look at any era of history for the good of that era or for the ill.
Regardless, in countless eras of history being considered "compliant and soft" has been considered bad by both men *and* women, who are expected among many societies to be instead e.g independent and hard. This is not a sexism thing.
You seem to have missed the point of the article, which was that our culture is now dominated by fakery. The opposition isn’t between seriousness and comedy, but between seriousness and fakery. Comedy, good comedy, is real and therefore serious in the wider sense of the word - as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark could tell you.
But nothing fake can be comic, unless it’s deliberately comic because it’s fake (a real fake? A comedy of fakery?) Otherwise it’s a brain tickle, without comic spark and the cleverness, cognitive dissonance and touch of compassion that makes the best comedy.
Much of our culture is just a great big fake balloon just waiting to be pierced. And what better to do it than comedy ?
It's a question of emphasis. People seem to have been a lot more serious during the Great Depression and World War II than they are when things aren't nearly so bad right now. Yeah, they had their Charlie Chaplin and so on, but fundamentally, they didn't find comfort in schlock media, but in institutions like faith, family, community, and neighbors. People buckled down, they rationed, and they worked.
It says something to me that people self-sooth with entertainment first. It's like when some kid on TikTok describes it as self-care to stay in bed with their phone all day, eating potato chips for breakfast. They "give themselves permission" to live the lowest, most slovenly, undignified, inhuman, and unhealthy life, and call that taking care of themselves. That's not care. You're stressed about the future? Take a walk, go to the gym, eat more vegetables, have a thoughtful face-to-face with the most even-headed people you know, start a journal, save money, read a book from the canon, cut back on drinking, get off social media, be kind to the people to those who deserve it and polite to those who don't. The only real comfort anyone can take from life is to live well. And I say that as someone of extremely modest means, with a lot of demographic bullseyes on me if things turn out half as bad as people say. If they disappear me, and torture me to death, and bury me in a mass grave, at least I'll have died a human being, unlike those who'd do such things.
"Be kind to the people who deserve it and polite to those who don't."
Did you come up with that, or did you hear it somewhere? I think it's one of my guiding principles, but only subconsciously. To see it verbalized feels revelatory.
It's a delightful way of saying Matthew 5:43-48, my friend. Lines up with why Jesus' teachings were, and still are, revelatory. They're real. Serious. Challenging. Loving.
As someone who writes comedy behind an avatar, I have to agree with you. If the opposite of seriousness is comedy then we should be overflowing with comedy which I assure you, we are not. I have a hard time growing my Substack because there are no online groups to share comedic writing. In fact, the reason I started writing comedy is because there is such a low supply. I'm not exactly competing with John Belushi or Chris Farley. People like them just don't exist anymore.
I don't think serious is quite the right word but there is some truth to what he says. I might argue "honest" or "adult" might be better words. Nobody today acts like an honest adult.
Nobody wants to hear serious thoughts from a comedian though. 😄 I'm sure I have done the opposite of advertise my Substack. 😄
"- We *all* need "unserious" stuff to help us get through the very hard business of living our lives. And, hopefully, giving to others."
Do we really? You claim Ted Gioza speaks for others in giving his own opinions and thoughts, yet you do that numerous times throughout this post. I could really go without zany, unserious film, for example. Even when I enjoy a comedy, I'll take it black like my coffee.
"- the films you cite as great works are so violent and cruel that I've only ever seen one of them. Neither Taxi Driver nor Raging Bull are my cuppa. I think you're confusing your personal taste with some kind of objective criteria for "good films.""
Fair enough at them being violent, but I do think you exaggerate somewhat. They are violent by the standards of when they were released. But let's be honest, only the ending of Taxi Driver (from what I recall) has much of any violence, and Raging Bull is about boxing, not killing and violence, nor is violence the point of either film, let alone cruelty. And regardless of if they are not to your taste, Scorsese is the most award winning director of all time for a reason and they are both in fact considered objectively good films by all measures, even if not your cup of tea.
"- please, please, don't tell us we need to watch the complete works of Ingmar Bergman. Talk about bleak! They sure as hell were hard to take when i was struggling with clinical depression and taking a film course, back in undergrad."
Those movies helped me with my depression a lot as a teenager. So tell everyone to watch them and they can decide for themselves, I say. They are thought provoking and helped me explore existential questions, and increase my confidence learning and listening to Swedish language. I find Bergman always has a profound sense of hope in his movies, like Jungfrukällan's ending. Again, you assume the way you think is the way everyone thinks, and I can't stand that either.
"- i think we're about to get a crash course in both "serious" and "bleak" whether we want it or not."
"Serious" and "bleak" are what you make of it. I tend to prefer what others would consider serious, dark, or bleak art. But I don't typically find art seen that way to be that way, and that's certainly not what I get from it. What you call "lighthearted" I may well find unserious, zany, and uninteresting, giving me nothing to think about. Art is what you make of it.
"- this trashing of popular entertainment as a sign of intellectual vacuousness is not OK. it *is* OK to say "This is how I see it," but you implicate our entire society in doing so."
How is this a problem? Cultural critics have done this forever. I don't see what is wrong with criticising (or "implicating") our entire society. Good for Ted Gioza doing so—our society is sorely in need of plenty of critique.
"Please stop. I mean it."
I would say to Gioza – please continue. I mean it. You don't have to keep reading him if you don't like what he writes, and asking a writer even politely to change their personal tastes to satisfy your own comes across as more than a tad self-important and entitled, although of course I take in good faith that you are certainly likely neither of those things as a person, it's just how this individual post reads to me.
Excellent commentary, and "Even when I enjoy a comedy, I'll take it black like my coffee" is the cherry on top. Being an overt fan of black humor is a way to laugh about the fact that no one gets out of this alive; we're all ultimately equal.
Playfulness can be a good, and it can thrive alongside the serious, but not in place of the serious. Ted is making the latter point, and doing it rather more seriously than your critique, which requires misconstrual to advance past the first sentence. My opinion, of course. And I mean it.
I dreamed of a comment. Your modus operandi proves Ted's point. "𝓣𝓮𝓭, 𝓖𝓵𝓮𝓷, 𝓜𝓲𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓮, 𝓙𝓲𝓶, 𝓙𝓪𝓼𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓮"" all decided to leave a comment using real names, not fake ones. Names you would associate with human beings. The origins of personal names can be traced back to the earliest human societies, where they held immense cultural and societal importance. These anthroponyms often carried deep meanings, reflecting aspects of a person's identity, familial lineage, or even religious beliefs. Until the advent of social media, people penned articles using their birth names, today, people give financial & geopolitical commentary using made up names.
Painters write their name on the canvas. Songwriters on the sheet music, we even used to write our names in the sand, but not today. Today we take advice from anonymous souls on social media who go by "MAGA MANIA MAN" "THE WOKE BLOKE" "FREE CASH TRADER" Everyone now had an opportunity to have a say.
I can't blame you for adopting this cultural trend unique to our time without thought. Or feeling vulnerable online thus creating a series of cute monikers to attach your thoughts to. Nonetheless, fake and by no means authentic. "But it's what everyone else does" EXACTLY
I wonder if you would ever dream of leaving a comment with a real name? Like the good ole days when we were Dan, Pam or Sam. Or maybe this current cultural trend is a hold over from how rap artists identified themselves. Iced-T, 50 cents, Gucci Mane or Busta Rhymes.
I agree with your assessment with one exception: My surname is somewhat unusual, and I know people who've used their full name and have become targets for those who are offended by their comments.
Mine is a nod to the car I inherited when my Dad passed, and I'm stickin' with it.
Exchanges where everyone agrees and nods in total agreement are boring. I don't read anything disparaging regarding your comments here. Disagreement, yes, but not disparaging and certainly not insulting. Stick around!:-)>
The founding editor\publisher of THE REALIST, namely Paul Krassner (a stand-up performance artist and satirist in real life) lived to blur those lines between absurdity and reality in our US political spheres. Check out the archives now online after Krassner's death. Also, binge on the U. of Tube clips of Krassner doing his "act" or speaking from academic or political or socio-political benefit shows.
Is Raging Bull a better movie than Twister? You seem to think not. Well, you're entitled to your opinion of course but I gotta tell ya, that doesn't give me a good opinion of your movie reviewing chops.
I'm not "reviewing" anything. Haven't seen either movie. And boxing's not for me. Especially the potential brain damage due to not wearing protective headgear.
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.
I guess it depends on what media one looks at or to. The 1960s were vacuous, per media - just in a different way. Like Jerry Van Dyke's show "My Mother the Car." Or "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Petticoat Junction," et. al. OTOH, The Dick Van Dyke show really *was* good, and not vacuous at all.
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 couldn't read it either. He needed editing. If you want a book about addiction, I recommend "Junky" by William Burroughs. It packs a punch and doesn't require a month-long commitment. You can finish it in an hour.
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.
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.
I would argue the following:
- Sontag became far *too* serious. Did she ever write about comedy or satire? I met her once. She was extremely serious. And not easy to deal with. (She was reading at a bookstore where I worked, when her novel The Volcano Lover had just come out, in 1994.) I've never seen a sense of playfulness or a hint that there's such a thing as "fun" in her work.
- Ted, there was just as much shlock being released when Sontag was in her heyday than was the case in 1996. I feel sometimes like you pull things out of context, to the detriment of your points in many posts. In this post, for example.
- We *all* need "unserious" stuff to help us get through the very hard business of living our lives. And, hopefully, giving to others.
- the films you cite as great works are so violent and cruel that I've only ever seen one of them. Neither Taxi Driver nor Raging Bull are my cuppa. I think you're confusing your personal taste with some kind of objective criteria for "good films."
- if we don't maintain a sense of humor, the next however many years will destroy us.
- light, even goofy, movies can be good for the soul.
- please, please, don't tell us we need to watch the complete works of Ingmar Bergman. Talk about bleak! They sure as hell were hard to take when i was struggling with clinical depression and taking a film course, back in undergrad.
- i think we're about to get a crash course in both "serious" and "bleak" whether we want it or not.
- it's entirely possible for lightheartedness and seriousness to coexist in one and the same work, whether film, a book, music... or a video game.
- this trashing of popular entertainment as a sign of intellectual vacuousness is not OK. it *is* OK to say "This is how I see it," but you implicate our entire society in doing so.
Please stop. I mean it.
Signed,
Gadfly
I think Ted is referring to 'systemic' goofiness .. though Sontag may have been unfunloving.. the work of Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death ' I think best reflects the argument that Ted is proposing. Comfort, access, tech, makes us compliant and soft.. and we no longer make the effort to tackle understanding.. we live on a diet of distraction and dopamine... and prefer to be right all the time and not bothered with perspectives. I enjoyed Ted's take and I think he has a very healthy sense of humour !
Amusing Ourselves to Death?
Postman along with his elder Prog mentor George Seldes are superb and focused mass media critics from earlier eras of the Global Village. Postman became my pride and joy cribbed from my hometown, the outer boroughs of Manhattan island on Long Island in the borough of Queens. One generation back in German blue-collar contracting Fred Trump's choice of home to build a BIG government. Thanks Cold War for making that possible compared to decades since of ScareCity Principle driving up value of quickly and cheaply built (if over-billed) subsidized Low Income Housing.
All spent to win the Cold War v. Commies & anything with a whiff of Socialism, except for our life-saving Social Security. Also, bailing out Wall Street and corporate conquistadors that could not digest all that they'd hoarded of Public Health and Privatized Wealth. Include in all who were private contracting in the publicly financed building boom to house their new working muddle classes, impoverished and overworked, but housed compared with the Normalization of Homeless here in the Western Christian Empire. With our barely mentioned before a live broadcast camera or microphone ever wealth-concentrating family values fortune:
https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026
Back then it was a WASP and Irish, Italian, Slovak and German Catholic shades of white blue collar working class collection of 'hoods with small villages within where Caribbean, Puerto Rican & Dominican, Haitian, some various denominations of Jewish either from Eastern Europe or Muddle Eastern mother tongues alongside Flushing and Jamaica Bays.
2 decades ago when China loosened its controls and actually encouraged emigration for the return of U.S. employed emigrant dollars sent back to families in Neo-Liberal E-CON bedazzled control-mad China our outer borough became an inner province of Beijing where so many Han Chinese emigrated to find opportunities and access to all the merch that glitters on our corporate-captured Surveillance and 'Scapism Mass Technology arm of the Marketing bid-net:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman
Then of course you can spend some Public Interest viewing time watching long-teaching Linguist by academic trade and engaged political and mass media critic Noam Chomsky (tenured & revered beyond Massachusetts Institute of Technology around Boston) while mostly shunned by U.S. Land of Free corporate-captured broadcast and BIG mainstream Press media.
http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/dvd/m/manufacturing_consent.html
Chomsky was invited to speak and teach at seemingly every educational campus in the world though. And in most nations and states beyond these United States his simply spoken English has been translated into a global polyglot reference library interconnected with the many scholars he agreed or disputed often for decades on other countries Public Interest broadcasters (of which we have had zero in these Lands of the Free and Home of the Knave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCyL_6WnVI
Noam Chomsky: Media and Mass Manipulation
Carefree Wandering
79.5K subscribers
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#NoamChomsky #philosophy #media
Media and philosophy, part 7. A virtual lecture on Noam Chomsky.
#NoamChomsky #media #philosophy
"Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of the recently published You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity".
For more quips and a distinctly U.S. sit-com sense of humor with sharper & more insightful quips check out the late great and hysterically funny Molly Ivins, who taught and did some serious news-papering of the commercial variety and academic book publishing and campus lecture variety.
Dip and dive into the "seep and creep" unified theory of corporate capture and her Texas back-slap way of defending her Free Thought and Defended Critique space wherever she met to discuss or to lecture. Needless to say student and faculty Q&A always best part of her speaking tours. Prof and Journalist Ivins was rarely as welcome on U.S. broadcast system as in nations that had set-aside broadcast spectrum for PUBLIC INTEREST broadcasting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpfHjpHi_TA&list=PLJJFppKdrBbbsoduIt3XOHrUAZXTZSwYI
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Sorry; not convinced. Especially on "compliant and soft." That phrase contains two words that were things demanded of women by our socirty, ever since the Victorians came up with their "seperate spheres" dictum for the well-heeled: men go out into the cold, hard world to earn $ so that women can stay home, culyivate "womanyly" things like "gracious living," not waste their precious time on fripperies like real education... and boss the servants around. There's plenty of reading to be gound that will bear thid out - t the point of nausea. It's treacly b.s.
P.S. This gadfly is a woman.
I think you missed the point. Roger Water's album "Amused Themselves to Death" came out about then too. That's exactly what's happening in our society. You're confusing fun with banality. The powers that be want us to be distracted while they pillage us and bomb people into dust. Perhaps the phrase bread and circuses sums it up best.
Bread and circuses. The Roman oligarchs and emperors were masters at it and left detailed examples behind !
Yep.
Well, if there were ever an argument that's unconvincing, it's yours.
¿Que?!
How?
Please elucidate. Once you read my entire post, just above, as i added some stuff.
compliant here, meaning passive and even gullible, ..no reference to Victorians or women was inferred. It's about how people engage less now than before in challenging texts, films, music, conversations ( they text and are in relationships with their phones ) and are preset to need special effects and game-like stimulus.. even 'treacly' ; )
You realise both the words "compliant" and "soft" have definitions outside of whatever Victorian use you are talking about...? Trying to connect casual usage of those words to usage two centuries prior as if the understanding today is the same as then comes across as confused to me.
The Victorian era I know as the one with the greatest degree of scientific progress and invention in history, the great liberal era where feminism emerged and women made gains in every era of society, but again, you can choose to look at any era of history for the good of that era or for the ill.
Regardless, in countless eras of history being considered "compliant and soft" has been considered bad by both men *and* women, who are expected among many societies to be instead e.g independent and hard. This is not a sexism thing.
You seem to have missed the point of the article, which was that our culture is now dominated by fakery. The opposition isn’t between seriousness and comedy, but between seriousness and fakery. Comedy, good comedy, is real and therefore serious in the wider sense of the word - as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark could tell you.
But nothing fake can be comic, unless it’s deliberately comic because it’s fake (a real fake? A comedy of fakery?) Otherwise it’s a brain tickle, without comic spark and the cleverness, cognitive dissonance and touch of compassion that makes the best comedy.
Much of our culture is just a great big fake balloon just waiting to be pierced. And what better to do it than comedy ?
It's a question of emphasis. People seem to have been a lot more serious during the Great Depression and World War II than they are when things aren't nearly so bad right now. Yeah, they had their Charlie Chaplin and so on, but fundamentally, they didn't find comfort in schlock media, but in institutions like faith, family, community, and neighbors. People buckled down, they rationed, and they worked.
It says something to me that people self-sooth with entertainment first. It's like when some kid on TikTok describes it as self-care to stay in bed with their phone all day, eating potato chips for breakfast. They "give themselves permission" to live the lowest, most slovenly, undignified, inhuman, and unhealthy life, and call that taking care of themselves. That's not care. You're stressed about the future? Take a walk, go to the gym, eat more vegetables, have a thoughtful face-to-face with the most even-headed people you know, start a journal, save money, read a book from the canon, cut back on drinking, get off social media, be kind to the people to those who deserve it and polite to those who don't. The only real comfort anyone can take from life is to live well. And I say that as someone of extremely modest means, with a lot of demographic bullseyes on me if things turn out half as bad as people say. If they disappear me, and torture me to death, and bury me in a mass grave, at least I'll have died a human being, unlike those who'd do such things.
"Be kind to the people who deserve it and polite to those who don't."
Did you come up with that, or did you hear it somewhere? I think it's one of my guiding principles, but only subconsciously. To see it verbalized feels revelatory.
It's a delightful way of saying Matthew 5:43-48, my friend. Lines up with why Jesus' teachings were, and still are, revelatory. They're real. Serious. Challenging. Loving.
As someone who writes comedy behind an avatar, I have to agree with you. If the opposite of seriousness is comedy then we should be overflowing with comedy which I assure you, we are not. I have a hard time growing my Substack because there are no online groups to share comedic writing. In fact, the reason I started writing comedy is because there is such a low supply. I'm not exactly competing with John Belushi or Chris Farley. People like them just don't exist anymore.
I don't think serious is quite the right word but there is some truth to what he says. I might argue "honest" or "adult" might be better words. Nobody today acts like an honest adult.
Nobody wants to hear serious thoughts from a comedian though. 😄 I'm sure I have done the opposite of advertise my Substack. 😄
I'm no comedian, but I think comedians who make jokes about the serious are often the most insightful and funny in the business.
Best of luck with your substack.
Thanks!
"- We *all* need "unserious" stuff to help us get through the very hard business of living our lives. And, hopefully, giving to others."
Do we really? You claim Ted Gioza speaks for others in giving his own opinions and thoughts, yet you do that numerous times throughout this post. I could really go without zany, unserious film, for example. Even when I enjoy a comedy, I'll take it black like my coffee.
"- the films you cite as great works are so violent and cruel that I've only ever seen one of them. Neither Taxi Driver nor Raging Bull are my cuppa. I think you're confusing your personal taste with some kind of objective criteria for "good films.""
Fair enough at them being violent, but I do think you exaggerate somewhat. They are violent by the standards of when they were released. But let's be honest, only the ending of Taxi Driver (from what I recall) has much of any violence, and Raging Bull is about boxing, not killing and violence, nor is violence the point of either film, let alone cruelty. And regardless of if they are not to your taste, Scorsese is the most award winning director of all time for a reason and they are both in fact considered objectively good films by all measures, even if not your cup of tea.
"- please, please, don't tell us we need to watch the complete works of Ingmar Bergman. Talk about bleak! They sure as hell were hard to take when i was struggling with clinical depression and taking a film course, back in undergrad."
Those movies helped me with my depression a lot as a teenager. So tell everyone to watch them and they can decide for themselves, I say. They are thought provoking and helped me explore existential questions, and increase my confidence learning and listening to Swedish language. I find Bergman always has a profound sense of hope in his movies, like Jungfrukällan's ending. Again, you assume the way you think is the way everyone thinks, and I can't stand that either.
"- i think we're about to get a crash course in both "serious" and "bleak" whether we want it or not."
"Serious" and "bleak" are what you make of it. I tend to prefer what others would consider serious, dark, or bleak art. But I don't typically find art seen that way to be that way, and that's certainly not what I get from it. What you call "lighthearted" I may well find unserious, zany, and uninteresting, giving me nothing to think about. Art is what you make of it.
"- this trashing of popular entertainment as a sign of intellectual vacuousness is not OK. it *is* OK to say "This is how I see it," but you implicate our entire society in doing so."
How is this a problem? Cultural critics have done this forever. I don't see what is wrong with criticising (or "implicating") our entire society. Good for Ted Gioza doing so—our society is sorely in need of plenty of critique.
"Please stop. I mean it."
I would say to Gioza – please continue. I mean it. You don't have to keep reading him if you don't like what he writes, and asking a writer even politely to change their personal tastes to satisfy your own comes across as more than a tad self-important and entitled, although of course I take in good faith that you are certainly likely neither of those things as a person, it's just how this individual post reads to me.
Excellent commentary, and "Even when I enjoy a comedy, I'll take it black like my coffee" is the cherry on top. Being an overt fan of black humor is a way to laugh about the fact that no one gets out of this alive; we're all ultimately equal.
Playfulness can be a good, and it can thrive alongside the serious, but not in place of the serious. Ted is making the latter point, and doing it rather more seriously than your critique, which requires misconstrual to advance past the first sentence. My opinion, of course. And I mean it.
Yeah, I know... maybe this blog isn't for me.
But I wonder how many of your readers disagree but would never dream of leaving a comment. It can be very hard to put oneself on the line in that way.
I dreamed of a comment. Your modus operandi proves Ted's point. "𝓣𝓮𝓭, 𝓖𝓵𝓮𝓷, 𝓜𝓲𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓮, 𝓙𝓲𝓶, 𝓙𝓪𝓼𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓮"" all decided to leave a comment using real names, not fake ones. Names you would associate with human beings. The origins of personal names can be traced back to the earliest human societies, where they held immense cultural and societal importance. These anthroponyms often carried deep meanings, reflecting aspects of a person's identity, familial lineage, or even religious beliefs. Until the advent of social media, people penned articles using their birth names, today, people give financial & geopolitical commentary using made up names.
Painters write their name on the canvas. Songwriters on the sheet music, we even used to write our names in the sand, but not today. Today we take advice from anonymous souls on social media who go by "MAGA MANIA MAN" "THE WOKE BLOKE" "FREE CASH TRADER" Everyone now had an opportunity to have a say.
I can't blame you for adopting this cultural trend unique to our time without thought. Or feeling vulnerable online thus creating a series of cute monikers to attach your thoughts to. Nonetheless, fake and by no means authentic. "But it's what everyone else does" EXACTLY
I wonder if you would ever dream of leaving a comment with a real name? Like the good ole days when we were Dan, Pam or Sam. Or maybe this current cultural trend is a hold over from how rap artists identified themselves. Iced-T, 50 cents, Gucci Mane or Busta Rhymes.
There are good reasons not to use one's real name on public websites. I don't use mine, but I'm not a troll or a bot.
No. I never use my real name b/c of a longterm problem with a stalker.
Are you suggesting my real name is not Sotoportego, just because I drop the capital "S"? ;-)>
I won't troll you or look up your name just the same.
It's Ice-T. Not much on rap, but hey.
I agree with your assessment with one exception: My surname is somewhat unusual, and I know people who've used their full name and have become targets for those who are offended by their comments.
Mine is a nod to the car I inherited when my Dad passed, and I'm stickin' with it.
Exchanges where everyone agrees and nods in total agreement are boring. I don't read anything disparaging regarding your comments here. Disagreement, yes, but not disparaging and certainly not insulting. Stick around!:-)>
Yes, and i saw a lot of comments like that early this year. It put me off trying to comment at all, tbh.
Oh no, you should definitely post! It’s good to talk and debate and refine ideas. Who wants to live in a digital bubble ?
I’d rather someone think I’m joking when I’m being serious than someone think I’m serious when I’m joking.
The founding editor\publisher of THE REALIST, namely Paul Krassner (a stand-up performance artist and satirist in real life) lived to blur those lines between absurdity and reality in our US political spheres. Check out the archives now online after Krassner's death. Also, binge on the U. of Tube clips of Krassner doing his "act" or speaking from academic or political or socio-political benefit shows.
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
> Sontag became far *too* serious.
Good. We could use more of that.
Is Raging Bull a better movie than Twister? You seem to think not. Well, you're entitled to your opinion of course but I gotta tell ya, that doesn't give me a good opinion of your movie reviewing chops.
I'm not "reviewing" anything. Haven't seen either movie. And boxing's not for me. Especially the potential brain damage due to not wearing protective headgear.
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.
Robertson Davies comes to mind. He had a wonderful sense of humor. A deep, dark one.
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.
Very well said.
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 ;-)>
Solarizing!
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.
Well, unless there's a fire or flood...
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'm sure many type compositors felt the same when their work became obsolete...
Physically editing film sounds wonderful! I like shooting film, too (SLR or point and shoot).
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.
It was gut-punch awful to me. I hated it.
Thanks, Ted, for your serious writing.
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?
Yeah... no.
I guess it depends on what media one looks at or to. The 1960s were vacuous, per media - just in a different way. Like Jerry Van Dyke's show "My Mother the Car." Or "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Petticoat Junction," et. al. OTOH, The Dick Van Dyke show really *was* good, and not vacuous at all.
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...
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 couldn't read it either. He needed editing. If you want a book about addiction, I recommend "Junky" by William Burroughs. It packs a punch and doesn't require a month-long commitment. You can finish it in an hour.
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.
Like I said, he needed editing.
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?
The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, for example..
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.