Roger Ebert in his consistently interesting blog has a post about how Twitter and internet browsing are destroying his concentration, reducing his ability to enjoy Victorian novels. It's a sensation many people may have felt, although whether the internet is anything more than a scapegoat is uncertain.
The epic films of the 1960s and 70s, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris, and Apocalypse Now, began with an often glacial slowness, and didn't get much faster. It seems like they aspire to the condition of dreams, enveloping the viewer in a strange world. But it is not exactly the dream they want to create, but the concrete, the secular - which means variously the non-spiritual, the long-lasting, and the non-eternal - a space where they can exist and be free. All art needs this room, a space and time where the audience can move and stretch their legs and experience something at length, escaping the momentariness and fragmentation of ordinary life.
There is a book to be written about how changes in artwork density from gallery to gallery and era to era have affected the visual arts - pictures crammed on walls in the 19th century, now sitting in solitude in white galleries - and how today we may be giving contemporary art too much space. Because after all, despite our dense urban lives, it is time we really have a shortage of - we can flit from work to shallow sensationalist work in a gallery but not commit the time to enjoy temporal arts like the novel, the slow-moving epic, or the opera.
People still have time for long TV series, box sets, but they are paced and punctuated for stop-start viewing with their ad-space-friendly ten-minute acts and credit sequences. What they do not offer is the long slow sensation of drifting off. Everything is Brechtian now, shocking you out of its reality, showing you its frame.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Just putting line breaks in something doesn't make it poetry
German miserabilist philosopher Theodor Adorno asked how it was possible to write poetry after the Holocaust, and Charles Reznikoff produced one of the greatest collections of poetry about the Nazi genocide by not writing anything at all. A master of found poetry, he pursued the avant-garde goals of driving out subjectivity and directly apprehending the world, while managing to document crime and suffering in central Europe and the USA.
Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894 of Jewish Russian parents. He studied journalism and later law and wrote reports for a legal publisher, but also wrote poetry, at first influenced by the decadent poets of the 1890s and the French Symbolists, and later by Imagism. He printed much of it himself, and made little money. He constantly worked and re-worked his poems, on one occasion demanding work back from Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse when the magazine refused to let him change it before publication; staying out of the magazine was preferable to a ban on tinkering.
He never made much money from his verse, and worked at a range of jobs from hat salesman to a spell as assistant to Albert Lewin, a Hollywood writer, producer, and director, who helped create such seductive and decadent movies as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). He always depended on unliterary day-jobs for his money and wrote in the evenings:
Williams wrote of the necessity of "ridding the field of verbiage": giving poetry a new form suited to its present role. He wrote: "the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. [...] This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse." (quoted by Peter Jones in Poetry Magazine). Zukofsky ranged from short poems to epics, from the four-word The:
In the 1940s and 50s, Reznikoff's published output declined as he concentrated on other tasks, but he was never idle. All of Reznikoff's interests - poetry, law, history, journalism - were combined in his book Testimony, which he had worked on for decades. Finally published in 1965, it turned old court reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into verse. This:
Many of the great modernist poets, from TS Eliot to William Carlos Williams, made use of quotes and samples in their writing. Eliot's The Waste Land included footnotes by the author explaining how "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" was from Dante's Inferno and "Why then Ile fit you" and "Hieronymo's mad again" from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Williams incorporated personal correspondence (including mail from Allen Ginsberg) and other prose in his epic poem Paterson.
More recent poets like Charles Bernstein (one of the pioneers of language poetry) have made equally creative use of found texts, seeking to question the idea of poetry as communication of meaning by pointing up the reuse and repetition of its linguistic building blocks. In the 1960s, Ronald Gross attempted to copy pop art with his pop poetry, taking text from advertisements and commercial writing:
Gross's writing, like Reznikoff's, is part of the genre of found poetry, where a writer (or collector) comes across a few sentences and decide it should be poetry; it has a long history. In 1936 Yeats edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and included a section of Walter Pater's prose description of the Mona Lisa broken up into separate lines (New Criterion).
More recently, Hart Seely collected the poetry of George W Bush's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Slate). From a 2001 defence briefing comes this, which Seely entitled "Glass Box":
Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894 of Jewish Russian parents. He studied journalism and later law and wrote reports for a legal publisher, but also wrote poetry, at first influenced by the decadent poets of the 1890s and the French Symbolists, and later by Imagism. He printed much of it himself, and made little money. He constantly worked and re-worked his poems, on one occasion demanding work back from Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse when the magazine refused to let him change it before publication; staying out of the magazine was preferable to a ban on tinkering.
He never made much money from his verse, and worked at a range of jobs from hat salesman to a spell as assistant to Albert Lewin, a Hollywood writer, producer, and director, who helped create such seductive and decadent movies as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). He always depended on unliterary day-jobs for his money and wrote in the evenings:
After I had worked all day at what I earn my living,But nonetheless, Reznikoff produced a large number of books of his poetry, self-published or from little publishers such as the Objectivist Press which he ran with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Offen, and others. He became closely linked with the Objectivists, who also included George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, the British Basil Bunting, and the legendary William Carlos Williams. They rejected sentiment, subjectivity, and vagueness of language (but were unrelated to the objectivism of Ayn Rand).
I was tired. Now my work has lost another day
I thought, but began slowly,
and slowly my strength came back to me.
Surely the tide comes in twice a day. (*)
Williams wrote of the necessity of "ridding the field of verbiage": giving poetry a new form suited to its present role. He wrote: "the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. [...] This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse." (quoted by Peter Jones in Poetry Magazine). Zukofsky ranged from short poems to epics, from the four-word The:
Thewhich appealed to boat-obsessed Scottish artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, (Jacket Magazine) all the way to his epic daybook entitled A.
The
desire
of
towing.
In the 1940s and 50s, Reznikoff's published output declined as he concentrated on other tasks, but he was never idle. All of Reznikoff's interests - poetry, law, history, journalism - were combined in his book Testimony, which he had worked on for decades. Finally published in 1965, it turned old court reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into verse. This:
"It's a lie!" she cried. He struck her in the face with his newspaper, andcame from this:
then with his straw hat;
and she struck back with a fish she had just bought
and then with the pocketbook she still held in her hand.
The steel clasp scratched his face and it began to bleed.
As she left the store,
he shouted after her that she should not come back
and his house was closed to her forever!
He went upstairs to the rooms where they lived
and gathered up all her clothing he could find
and cut and slashed it with knife and scissors.
The complainant denied the charge, and charged her husband with lying. He struck her in the face with his straw hat and with a newspaper. She struck him, first with a fish which she had just been buying for breakfast, and then with a pocketbook which she held in her hand, and whose steel clasp scratched his face and drew blood. The parties were separated. The complainant left the house, and defendant shouted after her, and sent word to her by his son that she could not come back again. She went to her father's house. Three days afterwards the husband said to the son, who was working for him in his store, that he must decide whether he would go with his mother or stay with him. The son decided to go with the mother, and left. The husband then sent word to the wife to take away her clothing, but, before delivering it to her, mutilated each piece of it thoroughly with a knife or scissors, or other sharp instrument, so that a large number of costly female garments of all kinds were utterly destroyed, and in that condition sent to the wife. (Streitwolf v. Streitwolf, 47 A. 14, 18 (N.J. Ch. 1900).)(Example from Benjamin Watson, Legal Studies Forum, Volume 29, No. 1 (2005)). Reznikoff set out his principles and working methods in the following brief statement (Watson again):
The Method of RevisionThe follow-up to Testimony was Holocaust, with texts taken from the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and from the Eichmann trial. You can listen to him reading from it at Penn Sound, a project of the University of Pennsylvania. Being taken from court testimony, not legal judgments, the poems present the evidence not the verdicts; facts, not commentary.
1. Write all seemingly good lines
2. Examine every word to remove all possible latinisms and unnecessary words
3. Examine the meaning of the sentences in their order
4. Examine the rhythm of the lines
5. Examine the rhythm of the whole
6. Then revision by contemplation
Once the commander of a camp had eight of the strongest amongReznikoff died in 1976, a year after Holocaust was published. Despite mixed reviews for it, his popularity was on the rise, with the support of the prestigious Black Sparrow Press. His voice remains on filmmaker Abraham Ravett's recordings, reading other people's words.
the Jews
placed in a large barrel of water,
saying that they did not look clean,
and they had to stand in this barrel naked for twenty-four hours.
In the morning, other Jews had to cut away the ice:
the men were frozen to death.
In this camp - and in others also -
they had an orchestra of Jews
who had to play every morning and evening
and whenever Jews were taken to be shot.
In one such camp,
the orchestra had all of sixty men. (*)
Many of the great modernist poets, from TS Eliot to William Carlos Williams, made use of quotes and samples in their writing. Eliot's The Waste Land included footnotes by the author explaining how "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" was from Dante's Inferno and "Why then Ile fit you" and "Hieronymo's mad again" from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Williams incorporated personal correspondence (including mail from Allen Ginsberg) and other prose in his epic poem Paterson.
More recent poets like Charles Bernstein (one of the pioneers of language poetry) have made equally creative use of found texts, seeking to question the idea of poetry as communication of meaning by pointing up the reuse and repetition of its linguistic building blocks. In the 1960s, Ronald Gross attempted to copy pop art with his pop poetry, taking text from advertisements and commercial writing:
An optional featurebegan his "The Miracle of Creation", text taken from a toy catalogue that seems strange and suggestive when removed from its colourful illustrations and given the full concentration of the poet or reader. Presumably, the text is describing the Visible Woman, an educational anatomical model (of the sort Damian Hirst later reproduced - BBC), and its optional add-on the Miracle of Creation.
designed to make
the Visible Woman
even more useful
as an educational toy
is the Miracle of Creation.
Understanding female biology
requires observation
of those parts
relating to gestation.
Gross's writing, like Reznikoff's, is part of the genre of found poetry, where a writer (or collector) comes across a few sentences and decide it should be poetry; it has a long history. In 1936 Yeats edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and included a section of Walter Pater's prose description of the Mona Lisa broken up into separate lines (New Criterion).
More recently, Hart Seely collected the poetry of George W Bush's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Slate). From a 2001 defence briefing comes this, which Seely entitled "Glass Box":
You know, it's the old glass box at the—In 2009, former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was criticised from some quarters (see the Telegraph) for his poem An Equal Voice, made up of the testimonies of British soldiers. For this poem, he minimised signs of his intervention by choosing a regular line length:
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—
And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—
Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.It looks like a column of text; like prose.
Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust
reports, blueprints one day and the next –
with the help of a broken-down motor car
and a few gallons of petrol – marching men
with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,
horses straining and plunging at the guns,
little clay-pits opening beneath each step,
and piles of bloody clothes and leggings
outside the canvas door of a field hospital.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Rock 'n' roll high schools
Bandslam (2009) is a film about teenagers interested in alternative rock, produced by Christian educationalists Walden Media and starring a clutch of Disney's wholesome young actors. It joins a run of films about independent music and its fans, including the breakout Oscar success Juno (2007), which combines teen heartthrob turned Arrested Development star Jason Bateman with the sad quirky music of Kimya Dawson. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) follows teens through a night in New York in a quest for a secret gig (an upbeat successor to urban movies from The Warriors to Hangin' With The Homeboys). (500) Days of Summer (2009) is about twentysomethings wondering if love exists and whether musical taste is the be-all and end-all, or if (as Los Campesinos once sang) "it's not what you like, it's what you're like as a person". But this trend also follows such kid-oriented material as Freaky Friday (2003), in which Lindsay Lohan plays guitar in a rock band when not swapping bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis, and even a range of Bratz dolls with attached guitars.
Bandslam centres on Will (Gaelan Connell), a nerdy teenage boy who moves from the horrors of Cincinnati to the paradise of New Jersey (the reason for his leaving does become clearer). His mother is played by Lisa Kudrow: unlike her fellow Friend Jennifer Aniston she has not become a film star but has prospered in smaller films as best friend or sister and now mom. She and her son have an unhealthily close relationship: while he's in the shower she sits on the toilet to talk to him; at one point he encourages her to unzip her top to get the services of a talented drummer with a fondness for older women.
In New Jerseyan suburbia (the Garden State was the subject of another music-heavy film with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman), our hero finds himself in a sort of romantic triangle with two girls. Charlotte is a blonde ex-cheerleader who helps out at playgroup and leads her own dodgy band Glory Dogs - not to be confused with the school's favourite band Ben Wheatly and the Glory Dogs whose singer she once dated. Her strange behaviour is explained towards the end when it emerges that she has made a pact with God (everyone has their secrets here). She is played by Alyson Michalka, who starred in Disney sitcom Phil of the Future, which had a certain following outside its core age group.
The other girl is Sa5m (the 5 is silent - one of the better jokes), brunette and antisocial, played by Disney superstar Vanessa Hudgens, who was Gabriella, the female lead, in High School Musical. While HSM co-star Zac Efron was worshipped by the camera and given many long sequences to show his sensitive side and conflicted personality, Hudgens suffered from a lack of material as his love interest: a mathlete in the first film turned into a lifeguard in the second. She's not much better off here, miscast as Bandslam's troubled girl (think of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club or Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You for how it should be played) with her natural perkiness and an inability to slouch or mumble or look anything other than well-scrubbed and beautiful.
As with many teen stories, the film uses the device of unsent letters - Will composes regular missives to David Bowie. This appears forced and incongruous, not least because otherwise he doesn't seem to be a particular Bowie fan, but does create expectations for the inevitable Bowie cameo, which is late and brief and poor by the standards of Ricky Gervais's Extras. (In fairness, many things that teenage boys do are forced and incongruous.) Rather than go to the trouble of learning to play an instrument, Will becomes manager of Charlotte's group of no-hopers (one of whom is told off for bearing a resemblance to Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whom he is almost entirely unlike). He rapidly improves the band by recruiting even more freaks and outcasts, from shop class, orchestra, and marching band.
The film was shot in Austin, Texas, known for its excellent live music scene, and some local bands feature in the climactic bandslam (a music competition not a wrestling event). But the film's attitude to music is inconsistent, flipping between the super-cultish and the mainstream. Will and Charlotte bond while arguing whether The Velvet Underground's self-titled third album is better than their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico. He wants to visit CBGB's in New York, but uses his trip to enthuse about how punk's spirit inspired U2 and The Killers; most cliquey, over-serious indie fans dislike the pompous stadium rockers (aptly parodied in South Park with Bono's quest to produce the biggest bowel movement in history) and the 80s-influenced pop-rock Mormons.
A similar conflict can be seen in 10 Things I Hate About You, slightly cooler but still fairly mainstream, where the heroine speaks of her love for Bikini Kill (confrontational riot grrls who recorded the best-ever double A-side I Like Fucking/I Hate Danger) and the Raincoats (wayward, disorganised mostly-female post-punk act who swung between dreamy proto-world music and fierce denunciations of soldiers visiting prostitutes) but the film features cute power-poppers Letters To Cleo. Both 10 Things and Bandslam feature covers of Cheap Trick's I Want You To Want Me.
But according to Bandslam the greatest music genre of all isn't indie rock, power pop, or even poverty-eliminating Irish stadium pomp. It is reggae, and particularly the 1960s subgenre called ska, which is apparently better because it's not just about getting stoned. This is a curious statement, as Rastafarians like Bob Marley blended a fondness for weed with a passion for social justice that has made him an icon throughout the developing world, while ska was mostly party music that focused on beats not lyrics. But perhaps the anti-drug message is more important. (In the infinitely cooler Ghost World, the nihilistic heroes dismiss reggae and its main audience of dumb stoners with a contemptuous glance.) Hudgens is particularly fond of Everything I Own, a big hit for Jamaican singer Ken Boothe and a reggae-tinged cover by Boy George.
Walden Media may have filmed The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe but isn't the worst company to be making kids' films: aside from their genuine commitment to get kids reading, their adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia was moving and shocking, with indie-queen Zooey Deschanel at her nicest and best as a school teacher. There isn't much religion in Bandslam, and as with the lion-killing in Wardrobe, it's more Flannery O'Connor than nativity play: a teenage girl who promises to be nice if God will spare her terminally ill father, then sees him die. Religion, then, is real but not always benign.
There are some good jokes (feeding toddlers teriyaki-flavour beef jerky, a bit of Violent Femmes business), and there are certainly plot twists, even though the film is badly paced. But if you were to rate the kids' rebelliousness and cool on a scale from the Heathers to the Flanders, they're not even as cool as Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday who manages to be authentically hard to get out of bed in the morning.
Bandslam is made by adults with a pop-culture sensibility but is aimed at kids and the censors who guard them. Movies like Ghost World, Heathers, or Mysterious Skin choose to show teenage life as a random, brutal, nightmarish place where you've got to make your own meaning; Juno approaches adult themes with cutting jokes; and The Breakfast Club and 10 Things I Hate About You represent teenage confusion with some attempt at sincerity. In contrast, Bandslam has improbable plot elements, tried-and-tested cliches, pretty girls, and a few flashes of wit. The result is less anarchic than many shows on Nickelodeon; even Disney's Kim Possible (an animated heroine who fights super-villains with the aid of a naked mole rat) is a more interesting and complex character. But for fans of alternative music, or of movies that make references to Patti Smith and Samuel Beckett (Will's band is called I Can't Go On, I'll Go On which he justifies as being no stupider than Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly!), it's a fascinating collision of commerce and art.
The movie is set in the fictional Martin Van Buren High School. This might be a nod to Glee or Freaks and Geeks, both of which feature a William McKinley High School; to James K Polk Middle School in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide; or to The Brady Bunch which had both Fillmore and Coolidge Highs.
Bandslam centres on Will (Gaelan Connell), a nerdy teenage boy who moves from the horrors of Cincinnati to the paradise of New Jersey (the reason for his leaving does become clearer). His mother is played by Lisa Kudrow: unlike her fellow Friend Jennifer Aniston she has not become a film star but has prospered in smaller films as best friend or sister and now mom. She and her son have an unhealthily close relationship: while he's in the shower she sits on the toilet to talk to him; at one point he encourages her to unzip her top to get the services of a talented drummer with a fondness for older women.
In New Jerseyan suburbia (the Garden State was the subject of another music-heavy film with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman), our hero finds himself in a sort of romantic triangle with two girls. Charlotte is a blonde ex-cheerleader who helps out at playgroup and leads her own dodgy band Glory Dogs - not to be confused with the school's favourite band Ben Wheatly and the Glory Dogs whose singer she once dated. Her strange behaviour is explained towards the end when it emerges that she has made a pact with God (everyone has their secrets here). She is played by Alyson Michalka, who starred in Disney sitcom Phil of the Future, which had a certain following outside its core age group.
The other girl is Sa5m (the 5 is silent - one of the better jokes), brunette and antisocial, played by Disney superstar Vanessa Hudgens, who was Gabriella, the female lead, in High School Musical. While HSM co-star Zac Efron was worshipped by the camera and given many long sequences to show his sensitive side and conflicted personality, Hudgens suffered from a lack of material as his love interest: a mathlete in the first film turned into a lifeguard in the second. She's not much better off here, miscast as Bandslam's troubled girl (think of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club or Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You for how it should be played) with her natural perkiness and an inability to slouch or mumble or look anything other than well-scrubbed and beautiful.
As with many teen stories, the film uses the device of unsent letters - Will composes regular missives to David Bowie. This appears forced and incongruous, not least because otherwise he doesn't seem to be a particular Bowie fan, but does create expectations for the inevitable Bowie cameo, which is late and brief and poor by the standards of Ricky Gervais's Extras. (In fairness, many things that teenage boys do are forced and incongruous.) Rather than go to the trouble of learning to play an instrument, Will becomes manager of Charlotte's group of no-hopers (one of whom is told off for bearing a resemblance to Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whom he is almost entirely unlike). He rapidly improves the band by recruiting even more freaks and outcasts, from shop class, orchestra, and marching band.
The film was shot in Austin, Texas, known for its excellent live music scene, and some local bands feature in the climactic bandslam (a music competition not a wrestling event). But the film's attitude to music is inconsistent, flipping between the super-cultish and the mainstream. Will and Charlotte bond while arguing whether The Velvet Underground's self-titled third album is better than their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico. He wants to visit CBGB's in New York, but uses his trip to enthuse about how punk's spirit inspired U2 and The Killers; most cliquey, over-serious indie fans dislike the pompous stadium rockers (aptly parodied in South Park with Bono's quest to produce the biggest bowel movement in history) and the 80s-influenced pop-rock Mormons.
A similar conflict can be seen in 10 Things I Hate About You, slightly cooler but still fairly mainstream, where the heroine speaks of her love for Bikini Kill (confrontational riot grrls who recorded the best-ever double A-side I Like Fucking/I Hate Danger) and the Raincoats (wayward, disorganised mostly-female post-punk act who swung between dreamy proto-world music and fierce denunciations of soldiers visiting prostitutes) but the film features cute power-poppers Letters To Cleo. Both 10 Things and Bandslam feature covers of Cheap Trick's I Want You To Want Me.
But according to Bandslam the greatest music genre of all isn't indie rock, power pop, or even poverty-eliminating Irish stadium pomp. It is reggae, and particularly the 1960s subgenre called ska, which is apparently better because it's not just about getting stoned. This is a curious statement, as Rastafarians like Bob Marley blended a fondness for weed with a passion for social justice that has made him an icon throughout the developing world, while ska was mostly party music that focused on beats not lyrics. But perhaps the anti-drug message is more important. (In the infinitely cooler Ghost World, the nihilistic heroes dismiss reggae and its main audience of dumb stoners with a contemptuous glance.) Hudgens is particularly fond of Everything I Own, a big hit for Jamaican singer Ken Boothe and a reggae-tinged cover by Boy George.
Walden Media may have filmed The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe but isn't the worst company to be making kids' films: aside from their genuine commitment to get kids reading, their adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia was moving and shocking, with indie-queen Zooey Deschanel at her nicest and best as a school teacher. There isn't much religion in Bandslam, and as with the lion-killing in Wardrobe, it's more Flannery O'Connor than nativity play: a teenage girl who promises to be nice if God will spare her terminally ill father, then sees him die. Religion, then, is real but not always benign.
There are some good jokes (feeding toddlers teriyaki-flavour beef jerky, a bit of Violent Femmes business), and there are certainly plot twists, even though the film is badly paced. But if you were to rate the kids' rebelliousness and cool on a scale from the Heathers to the Flanders, they're not even as cool as Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday who manages to be authentically hard to get out of bed in the morning.
Bandslam is made by adults with a pop-culture sensibility but is aimed at kids and the censors who guard them. Movies like Ghost World, Heathers, or Mysterious Skin choose to show teenage life as a random, brutal, nightmarish place where you've got to make your own meaning; Juno approaches adult themes with cutting jokes; and The Breakfast Club and 10 Things I Hate About You represent teenage confusion with some attempt at sincerity. In contrast, Bandslam has improbable plot elements, tried-and-tested cliches, pretty girls, and a few flashes of wit. The result is less anarchic than many shows on Nickelodeon; even Disney's Kim Possible (an animated heroine who fights super-villains with the aid of a naked mole rat) is a more interesting and complex character. But for fans of alternative music, or of movies that make references to Patti Smith and Samuel Beckett (Will's band is called I Can't Go On, I'll Go On which he justifies as being no stupider than Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly!), it's a fascinating collision of commerce and art.
The movie is set in the fictional Martin Van Buren High School. This might be a nod to Glee or Freaks and Geeks, both of which feature a William McKinley High School; to James K Polk Middle School in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide; or to The Brady Bunch which had both Fillmore and Coolidge Highs.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Young Harvey, Young Jack
You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
1970s cinema has a canon beloved by film-buffs, movie magazines, and even film writers: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, but also Jaws and Star Wars. At the same time, films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, despite their power and audience affection, remain outside the official story of American film history in which self-involved mavericks took over, only to be usurped by special effects and populism. This article considers a number of films which fit within the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tradition but perhaps aren't viewed as often as they should be.
The first thing you notice about Mean Streets is how young Harvey Keitel is. From his 1990s renaissance (The Piano, Bad Lieutenant) he is clearly middle-aged, balancing paunch with muscles, still clinging on not to his youthful beauty but to some of his power. In Mean Streets he is slim, immaculately dressed in suit, bright patterned shirt, and large-knotted tie, with a bouffant hairdo and clean-cut good looks. He is a young man, trying to get started in organised crime, trying to find the balance between religion, loyalty, love, and the necessity to project the appropriate image. His girlfriend is unsuitable, his best friend is a lunatic who owes money to every loan shark in town, and he is trying to be a good Catholic not only in church but on the streets. While he's running the rackets.
Scorsese shoots the film with astonishing facility, layering it with constantly-moving camera, incongruous pop songs on the soundtrack, the first 20 minutes bathed in red light. It's the confidence of a young man who for the first time has the total freedom to say what he wants but more importantly knows almost instinctively how to do it. His cast is brilliant - they look like mobsters and mooks, not actors. The script is funny and savage. De Niro steals scenes with a youthful vitality absent from his later films - in Taxi Driver he was already a veteran, and by the time of Raging Bull he was an old has-been. But at the centre is Keitel, a smooth surface that never lets us beneath the clothes he wears like armour. We can only imagine his troubles and the decision he must make between love and success; yet while we want him to choose Teresa (Amy Robinson) over the mob, we equally want him to stop being so soft with Johnny Boy. It's not just about being made in the mob; it's about entering society and becoming an adult.
James Toback's Fingers, which also stars Keitel, is a lesser-known film, or at least until its recent French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Keitel is a wannabe pianist again working as an enforcer for the mob. The job description for his position involves beating up debtors and having sex with - or sometimes raping - their wives and girlfriends. It is a film of dubious morals and astonishing energy. Like Mean Streets it is a film about what it takes to be a man, and yet even more than Mean Streets it ignores so much of manhood that it is a caricature, albeit one of great virtuosity.
The critic David Thomson, later a close friend of Toback, wrote "Fingers is the best first film by an American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick's debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal." Thompson could not bring himself to comment on any of Toback's later films. Certainly, Toback never made anything else nearly as good as Keitel explaining why he loved the song Summertime Summertime by the Jamies.
There's a long tradition of tough guys in movies wanting to go straight: most mafiosi seem to want to become legitimate business people. But there's a limit as to what jobs they can do: in Paul Schrader's smoother Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe's drug dealer wants to become a record producer, and in countless films people want to be rappers. But becoming a concert pianist is a little too esoteric for movie cliches. Insofar as they treat classical music at all, movies tell us that concert pianists are weird, effete, stuck-up and rather unlikable. Thomson finds it all "implausible" and points to the schematic nature of Keitel's character's parents - tough guy father, mother in an asylum. Added to that chiaroscuro is former American footballer Jim Brown as a black pimp, a terrifying figure of darkness. The scene in which he bangs two of his girls' heads together, and the noise of the crack, is one of the most horrible in cinema. Becoming like that is the more realistic choice for Keitel.
It's a film that's all about angels and demons. It's ridiculous, unbelievable; nobody in the audience thinks it's possible for Keitel to become a serious musician, even if his fingers make it through everything intact. When Jacques Audiard remade it, he cut down on the evilness of the criminals, and made Romain Duris's dreams of musical success seem more delusional and pathetic, but he lost the insane sense of Augustinian spiritual conflict: that the true battle was not fought with the hero's fists but with his soul.
Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson, are not about the glamour of violent crime on the streets. They are films about fraud, deception, hiding, and escape. Central to both is perhaps the greatest Hollywood actor of the last 60 years. Nicholson, unlike Keitel, remained a star from the 70s to the present day. While he does all the usual hack work of any big star, he has found time for some astonishing performances more recently. About Schmidt (2002), the greatest film of the overpraised Alexander Payne, is one of the best tales of growing old in middle-class America, and for it Nicholson seems to resurrect both the trauma and the tenderness of the youthful roles that made his name. But back to the 1970s.
The King of Marvin Gardens starts with one of the great scenes of 70s cinema: Nicholson sitting alone in a darkened room, telling lies to no one. He is a late-night radio DJ, spinning wonderful if implausible tales, but it is hard to believe there is anybody listening to him. The film is a stylised, almost theatrical piece, in which nobody might exist except the four main characters, with Bruce Dern playing out dreams of property development in a run-down Atlantic City that doesn't seem to have anybody to live in his houses. It's a film about capitalism, about success, but one in which success and failure are both strangely illusory - Bruce Dern in another of his great madman roles is certainly the happiest character. Nicholson for once plays quiet and introverted, coolly intelligent rather than impulsively physical, something he has seldom explored since.
Nicholson made his name with a supporting role in Easy Rider, a shallow but impactful story about the counterculture and their war with America. Five Easy Pieces presents a generational conflict which is far more ambiguous and more specific in its social and economic setting. While earlier filmmakers like Douglas Sirk criticised the American middle class for its philistinism, greed, crassness, and meanness of spirit, Nicholson's character grows up in an exemplary artsy, liberal, upper-middle-class family, and chooses to reject all that in favour of dangerous labour on oil-fields and being cruel to women. This is a film about somebody who doesn't want to be a concert pianist.
Long before Mean Streets or Five Easy Pieces, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause alluded to a crisis of masculinity in the American middle-class. Teenager Jim (James Dean) despaired at his hen-pecked father, but it still showed the young man as capable of love and responsibility in his relationship with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. In the 1950s, there was a cosy suburbia against which a man could define himself, but by the 1970s this uniform social background was gone, and there was nothing to rebel against. Five Easy Pieces is nihilistic, with Nicholson's contempt for women (and for his family) only equalled by his contempt for himself.
And yet the film recognises the attractiveness of Nicholson's character Robert Eroica Dupea to both men and women. The scene in the diner where he tries to change his order - denied toast he cleverly requests a chicken salad sandwich in toasted bread, but tells the waitress to hold the butter, lettuce, mayo, and the chicken - instantly became a classic for lovers of grumpiness, despite its mean-spiritedness and the way that it's instantly undercut: Dupea saying he didn't get his order despite his verbal skills and his girlfriend suggesting she'd have punched the waitress out instead. This is not rebellion that's big or clever or successful; it's self-destructive and pointless. Nobody gets what they want in any of these movies.
It's clear that what all the films have in common is that the world, no matter how lovingly and accurately described in Mean Streets or how stylised as in Marvin Gardens, is not where the action is taking place. Was this generation of directors - Scorsese, Rafelson, Toback, the last who could make spiritual dramas that can stand with Bresson or Bergman or Tarkovsky? There's something Dostoevskian about it, recognising that Dostoevsky could be tremendously funny and sly as well as dark and prophetic; the urban hell of St Petersburg at night mirrors that of New York. As well as being the first great urban novelist, it sometimes seems that Dostoevsky was the last novelist to believe in good and evil, even if he loved evil more than good and saw both fade away impossibly - Raskolnikov fails at being evil just as Leo Myshkin fails at being good. While nobody in any of these films is exactly good or evil, what these filmmakers did was to recreate some of this old whirlwind of moral debate, to affirm that the most important thing in the world is the decision about how you live your life even if that decision cannot bring you happiness.
Moving forwards 20 years, Scorsese's last really great film was Casino, in which Robert De Niro plays Jewish gambler turned casino manager Ace Rothstein. This is a film about how it's impossible to ever be really successful. What is great about the movie is the way it demolishes the characters' seeming success with terrible precision. It is a film full of ironies, both visual and narrative, and its over-the-top style captures the enthusiasms of its characters, but at its heart is something similar to Mean Streets. This is a film that understands and sympathises with its characters' successes, but at the same time that is willing to destroy them clinically, to pick them apart without sentiment. Goodfellas, a slightly earlier film considered better by many people, managed the clear-headed analysis of its young mobster's rise and fall, but it lacked the kindliness of the later film. Goodfellas is about a young upstart who thinks he can get somewhere, and by betraying his friends ultimately escapes, while Casino is a film about middle-aged failure, the end of dreams that cannot be avoided.
1970s cinema has a canon beloved by film-buffs, movie magazines, and even film writers: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, but also Jaws and Star Wars. At the same time, films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, despite their power and audience affection, remain outside the official story of American film history in which self-involved mavericks took over, only to be usurped by special effects and populism. This article considers a number of films which fit within the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tradition but perhaps aren't viewed as often as they should be.
The first thing you notice about Mean Streets is how young Harvey Keitel is. From his 1990s renaissance (The Piano, Bad Lieutenant) he is clearly middle-aged, balancing paunch with muscles, still clinging on not to his youthful beauty but to some of his power. In Mean Streets he is slim, immaculately dressed in suit, bright patterned shirt, and large-knotted tie, with a bouffant hairdo and clean-cut good looks. He is a young man, trying to get started in organised crime, trying to find the balance between religion, loyalty, love, and the necessity to project the appropriate image. His girlfriend is unsuitable, his best friend is a lunatic who owes money to every loan shark in town, and he is trying to be a good Catholic not only in church but on the streets. While he's running the rackets.
Scorsese shoots the film with astonishing facility, layering it with constantly-moving camera, incongruous pop songs on the soundtrack, the first 20 minutes bathed in red light. It's the confidence of a young man who for the first time has the total freedom to say what he wants but more importantly knows almost instinctively how to do it. His cast is brilliant - they look like mobsters and mooks, not actors. The script is funny and savage. De Niro steals scenes with a youthful vitality absent from his later films - in Taxi Driver he was already a veteran, and by the time of Raging Bull he was an old has-been. But at the centre is Keitel, a smooth surface that never lets us beneath the clothes he wears like armour. We can only imagine his troubles and the decision he must make between love and success; yet while we want him to choose Teresa (Amy Robinson) over the mob, we equally want him to stop being so soft with Johnny Boy. It's not just about being made in the mob; it's about entering society and becoming an adult.
James Toback's Fingers, which also stars Keitel, is a lesser-known film, or at least until its recent French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Keitel is a wannabe pianist again working as an enforcer for the mob. The job description for his position involves beating up debtors and having sex with - or sometimes raping - their wives and girlfriends. It is a film of dubious morals and astonishing energy. Like Mean Streets it is a film about what it takes to be a man, and yet even more than Mean Streets it ignores so much of manhood that it is a caricature, albeit one of great virtuosity.
The critic David Thomson, later a close friend of Toback, wrote "Fingers is the best first film by an American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick's debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal." Thompson could not bring himself to comment on any of Toback's later films. Certainly, Toback never made anything else nearly as good as Keitel explaining why he loved the song Summertime Summertime by the Jamies.
There's a long tradition of tough guys in movies wanting to go straight: most mafiosi seem to want to become legitimate business people. But there's a limit as to what jobs they can do: in Paul Schrader's smoother Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe's drug dealer wants to become a record producer, and in countless films people want to be rappers. But becoming a concert pianist is a little too esoteric for movie cliches. Insofar as they treat classical music at all, movies tell us that concert pianists are weird, effete, stuck-up and rather unlikable. Thomson finds it all "implausible" and points to the schematic nature of Keitel's character's parents - tough guy father, mother in an asylum. Added to that chiaroscuro is former American footballer Jim Brown as a black pimp, a terrifying figure of darkness. The scene in which he bangs two of his girls' heads together, and the noise of the crack, is one of the most horrible in cinema. Becoming like that is the more realistic choice for Keitel.
It's a film that's all about angels and demons. It's ridiculous, unbelievable; nobody in the audience thinks it's possible for Keitel to become a serious musician, even if his fingers make it through everything intact. When Jacques Audiard remade it, he cut down on the evilness of the criminals, and made Romain Duris's dreams of musical success seem more delusional and pathetic, but he lost the insane sense of Augustinian spiritual conflict: that the true battle was not fought with the hero's fists but with his soul.
Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson, are not about the glamour of violent crime on the streets. They are films about fraud, deception, hiding, and escape. Central to both is perhaps the greatest Hollywood actor of the last 60 years. Nicholson, unlike Keitel, remained a star from the 70s to the present day. While he does all the usual hack work of any big star, he has found time for some astonishing performances more recently. About Schmidt (2002), the greatest film of the overpraised Alexander Payne, is one of the best tales of growing old in middle-class America, and for it Nicholson seems to resurrect both the trauma and the tenderness of the youthful roles that made his name. But back to the 1970s.
The King of Marvin Gardens starts with one of the great scenes of 70s cinema: Nicholson sitting alone in a darkened room, telling lies to no one. He is a late-night radio DJ, spinning wonderful if implausible tales, but it is hard to believe there is anybody listening to him. The film is a stylised, almost theatrical piece, in which nobody might exist except the four main characters, with Bruce Dern playing out dreams of property development in a run-down Atlantic City that doesn't seem to have anybody to live in his houses. It's a film about capitalism, about success, but one in which success and failure are both strangely illusory - Bruce Dern in another of his great madman roles is certainly the happiest character. Nicholson for once plays quiet and introverted, coolly intelligent rather than impulsively physical, something he has seldom explored since.
Nicholson made his name with a supporting role in Easy Rider, a shallow but impactful story about the counterculture and their war with America. Five Easy Pieces presents a generational conflict which is far more ambiguous and more specific in its social and economic setting. While earlier filmmakers like Douglas Sirk criticised the American middle class for its philistinism, greed, crassness, and meanness of spirit, Nicholson's character grows up in an exemplary artsy, liberal, upper-middle-class family, and chooses to reject all that in favour of dangerous labour on oil-fields and being cruel to women. This is a film about somebody who doesn't want to be a concert pianist.
Long before Mean Streets or Five Easy Pieces, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause alluded to a crisis of masculinity in the American middle-class. Teenager Jim (James Dean) despaired at his hen-pecked father, but it still showed the young man as capable of love and responsibility in his relationship with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. In the 1950s, there was a cosy suburbia against which a man could define himself, but by the 1970s this uniform social background was gone, and there was nothing to rebel against. Five Easy Pieces is nihilistic, with Nicholson's contempt for women (and for his family) only equalled by his contempt for himself.
And yet the film recognises the attractiveness of Nicholson's character Robert Eroica Dupea to both men and women. The scene in the diner where he tries to change his order - denied toast he cleverly requests a chicken salad sandwich in toasted bread, but tells the waitress to hold the butter, lettuce, mayo, and the chicken - instantly became a classic for lovers of grumpiness, despite its mean-spiritedness and the way that it's instantly undercut: Dupea saying he didn't get his order despite his verbal skills and his girlfriend suggesting she'd have punched the waitress out instead. This is not rebellion that's big or clever or successful; it's self-destructive and pointless. Nobody gets what they want in any of these movies.
It's clear that what all the films have in common is that the world, no matter how lovingly and accurately described in Mean Streets or how stylised as in Marvin Gardens, is not where the action is taking place. Was this generation of directors - Scorsese, Rafelson, Toback, the last who could make spiritual dramas that can stand with Bresson or Bergman or Tarkovsky? There's something Dostoevskian about it, recognising that Dostoevsky could be tremendously funny and sly as well as dark and prophetic; the urban hell of St Petersburg at night mirrors that of New York. As well as being the first great urban novelist, it sometimes seems that Dostoevsky was the last novelist to believe in good and evil, even if he loved evil more than good and saw both fade away impossibly - Raskolnikov fails at being evil just as Leo Myshkin fails at being good. While nobody in any of these films is exactly good or evil, what these filmmakers did was to recreate some of this old whirlwind of moral debate, to affirm that the most important thing in the world is the decision about how you live your life even if that decision cannot bring you happiness.
Moving forwards 20 years, Scorsese's last really great film was Casino, in which Robert De Niro plays Jewish gambler turned casino manager Ace Rothstein. This is a film about how it's impossible to ever be really successful. What is great about the movie is the way it demolishes the characters' seeming success with terrible precision. It is a film full of ironies, both visual and narrative, and its over-the-top style captures the enthusiasms of its characters, but at its heart is something similar to Mean Streets. This is a film that understands and sympathises with its characters' successes, but at the same time that is willing to destroy them clinically, to pick them apart without sentiment. Goodfellas, a slightly earlier film considered better by many people, managed the clear-headed analysis of its young mobster's rise and fall, but it lacked the kindliness of the later film. Goodfellas is about a young upstart who thinks he can get somewhere, and by betraying his friends ultimately escapes, while Casino is a film about middle-aged failure, the end of dreams that cannot be avoided.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
We've all seen the future, which is the problem.
A forthcoming event in Manchester, the FutureEverything Conference (May 13-14) seeks to explore the future in all its myriad streams: crowdsourcing, social networking, Twitter, and databases, to answer questions like what will be the next Wikipedia.
There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.
And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.
Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.
It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.
There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.
And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.
Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.
It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.
Monday, March 8, 2010
The dark side of Live Aid
The BBC recently reported that some money from the 1980s charity Live Aid was used by one of the rebel groups, the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray, to buy guns. Live Aid founder Bob Geldof has angrily denied the allegations and is complaining to broadcasting regulator Ofcom, but the claims appear well-researched and the BBC is standing by its report.
In 2005, Prospect Magazine (subscription required) reported that
In 2005, Prospect Magazine (subscription required) reported that
The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement projectAid resources were used to sustain forced population transfers on a large scale, as President Mengistu moved his enemies around Ethiopia; the article did not use the phrase "ethnic cleansing", but it might easily be applied.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Control
In a new blog post, Adam Curtis discusses the problems with economics and the difficulty of treating the socio-political sphere as if it was a machine. This repeats arguments advanced in his series The Trap and Pandora's Box - that the Thatcherite/laisser-faire (and even Blairite) project of marketizing all aspects of public life (education, the health service, social services, etc) is not truly a freeing, but the construction of an incredibly complex network of measurements, penalties, and rewards, all of which are susceptible to manipulation by the people involved (politicians, managers, staff) who gain rewards or punishments depending on the data fed into the system; inspired by cybernetics, feedback engineering, and systems theory.
One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.
As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.
One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.
As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.
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