Colin Marshall

My favorite thing Marginal Revolution

I aspire to Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen’s level of cultural openness. He seems to exercise it at all times, without exception. I know this from reading his blog, and I know this from interviewing him twice on The Marketplace of Ideas, and I received a reminder of this in a recent Businessweek article:

Tyler Cowen has read what's listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, though not, he concedes, every single last one of the Icelandic sagas. He rereads what you probably haven't heard of, like Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. For the Brazil trip, in case he runs out of new books, he has also brought Neal Stephenson's 1,100-page Cryptonomicon, which he has already read. Fiction slows him down, he says, which makes packing easier. He carries a Kindle but reads paper when he can; he says he's invested too much time on the rhythm of how the eye tracks the page. Several people have told me the same story about Cowen: They have watched him read, and he scans a page as others might scan a headline.

[ … ]

Since the late '90s much of Cowen's work has looked at the economics of culture. He consumes art and music at the rate he does books, but unlike most critics he doesn't sniff that markets have either ruined culture or brought it low.

[ … ]

After Cowen gets back from Brazil, we meet at Eyo Restaurant & Sports Bar in Falls Church, Va., an Ethiopian place that sits in a strip mall underneath several housing towers. This is yet another of Cowen's enthusiasms: searching for food, and recording it on Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide, another blog. He's included rules on how to find a restaurant and how to order when you get there in a book, Discover Your Inner Economist. For one: Order the strangest thing on the menu—chances are the chef put the most work into it. And the best ethnic food, he writes, is prepared at strip malls. He orders for me, then asks whether I eat raw beef.

I didn’t used to care much about geography at all, although that term makes it sound academic — maybe I mean I didn’t used to care about place. Over the last decade, this changed with a vengeance; I now feel much more in line with the highly place-oriented way Tyler Cowen seems to think about culture. You can see this in my favorite series of posts he makes: “My Favorite Things”. To read these is to know how much culture you’ve missed — or, put more happily, how much culture you have yet to savor.

From "My Favorite Things Hungary": "Movies: Bela Tarr, Satantango.  It’s over seven hours long, but don’t be put off.  It has some of the best shots of grazing cows and angry peasants committed to reel, and I wanted it to be longer." From "My Favorite Things South Africa": "Music: Where to start?  Malanthini, for one.  As for mbqanga collections, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto series is consistently excellent.  Singing in an Open Space, Zulu Rhythm and Harmony 1962-1982 is a favorite.  Random gospel and jazz collections often repay the purchase price and in general random CD purchases in these areas bring high expected returns." From "My Favorite Things Egypt": "Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus?  I don't find him especially readable." From "My Favorite Things Turkey": "Cynic: Diogenes, who in a few ways was an early version of Robin Hanson, though I am not suggesting Robin is a cynic in the lower case sense." From "My Favorite Things Grenada": "Short story writer: Paul Keens-Douglas.  This pick is a no-brainer.  Here is Keens-Douglas telling a story.  Here is Keens-Douglas doing a comedy routine.  I used to have some very good cassettes of him telling folk tales." From "My Favorite Things Mars": "Album about: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Venus and Mars is not overall a good album; it is mostly dull and overproduced.  So Bowie is a clear winner here."

I plan to “borrow” this format for a post about Mexico City (I find myself more city- than country-oriented) before I leave for there. We’ll see how it stacks up.

The uselessness of "good"

Since my career prospects depend on people liking the stuff I make, I spend plenty of time thinking about how I got to like the stuff I like. (A slight variation on Jon Hassell’s ultimate question, “What do I like, and why do I like it?”) In what feels like a revelation, I suddenly realized that I’ve never grown interested in anything simply because someone said it was good, no matter how credentialed the someone, no matter how emphatic the superlatives piled upon “good.”

When I talk about criticism, I use a standard line about how two words have no place in the thinking critic’s vocabulary: “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof. The sheer cheapness of broad positive or negative pronouncements — but especially positive ones — seem drained them of their interestingness. I guess you’ve got to burn a calorie or two to type out that a film “is perhaps the greatest, most astonishing masterpiece to grace screens in the last half-century,” but even praise an order of magnitude more grandiose costs you essentially nothing — well, nothing aside from devaluing the currency of your own praise, but that’s another issue.

Let’s take The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new movie, reviews of which now sprout up like mushrooms. Had any critic written the made-up line above about it, they wouldn’t have moved me an inch closer to the cinema thereby. When Roger Ebert calls it “film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives,” I raise an eyebrow, but only just. He makes a comparison to 2001, one of my favorite early-cinephilia experiences, and that piques my interest a little more. But the clincher comes in a single observation on Jack Fisk’s production design: “Fisk is about my age and was born and raised in Downstate Illinois, and so of course knows that in the late '40s, tall aluminum drinking glasses were used for lemonade and iced tea.” I feel l need to see those glasses.

A.O. Scott writes of the “awe, amazement and grist for endless argument” The Tree of Life offers; only the last of the three sound interesting to me, but I’ve found almost any film has the potential to fuel eternal (if pointless) debates. “It is like Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ transported into the world of ‘Leave It to Beaver,’” he writes, “an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration.” Astonishment and admiration rarely transfer from viewer to viewer, but Wordsworth meets Leave It to Beaver? Oh man, who wouldn’t want to see what comes of that mash-up?

Anthony Lane, whom I’ve realized many other critics seem to consider a disgrace to the trade but whose writing I simply can’t not read, has always skillfully avoided the good-and-bad game. Though the least straightforwardly positive of the three, his review paints the most compelling verbal picture of The Tree of Life. Odd lines about how the film’s main boys “relax into near-Oedipal bliss” or about shots with “Sean Penn, dressed in Armani, kneeling on a beach, while the other characters mooch around like unwanted extras from ‘Zabriskie Point’” stoke my curiosity, but, for whatever reason, a passage not directly related to the movie actually gets me looking up showtimes. “‘If we cannot educate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense,’” Lane quotes. “That is Malick, writing of Heidegger, and introducing his own translation of Heidegger’s ‘The Essence of Reasons,’ in 1969.”

Wait wait wait. The director of this film — a film that stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, of all actors — published his own translation of Heidegger? That observation, one Lane includes under the pains of a little extra research and at some risk of losing his audience, convinces me to watch this film more than all the exhortations about wonder and majesty and transcendence and masterpieciness I’ve heard from countless critics, cinéastes, and utter randoms alike.

But in the interest of absolute clarity, let me say that I have a pre-existing interest in Terence Malick. I’ll watch anything he directs. But why? How did I decide to follow his films in the first place? Much of my interest grew from hearing rumors about his working methods: his shooting Days of Heaven only during the “magic hour”; his panning away from carefully orchestrated explosions on the set of The Thin Red Line and onto passing flocks of birds; his making a movie once every 11 years or so on average; his constant (and constantly backfiring) flight from fame; dreaming of producing an Andrzej Wajda-directed Sansho the Bailiff on Broadway. This stuff strikes me as more meaningful than incantations about his “singular quality of vision,” his “cinematic mastery,” or his status as a craftsman of “undisputed classics.” Goodness, or even greatness — especially greatness, maybe — doesn’t turn my head. Weirdness certainly does.

Or maybe I just got into Malick because of that old story about Pauline Kael’s review of Badlands. Reading her pan of the film, William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, said, “I guess you didn’t know Terry is like a son to me.” Kael’s reply: “Tough shit, bill.” My reaction: any movie Pauline Kael insisted on getting that harsh about has to have something special going on.

Enotes

Last Sunday, I saw "The Domed One", "Brain One", "God" — or, if you prefer, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno — speak at the Carpenter Center. The lecture came in association with "77 Million Paintings", a visual art installation at CSU Long Beach's museum. The core of the show is a dark room with a set of randomly generated "paintings," made from a bank of Eno-composed images from the last three or four decades, projected on one wall while sparse generative music plays in the background. (Unifying the space and the work, the room also contains piles of faux rocks illuminated with a random patterns of slowly-shifting colored light.)

I plopped down on one of the couches and spent a good 45 minutes watching the images shift so gradually that I couldn't catch them in the act (no matter how hard I tried), knowing that the exact configuration of music, sound and space I experienced would never, ever arise again. Of all Eno's ideas, I've always found find his concept of art as the creation of spaces the most compelling. Whether you're making music, paintings, films, novels or whatever, he might well argue, you're actually creating places for your audience to be, think and experience. This installation, of course, takes the notion more literally than metaphorically, as it really is a place you can hang out in, a place you can be, think, experience, etc.

The points of Eno's talk that I remember most clearly follow:

1. The broad thrust of the talk had to do with a bunch of ideas that appeared, in less developed form, in Eno's book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. (Some of the ideas go as far back as his first magazine interviews in the early 1970s.) These included his definition of art as "everything you don't have to do," the importance of cultural creation as risk-free simulation of possible worlds, axis thinking, the line between style and utility, the inseparability of artworks from their context, the modern irrelevance of many hierarchical structures (his bête noire the orchestra included), and haircuts.
2. One of the new illustrative devices he brought to this suite of concepts was the lowly screwdriver. He set a series of them on his video projector, each with an identical flat metal head but a completely different plastic handle. He presented these as an elegant illustration of how utility meets style: the "utility" bits of the screwdrivers are the same, but the "style" bits vary. One part you have to do a certain way, and the other, like art in general, you don't. (He also showed a few pictures of "women's screwdrivers," all of which had feathers attached to their handles. "On the assumption," Eno said, "that a women can't use a tool unless it's got feathers on it. By the same token, I've devised a new line of male knitting needles. They've got rifle sights.")
3. By way of tracing the lineage of "77 Million Paintings", he described his very first piece of electronic visual art, crafted by his own fair hand in 1965-ish. He divided a box into nine compartments, each containing a blinking light and covered by a different-colored gel. Looked at directly, the box's face presented what appeared to be shifting patterns of color due to the imperfectly-constructed lights' tendency to fall out of phase. Eno thought this might make a fine piece of bar entertainment, and thus filed a patent about which he received not a single inquiry in its seventeen years.
4. He made fun of David Pagel's lukewarm review of "77 Million Paintings" in the L.A. Times, which goes a little something like this:

   The biggest surprise of Brian Eno’s light-and-sound installation is its modesty, both in terms of size and ambition. In other words, “Brian Eno: 77 Million Paintings” is a small show. Despite the playful overstatement of its title, the mellow exhibition requires very little of visitors and repays their attentiveness with a perfectly pleasant (and perfectly ordinary) experience of tasteful relaxation.

   [ ... ]

   Rather than sticking with a consistent line of inquiry to see how far it can be pushed, like filmmaker Pat O’Neill, abstract painter David Reed or sound sculptor Michael Brewster, Eno is a visual dabbler, a little-of-this and a little-of-that sampler who skims the surface of media without diving into their philosophical underpinnings or wrestling with the consequences (and difficulties) of sustained inquiry.

   Though he disagreed, he did admit that the writeup made him think about the show's nature and purpose. (Not shying away from the "why" has, perhaps more than anything else, kept me strongly interested in whatever Eno says and does.) And it gave him some lecturing mileage!
5. He told his current favorite joke, concerning a Texas rancher who decides to return to old Blighty to rediscover his English heritage. He visits his great uncle, a yard farmer, and asks him how far his land extends. "All the way down there to the street," replies the yard farmer, gesturing proudly. The Texan chuckles. "I could drive all day long and not reach the end of my property." His uncle replies, "I used to have a car like that."
   
   Eno meant this not just to get a laugh but to illustrate his point about works of art. To wit, that works don't contain any objective, universally perceivable substance — "art" — that always and everywhere has an impact but are utterly dependent on their position in the greater cultural conversation. Oft-misunderstood pieces like Duchamp's "Fountain" and Malevich's "White on White" aren't standalone entities — they're punchlines. Presented by themselves, they make about as much sense as just saying "I used to have a car like that" in expectation of guffaws.
6. He described much of what he does as an attempt to answer the double-barreled question posed by avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell: "What do I like, and why do I like it?" (This, to my mind as well, may be the question.)
7. Perhaps as a bid for chance and randomness, the evening included a longer-than-usual Q&A, at the end of which a near-forest of hands remained raised. Before opening the floor to the audience, Eno laid down two caveats: questions must be concise (because he'd have to repeat them for everyone to hear), and questions must be interesting to at least someone else in the world. Despite the rules, he had to shoot down a number of askers, especially the ones who asked "What's the snake guitar?" ("A way of playing guitar I invented 97 years ago. Next.") and "Can you talk about The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway?" (he just wrote "ZZZ" on the overhead projector).
8. Madelaine asked Eno whether he considered "77 Milion Paintings" more of the realm of visual art or video art. Calling it a good question, he thought for a moment and said that he doesn't much care what category it falls into. He added that he doesn't even think it belongs to the realm of fine art at all. As long as it functions as a bridge from one cultural point to another, he explained, it doesn't matter what specific points those are.
9. Something, possibly a question, got him talking about a series of panic attacks he experienced a few years back, which felt so much like heart attacks that they landed him in the emergency room at least once. Though he ultimately determined a probable cause of caffiene overconsumption — his then-new assistant was an exotic coffee buff — he saw a psychiatrist who told him to just roll with the panic attacks, to just accept his next panic attack as a panic attack. Surprisingly, this worked. Eno then segued into a discursion on how the psychiatrist was provided by the NHS, and how the NHS' incentive is to have you cured quickly so you cost less instead of selling you all sorts of expensive treatments for a profit¹, and how Americans need to boost Obama in order to furnish the political will to do whatever he wants. I'm no Sarah Palin death panel-invoker, but the sudden rush of political tribalism I felt around me, which made me very, very uncomfortable.
10. He said he's working on a book about all this stuff, but that it's damn slow going since he develops his ideas not by writing, but by talking.

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¹ I might add that the NHS' operative incentive isn't exactly to cure you — though that indeed gets you off their financal back — but to simply stop you from being an expense. There are many ways to accomplish that besides curing you.

Stratum upon stratum

I agree:

Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.

It used to operate the same way for music as well: the hurdles to getting music from Africa or South America or Asia released and promoted in the west were so high that only the better stuff got through, and the average world music release was better than the average pop album.

I've written on this strategy before: the more (and harsher) external selection pressures to which you subject your cultural experiences, the fewer you have to exercise yourself. Per the above, if you limit yourself to foreign fiction that had to survive the translation/promotion gauntlet, you'll have a smaller but much stronger pool of choices. Despite the article's reservations, the same still (sort of) goes for music: snag the stuff that had to see hell to get to to you, no matter where you may be.

This sits right in line with my advice to friends looking to get into film but unwilling or unable to pile as much time into it as does the neighborhood cinéaste: go old, go foreign. While not a flawless prophylactic against suckage — I could name a dozen old foreign pictures, even allegedly "beloved" ones, that aren't worth the light to project them — this procedure surely beats recency-biased random selection. To aspiring American seekers of quality film, I suggest spending a year viewing only non-American movies that are at least thirty years old. Attach one more filter mandating that, if DVDs, they must be released by the Criterion Collection, and you're also almost guaranteed a rich presentation.

I can, under these rules, generate almost effortlessly a viewing plan that includes Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows, Walkabout, High and Low, Andrei Rublev, Branded to Kill, Autumn Sonata, Cléo from 5 to 7, Good Morning, L'avventura, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Solaris, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Tokyo Story, Diary of a Country Priest, Le Samouraï, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Vengeance is Mine, The Face of Another and Last Year at Marienbad. Watch just those and you've had a better film experience than most. Hell, watch just those and you've had a better life than most.

If you'd like to get seriously stringent, apply a cost of production filter as well, to ensure maximum creativity. (Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, here you come.) It's like wine grapes: you want to drink the stuff made out of vines that had to fight, and hard, to see the light of day. It's no coincidence that capricious weather conditions and stratum upon stratum of unfriendly ground produce the grapes of some of the most complex, enjoyable wines out there.

Cheaper

My instinct has recently bent toward cheapness. This isn't so much a move born of semi-typical 24-year-old's destitution — which is not to say that I'm T-Pain or nothin' — but of a line of aesthetic thinking down which I've traveled for what turns out to have been years. Perhaps we can call it an "ascetic aesthetic"; simply put, I've found that I'm more fascinated by stuff that happens to be cheap. What this doesn't mean: things that are chintzy/tacky/kitschy/otherwise, things that are so mass-market that they're simply inexpensive at the point of purchase or things hobbled by a lack of resources.

I'm talking about works whose creators didn't, because they couldn't, vainly attempt to wash away their problems and beat back tough decisions with what Robert Rodriguez calls "the money hose." I'm coming to believe that no interesting creative move was ever made by dropping big bucks, not least due to the realization that many of my favorites were crafted under thin financial conditions. Werner Herzog describes his pillar of cinema Aguirre, the Wrath of God as a "child of poverty," a project with so little funding that filmmaker and company had to deal improvisationally with the unexpected, such as flooding jungles and deadly arrows flying in from nowhere. Some truly delicious dishes comprise startlingly inexpensive ingredients: red beans and rice, for example. (Not that I've achieved any competence yet making it myself, but with iteration comes mastery.) I'm convinced that, using the most impoverished technical materials ever — a rickety old no-sound 16mm Bolex camera and a consumer cassette recorder — Chris Marker somehow committed alchemy in the making of Sans Soleil. Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's (No Pussyfooting) was recorded for £12, the cost of tape, which even in the early 1970s was, by music industry standards, zero. It's no accident that podcasters in their basements are putting out more compelling audio content for a marginal cost equal to pocket change than large public radio outfits do burning through hundreds of dollars per minute. The most innovative tech startups, such as the ones funded by Paul Graham's Y Combinator, operate on little more than the cost of dorm beds, ramen bricks and a net hookup. Shane Carruth completed Primer, the finest time travel picture ever made — and time travel narratives are a total third rail — for $7,000.

I don't have a super-solid hypothesis about why the better stuff tends to be the cheaper stuff, though perhaps economy of means forces creators to — brace yourself for grotesque management-speak — "think outside the box," to find clever workarounds and unexpected solutions to situations usually resolved with pricier clichés. My own recurring question has become, "How can I do this cheaper, quicker, more creatively?" As I've written before, if you want something good, you go where the money isn't.

To seek the genreless

As you might have noticed, the (current) title of this journal is "The War on Mediocrity", which is most definitely a war I'd lobby Congress to fund. (Turns out Congress has no clear position on mediocrity.) I'd considered "The War on Cliché", which I also support, but the phrase now seems to have nearly passed into the realm of cliché itself. But if you fight a war on all mediocrity, you necessarily fight a war on the particular manifestation of mediocrity that is the cliché anyway, so it's all good.

You may remember me writing that "Defeat of cliché is the sine qua non of goodness." You may also remember my admonition of "Don't be a genre", since genres would seem to be little more than prepackaged sets of clichés to which works adhere. Though I still think these hold, it's taken me a long damn time to take the next step and figure out that the unclassifiable might be a goal, both of consumption and of production. The cracks in a genrefied view of culture started to show early, back when, as a young teenager, I first deemed major video rental chains' addiction to organization by genre arbitrary, groundless and confusing. Yes, anyone looking for, say, Airplane! will know to make a beeline to the "comedy" shelf and those who would prefer Terminator 3 need look no further than "action" (or maybe, less justifiably, "sci-fi"). But the best of cinema — the most memorable, the most engaging, the riskiest — resides almost entirely in the borderlands.

(This is one of the many reasons I still plump for organization by directorial surname like Roger Ebert plumps for Maxivison. Everyone can agree that The Squid and the Whale was directed by Noah Baumbach; everyone seems to disagree about whether it's a comedy, a drama or what. And don't even get me started on "foreign" sections. I do, however, provisionally applaud Netflix's ever-more-specific categories that have now transcended genre to include region, era and certain low-res aesthetic values. My current algorithmically-generated Netflix front page is fairly certain that I enjoy these sub-sub-subclasses:

• "Critically-acclaimed dark documentaries"
• "Japanese dramas from the 1960s"
• "Underrated British independent movies"
• "Visually striking Cerebral [sic] movies"

Can't really argue with that. But, uh, would I have wanted critically unacclaimed dark documentaries? Overrated British independent movies?)

The same seems to hold for other forms: the best books, the best music and the best visual art tend to be the works that defy easy categorization; the ones, in other words, with the fewest clichés to indicate where to shelve them. So why not use that phenomenon as my own cultural lighthouse? Instead of asking myself "What genre should I watch/read/listen to?" or "In what genre should I work?" — questions that have paralyzed me before — I'd likely do better to ask "What would be least genrefiable?" A simpler heuristic: "Choose the option that least fits a genre", whether that option be the choice of which work to experience or the choice of how to craft a particular component of a work. And I think I'm in good company here. Andrei Tarkovsky often spoke and wrote of his desire to release cinema, especially his own, from the shackles of genre. Only one of his films fell victim, in his own mind, to the vile manipluations of genre, and hey, it still turned out to be, alongside 2001 and Blade Runner, one of the three greatest science-fiction movies ever shot.

Where the money isn't

Asked about modern film in a 1990 Interview magazine, Brian Eno responded:

I think the big problem is that the budgets are too large. Nothing is more guaranteed to kill any work of art than a big budget. Because as soon as you have a big budget you have big expectations, you have lots of people involved, you owe. Nobody talks about making a movie these days for less than several million dollars. I’d hate to do anything in that frame of mind – “It’s got to succeed.” You get so many movies that are dilute in their position, because to take any extreme position means sacrificing part of the potential audience. So movie people say, “It was meant to be this, but we had to have a bit of that, and we had to have somebody else showing the other point of view as well.”

This also happens to be how I explain to myself why I walk out of almost every Hollywood film brimming with disappointment. I bear sadness for the films' opportunities missed, their risks untaken and their fields of cinematic innovation left fallow. When there's a great deal of money to be made, there's a great deal of money spent, and a great deal of money spent means a great deal of control for the financiers, who understandably desire a safe investment. A risk-taking film might succeed wildly, but it might sink; the most mediocre of Matthew McConaughey vehicles, on the other hand, stands at least a fighting chance of returning the money before it decays into oblivion.

That's why I'm optimistic about most media industries' recent — if you call the past few-decade span the window of recency — hemorrhaging of financial potential. It's not that I think, as the top suits of said industries vainly hope, that the profitable bottleneck conditions of the 1970s shall rise again. It's that I find that the most effective stuff is made where there least money is made. The most effective music today, to my mind, comes out of the ambient and avant-garde traditions, which have never been cash cows. The most effective films are small-return, small-budget, pictures like Ramin Bahrani, Kelly Reichhardt and So Yong Kim are putting out. The most effective books tend to come off small and/or academic presses. They're not making anyone wealthy — not directly, at least — but they're taking the chances necessary for success.

So there's not a dime to be made selling records any more? Good; weed out the musicians — and more importantly, labels — in it for the dimes. Box office returns are slowly but surely shriveling? Maybe we'll be spared Spider Man 4. Publishing's ongoing crisis state continues? The problem was never that there are too few books. Newsprint's dying? Not exactly; it's just that what people have done with newsprint before is no longer viable. There are plenty of neato imaginable uses of ink and paper, just not ones that cost, and lose, millions of dollars a week. Same deal with radio: you can execute all sorts of fun, useful ideas with it, just not the ones that cost a hundred bucks a minute. Like economically depressed cities, unprofitable forms are labs. If you want to know where to find the cool stuff, it's where the money isn't — or where the money soon won't be.