Tag: Criticism

Phil Collins – Psychological Thriller Vibe of Songs

In ”One More Night,” Mr. Collins’s recent number-one hit, a ticking snare drum injects a whisper of lurking fear into a song that suggests a sweeter, tenderer reprise of ”Against All Odds.” And in the impassioned ”Don’t Lose My Number,” the singer offers solace to a criminal suspect- turned-fugitive. Like many of Mr. Collins’s songs, ”Don’t Lose My Number” is defiantly vague, sketching the outlines of a melodrama but withholding the full story. The album’s final song,”Take Me Home,” is another interior monologue, in which the protagonist may or may not be a discharged mental patient. ”I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” he sings. ”They can turn off my feeling like they’re turning off my light, but I don’t mind.” The singer wants only to be taken home ”because I don’t remember.”

Mr. Collins’s astringent voice, with its petulant undertones and grim, wound-up edge is as important as the drums in sustaining a mood of dramatic suspense. And by double-tracking and electronically phasing the vocals, Mr. Collins and his producer Hugh Padgham, accentuate the sense in his singing of ominous psychological submergence.

On the surface, ”No Jacket Required,” is an album bursting with soulful hooks and bright peppy tunes. But beneath its shiny exterior, Mr. Collins’s drums and his voice carry on a disjunctive, enigmatic dialogue between heart and mind, obsession and repression. The jacket that the album title assures us is not required may not be a tuxedo but a straitjacket.

PHIL COLLINS: POP MUSIC’S ANSWER TO ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Review of No Jacket Required by Stephen Holden

Black Sabbath as Protest Music – Vernon Reid Interview

The greatest protest record
Black Sabbath was never seen as a protest band, but War Pigs is one of the greatest anti-war songs of all time. It’s up there with [Bob Dylan’s] Masters Of War. It’s up there with [Jimi Hendrix’s] Machine Gun. It’s a masterpiece, there’s no mistaking what it’s about. They equated the military industrial complex with the occult, and that was very powerful and very new and cleverer than they’re given credit for.

“What guitar meant for everyone, he changed it, and he did it with incredible songs”: Living Colour’s Vernon Reid picks the soundtrack of his life
Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid picks his records, artists and gigs of lasting significance, and reveals what it’s like to be in a stadium filled with people singing War Pigs

Well Written but Hard to Relate to

Wonderful prose but I can’t relate
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 1999

I have a confession to make. I don’t like these stories. I recognize the strengths of Taylor’s story telling – the elegant language, the depiction of emotional tension in simple things, the clear progression of ‘story’ or theme from setup to inevitable conclusion, but I can’t get past a deep dislike for his characters. This is a personal failing. Taylor’s fiction depicts a world that is inhabited almost exclusively by a certain class of affluent, white, middle class city dwellers whose lives are bounded on the upside by manners, fashion and ritual (in imitation of an upper class to which, presumably, they aspire)and on the downside by a stiff reticence and correctness of behavior to insulate them from their inferiors (not only their black servants but also whites of a lesser social and economic standing). I grew up in Nashville, TN at a time when this world was rapidly passing away, but I have met people, more than a few, who could have stepped from the pages of these stories, and almost without exception developed a deep antipathy for them. Their overt arrogance which seemed to mask a great fear of the world ‘outside’ always made social intercourse with such people strained and unsatisfying. There is nothing like being politely condescended to to make the recipient want to deliberately break convention and strike through the mask. So it’s personal.
I have read, and reread, these stories enough to see that Taylor’s characters are frequently as frightened of change and the possible corruption of contact outside their little world as I had sensed in the real Taylor-type folk I have met. There is great skill in his presentation of this tension, but it doesn’t lead me to empathize, much less sympathize, with his characters.
Any given person’s response to a piece of fiction is going to be colored by a host of factors over which the author has no control, and no writer ever had universal success at generating the response he desires the reader to have. In the case of my response to Taylor’s stories, I fear that my dislike of the specific milieu (and its inhabitants) that is his chosen subject will forever keep me from a full appreciation of his work.

review of:
The Old Forest and Other Stories
Peter Taylor

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – What Was it About, Interpretation

reddit

Several-Operation879

I know this is an older post, but I just watched and I would love to chime in…

This is all the day-dream, imaginary scenarios/stories of the janitor periodically coming into conflict with reality as well as his deteriorating mental state.

It’s like a self-insert book where he highlights the good parts, and paints over the bad parts. He writes “Jake” to be well-read, sensitive, caring, but also insecure, and vulnerable in a humanizing way. His girlfriend is intelligent, successful, a physicist, painter, poet, doctor. Her name changes because it’s either unimportant, or because his memory is failing with his health.

Jake’s part is like the writer catching himself being insecure. Jake has to know enough and be sensitive enough to catch her attention, and know about his stuff as well as hers. Then reality hits, and she’s way more put together than him. He gets unbelievably angry, but never hurts her. Then he calms, and relents. He caught himself attempting to have more control of the story than he ought to.
Continue reading “I’m Thinking of Ending Things – What Was it About, Interpretation” →

Stanley Kauffmann on Marlon Brando

The Young Lions, 1958

I have had a chance to watch Brando’s career from its beginning because he made his professional debut in a children’s play of mine at the Adelphi Theater in New York in 1944. His role consisted of being hit on the head and falling down; but he managed to find a way of falling down that, without being obtrusive, was individual.

Brando has evolved a personal style which relies largely on understatement and the liberal use of pauses. Often the effect is heart-breaking; remember the poignancy he gave the vapid monosyllable “Wow” in On the Waterfront when he learned that his brother was threatening his life. Occasionally the style lapses out of meaning into mannerism; some of Sayonara could have used compression. But in essence he reflects in his style—as actors often do—a prevalent artistic vein of his day. Kemble exemplified the classic, elegant eighteenth century, Kean the wild, torrential romantics of the early nineteenth century, Irving the elaborate majesty of the late Victorians. I compare Brando with these luminaries only to draw a parallel. He is a taciturn realist: an epitome not of that joyous realistic revolution which swept away the humbug that obscured the contours of the world but of that generation born into realism which has seen its world with harsh clarity, whose work is to reconcile itself to that world’s revealed boundaries and to find its triumphs inwardly.

https://newrepublic.com/article/115297/excerpts-reviews-stanley-kauffmann

Philosophical Thoughts on Movie Watching from Siskel and Ebert

Why do we go to the movies in the first place? To have a vicarious experience. For two hours we sit there and if the movie works we stop being ourselves to some degree and become the characters on the screen. And then a review to some degree should talk about whether we enjoyed that vicarious experience. —Roger Ebert…

In a 20/20 interview, he took things even further. “When you disagree on a movie,” Ebert said, “you’re not disagreeing on the movie. You’re disagreeing on who you are. If I don’t like a movie and he does, then I’m not saying that the movie is flawed, I’m saying that he’s flawed.”…

Because the crosstalk was unplanned and unscripted, it occasionally ventured off into fascinating tangents. A Siskel & Ebert movie review could mutate at a moment’s notice into a debate about philosophy, morality, or spirituality. The occasion of the 1987 fantasy film Made in Heaven, about a young man who dies, meets his soulmate in heaven, then must return to Earth to find her when she is reincarnated in a new human body, inspired Roger and Gene to talk less about the movie than their own beliefs about the afterlife.

“I believe,” Siskel revealed, “that if you think of someone, whether it be here or in someplace else, that they come alive. I think the film had a religious content to it. So I found the film beautiful.”
“Yeah, but, of course, whether or not you believe in this doesn’t have anything to do with whether the movie is good or not,” Ebert countered.
“For me, it does,” Siskel responded.
“Okay, well, in that case you think every movie you agree with is good!” Ebert said.
“I have for years,” Siskel replied.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
Matt Singer

Note – recommended

Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies

Rock Albums Of The 70s: A Critical Guide
by Robert Christgau

Robert Christgau on James Brown: “When he modulates to the bridge it’s like the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. After that he could describe his cars for three [LP] sides and get away with it.” Christgau on Carly Simon: “If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn’t rhyme ‘yacht,’ ‘apricot,’ and ‘gavotte.'” Christgau on Van Morrison: “This is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn our radios all the way into the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty.” Christgau on Lou Reed: “Reed Sounds like he’s imitating his worst enemy, himself.” (Lou Reed on Robert Christgau: “What a moron! Studying rock and roll. I can’t believe it!”) An indispensable book, Christgau’s Rock Albums the ’70s is the definitive guide to nearly 3,000 albums of the decade that brought us progressive rock, country rock, glam rock, funk, disco, punk, heavy metal, and new wave.

Amazon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christgau%27s_Record_Guide:_Rock_Albums_of_the_Seventies

Gene Siskel, Best Films of the Year 1969-1998

Siskel compiled “best of the year” film lists from 1969 to 1998, which helped to provide an overview of his critical preferences. His top choices were:

From 1969 until his death in February 1999, he and Ebert were in agreement on nine annual top selections: Z, The Godfather, Nashville, The Right Stuff, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, Hoop Dreams, and Fargo. There would have been a tenth, but Ebert declined to rank the 9+1⁄2-hour documentary Shoah as 1985’s best film because he felt it was inappropriate to compare it to the rest of the year’s candidates.[66] Six times, Siskel’s number one choice did not appear on Ebert’s top ten list at all: Straight Time, Ragtime, Once Upon a Time in America, The Last Temptation of Christ, Hearts of Darkness, and The Ice Storm. Six times, Ebert’s top selection did not appear on Siskel’s; these films were 3 Women, An Unmarried Woman, Apocalypse Now, Sophie’s Choice, Mississippi Burning, and Dark City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Siskel

For more Siskel ->  https://siskelebert.org/

Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon – Stanley Kauffman on

My admiration for Lumet and Pacino has had discernible limits in the past, but here, happily, I can change my tune. Lumet, at fifty much less of a show-off than Lumet at thirty-five or forty, directs with simplified technique and deepened perceptions. Pacino is not called on here to radiate quiet power, at which he failed in both Godfather films. Here he is fortune’s fool—a pawn who is being played at the same time that he thinks he’s masterminding the game. This summer I went to a racetrack for the first time in ten years, and outside the gate there was a tout selling a tip sheet for a dollar—eight sure winners. His elbows were sticking out of his ragged jacket, but he had eight sure winners. Pacino, about to lick his condition in the world and his personal troubles by being smarter than the world, has his figurative elbows sticking out. The pseudosuperiority, this pathos of self-deceived bravado, Pacino handles very well.

Before My Eyes: Film Comment And Criticism
Stanley Kauffmann

Burning Down the Waffle House – The Alchemist – Review of, Summary

What book do you WANT to like but just can’t?
byu/tinuvi3l inliterature

ProudTacoman
Hear me out here…The Alchemist can be the best book you could possibly read…BUT it’s all about timing. At just the right time in your life, in just the right circumstances, with the wind blowing softly toward the southeast, and Capricorn in Venus or whatever…The Alchemist has the potential to be exactly what you need to read at that moment. No, as a book, it’s not elegant, subtle, wise, or necessarily “well written,” but it is a quick hit of affirmation without requiring much time or any thought. In fact, the less thought you give it, the better it works for this. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature!

That magical and rare confluence of circumstances that makes The Alchemist a good book for you is this: You’re thinking about making a major change or decision in your life that you know in your bones is the right one, despite what your research, your smarter friends, the criminal justice system, the people who care about you, and the latest consensus of the scientific community might say. Maybe these folks started talking about pros and cons lists, cost/benefit analysis, and “critical thinking,” but you need none of that. Nine times out of ten, these are the guys to listen to, and you should abandon whatever self-destructive course you’re on, like, yesterday. But you’ve already searched your soul and you’ve decided: You’re going to step out on your marriage. You’re ready to sell all your worldly possessions, give the proceeds to Scientology, and move to Lhasa. You’re going to propose to your ex. You’re gonna burn down a Waffle House. You don’t need the wisdom of the masses. What do you need? You need to talk to the tenth dentist. The one who recommends never flossing and isn’t afraid to call out Big Toothpaste on their “after every meal” conspiracy.

These are the times you call up your old buddy from the shit-kicking days who barely graduated middle school and lives life a quarter ounce at a time. Why him? Because he positively exudes that “hell yeah brother!” pothead wisdom that only holds up for the brief time you’re talking to him, and absolutely crumples under any kind of scrutiny. He doesn’t ask questions. In fact, big questions confuse him and make him kind of aggressive. But he fully and vocally supports anything that doesn’t require him to keep a schedule or figure out the ring inside his toilet bowl. In this tipping-point moment, you need that kind of pseudo-wisdom, just to hear some kind – any kind – of support for your hare-brained scheme. However wound up you are to do what you’re going to do, he’ll wind you up tighter with a bug-eyed rant about putting aside your inhibitions to embrace your destiny. Your personal legend.

Paulo Coelho is your loser buddy, and The Alchemist is his pep talk. Pick up the phone. Burn down that Waffle House. Maktub, bitches.

A Way in the World – Amazon Review of

2.0 out of 5 stars Mythologizing his Existence
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2021
As I said in other reviews, I’m reading through Naipaul. I’m disappointed in the book, yet another attempt by Naipaul to mythologize his own existence, to identify who he is, what he is. I say it is an attempt because the line of thought he pursues to locate himself in his historical context is doomed to failure. His attempt at self-realization goes nowhere, as it does for everybody. It is a common mistake to look backward for some sense of self because there really is no sense of self, in the sense of self-realization, to begin with. It is mythology that we hold on to for dear life, for the abyss awaits those that fail in this endeavor. But the mythology is fiction, and thus we are always sitting on the edge of the abyss.

A Way in the World

Amazon blurb/summary:

The Nobel Prize-winning author—and “one of literature’s great travelers” (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism.

“Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul’s) life and work.”—The New York Times

“Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.”

So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention.

It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

Drug Testing Music Critics

On his desktop, he opened a database of all the live gigs that he has ever attended. There was a time when he would see two hundred a year. He took it seriously. “I’ve never done drugs,” he said. In the nineties, as the pop-music editor at New York Newsday, he cranked out reviews and features. When he was hired, the paper made him take a drug test. “I didn’t know whether I was meant to pass it or fail it,” he said.

A D.I.Y. Fanzine, Fifty Years On
When Ira Robbins was publishing Trouser Press, he got mail from Pete Townshend and Joan Jett (who told him to get lost). Now he’s publishing a compilation.

Jon Batiste on Thelonius Monk

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk
We asked Jon Batiste, Arooj Aftab, Mary Halvorson and others to share their favorites.

Jon Batiste, pianist and composer

“Introspection”

It’s not possible for me to choose a favorite Monk song. At 19, I became obsessed with everything Thelonious and spent a year focused exclusively on absorbing as much as I could. Monk is a world. “Introspection,” from the album “Solo Monk,” is borderline atonal while still distinctively melody-rich. The melody is akin to a nursery rhyme in its playful logic and symmetry, all while whistling overtop a bed of through-composed dissonance. Those chords! The way he constructs the harmony to shift between at least three identifiable key centers creates a trance-like quality to the recording that rides the borders of Eastern mysticism and some obtuse sanctified hymn. The chord voicings are constructed for every note to have a deliberate intention. There’s no room for harmonic interpretation here — if you add or take away any of the notes from his chord voicings, the song risks completely losing its identity. Monk’s way of “super syncopation” is utilized significantly in this tune as well, making his charismatic approach to aligning the harmony and melody a defining characteristic of the composition.

He named it “Introspection” ’cause he certainly had a lot on his mind with this one. Very concentrated in all harmony, melody and rhythm. The master of repetition. Over the years it’s the least played Monk tune of all. This is significant given that he is one of the most covered and influential composers of the modern age. I love the “Solo Monk” version because he doesn’t even improvise over the chord changes, he just states the melody twice and walks out of the studio (or at least that’s how I envision it). Sometimes that’s all that needs to be played: the tune.

Is this Satire or Propaganda? – A. O. Scott on The Wolf of Wall Street

This brings me back to the question I started with, which perhaps should be posed another way: Is this movie satire or propaganda? Its treatment of women is the strongest evidence for the second option. On his way up, Jordan trades in his first wife, a sweet hometown girl named Teresa (Cristin Milioti), for a blonder, bustier new model named Naomi (Margot Robbie), whose nakedness is offered to the audience as a special bonus. (Mr. DiCaprio never shows as much as she does.) The movie’s misogyny is not the sole property of its characters, nor is the humiliation and objectification of women — an insistent, almost compulsive motif — something it merely depicts. Mr. Scorsese, never an especially objective sociologist, is at least a participant-observer.

…

Does “The Wolf of Wall Street” condemn or celebrate? Is it meant to provoke disgust or envy? These may be, in the present phase of American civilization, distinctions without a meaningful difference behind them. If you walk away feeling empty and demoralized, worn down by the tackiness and aggression of the spectacle you have just witnessed, perhaps you truly appreciate the film’s critical ambitions. If, on the other hand, you ride out of the theater on a surge of adrenaline, intoxicated by its visual delights and visceral thrills, it’s possible you missed the point. The reverse could also be true. To quote another one of Mr. Scorsese’s magnetic, monstrous heroes, Jake LaMotta, that’s entertainment.

When Greed Was Good (and Fun)