I’ve failed to go to the Toronto International Film Festival so many times in my life as a critic that I might as well pretend that I’m boycotting it, rather than being merely too lazy and distracted to jump the accreditation hoops in due time. Well, the boycott is on this year—Vive Quebec libre!—and while the best, worst, and vast, spongy middle-range of film journalism convene north of the 49th parallel, I watched the summer sluggishly drain out of the Mill Creek Valley in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I was born, and where I spent the better part of my first eighteen years.
There is also a film festival happening here, but the “Cincinnati Film Festival” is a long-running joke. (Woody Allen’s documentarian character Cliff Stern got an “Honorable Mention” there in Crimes and Misdemeanors.) The big event this year was expected to be Crispin Hellion Glover appearing in person, as he always does, to present his touring Big Slide Show and 2007 film It is Fine. Everything is Fine, but this was cancelled on the day of screening due to “technical issues,” which seems like a synonym for “organizational incompetence.”
So I’ve given the CFF a wide berth. Rather than report to the Tower Place Mall for Monday night’s screenings, I went to see the Los Angeles-based twosome No Age, composed of drummer Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall. They performed in the black box performance space on the lower level of the Contemporary Arts Center which, I am fond of telling people, was the first major completed commission for the now very in-demand British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. The opening act was a trio of local boys with the Google-resistant moniker Vacation, and they were tops: the guitarist laid down careening Rikk Agnew-esque lines; bassist steady-as-she-goes, with the stooped carriage of a large herbivore; singer/ drummer with bitchy, tongue-lolling presence, looking something like a messy-drunk divorcee who’d recently gotten a “fun” short and spiky haircut to give herself a fresh start. (Off stage she became a perfectly nice-looking young man!)
I picked up Vacation’s self-titled LP at the merch table—it contains a song titled “Christopher Columbus Was Not a Hero,” which is awkwardly contraction-less, and pretty punk. Also for sale were a run of No Age cassettes featuring new material not included on Spotify-handy fourth album An Object, along with “Limited Edition” screen-print posters. These were made by Cincinnati design studio We Have Become Vikings, while the stage backdrop was the work of Visionaries + Voices, a local organization that exhibits the work of artists with disabilities. Spunt and Randall are themselves quite design-oriented—No Age even earned a Grammy nomination in 2008 for Best Recording Packaging. The process whereby the bandmates totally, comprehensively involved themselves in every stage of the recording, packaging, and shipping of An Object was detailed in a fine LA Weekly profile by Jeff Weiss, which you can read if you are willing to subject your eyes to the trauma of a Voice Media Group ad-gangbang web layout. An excerpt:
Spunt and Randall handled all aspects of production. This included personally manufacturing the covers and inserts, packing crates and hauling all 10,000 units to the pressing plant. They even made the moving boxes. “We wanted to go through that process, feel everything in our hands, and see if it changed listeners’ perception if they understood that we actually made this”… “I was trying to understand the point of making records when they’re essentially useless. When we can download music so easily, they’re really just to hold and look at. To me, that’s the idea of an art object.”
A few days later I saw some noteworthy art objects at the Cincinnati Art Museum. These were the work of a Visions + Voices affiliated artist called Courttney Cooper. Using ballpoint Bic pens and a scratchy, frenetic line, Cooper makes large scale 3D aerial views of the city of Cincinnati on copier paper “pulled from recycling bins at the Kroger store where he works.” (Some of Cooper’s process is visible in this short video). The resulting tapestries, glommed together with glue and appearing clumpy, brittle, and stained, are nevertheless overwhelming in their obsessive density. While they are accurate enough in geographical details, Cooper also adds elements of fancy. The Ohio River is lined with a fleet of hot air balloons, each bearing the names of a local product or radio station (Hudepohl beer, KISS 107). Landmarks include both the historical (Union Terminal, the Roebling Bridge) and the prosaic (JC Penney Outlet, Staples, Check Casher). It is a personal geography above all, hence, presumably, the inclusion of the Mill Creek Psychiatric Center for Children in Bond Hill, which has now been closed for twenty years.
A number of half-legible slogans are scratched over Cooper’s cityscapes. Two of his favorites are “Who Dey? Cincinnati Bengals. 2009 AFC North Division Champs” and “Zinzinnati Oktoberfest. Authentically German.” Oktoberfest is a big deal in vestigially-German Cincinnati—it remains my greatest accomplishment to have been named Cutest Baby, Oktoberfest, 1982, wearing lederhosen and Tyrolean hat. It would appear, though, that Cooper’s obsession with the festival is not entirely un-conflicted, for alongside the boosterism there are outbursts like “TAKE THAT STUPID GERMAN HAT OFF,” “DO NOT MAKE ME SLAMMED AND BREAK THAT GIANT GERMAN OKTOBERFEST BAVARIAN BLUE MUG AND PLATE,” and, a propos of nothing, “GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME YOU DAMN SON OF A BITCH I HATE YOUR ASS.” What does it all mean? Not sure, but I was impressed. “When the artist creates something on such a large scale, you can’t really ignore it,” Splunt told Weiss. “You have to think about it in some way.”
The No Age guys are approximately my age, in their early ‘30s, and seemingly have a lot of the same reference points that come from a misspent punk youth in the era of Book Your Own Fucking Life—which was a kind of national telephone book listing local bands, crashable couches, and venues across the US. With An Object, No Age seems in part to be turning back the clock to the era of pre-Internet DIY, to the era of, well, objects. As Weiss notes, Spunt lives in the fairly tony Mount Washington neighborhood, which means he’s made his little pile from the punk game, and has earned the freedom to fuck around. Remember when Radiohead “revolutionized” the music industry with the pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows, a model that was practicable only for an already immensely wealthy band? (Radiohead, incidentally, were quite fond of wearing the No Age “rainbow” logo tees on the In Rainbows promotional rounds.)
When placed in a gallery context, the model of production and distribution being utilized by No Age—the classic ‘80s, SST Records model of DIY that was adopted as a matter of necessity—becomes conceptual art. In addition to the CAC, No Age has gigged at MoMA, the New Museum, and the Hirschorn. But theory only counts for so much without a viable text with which to put it into practice—when you emphasize a manifesto at the expense of an accompanying work, you wind up with a Beasts of the Southern Wild. So I should add that An Object is full of certifiable heaters, and No Age plays a stout, stomping set, with Spunt actually emerging from behind his kit to play bass on several new tracks, including the brutally bitter “I Won’t Be Your Generator.”
If this all seems a little eggheaded, a little trying too hard, it’s still of more interest to this writer than, say, doing intellectual backflips in order to prove that there’s something worth analyzing in the ordure excreted by an ailing popular culture that’s ready to be put down. Terms like “mainstream” and “underground” are an insufficient oppositional dialectic to define a cultural landscape that, thirteen years into the new millennium, can still seem dauntingly alien, but quite often it seems that what passes as “Poptimism” today is a matter of letting the corporate oligarchy shit “entertainment” into your mouth while you happily proclaim it chocolate ice cream, or using ten-cent words to assign agency and semiotic genius to literally brain-dead celebrity husks. (I wish that I could link you to n + 1 editor Christopher Glazek writing on Lana del Rey in ArtForum but, sadly, a paywall stands between us.)
This is, of course, exactly what a cis bro hella authentic farm-to-table jock rockist cracker like myself would think, and I don’t want to make out that the world of my youth—or No Age’s—was a lost paradise. The nineties hardcore scene could be exceedingly humorless in its abstemiousness, and often erred on the side of over-vigilance in its finger-wagging and self-policing. (In this respect, it predicted the dogpiling faux-outrage of the Internet.) I have a rather vivid memory of a spin-the-bottle game at the 1997 More Than Music Festival in Columbus, Ohio, which provoked an epistolary outcry in the pages of HeartattaCk fanzine, the house organ of holier-than-thou Ebullition Records. And of course there is the fact that, in order to remain a member-in-good-standing of a scene, you often had to subject yourself to some really awful music while ignoring other things at odds with your official clan identity.
There is a great deal of intellectual dishonesty that goes on in any scene or community, as natural tastes and distastes are suppressed in the interest of keeping things posi. You get this in the microcosm of the festival environment too. You’re brilliant! I’m brilliant! Everyone is making work that will last a thousand years! Last weekend I was at a Cincinnati Reds game with a couple of dear friends who I have known since we were teenagers kicking around the southwestern Ohio hardcore punk scene in places like Flora St. basements, the Blank Space, Norwood VFW Hall, the Proving Grounds and Sub Galley in Dayton. We were discussing some of the shockingly awful music that we used to listen to in what, at the time, seemed to be absolute earnestness. “I tried to listen to Earth Crisis on the way to work the other day,” said my friend, Andy, who collects Italo-disco now. “It was absolutely terrible.”
In fairness, even at that time most of us had a healthy sense of irony about a band with cornball album titles like Destroy the Machines and Gomorrah’s Season Ends, but we interfaced with music in a very different way then. Once you owned an album—hell, once your friend owned an album—you were stuck with it. When I was a teenager, immediately before the watershed Napster moment of 2000, the same conditions of scarcity that No Age has tried to impose onto their cassette-only work existed as a matter of course. If you skipped school lunch in order to buy, say, a Shai Hulud 7”, you were damn well going to try to wring something out of that Shai Hulud 7”, be it something worthy of interest or at least good for a giggle. This could also, occasionally, lead to revelations. If one was driving during the era of the dashboard cassette player, a format with which it was terribly inconvenient to accurately fast-forward through tracks, you wound up listening to a lot of songs that you probably would’ve skipped if you’d been listening on a CD—getting familiar with every nook and cranny of an album, and sometimes discovering new favorites as first impressions gave way to a deeper familiarity.
When you can effortlessly obtain a thin-slice sample of anything that you might for a moment entertain a passing interest in, what naturally follows is a rush to judgment—of much the same sort that we can presently see issuing from Toronto, or any festival, via Twitter. (I am not entirely without sin on this account, though it is too much fun to resist throwing stones.) Though Pauline Kael has fallen out of favor with the kids, her one-and-done viewing methodology has become pretty de rigeur, much as the quick-draw is increasingly favored over the accurately-targeted.
This is considered necessary because the oiled jaws of the content mills demand verbiage. And as much as I might like to destroy the machines, Gomorrah’s season isn’t ending any time soon. Whenever the issue of progress is raised, I think to the monologue that automobile inventor and manufacturer Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) gives at the dinner table in 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons, after George Minafer (Tim Holt) questions the right of the horseless carriage to have been created in the first place:
I’m not sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. May be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men’s souls, I’m not sure. But automobiles have come and almost all outwards things will be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that George is right. May be that in ten to twenty years from now that if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine but agree with George—that automobiles had no business to be invented.
Just switch out “automobiles” in the above with “the Internet,” and you get the idea.
The Internet has had its ten to twenty years, and the jury is still out. Web 2.0 should have made Gods of us all—noble in reason, infinite in faculty, able to confidently make associative leaps in a single bound that our forefathers would nary have dreamed of. I hope that it still will, though most of the time I can’t help but think that it’s only bollixed everything up, not least the cultural conversation, subject as it is to corralling pageviews—nevermind that what’s actually on the page is alphabet soup.
Every acceleration is accompanied by a cry to hit the brakes. First we had the slow food movement, which today gets lip service from the CEO of Domino’s Pizza, then saw slow cinema discussed in the pages of the NY Times, and now the term “slow criticism” has been making the rounds. I’m loathe to hitch my wagon to such a marketing-friendly term—great criticism can be short, and long criticism often has to be rushed to deadline—but the very emergence of such an idea speaks to a real lack that isn’t being addressed by the developing journalistic model. Faced with this onrushing deluge of content, those of us who are picky about what we’re putting into our brains must make deliberate choices about the way that we approach art, talk about art in public forums and, as No Age or Crispin Glover have done, produce and distribute art.
It may be that it is absurd to look for artisanal values in film culture—as absurd as using the Internet to rag on the Internet! Film is, after all, an industrial, mass-produced artform which, in order to attain some of its grandest achievements, has traditionally needed an enormous organizational apparatus behind it. And that apparatus, in common with all American industry, now largely takes the form of the multinational corporation. Nevertheless, work exemplifying values of craftsmanship and bearing the markings of human fingerprints continue to appear in the present hostile environment, across all strata of film culture. This year I’ve seen films, across the budgetary spectrum, that are unquestionably made with pride and care, and have read writing about film that displays intricate filigree that just couldn’t be achieved in one sweaty cram session.
Standing head-and-shoulders above the rest in my mind is Kent Jones’ “Intolerence,” a rejoinder to Quentin Tarantino’s dismissal of John Ford’s films, with what Tarantino called their “faceless Indians… killed like zombies.” “Intolerance” may be said to exemplify slow criticism, for it was published in the May/June Film Comment, fully four months after the words that inspired it. I think that I speak for a number of movie chat writers of my generation when I say that Jones’s work is something to aspire to, for few others have such a gift for lodging epigrammatic bolts in a reader’s brainpan. Since reading Jones’ piece about Manny Farber in a 1999 Film Comment, I don’t suppose a month has gone by when I haven’t thought of an offhand observation Jones makes about Farber’s legacy:
[Farber's acolytes] scour the landscape looking for examples of termite art when his most important lesson is to find oppositions that speak to the year 2000 as directly as White Elephant/ Termite Art did to 1962. For instance, the distinction between aesthetics that are handmade (Rushmore) and those that are rented for the occasion (Three Kings).
In this one digressive “For instance,” Jones frames an oppositional dynamic that persuasively defines the cultural landscape in ways that “mainstream” and “underground,” “culture” and “counterculture,” no longer do. He also distils the essences of both Wes Anderson and David O. Russell’s work to-date—the blue-collar Philly in Silver Linings Playbook seemed about as lived-in as the characters’ crisp, off-the-rack Eagles jerseys.
I love how, in “Intolerance,” Jones slyly brings out the point that it’s Tarantino to whom the “Indians” are truly faceless—another interchangeable oppressed people—by peppering his piece with reference to specific tribes (Abenaki, Sioux, Cree, Apache, Navajo, Arapaho, Comanche) as they are identified in Westerns of the pre-Revisitionist period. One should strive to exemplify what one endorses: As much as he is arguing for Ford, Jones is also arguing for the specific and against the sweeping. “From a distance,” Jones writes in “Intolerance,” “it’s very easy to view the Western genre as a great abstract swirl of cowboys and Indians, the proud Cavalry vs. the mute savages, a long triumphal march of Anglo-Saxon humanity led by John Ford and John Wayne brought to a dead halt by The Sixties. Up close, one movie at a time, the picture is quite different.”
This “Up close, one movie at a time” is key. Any fool can make broad assertions and, if those assertions are made with a provocative air and stated in a cocksure fashion—regardless of how tired the expressed ideas might be—that fool can get attention and even draw largely nugatory paychecks for it. What is difficult, and I hope not endangered, is the sort of lacework writing that Jones and a few others do at their very best, writing that has the necessary delicacy to get into obscure spaces that bluster cannot penetrate. “Why do we keep insisting on the de-complication of history if not to justify our own tastes and abolish our discomforts?” asks Jones in “Intolerance,” to which I would only add—why do we keep insisting on the de-complication of art?
Effort and intention don’t reliably translate into effect—but they certainly can’t hurt. Putting in the hours, be it Courttney Cooper hunched over his blanket of copier paper and obsessively scratching out the landscape that appears in his mind’s eye or the members of No Age putting themselves through grueling process for wholly symbolic effect, does tend to come across in the impact of the work itself.
“Punk wasn’t their sound,” Weiss writes of No Age, “it was their North Star.” And so, for many of us, it remains. While it’s probably not healthy to still profess love for every 7” that one brought home in 9th grade, the abiding lesson of punking out is the DIY model, the discovery of a peer-generated world powered by boredom and restlessness, a world that exists outside the channels of school culture-approved socialization and expression, where people made and did their own thing. Even more important for an impressionable youth was the fact that this world existed largely outside the system of adult incentives—in short, money—that one was being prepared to enter.
The kids, thank God, will always do their own thing. As for us no longer young, the old “Do it for the cause” value system has lately come in handy. The bad news, for creators and consumers alike, is that arts journalism is scarcely a livelihood any longer, particularly unsupportable on the handcrafted level that allows a level of scrutiny and insight beyond facile opinion-mongering. The good news is that this fact can’t and won’t keep some people from writing about art as if their lives depended on it.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.
