Art Blog

Deidre Barrett—Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Original Purpose

2011-08-21T15:17:00.007-04:00

“Our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” say psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, quoted in Supernormal Stimuli (27). The book's title comes from the work of Niko Tinbergen, the Danish ethologist whose work on animals’ instinctive reactions to external stimuli won him the Nobel in 1973. Tinbergen discovered that much of animal behavior is cued to very particular stimuli—geese are so programmed to sit on eggs with certain markings that they prefer a volleyball to their own eggs if the markings are enhanced (say, black with bright blue spots rather than grey with pale blue spots). The male stickleback fish is so enraged by the red color of other males’ chests that he will ignore actual male fish to attack a bright red ball, or even a passing red van outside the window.

These enhanced versions of evolutionarily developed triggers are, in Tinbergen’s words, “supernormal stimuli,” and Barrett’s book develops the thesis that we are similarly triggered by certain stimuli, evolved over millennia on the African savannah, and that we remain the victims of our stone-age reactions—particularly since we have used our modern skulls to devise a wide array of supernormal stimuli that end up being actually bad for us. The clearest example is our taste for fatty and sweet foods, which had an obvious logic for hunter-gathers but becomes a severe liability in a world of McDonald’s cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes.

Less well known is the interplay between television and what Pavlov termed “the orienting response”—the instinct to pay rapt attention to any new aural or visual stimulus. In Barrett’s description: “The orienting person or animal turns eyes and ears in the direction of the stimulus and then freezes while parts of the brain associated with new learning become more active. Blood vessels to the brain dilate, those to the muscles constrict, the heart slows, and alpha waves are blocked. . . . The effects persists for four to six seconds after each stimulus.”

Television’s increasingly rapid-fire technique of quick cuts plays right into this, essentially paralyzing us on the sofa as our stone-age brains try to process the flood of supernormal stimuli. Eventually, however, the body slips into a lower state—hypnotized but no longer alert, and the metabolism actually drops to a lower state than if one were simply lying in bed.

The concept of the supernormal stimulus explains a great deal of modern behavior. Alcoholism and drug addiction, for one, as well as the tendency of our society to treat as an addiction any compulsive behavior (gambling, promiscuity, overeating) that exceeds the rational mind’s ability to regulate it.

What Barrett doesn’t engage sufficiently, to my mind, is the role of both technology and corporate capitalism in the development of these supernormal stimuli, and while she urges us to begin to restrain and regulate the most destructive of these stimuli, she doesn’t touch the issue of what this means for the twin sacred cows of free speech and private enterprise—both of which presume a rational mind capable of regulating its stone-age instincts without exterior help. Already in ancient Athens, Aristotle pondered why individuals pursued self-destructive behavior, and that was long before there were billions to be made by marketing products scientifically designed to encourage that behavior. The Athenian vices of excessive wine and the occasional hetaera pale before crack cocaine and 24/7 online streaming pornography, or even the less obviously pernicious burger and fries and video gaming.

Twitter vs Facebook

2011-04-27T16:49:00.007-04:00

According to a college newspaper I was just browsing, there are two types of students—those who use Facebook, and those who use Twitter, and “when the second type of student communicates with the first type, it’s like a teenager talking with their grandparents.” This suggests that I, who don’t use either media, am probably somewhere close to death, at least as far as social networks go. Which is fine, really—being archaic is always relative, and blogging from beyond the grave may be one of the last frontiers left to us. I’m imagining a great B-movie about it, but the college editorial was no doubt right: the idea sounds dated already. Much better: To Sleep, Perchance to Tweet, or maybe The Undiscovered Keyboard . . . "The Network from Whose Botnet No Twitterer Returns"

Walker, Texas Ranger — NCIS

2011-03-31T08:49:00.009-04:00

I think it’s important to have a TV show that you watch at least semi-regularly, and preferably, one that’s not very good. No high-end Mad Men, Sopranos, or The Wire here, but rather something so basic and primitive that it’s like walking out into the vast cultural wasteland of television, choosing an ordinary, mid-sized rock, and hitting yourself over the head with it.

No program was better in this regard than Walker, Texas Ranger, a show so elemental in its structure that it was virtually indistinguishable from the Lone Ranger reruns I used to watch as a child, and from which it was clearly descended. Walker ran a full hour, but there was still only one plotline per episode, with no subplots or side action to obscure the sharp edges of the story. There was even less moral ambiguity—the good guys were 100% good, the bad guys (insofar as you even saw them) were 100% bad, and the only moment of doubt was whether good was smart enough, quick enough, and strong enough to stop evil before it had made serious inroads into the community. Though, of course, it always was. With his face reflecting a weathered gravitas, Walker looked as if he had seen great evil, but that he could always be counted on to deliver it a roundhouse kick to the chest and march it off to jail. The Rangers fought evil with the implacable resolve of the Norse gods, yet without any hint of that troubling Ragnarök.

About a year ago, sick with the flu, I steeped myself in an NCIS rerun marathon and recognized it as the true inheritor of Walker’s legacy. Despite the larger and more eccentric cast, the show maintains the same simple moral clarity, and manages to do so even when it treads into much more suspect territory (like when everyone leaves Ziva, the Mossad operative, alone in a room with a suspect to extract information in ways unspecified, undocumented, and certainly illegal under American law—it's extreme rendition in miniature). Whatever they’ve glimpsed of the dark side in the course of the investigation falls away, and by the end of the episode the gang is squabbling and teasing each other like tweens on their way home from a field trip. It is, perhaps, the most infantile example of its entire genre, and this combination of serious police procedural and ridiculous adolescent hijinks led me to think I’d really found an obscurity, something that remained stuck to the side of the TV barrel mostly because nothing had been developed yet to take its place. Recently, however, I read on the cover of a supermarket checkout magazine that NCIS is the most popular TV show in America, and this has totally ruined it for me. I’m now in search of another rock to hit myself over the head with.

David Lewis-Williams & David Pearce—Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, & the Realm of the Gods

2011-03-24T12:37:00.022-04:00

When Czech president Vaclav Havel spoke to Congress in 1990, his line about how “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim,” garnered him great applause from the assembled senators, though I expect almost no comprehension since probably no more than a handful of them have the slightest grasp on the argument that rages from Hegel through Marx and onward about the true nature of the engine driving history.

I thought of this “which-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg” debate again while reading Inside the Neolithic Mind. On the one hand, the authors seem to be clear materialists: they quote from Marx at several points (though they’re just as clearly not slavish Marxists), and they base all their assumptions in the limited material record that comes to us from the Neolithic, appended by anthropological and neurological studies from the present.

On the other hand, they stand the usual anthropological understanding of the Neolithic on its head. Most archeologists (I gather from their book) posit that humans built the enormous Neolithic monuments of Europe (Stonehenge, Newgrange, and others) only after they had already developed agriculture and begun settling down. Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue the opposite—that humans built these ritualistic holy sites first, and only as a result of that began to develop settlements and agriculture around them.

This would seem to be along the lines of Havel’s claim that our spiritual lives precede and dictate our material existences, except that Lewis-Williams and Pearce’s claim isn’t a spiritual one, but rather a material one. Humans constructed mound graves and stone circles out of an attempt to recreate and codify a neurological experience—the experience of the mind in altered consciousness. Whether through madness, fasting, sensory deprivation, drugs, or other extreme states, our brains tend toward hallucinations, and these bear a striking similarity across chronological and geographical distances. With a similar universality, we tend to grant these experiences a religious aura.

In short, we’re physically hard-wired for spiritual experience, almost as if we had a Religion-Acquisition Device that paralleled Chomsky’s Language-Acquisition Device. Or, to put in another way, we're chickens who imagine that we're the egg.

John Currin—Society Painter

2011-03-16T10:22:00.031-04:00

I ran across the work of the painter John Currin recently in a fawning NYTimes Style piece, the central tenet of which was that his and his wife’s decision to flout the traditional artist lifestyle and live “amid the kind of ritzy indulgence their collectors do” was a act of bold independence (rather than, say, merely ritzy self-indulgence). Of course, for centuries there have been artists who hobnobbed with their patrons and affected the same genteel, affluent lifestyle—the fact that their lives and work are less known to us than those of their more ascetic, or more tormented and excessive, brethren suggests that Currin and his wife/muse/artist-in-her-own-right Rachel Feinstein are probably not destined for the history books.

Currin’s work itself (not much on display in the article—it was a Style Section piece, after all) is actually vaguely nauseating, and seems built around the standard postmodern pastiche-gimmick of shoehorning together in a single frame two radically opposing aesthetic styles, drawn from two distinct chronological eras. In Currin’s case, he adopts the lush painterly approach of a Rubens, Watteau, or Renoir, but applies it to nudes whose bodies have been distended and distorted in a manner reminiscent of German Expressionism (although at times his women, with their comically enormous breasts, recall Pop Art’s simultaneous ironization and celebration of mainstream iconography).

The result makes the viewer queasy in the same way that eating two rich but incompatible foods does. The dripping sensuality of a style like Renoir’s—kitschy as it may seem now—is still a sincere attempt at embracing beauty, at continuing the Classical agenda. The confrontational ugliness of much of German Expressionism, in contrast, aims precisely to upend the Classical tradition, to throw muck in its face out of disgust with its blinkered preoccupation with such a narrow register of existence. (As the poet Rimbaud wrote: “One evening I sat Beauty on my knees / And I found her bitter / And I reviled her.”)

Still, certain unexpected juxtapositions can be revelatory—Sid Vicious’s “My Way” may crap all over the original, but his self-destructive bravado isn’t that far from Sinatra’s, really, and he’s even willing to expose the desperate hollowness behind that bravado (something Sinatra himself is at pains to conceal).

Currin’s work, however, exposes nothing, beyond perhaps his own vacuity as an artist. To merge these two particular aesthetics goes beyond ironic juxtaposition; it does actual violence to both. The love of the physical world inherent in Rubens or Renoir receives a sucker punch from Currin’s uglification of his models, while Expressionism’s desire to shock the viewer into a recognition of the barbarity underlying culture is reduced to mere titillation. Such a stylistic merger (and the business metaphor is entirely apt here) is possible only if both styles are stripped of their motivating aesthetics and reduced to mere styles, to bloodless ciphers. No wonder his work receives such acclaim among the cadaverous socialites of New York.

Eric Ambler—A Coffin for Dimitrios

2009-08-14T20:48:00.042-04:00

I lifted this from the shelves at a bed and breakfast I was staying at, thinking that there’s nothing quite like a mindless murder mystery to entertain you at the beach.

In fact, it’s quite a mindful one, from its erudite protagonist to its oddly inverted plotline, in which a British professor turned crime novelist happens into a murder while vacationing in Istanbul. One expects he will set out to solve the crime, but rather than trying to unravel the circumstances of the death, he becomes obsessed with reconstructing the trajectory of the life, much like assembling an existential jigsaw puzzle when you have only a few pieces.

Since the victim was a career criminal who profited off the misfortune of others, the trail leads through various stress points of early-twentieth-century Europe: the uneasy ethnic mishmash of the late Ottoman Empire, the holocaust of Smyrna, the refugee camps of Athens, the political intrigues and coups of Bulgaria, and the trade in drugs and kidnapped women in Paris. Lurking behind everything are the giant, shadowy international banks who profit off all of it, just as surely as Dimitrios did. In the narrator’s words:

It was useless to try and explain Dimitrios in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than Baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michael Angelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

There's a lovely linkage set up here between the petty criminals who threaten civilized society, the criminal masterminds who destroy it, and the economic masterminds who arrange it for their own benefit, making use of (it is suggested) the other two groups as needed. Published in 1939, before the invasion of Poland, the book ends with the premonition of World War II. If Brecht had written crime novels instead of just reading them, he probably would have come up with something like this.

Nora Ephron—Julie & Julia

2009-08-14T20:48:00.041-04:00

I never thought it would come to this—that I would actually be holding up legendary French TV-chef Julia Child as a model of strong-willed womanhood. Yet that’s the only conclusion I can come to after seeing Julie & Julia, a film that traces the quasi-parallel lives of Julia Child and Julie Powell, a thirty-year-old New Yorker who decides to cook every one of the 524 recipes in Child’s iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And to do so within a year’s time. And to blog about it.

The film is in many ways a meditation on what it means to be an epigone. A middle-aged American wife in Paris in the late fifties, Child brazenly takes on the task of learning French cooking despite the myriad slights and obstructions put in her way by various French people. Brushing them aside, she learns to cook and, in writing about it, makes French cuisine her own.

Julie’s talent, on the other hand, lies mostly in following Child's recipes, and so she’s devastated when she hears that the actual Julia Child might have a certain disdain for her cooking-and-blogging adventure. If Child can be said to translate French cooking into Americanese, then Julie is more like a calligrapher—faithfully reproducing the art of the master without changing a word.

Another way of putting it would be to say that the two women’s lives are not so much parallel as inverted. Child takes on French cooking because she is looking for something to do (“What am I to doooooo? What am I to dooooo?” she trills to her husband sonorously), and in the process invents a new identity for herself. Powell, on the other hand, is primarily looking for a new identity (“I’m not a writer, I’m not a writer,” she insistently whines to her husband), and the cooking project is something she invents for herself to do in the process. The directions of the two women’s lives couldn’t be more different.

Michael Cacoyannis—Zorba the Greek

2009-06-07T01:21:00.038-04:00

Back in the days before Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the standard Hellenic reference point for American audiences, there was Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek. Filmed in black and white, set in a poor village in southern Crete, featuring a number of grim scenes and culminating in catastrophe, it would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the international film sensation of 1964. And yet, it took the world by storm, becoming both a critical and a commercial success—among other tributes, it was nominated for eleven Oscars, won three, and was even credited with helping the late-sixties tourist boom in Greece.

This is to a large extent a tribute to Anthony Quinn’s hyperkinetic turn as Zorba, a recklessly charismatic adventurer who moves through life so quickly that the disasters he creates can never quite catch up with him. As with the scene in the film where he emerges unscathed from a mine collapse, he has an astonishing ability to get out just in the nick of time, and while he certainly carries the scars of what he’s lived through, they haven’t so thickened his skin that he can’t feel the pulse of new experiences. He lives with such vitality that everyone around him—his cautious, bookish boss, the black-shrouded men and women of the village, even the flamboyant French prostitute—seem like shadows. Zorba is a force of nature, a hurricane of existence that we can’t help but be overwhelmed by, precisely because he resists our better judgments.

It’s a role that defined Quinn ever afterwards, and it defined “Greek” for several generations of movie-goers as well, though with a strong assist from the innumerable restaurants and diners that stuck the mnemonic “Zorba” in their names. A Google search turns up literally hundreds, and it’s no coincidence that Vardalos, in her own portrayal of what it means to be Greek, pays ironic homage by calling her family's restaurant “Dancing Zorba’s.” Though one has the impression that she’s never danced a day in her life, and certainly not there.

There’s another irony to Zorba’s success, though, which has to do with Cacoyannis himself. From his earliest films, Cacoyannis displayed a sensitivity to women’s position in a male-dominated society that would be rare in any director, but is simply astonishing in a male director of his generation. Zorba is, in fact, one of his few films to even feature a male protagonist. Of his fifteen feature-length works, over ten place women in the starring roles, including his three adaptations of Greek tragedies—Elektra, Iphigenia, and the powerhouse Trojan Woman, which actually stars four women: Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Pappas, and Geneviève Bujold. In the early Stella, Melina Mercouri plays a woman who would rather die than give up her freedom by marrying, even to the man she admittedly loves. It was made in 1955.

And then there’s Zorba, a movie so relentlessly preoccupied with its male characters that it could qualify as an early example of a seventies “buddy film.” In fact, it would be hard to come up with an apter description of Zorba's structure than the genre definition provided by The Journal of Popular Film and Television: Buddy films “replac[e] the traditional central romantic relationship between a man and a woman with a buddy relationship between two men. By making both protagonists men, the central issue of the films becomes the growth and development of their friendship. Women as potential love interests are thus either eliminated from the narrative ... or pushed into the background as side characters.”

And yet, with the women being portrayed by Irene Pappas and Lila Kedrova—who won an Oscar for her performance—one can hardly call them side characters. I would argue that Cacoyannis has done something extraordinary here—he’s made a buddy film that clearly honors the central place of the men’s friendship, and as well novelist Kazantzakis’s tribute to a life lived with courage and a refusal to bow down to the quotidian demands of bourgeois existence. At the same time, Cacoyannis also pays homage to the women who are systematically—albeit unintentionally—destroyed by the men's pursuit of their friendship.

Zorba is indeed admirable for the freedom he asserts as his natural right, but Cacoyannis can’t help but also notice what happens to the women who try to grasp even a small piece of that freedom. Watch Pappas’s face as she welcomes Alan Bates into her house—she knows what she is risking, and she risks it anyway. She is, in this one moment, perhaps more courageous than Zorba ever is.

Michael Cacoyannis—Attila 1974: The Rape of Cyprus

2009-06-06T23:52:00.016-04:00

Journalism is, in the words of Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post, “the first, rough draft of history.”

This quote has several interesting implications—the first is that the journalist isn’t merely a transcriber of events or an information monger who gathers dry bits of fact and assembles them for a readership. He or she is already involved in the interpretation of events, in the making-sense-of-things that we usually imagine is only the historian’s job.

At the start of Michael Cacoyannis’s documentary about the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, the director seems to understand and acknowledge this by making known his own position. “I am Greek,” he announces, “and my name is Michael Cacoyannis.” There’s no pretense to objective journalism here—this is from the start an interpretive documentary.

The other implication of Graham’s quote is that, since journalism is only the “first, rough draft,” the journalist should be given some leeway if he or she gets a few things wrong.

What’s remarkable about Cacoyannis’s film, made at the exact, impassioned moment of the Turkish invasion of his homeland in 1974, is how much he gets right.

The invasion and division of Cyprus was not a simple event—it was a disaster that was provoked by some, carried out by others, and allowed to happen by still others . . . and the island’s continuing division is the responsibility of yet others still. There’s plenty of blame to be spread around, and Cacoyannis is committed to calling out all the guilty parties. It would be easy enough for him to point a finger simply at the Turkish invaders, but he doesn’t settle for that—the British, the Americans, the Greeks, and even many Cypriots come under fire as he teases out the interlocking causes of the invasion.

Of course, Cacoyannis isn’t a journalist, but a filmmaker who was already well into his mid-career when this film was made. He had lived abroad in Greece and England for years, but returned immediately to make this documentary when he heard of the invasion. Therefore, not being a journalist, he doesn’t just give us the facts, or even the facts and an interpretation. Instead, like the filmmaker that he is, he creates a documentary that is as rich in atmosphere as it is in information. He gives us a chance to experience for ourselves what it feels like to be in his country at that moment.

He does this by alternating between information and emotion, by sequencing interviews and factual narration with long—almost embarrassingly long, sometimes—shots of individuals as they tell their stories, cry in sorrow, scream in despair, or simply sit in resigned humiliation. These shots, actually, have no purpose within the narrative of the film—they convey no information, and the flavor they impart could be edited down by a professional documentarian to just a few minutes. But that’s not Cacoyannis’s point. These shots are not just a little spice in the thick stew of important information. They are stories told by the people who experienced them, with no greater purpose than that the people have to tell them and Cacoyannis is there to listen.

Part of Cyprus’s problem is that its history is remembered only in pieces—the Greek Cypriots remember the 1974 invasion; the Turkish Cypriots the violence against them in 1963. Turkey remembers the 1974 coup by Greek nationalists; Greece remembers the 1955 expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul, made in response to the Greek Cypriot independence movement.

What Cacoyannis lets us see is another sort of memory in the making—not the collective memory of the Greek Cypriots as a group, but the deeply personal memories of Cypriots as individuals. These memories are almost entirely of loss—loss of sons, husbands, or fathers; loss of property or a good life; loss of a sense of belonging and of the pride of self-sufficiency. Among other things, this might be the best film made on the experience of refugees, whom we see in their pain, boredom, anger, and stunned emotionlessness.

Again, Cacoyannis shows this though extended, almost too-personal shots of his fellow Greek Cypriots as they communicate, each in their own way, what they’ve lost. It’s a process that continues to this day. As late as 2004, when I was in Cyprus, there were still old women standing by the border crossings, dressed all in black, holding pictures of the loved ones who had disappeared without a trace in 1974. Politics falls away in the face of these women.

Though Cacoyannis opened his film with a declaration of his own viewpoint going forward—I am Greek and my name is Michael Cacoyannis—he closes quite differently. In an epilogue added 25 years later, he is looking back and wants to know only about the dead. “I am Michael Cacoyannis,” he declares “and I want to know, where?” Where are the nameless dead buried?

Just a few years ago, more than three decades after the invasion, bi-communal teams of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot forensic scientists were assembled, to begin exhuming and identifying remains—from both sides—and returning them to their families. Until they are all identified, however, we have Cacoyannis’s film to help us remember—if not to remember them, then at least to remember their loss.

Martin Kippenberger—Zuerst die Füsse (First the Feet)

2008-08-29T11:08:00.026-04:00

One thing I've noticed about blasphemic art—by which everyone usually means: art that blasphemes Christianity—is that nearly all of it has been created by Catholics. (I don't know Kippenberger's religion, but he comes from a Catholic region of Germany.) This has to be factored into the debate about artworks that offend non-Christian religions, most of which originate from outside the faith. I seldom see Jewish, Muslim, or even Protestant artists deliberately violating their religion for shock effect, though they may run afoul of it anyway, as Rushdie did. Catholics seem to be driven to great lengths to exorcise their religion.

Second, defenders of blasphemic art seem to assume that taking offense to an artwork leads inevitably to advocating censorship, and therefore we should never take offense to even the most provocative imagery. Personally, I don't want to live in a world where art is regarded with such rational detachment that it has lost its power to shock—that's one (though only one) of its possibilities. The artist has a right to offend people, and people have a right to be offended.

Third, a work like this one by Kippenberger has almost no aesthetic impact—its effect is entirely psychological. Because we grant the image of the crucifixion a certain power, Kippenberger can exploit that emotional reservoir of feeling, but he doesn't add anything to it, in the way that, say, Michelangelo's Pietà invests a tremendous power into the image of Mary and Christ, for example. In a world filled with blasphemic art, Kippenberger's image would have no effect at all, whereas the Pietà still would.

In this, it's of an entirely different order from Andres Serrano's once-controversial "Piss Christ," which remains in my opinion a visually stunning and philosophically troubling work of art. It's even been defended by art critic/nun Sister Wendy Beckett!

So many musicians, so little time

2008-04-13T10:30:00.020-04:00

It's been ages since I posted here, which signifies partly a lack of inspiration and partly a lot of travel followed by a deluge of editorial work to pay for it. I finally managed to keep it all at bay for a few days so I could churn out some reviews of things I've been listening to recently—Cuong Vu, a Vietnamese-born, American-raised trumpeter whose work investigates sonic regions usually left unexplored by jazz musicians; Haale, a Bronx-born guitarist of Iranian immigrants who delves deeply into a mystical trance-rock that wavers between sixties intoxication and Sufi transcendence; Bulgarian pianist Plamen Karadonev whose take on jazz is a bit too mainstream for my tastes but who straddles an interesting line between virtuosic homage and playful experimentation; and Diamanda Galás, the magnificent singer of Greek parentage who manages to channel an archaic tragic sensibility into her covers of American blues, soul, and country. In addition, I'm reviewing three jazz concerts this year at the Albright Knox art museum—the serene Norwegian pianist Tord Gustafsen, the joyful Malian guitarist Lionel Loueke, and the thoughtful American-born Indian pianist Vijay Ayer.

In other words, I'm apparently not much interested in American music these days, though I did pick up an amazing Doc Watson collection today that represents the best of bluegrass—mournful picking accompanying Watson's slightly nasal twang as he narrates songs about the loss of love, of money, of hope, of virtually everything that sustains a life. And yet falls not into despair. The songs with banjo have an almost Asian resonance as the instrument maniacally percolates under his elongated vocals ("Country Blues" and "Shady Grove"). But Watson's guitar is just as virtuosic, playfully rambling alongside his tale of murder on "Little Sadie" or of hippophilia on "Tennessee Stud," a song so exuberantly praiseful of a good horse and the adventures that it can provide that the singer's return to his girlfriend seems almost anticlimactic. At least the Tennessee stud gets a Tennessee mare.

Anand Tucker—Hilary and Jackie

2007-11-30T08:03:00.010-05:00

As soon as this ended, the question arose why bio-pics always manage to portray difficult men as troubled geniuses, while difficult women mostly come across as just annoying hysterics?

In this case, it's partly because Jackie du Pré—for all that she may have been a gifted cellist—was no genius, and we're not going to see a better breed of women’s bio-pic until we raise our sights a bit.

Mostly, though, it's the perverse approach of this film, which focuses on du Pré's personal life at the expense of her music. Even a film like Immortal Beloved, which is almost entirely about Beethoven's love affairs, has some transcendently beautiful musical passages—most notably when he flees as a boy from his drunken, abusive father into the solace of a starry night, accompanied by the full orchestration of the Ninth Symphony—and these allow us to understand in some allegorical way what music meant to him.

The filmic du Pré, on the other hand, seems to have no inner relation to music at all—as a child she practices only to keep up with her talented older sister, and as an adult she actually resents the cello's dominance over her life. In one scene, she even locks her instrument outside during a snowstorm, the way an abusive parent might punish a misbehaving child. She's reconciled to it only after it helps her meet her future husband, the pianist Daniel Barenboim.

In fact, the film’s only joyful musical moment comes when Barenboim strikes up the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" at the end of a dull rehearsal, and du Pré picks it up adoringly. It's a School of Rock touch ("This is the way Beethoven should always be played," Barenboim declaims), but it is, after all, the sixties, and at least the musicians are having fun. One senses, though, that for du Pré it’s still less about the music than it is her recognition that she’s made great catch in Barenboim. In other words, a very old cliché: Women—even women of great talent—are always more about their outer relationships than they are their inner gifts.

Fox TV—House, M.D.

2007-04-11T13:13:00.003-04:00

"House," despite being relentlessly formulaic, has become a staple of my limited TV watching. For one thing, the formula is new, or at least a new variation: the police procedural transplanted into a hospital. Various diseases come under suspicion, and then are cleared, as House and his team relentlessly track down the true culprit. Unfortunately, there's not much variation within this process. Action is mostly confined to the hopsital corridors, there are limited subplots, and like the old Perry Mason episodes, you can virtually set your watch by the steps in the action.
What distinguishes the show is the character of Dr. House—a brilliant but surly misanthrope who works as a diagnostician not because he cares in the least about his patients (indeed, he has contempt for them), but because he's intellectually fascinated by the diagnostic process. At its best, the show raises an interesting ethical question about the relation between intention and action. Would you rather be treated by the acid-tongued, but accurate, House, or his far more benevolent but less clever colleagues?
This plays out perfectly in an episode where House spots and stops an incipient epidemic among the hopital's newborns. The end of the episode finds him sitting alone in the infant ward, trying to puzzle out the source of the infection. In the foreground, a sweet-faced grandmotherly volunteer strolls by with a baby carriage, alternately wiping her runny nose and stroking the infant's cheek with the same hand. As we see House again, a gloriously bitter and satisfied smile crosses his face—once again, the ineptitude of the well-meaning has raised its ugly head.

Rosanne Cash—Black Cadillac

2007-04-02T16:02:00.013-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about tradition as I listen to this CD—not surprising, since Cash has tradition running through her veins and this music's precipitating cause is the death of those who passed it on to her: father, stepmother, and mother, all within the space of a little more than a year. Cash isn't the radical her father was, but she's smart and knows how to make the music her own. "House on the Lake," for example, is a lovely, mournful evocation of the Cash homestead outside Nashville. It's filled with private references, and yet towards the end of it she tosses in a chestnut so overworn with use that one almost winces to hear it:

"I'm going down to New Orleans..."

How many hundreds, if not thousands, of mediocre songwriters have reached for that phrase to cast a mythic hue over their otherwise forgettable creations? As Orwell wrote about dead metaphors, the line is beyond cliché; it exists simply as a place-holder, a way to kill time without thinking about how you are saying what you are saying. And yet, abruptly, Cash redeems it with the very next line:

" 'Cause we both are sinking fast."

Suddenly what was vague snaps into focus. This isn't the city of a thousand bad folksongs, but a very specific New Orleans, the 2006 version staggering under the losses of Hurricane Katrina just as Cash was staggering under the losses of those she loved. The couplet, starting in generality, becomes just as intimate as the rest of the song, for it reminds us of how public tragedies always weave their way into our private losses, how they, like parabolic mirrors, reflect and intensify our sorrow. At the same time, there's a moment of hope there, too—aesthetically, at least—since the lines suggest that all these grand tropes of American songwriting, all these shopworn clichés, might still be able to help heal us, if we could only lay our hands directly the tradition itself, rather than the encrustations that have grown over it over the years.

Lucas Samaras—Mirrored Room

2006-12-05T12:05:00.005-05:00

Ever since I first saw this piece in the early 1990s, I've wanted to take a photo inside it. It's the perfect apotheosis of narcissism—the preoccupa-tion with yourself in the mirror raised to some astronomically high power—yet virtually every photo I shot in there came out terribly. It's very difficult to capture on film (or pixels, in this case) how strange the feeling is to be inside a ten-by-ten room lined with mirrors—the submarinish green tint to the light, the infinitely retreating images on all sides, the way the line of the corners' meeting always crops out your eyes. The first problem is simply that any time you hold the camera up to shoot, you find you're always in your own way. You lose the peripheral multitudes and all you see is that one single image of yourself, with only a faint halo of other self-images around it. A second, more significant problem is that it's hard to shoot in such a small space without the door—which is propped permanently open—intruding into the frame and spoiling the shot. If it were closed, one could be surrounded purely and wholly by images of only one's self. But then, of course, there wouldn't be any light. Apparently, even in moments of total narcissism, one still has to allow a small gap to let in the outside world.

Cat Power—The Greatest

2006-12-03T21:30:00.008-05:00

After years of stumbling across reviews of her, all tinged with a certain nimbus of fascinated horror like the backflaps of the Oscar Wilde books I used to pull off my father's bookshelves ("talented, yes, but so personally distressing!"), I finally sprang for "The Greatest." My first reaction was disappointment—I always hope women who come with a reputation like this will simply rip the top off things, but instead the CD starts off with a dirge-like piano floating on a wave of over-orchestrated strings vaguely redolent of "Moon River." Repeated listenings, though, convince me that she is perhaps the eeriest pop vocalist I've ever heard. She has an unexpectedly husky voice for someone so frail looking, with a slight gospel-blues coloring that places her ambiguously along the racial spectrum, but most of all it's the incredibly intimate feeling her voice conjures up. Despite the presence of backing musicians, and elliptical lyrics that suggest deeply personal associations without spelling them out, listening to her is an almost voyeuristic thrill, like pausing under the window of a musician playing for herself alone in the middle of the night. I'm reminded of Laura Nyro, sometimes of Tom Waits, sometimes of Lucinda Williams, sometimes of Townes Van Zandt—all highly ideosyncratic singer/songwriters with a strong melodic streak who made/make their perilous ways along the edge of the pit of American popular music. Over the last three listenings, I've become fixated on "Willie," a dreamily lilting piano piece that tells the story of a hopeless loser, or perhaps a winner despite it all, or perhaps it's all about her . . . it's hard to tell. She has the ability to give wispy lyrics the feeling of enormous import. It's a particular talent, to render a line like "I'm on the same side as you / I'm just a little bit behind" so that you want to weep when you hear it, and each time you hear it, you want to weep even more.