Bad
News
----------------
By Beppe Colli
Feb. 14, 2012
Regular
readers of this webzine know quite well that the "macro" perspective
I usually adopt as a tool for a better understanding is often painted using
the apocalyptic colours of an incoming catastrophe - which doesn't mean,
of course, that the current situation is to be considered as being without
any hope, hence the pragmatic reasons for my pointing the finger at its
most hideous aspects.
So it was with more than a pinch of irony
that I decided to call my first two editorials of the new year Doom and
Gloom, a classic couple that's good for disasters of any kind. Just to
anchor all those negative facts to something that I perceived to be quite
immutable, I wrote in the former piece: "One thing leads to another,
and so, by association, I decided to check if J. Hoberman still worked
at The Village Voice." (..) "Yep, Hoberman is still there - or
at least, he was on Wednesday, Dec 21 2011", a sentence which I obviously
wrote with my tongue firmly pressed to my cheek. But I have to confess
that, while writing those words, I happened to think: "well, let's
hope Hoberman won't be the next one to be sacked".
"That took a turn on January 4, 2012,
when my employer told me that my job was no more." (...) "Yesterday
afternoon I learned that my position at the Village Voice had been eliminated.
I’ve been a staff writer at the Voice since 1983, a regular film reviewer
since 1978, and sold my first free-lance piece (...) as a virtual toddler
back in 1972". So wrote Hoberman on his website.
I had a look online, found a few bits of
information, some interesting stuff by (and also about) Hoberman (there's
an interesting conversation starring Hoberman and The New York Times movie
critic A. O. Scott from 2008, a celebration of the first thirty years Hoberman
spent at the Village Voice). I also got a message from a reader based in
New York who knows Hoberman who said the critic was
"shocked but not surprised".
From what I understood, it was Hoberman's
long standing at the magazine - he's not old, by the way, and he still
teaches at a New York university - that's the key, given the belt-tightening
still going on in most magazines, a higher pay, and better benefits, being
proper to his position. Sure, this doesn't entail that the (young?) people
who will take his place will necessarily be ignorant. But there's only
one Hoberman, and there are not too many critics of a comparable quality.
Will readers care? Will advertisers? Is there any future left for quality?
A few
years ago, due to family reasons, I happened to visit a city in the South-Centre
of Italy, a city I rarely visit and whose socio-economic geography is quite
unfamiliar to me. Since I had a bit of free time, being reasonably hopeful
I could find what I was looking for - after all, there are about one million
people living in that city - I decided to look for shops which sold music,
and also - I hoped - musical instruments, and sheet music.
I found none. Well, I found nothing that
I thought to be interesting, the only minor exception being a shop which
was part of a national chain selling music and books (not bad at all as
far as chains go, a lot closer, say, to Barnes &
Noble than to Wal-Mart). In a nutshell, what was missing was the kind of
indie shop which sells "quality (import) rock items" alongside
recent Henry Cow re-releases, and new albums by, say, John Zorn, or Wayne
Horvitz. I pretended to be a private eye, stopped people in the street, became
a nuisance to all those carrying a musical instrument, but nothing came out
of it. There was just one man, a forty-something, who after thinking long
and hard about it said "There was a shop that sold this stuff, quite
near (...), but it closed its doors a long, long time ago".
It was at this point that it suddenly dawned
on me that this was a city where a lot of public money had been spent for
about forty years in order to keep
"difficult music" alive. So I asked a friend whom I consider to
be a reliable source how could it be that in a city like that there was no
shop that sold any music by those very artists who had indeed played there.
"Well", he said, "I'm sure they sell those CDs at their concerts".
But to me it appeared that one of the goals
when it come to public subsidizing to the arts - the development of a critical
mass of people in order to give birth to a
"virtuous circle" - had been missed by a mile. It goes without
saying that having the fact of buying music in a shop as an indicator could
sound quite bizarre to those who consider free downloading as a permanent
habit of any modern music consumer. But I think that whatever yardstick we
decide to use in order to measure one's maturity - whistling polyrhythms,
say, or 13th chords - asking a "consumer of quality goods" to behave
in a similar way when it comes to music as to when s/he has to buy food,
beverages, clothes, and trips to the islands, is not asking for too much.
Had we to ascertain a sameness of behaviour - say, three copies sold - when
it comes to both cities where arts are massively subsidized and cities where
public intervention is absent, we could draw the conclusion that in this
case subsidizing had no measurable effect. But maybe this is the wrong conclusion?
Just like so many things in life, public
spending to keep art alive and flourishing is an unambiguous notion till
we look at it closely. What's its goal? (This is not a minor point: If
one doesn't know what it is, one can't measure its efficacy.) Historically
speaking, the original goal was to bring down the economic barriers that
make it impossible for lower classes to enjoy art. So, the price of access
is greatly lowered, while producing costs stay the same.
Already the issue originates "practical" problems,
since those genres that are classified as being "art" (let's
remember all those struggles to have Jazz sit alongside Classical Music)
are considered as a whole. This by necessity entails quite paradoxical
effects, such as having David Murray playing for fifteen minutes The Kiss
That Never Ends (a song so cheesy and saccharine that rivals Gato Barbieri's
Last Tango in Paris) being listed under
"Art", while Fiona Apple is to be found under "Commercial".
In modern times, goal #1 ("bringing
light to darkness") goes hand-in-hand, in various combinations, with
goal #2, which reads "keep musicians alive", at least up to the
point when the full effect of goal #1 has been felt. So the fact of a musician
selling three copies at each of those ten concerts played in a given nation
is not to be considered as a failure, the real successful event being those
ten dates the musician played. But who's the one choosing those musicians,
and their compensation? To those attending those concerts, the money spent
is "our", i.e., also "my", money. But when one sees
those bright grateful eyes, and hears those grateful "ad hominem" thanks
musicians often formulate from the stage, instruments still in their hands,
it's easy to understand that musicians know perfectly well that what's
important is not to know "whose money is this?", but the person
who signed those checks that will make it possible for them to pay those
bills during the winter back home.
Whatever one's ideas about this, there
are two items that should always be present when we talk about public intervention
when it comes to the arts: the
"teaching" moment - which has to be continuous, and of a high quality;
and the "advanced" quality of the music funded (which should be
a given, I know, but it's a notion that often gets to be
"misunderstood"). But with every step, new necessities have been
placed upon the old ones, starting with the new need to fund "local"
realities. The factor known as "Circenses" chooses public intervention
as a mean to celebrate a city - it doesn't matter if it's a new building,
a movie Festival, or music. The "local" dimension is well served
by celebrating something that's peculiar to that place, hence "mushroom
fair in the birthplace of...". Or it could be a big, expensive Festival
designed to work as a "seasonal attractor" to get more tourists
to visit the region.
The funny thing is that it will be precisely
those realities that are the most interesting, and, quite often, not at
all expensive to fund, that suffer first, since "being really difficult,
and not expensive" doesn't work too well in times when being a "strong
attractor" rules. (Let's also think about those very expensive "Premières" of "original
productions" funded by regional powers that feature local musicians,
works that will stay dormant forever after the Première.)
What stays intact from the old times is
a total indifference to costs, a side of the story that not many people
- and anyway not musicians, theatre owners, nor those who rent halls, sound
systems, transportation, nor hotels, magazines, papers, webzines, critics
and audiences alike - bother to think about.
Had
I to answer quickly a question about the way Italian press has changed
lately - here I'll immediately say I'm only talking about that tiny slice
of newspapers I read - I'd say that the change confirmed my worst suspicions
(which I felt were founded, but which I secretly hoped to be false): the
majority of those who could afford to spend the last fifteen years without
ever bothering to open a book once did exactly so (while having a look
at bookstore windows will prove that those very people somehow found the
time to write many books), while sitting in a position of "opposition
forever" that promised to be eternal, given the fact that the coalition
in power appeared to overwhelm all other forces. Alas!, the government
crumbled - once again, for "external reasons" - and the babbling
that followed only showed that those who were supposed to having read possessed
no ideas to even understand what had happened, let alone think about what
had to be done. A few even became "unemployed, but with a stipend".
There's also the fact of the disappearance
of the specialist, meaning "one who really knows his/her stuff".
If one looks at the way movies get covered in the press (theatre is no
more), one sees that the space reserved for reviews by professional reviewers
is extremely tiny; whole pages being given to those cheerleaders and megaphones
whose work walks side-by-side with a movie, from the moment it gets written
to the day it's shown in theaters. The new fact is that those movies which
seem destined to be blockbusters are not reviewed by professional reviewers,
but by "prestigious people working at the paper", who are obviously
competent people, but not necessarily so when it comes to movies. Even
more space is given to those "versatile" people who could maybe
do one thing well, but who (of course!) do four or five. While when it
comes to music, it's time for an "open door" policy (even Lana
Del Rey!).
Looking in the general direction of music,
including what's on the Web, it was totally by chance that I happened to
update my notions about what's nowadays considered
"acceptable". Having nothing better to do, I did a search about
¿Which Side Are You On?, Ani DiFranco's recently released album. Those five
or six Italian reviews I found offered to me a quite dispiriting picture
of the state of my nation. Quite generic and vague (a colleague of mine from
the USA warned me about not thinking too badly about music writers who only
have a few words given to describe an album, but being vague on purpose and
wasting precious space in order not to show one's ignorance about said album
is something else), most reviews read the same, as being "inspired" by
the same press release; quite vague, yes, but suddenly acute and knowing
about something such writers could not possibly know; they also presented
themselves as a "contribution to revolution", while in fact being
only servile (which I have to admit has been an Italian specialty starting
with those glorious times when Punk was King).
One would be very wrong to think this is
only typical of fanzines. One recent example from a professional magazine
where one could think there's a lot of professional layers of control in
place is from issue #1246 of magazine Il venerdì di Repubblica, 3 febbraio
2012. I happened to see a tiny article titled In marcia con Ani, la folksinger
che sogna di cambiare il mondo (Marching with Ani, the folksinger who wants
to change the world), by Anna Lombardi. These quotes by Ani DiFranco appear: "Amendment
talks about genre inequalities, and it's constructed just like an amendment.
Mariachi talks about those who don't have a home. Hearse is a kind of protest
about world's many inequalities". (...) "But the one I love the
most is Unworry, which features the banjo playing of the great Pete Seeger." Funny
thing, no story matches those titles, and Pete Seeger is not featured on
that track. (I waited for a correction to appear in the following issue,
but no.)
If things stay this way, Italy won't get
far.
© Beppe Colli 2012
CloudsandClocks.net
| Feb. 14, 2012
