An Island Where No One Lives

So, been working on a painting. I haven’t shared the progress because it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t translate to bits and pieces (though I have photographed every stage).

And I’ve been thinking that it’s going really well. Very well indeed.

Now I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s any good or not. I look at the excerpt above and I wonder if shouldn’t just take a break or something. Actually, I’m pretty sure I should.

Maybe the painting is actually good. I don’t know if I can judge. In fact, I think I’ve been looking at it as good for too long, and I’m getting a backlash.

It seems to be an issue with creative work. The work drives the work, and the judgement gets in the way, and the work resents this. The work is the work. The work is the reason for working. It’s not to feel good about oneself, or one’s choices, or one’s abilities.

The work is the work.

It’s amazing how resilient the movies are. After a summer of Star Wars, Fantastic 4, War of the Worlds and all the other semi-disappointments, I was pretty much ready to write off 2005.

Of course, I’d forgotten that my favorite movies from 2004 (Sky Captain, Team America and The Incredibles) were all released in the fall. And it looks like this year will probably be the same. For the start, I give you Corpse Bride, easily the best movie I’ve seen this year.

It has a unique look, great characters, funny bits and touching moments—everything the summer stuff lacked. (Except maybe the “unique look” part.) Danny Elfman’s songs didn’t do much for me, but I thought the same of his Nightmare Before Christmas stuff at first, so these will probably grow on me like those did. (There are a lot fewer of them this time around.)

One of the problems with anything done with painstaking labor, like stop-motion animation, is that I think it’s easy for the creators to obsess over the work and forget that they’re not illustrating a technique, but using a technique to tell a story. Two examples come to mind, where technique overwhelmed everything else: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and James and the Giant Peach. Both movies were great to look at and had some clever ideas, but they ultimately rang hollow because there was nothing to them other than a well-polished surface. (I’m aware that Tim Burton co-produced James, but my understanding is that he did so in title only.)

Thankfully, that doesn’t happen here. While many of Tim Burton’s live-action films seem to suffer from scripts that seem, well, unpolished or incomplete, this film (along with Nightmare) has a beginning, a middle and an end, all in the right place. (I would suspect that’s co-scenarist Caroline Thompson’s influence.) Perhaps he should stick to animation, every now and then tossing out an Edward Scissorhands for live-action fans.

There’s a lot to talk about when discussing this film. The one thing I do want to mention is how they made the Bride quite beautiful, in both looks and spirit. Sure, she’s initially a shock, but in instants you get used to her and feel for her situation.

Lucky for you, I’m done talking about it, and I’ll just urge you to go see it.

Highly recommended.

Other than spam, one of the things that most defines the modern on-line experience is the ubiquitous quiz. You know the kind. “What Kind of Lover Are You?” “What Kind of Idiot Do We Take You For?” and the ever popular “What Kind of Quiz Do You Like Taking?” You answer a set of loaded questions and, amazingly enough, you get a result at the end.

We’ve all seen them, we’ve probably all taken them, sometimes we post the results. Here’s one of my results.

All right! Bite my shiney metal ass, losers!

Actually, I don’t smoke, and I don’t steal. Except ideas. And since I tend to go out of my way to attribute those, I guess that doesn’t count either. But I definitely make it up via drinking.

And I am pretty rude to everyone. Well, mentally, anyway. I’m rather surprised I didn’t end up as Zoidberg, but you know, you have to have sunshine now and then or the gloom doesn’t seem special anymore.

Well, the summer of 2005 has come and gone. How was your summer? In the view of the only folks who matter–Hollywood–Summer 2005 sucked. Why, no one was going to the movies, unless they were going to Wedding Crashers.

There are a lot of factors in this. One is that there seems to be a six-year cycle for these things, with peaks and valleys coming every three years. The main reason, though, is that the movies this year were pretty bad.

I probably saw more of them this summer than I have in a long time, and it’s hard to think of anything memorable. Even Land of the Dead, which I guess I liked best, was interesting solely because it was a chance to see a George Romero film in a theatre. In retrospect, that’s not much, is it?

Some of the other films were okay, and I didn’t hate any of them, but boy…”I didn’t hate it!” sure ranks pretty low as a blurb, one imagines. Certainly nothing I saw compared to last year’s Sky Captain in terms of sheer spectacle and movie-going thrill, but then again, Sky Captain bombed, so, what do I know? That’s a rhetorical question.

I think the biggest problem is that screenwriters and directors are now so insular, just feeding off each other’s borrowed ideas, that there’s very little that was surprising or even interesting about the films I saw. Just the same old scenes from other films, re-cast, re-shot and re-edited until there’s just nothing left at all. Watching the trailer is the experience, now. I didn’t see Wedding Crashers, except for a couple of extracts lasting seconds on some television, somewhere. But I felt I knew exactly what was going to happen anyway, from the funny beginning to the sentimental end–it just seemed like a waste of time to, you know, actually go see it, since in a very real sense I’ve already seen it. Lots of times.

I guess there’s still Fall and the Holiday season to look forward to, if by “look forward to” I mean, I might hate those movies less. I used to love movies, but then, I used to love Big Macs, too. I still eat Big Macs now and then. And I still go to the movies. This will probably be the last Summer that I go out and see as many as I did, though. There no longer seems a point to it.

Well, I finally bought the Coldplay CD, the one with “Speed of Sound” on it. I just couldn’t get that song out of my head. So I went out and got it, thus succumbing to, I guess, peer pressure. I did, however, wait for a couple of months, so Coldplay’s fifteen minutes are pretty much over, so it wasn’t like I was succumbing to good peer pressure. I also bought a Doctor Who DVD at the same time, so it wasn’t like Coldplay was my only goal. Defensive, aren’t I?

The reason I hesitated so long was that I was pretty sure “Speed of Sound” would be the only really good song on it. And I was mostly right. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of it is at least agreeable, and there’s a clever re-working of the riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” that’s, er, clever. But it’s basically U2 sonic mush, shaped into some riffs and keening vocals.

Notice I don’t say it’s “U2-like” or “U2-esque.” This is basically a U2 record that they didn’t make themselves. Chris Martin and Bono have very similar voices (Martin’s voice is sweeter, but Bono’s is more powerful), but the guitarists for the bands could be evil twins to each other. The only thing I can figure is that Coldplay must have been really scared by U2 some time in their (collective) past, and they’ve been trying to work out some kind of therapy this way.

That’s not really what I want to write about, though. It struck me that a CD, as a container of music, is a fixed product. One generally has the idea that it should hold a certain amount of music, anywhere from 35 minutes (at the extreme acceptable low end) to over an hour. Anything less than 35 minutes seems like unused potential (at best) or a cynical rip-off (at worst). So I imagine that any conscientious band, not wanting to appear parsimonious to their fans, probably puts some less-than-stellar material out, just so the CD format seems to be a reasonable value to the potential consumer.

But doesn’t this mean that the overall quality of the CD is diluted? Sure, we’re consumers, but we’re also listeners. Back when vinyl was the standard, this good stuff on this Coldplay CD would have made an outstanding EP. As in, play it til the grooves wear out. As a CD, the sheer length means the excellent track (”Speed of Sound”) and the couple of very good tracks are drowned in a sea of okay-not bad noise. (Granted, the band members probably think all the songs are great, but they’re not writing this, are they.)

It seems to me that as our entertainment technology continues to advance, performers are being asked to adapt not only to the technology, but to the changing needs of the consumer. So whereas once a recording was the means by which music could be preserved and distributed, now a band is the means by which a recording can be produced and sold. (That’s not supposed to be as cynical as it sounds.) Also, whereas in the past consumers would seek out bands, now the band has to court the consumer.

This isn’t going to be a rant about how music nowadays sucks (though it does), as I suspect that as every generation passes, that’s the common complaint from the old to the young. The music that we choose is better than what came before, and better than what will come after. Twas ever thus.

No, what I want to talk about is the impact of recording technology, not just on how music is experienced, or how it is created, but why it is (possibly) created the way it is, and the ways in which it is thought about by the listener.

I suspect that before the invention of recorded sound, music was less tied to any kind of restriction. If you wanted to write an opera cycle that lasted several days, you could do so without let or hindrance. Likewise, if your song was only a few seconds in length, there were no rules to say that couldn’t be done. (Having your music performed for an audience was a different matter, but I digress.)

Most composers and performers didn’t do these extreme things, because popular music is, for the most part, a functional art form. People want to dance, or feel beloved, or feel blue, feel smarter than everyone else, or otherwise be entertained. The music had to fit a certain need in order to become popular in the first place. While Wagner’s marathon works are respected, they’re not as widespread as many other, simpler forms of music.

When recorded sound became popular, the limits of music (at least commercial music) changed. A song couldn’t be longer than what a wax cylinder, or a 78 RPM disk could hold–there was no medium capable of greater length. And I think over the course of the decades, the recorded sound object (the record) began to shape music to reflect its own image.

Originally, a dance band, for example, would simply shape its performance to the length of the party where it was playing. If the party ended early, they’d stop and go home. If the party went longer than expected, they could play more songs, or play longer versions of the songs they knew.

I think the first audio recordings were, basically, promotion for a band. The band could have a record played on the radio and people would know what the band sounded like, and if they liked what they heard, they’d go to the live show. The record was an advertisement for the concert.

My own opinion is that this was the norm for a long time. People bought records not for the records themselves, but because they liked the concert. For one reason, for a long time records didn’t have the same audio quality as live performance. Concerts were also right there and then, probably more fun than a tinny recording that had to rely on memory for most of its effect.

But when records became audibly equivalent to live performance, and began to surpass that (via overdubbing, compression, effects, etc) I believe the balance shifted.

Suddenly, records were no longer the enticement to a live performance; the live performance was now the enticement to go out and buy the record. That must have seemed odd to those bands that realised what was going on–they just wanted to (at this point in the century) rock and roll, but their wings were being fitted to a different flight path. Playing music? Sure, sure, as long as the LP sells!

As the recording process, and the resulting LPs continued to be refined, I imagine that bands began to tailor their aims more and more toward the physical record, and less toward what the record was supposed to document: the band’s own performance. After all, most bands at first aspired to a song on the radio, ie, one side of a 45 RMP record (the other side could be, and usually was, anything). Two to three minutes at most, just enough for radio play. The rest was the party.

When the LP became the standard, suddenly more was required of bands. They had more minutes to fill. Pete Townsend tells how he wrote “A Quick One” (a ten minute song cycle) because his producer told him he had ten minutes to fill to complete the album. Townsend was a consumate professional though, and very talented, so that ten minutes wasn’t just band noodling.

That wasn’t always the case, of course. Insert your favorite meaningless jam band here, but respect me and my kind if we say But wait! about our favorite prog rock outfit. To say nothing of Tangerine Dream!

Since this is getting too long, let me wrap up here. The era of the LP gave way to the era of the CD, and bands were under even more pressure to fill those minutes. Which leads us to Coldplay, and an excellent EP turned into an okay CD.

There may be hope on the horizon. The advent of the iPod and downloadable MP3s have made a conceptual leap in what is expected of music these days. It’s still tied to recordings rather than live performance, but it seems to know that there’s a need out there that bands can only sporadically fulfill.

Suppose Coldplay decided that what they wanted to go back to was the era of the 45 RMP record? The song on the radio…or in this case, the song on the iPod. They could put all their resources into making that one song really, really great, and not bother with the attendant CD.

It’s still a matter of terminal nostalgia, which our species seem can’t seem to shake since the advent of the recorder, but at least it’s a step forward for the consumer. At least he or she doesn’t have to listen to hours of drivel to get to the good stuff. Which of course, varies from consumer to consumer. One man’s drivel, etc.

This might mean a whole new era of composer-consumer relations, one actually based on music and not product.

Or it might not. Never underestimate the ability of marketing to undercut everything.

Still. I should do something with that iPod, shouldn’t I.

Before it does something with me.

Since pretty much every thought I have is trivial and/or uninteresting, there’s little I can say about Katrina that hasn’t been said far better elsewhere. I signed up on some kind of blog-relief list, and I chose the Salvation Army as my charity. I’m not precisely certain how this works but here’s a link where you can contribute:

Give and give generously.

Here is the page on Truth Laid Bear where you can sign your own blog up.

Here is a post on Instapundit where a lot of this information has been gathered.