The Pinkster, in his rarely seen Mark Jacobs ad.
In her September 20 A/V Club piece “Should Some Movies Be Taken More Seriously Than Others,” Stephanie Zacharek, doing the sort of end run that’s become a reliable feature of the “Your Art Film Sucks And So Do You” thumbsucker, characterizes the music score of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master as “interesting,” and then muses that that term, which she put in quotes to begin with, “might just be a euphemism for something you wouldn’t want to play at home with your cats around.” In a parenthetical, she then adds, “And I say that as someone who has subjected her own cats to Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and late Coltrane, God help their small ears.”
I should add here that Stephanie is a friend, but also that I feel for her as Edmund Wilson did for Vladimir Nabokov, that is, a “warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation.”
Anyway, you get what she’s doing there—she’s trying to tell you, and in an ingratiating way, that just because she’s hostile to this particular piece of possibly “difficult” art, she’s hardly hostile to ALL such art. Dan Kois did the same thing in his notorious “cultural vegetables” piece when he admitted that he eventually “got” Derek Jarman’s Blue, which still tops the shameless self-aggrandizement chart in that it bids to make himself look not just open-minded but gay-friendly and compassionate. (Jarman himself has yet to tell Kois “Good on yer, mate!” or any such thing, alas.) But I’m not writing this to decry the rhetorical device as such. I’m writing this because cats really don’t care what kind of music you play in their presence. For the most part.
We like to romanticize and anthropomorphize our delightful feline friends, but let’s face it: the domesticated feline consciousness, such as it is, is simply not wired to respond subjectively to, let alone process, music. Cats are attentive, sure, and have very sharp senses. But their senses are arranged in a way that’s entirely different from our own, and their pleasure centers have very little to do with those of humans. It stands to reason that the inverse follows—they’re annoyed by different things. Loud noises startle cats, to be sure, just as they startle humans. A blaring saxophone, played by Coleman, Ayler, or Coltrane, simply doesn’t register to a cat the way it does to us. Cats don’t try to make sense of it because A) their intellectual apparatus is not so sophisticated as they’re able to make sense of it and B) there’s no practical need for them to make sense of it. They categorize sounds in an almost binary way: those that are specifically friendly and inviting (your voice, the snap of a cat food can opening) and those that either threaten them or put them in stalking mode (as in the chirp of birds on a branch outside a window). If you put on No New York, your cat won’t saunter in front of the speaker, raise a cat eyebrow, and ask “What’s HE on about” as James Chance and the Contortions subject “I Can’t Stand Myself” to a seizure.
My cat, the above-pictured Pinky, a.k.a. The Pinkster, a.k.a. Beast, a.k.a. Purr Beast, a.k.a. about two dozen other really stupid nicknames, never showed any visible reaction to any of the music I played in my apartment during the period of our cohabitation, which was from 1990 to 2006. He was five years old when my cohabitating girlfriend of the time, Beth “The Shermanator” Sherman adopted his adorable ass, and we had no idea what environment he came from or what kind of music was played in it. As you can imagine, what with my being a very nearly professional Rock Snob of a certain age and having come of a certain age in a certain era, the amount of ostensibly Unlistenable Noise in my music library is pretty formidable, and I can find it for you in pretty much nearly every genre in which the quality of unlistenable noisiness is possible. From AMM to Xenakis with DNA, Metal Machine Music, Swans and The Velvet Underground in between, the Pinkster heard it all, and frankly, he didn’t give a shit.
All except for one recording. The 1991 Gramavision CD The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, a particular iteration (the 1984 “Melodic Version”) of a piece by the American composer LaMonte Young. Young is a composer with a particular interest in long durations, microtonal intervals, and drone music, and unlike his The Well-Tuned Piano, High Tension Line Transformer is not, on the face of it, a particularly complex or knotty piece; it consists here of an ensemble of trumpet players who chose between four specific pitches and play them at varying lengths. The first time I played it at home on my stereo, which was/is pretty good and can get pretty loud, it made Pinky very nervous. I don’t know if it was the specific pitches, or the phases they might seem to go in and out of, the sounds in relation to the silences, but the piece made him immediately extremely nervous. In very specific way: he began pacing in front of the speakers, and pausing, and then he would look at me, and then he would pace some more, then look at me. It was the damnedest thing. After about four minutes I just had to turn it off. He never reacted to any other music, including the scant amount of Young music on disc, in the same way again. And, you know, in the interim, Keiji Heino made A LOT of records and I owned and played a lot of them.
Some time soon after the unfortunate experience with The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer I had the occasion to interview LaMonte Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, and I told him this story in the spirit of sharing a droll anecdote. Young is a man of rather gentle demeanor, but that did not prepare me for his reaction: he was genuinely upset, almost hurt. Whatever his overt intentions concerning his music, causing unrest in the nervous system of another living creature did not figure. The idea that it did my cat some brief harm was not even vaguely amusing to him.
Artists are unusual people. And their thought processes are unusual, and the extent to which their thought processes are unusual is often not unrelated to the medium in which they work. Later in Zacherek’s article about…whatever it’s about, she says “[t]he movie I’m yearning to see again was not made by anyone who has been deemed a great artist, but by a sometime-director who mostly writes screenplays.” This movie is Premium Rush, which I haven’t seen. I couldn’t review it because not one but two friends worked on it, but I hear it’s very good and I look forward to catching it. I rather doubt, however, that sometime-director David Koepp would really appreciate having his movie adopted as a club with which to attempt to beat The Master and its fans over the head. The implication Zacharek is barely bothering to try to cover up is that there are some directors who like you and who want you to have fun, and some directors who hate you and want to punish you and make you do homework. Because no actual pleasure can be had from a “difficult” film. Even if you do own some Albert Ayler records.
Before I get too exasperated, I’ll give the last word to Orson Welles, who, in a mid-’60s interview for a British television show called Tempo, is asked by the interviewer: “To what extent, though, do you normally consider the audience you’re going for?”
Welles pauses for a good five seconds, then answers:
“Not at all. Impossible to.
Sounds arrogant. It isn’t meant to be and I don’t think it is. It’s because the
public is so unimaginably large. Whenever I do a play I think not only of the
public but of the specific public of that year and that time. And what it will
be like. That’s part of what’s
good about the theater. And part of what’s bad. What limits it even as it makes
it wonderfully immediate. But a film you simply cannot think of the public
because it’s made up of people in Manila, in the mountain vastnesses of the
atlas in the Andes, in Indianapolis, in Manchester, in…tin huts in the jungle.
You simply cannot think of that audience or think what they like because…they
simply aren’t an audience. It’s just a whole…population, you’re making it for,
of the globe, some percentage of which…will drift into a hut or a movie palace
and see what you did. Which is what limits films to an extent but which to a
great extent frees you. But the people, the PURELY commercial people, the
downright movie hacks who ‘give ‘em what they want’ are not thinking of the
public they’re thinking of the distributors. They know what the distributors
want, but they’re not anymore thinking of the public than I am. They can’t
imagine that public any more than I can. They just know the distributors say, ‘There’s a market this year for tough, sexy spy movies. So give ‘em what they
want.’ But they’re not really thinking of a public that likes them. They’re
thinking of bookers who will play them and report that we did that much money.
I think it’s an important distinction.”
The Tempo interview is an extra on the excellent foreign-region Blu-ray disc of Welles’ The Trial, a movie that wants to punish you and make you do homework.
Here is another picture of my cat Pinky, God bless him, who I miss every day and whom I aspire to be more like all the time. As in, for instance, this:
Not to ignore the excellence of your post, but just for the record I wish to note that the particular piece of furniture featured in these photos is no longer anywhere near our home.
Stephanie will be happy to know that “interesting” is one of our most vital contemporary aesthetic categories: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Aesthetic-Categories-Zany-Interesting/dp/0674046587
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2-IZFgH2U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TgCvi7KK3w&feature=related
My cat might raise his head of the couch pillow when I put on some Weakling or Godflesh, but just as quickly and casually he returns to sleeping and dreaming whatever kind of fucked up LSD nonsense cats dream about. That is all.
When I was in high school, our family’s three lazy, spoiled, adorable cats spent much of the day sleeping under my bed. One afternoon, I put the Velvets’ “White Light/White Heat” on my record player. About a minute into “Sister Ray”, the cats emerged from under the bed and hopped up onto the mattress, closer to the speakers. There they curled up, and dozed—they seemed very happy. When the record ended, they got up, stretched, and went back under.
So glad to know I’m not the only person who saddles his cats with multiple ridiculous nicknames. I just can’t help myself.
My cats never noticeably respond to music, but I can freak them out with my impression of a UFO, which basically involves simultaneously humming and whistling. My bird impression, which humans find quite impressive, never fools the cats. Frustrating.
I’ve been trying to parse through Zacherek’s piece for the last few days, which has its obvious flaws (the thing about boo-ing, which was clearly about the idea of boo-ing, not because Malick is a “genius.” Those same people condemning the booing hated “Cloud Atlas” a few days later and none of them booed). And as a big fan of “The Master,” I also find it hard to agree with her on her reading of the film. But I’m digging through her sentences and I do think she has a point, that is sadly buried under her sort of “man of the people” championing against snobbery, and she probably should have taken a different approach to the piece.
THAT being said however, I don’t think she’s blaming “The Master” for being difficult (she never uses that word, as my command‑f reveals). I think she like some other critics—really smart ones who are the type that usually love this stuff—saw the film and found it evasively about nothing. She writes, “I accept and acknowledge that the movie attempts to probe some dark and mysterious corners of human nature. I don’t feel that its elusiveness eluded me.” Maybe she is hiding something, but I’ve read enough of Zacherek’s work to think she doesn’t just throw her hands up and say something is too difficult. And again, I totally disagree with her on this end—I think “The Master” has quite a lot to say about the post-war American state as I described in my own writing on it—but I see where she is coming from.
But again, I don’t think she is attacking “difficult” films. Her whole riff on “Premium Rush” is that she wants to go back and figure out its filmmaking techniques that she missed while “enjoying” the film. She sees and respects the craft of “The Master” (which I agree with her, shows its craft throughout (but purposefully, because I think so much of the film is communicated visually as opposed to textually)), but wants to go back to a film in which she missed the craft because she was distracted by the text. I
I dunno but that’s my reading of it. Good idea buried under the wrong article.
Also: Bergman set in the first photo spotted!
Peter, the lede for the piece reads: “Sometimes you just know something is wank.” That’s the lede.
I really, really, really disliked Zacherek’s piece, but now counting you, Glenn, I’m friends with two people who are friends with her. So I’ll stop there, I think.
I’ve had two different cats freak out when I’d play the soundtrack to “The Day The Earth Stood Still”. Not a startled reaction, but wide-eyed frantic pacing until I’d shut it off. One of those cats had a similar reaction to ANY Bernard Herrmann music, for whatever that’s worth.
I enjoy reading Zachareck, and I too want to check out PREMIUM RUSH one of these days (I like Koepp as a director), but she can really be annoying sometimes, and that piece was one of those times. It’s not just that she uses PREMIUM CRUSH as a club to beat THE MASTER with, as you put it, Glenn, it’s also she sets up the same kind of false dichotomy that, say, Armond White does, with both films, that no one could *possibly* like both films, or consider their approaches equally valid.
And as for cats and their relation to music and the like, my family’s cats (as well as the cats my brother and his wife own, when I’ve been over to their place) never paid attention to music, or pop culture of any stripe. They paid attention when the TV was on, or we were watching a movie, but that was only because we were sitting on the couch, which meant someone whose lap they could sit on.
But perhaps ‘wank’ is a reference to all the handjobs!
No I get your point and I approached this wrong. I think there’s an ear worm of an idea that inspired this post that I kind of want to explore further, and trying to approach it through SZ’s piece, which kind of goes a totally different route, wasn’t the right idea. If I get time this week I’ll try and get my own thingamapost up.
As much as I appreciate Zacharek, I can’t take this piece seriously. It says “Punch Drunk Love” is a semi-misfire. I got off the bus right then and there. Plus, won’t be able to see “The Master” for months (Damn you, old-timey distribution mores!).
Glenn, you make a good point, but you miss the central one, which is that all cats are sociopathic. Unlike dogs, which have human souls.
I kid; I’ve always been more of a dog person, and suffer from a mild allergy to (some) cats. I’ve enjoyed the company of a few lovely cats over the years, but I’ve never connected to them the way I have with the wonderful and saintly and beautifully crazy dogs I’ve known.
As for Zachareck, whose last name makes me nervous, I mostly thought her piece was fluff, but it was mild enough to not be aggressively stupid, the way these things can be. And yes, the lede is just bad. Maybe I’ve missed it, but since when is “wank” an adjective? Is this some nascent Euro-hip trend that I haven’t heard of yet? Did she mean “wack?” As in, “The Wackness?”
Beautiful, beautiful,Pinky
I suspect that to cats and to most other animals, our music registers as extraneous noise, a bit like the way a song played on the radio in a noisy moving car will register as disconnected sounds *until you recognize it*, following which the remainder will cohere: the assembly is taking place on your end. I say “most animals” because I used to have a pair of budgies that reacted very distinctively to the opening minutes of “Le marteau sans maître” by Pierre Boulez: they’d begin to coo and mutter in a fashion I never heard in other circumstances. But I’m inclined to think that birds stand in a special relation to the auditory realm.
Boy, the “very good” reputation of PREMIUM RUSH is the oddest movie rumor of 2012. It’s not very good. It’s directed like one part video game, one part TNT pilot. Koepp is a framed often as a good “writer” because his ability to work quickly through a Robert McKee checklist is sort of uncanny. As a director, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Must be dry days for movie critics when that piece of lame is held up as a return to pure B‑movie kicks.
Okay, you asked (on Twitter), so YES, Pinky is adorable, dammit. Sorry for your loss, even this many years later – I still mourn my incredible cat Rogar The Evil Behemoth (1989−2003), so I know how long these feelings hang on. And seeing other peoples’ late kitties just makes me look sadly at my own two current ones (currently sleeping at my head and feet) and be even more aware they won’t be staying all that long …
http://www.flickr.com/photos/geminicollisionworks/2207147030/
As for sonic input – I’ve had a number of cats and never found any correlation between “difficult” music and their reaction (NONE have any shown any negative reaction to METAL MACHINE MUSIC, free jazz, Beefheart, Pere Ubu, “L.A. Blues,” or hardcore punk). They HAVE reacted to music on occasion, suddenly perked up, meowed, and run around the room with some agitation obviously caused by the sound, but never anything that would likely cause distress in humans. If they DO react, I’ve noticed the reaction is intensified if I hum or sing along with the music – much more than if I were making sound on my own. Never caught what specifically set some instinctual reaction off in their tiny feline brains.
G‑d save their ears, indeed – more subtext for those looking for it, and as implied by Glenn’s “(e)ven if you do own some Albert Ayler records” crack. It almost carries a snootful of a late-Fassbinder-esque debauched hauteur/dare, as e.g. I’d heard it when, towards the end, RWF would ingest something like an entire eightball in one inhale and then gently remark to his fellow traveler, “If you had taken that much, it would have killed you.” Don’t try this at home, amateurs! Oh, sure, I crank Eye and Ear Control and Live in Japan holed up in my lair, but I ain’t no role model, which is why Mr. Greenwood’s soundtrack sucks even more than I’m implying. Or, so goes the implication.
And as to implications, this cat’s heart starting beating faster when I misread your construction above, which made it briefly seem like you were suggesting Xenakis had sat in with DNA, no doubt to croon the Chet Baker songbook. A man can dream, can’t he?
PREMIUM RUSH is okay, but it’s not a patch on RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION.
Since I’m friends with neither Stephanie Zacharek nor the makers of Premium Rush, I think I’m in a pretty unique position to call that article a load of bunk.
I thought that PREMIUM RUSH was pretty terrific and I’ve seen THE MASTER at the Cinerama Dome three times so naturally I have no idea what to think about any of this.
The name of LaMonte Young’s longtime collaborator and significant other is Marian Zazeela, and she is a very fine artist in her own right. Fifty years ago she was a regular model for Jack Smith and his film Flaming Creatures was originally conceived of as a vehicle for her. Unfortunately for Jack, Marian felt that LaMonte needed all of her time. She did , however, make a cameo appearance in the film, near the end in the Carnival sequence, flanked by LaMonte and Irving Rosenthal (the friend who first introduced her to Jack.) It is the loveliest composition in a film full of lovely compositions. She is someone whose name you should never get wrong.
Except for your misidentifying Marian, I very much enjoyed your rebuttal of your friend’s piece. I am often annoyed when people anthropomorphise their feline companions. It appears they are unable to appreciate these animals for what they are and so attempt to turn their cats into quaint diminutive versions of themselves.
…and I’m sorry that LaMonte took your anecdote so badly.
@dalewettig: My apologies, and apologies to Marian Zazeela. I have no excuse except that I sometimes do make egregiously boneheaded typos or misremember things that I’d clearly be best advised to double check. I’ve fixed the error.
Mr. Peel, your point is well taken. What really kills me about such pieces, and convinces me that they really ARE manifestoes of a sort, is their relentless either/or nature. You’re either a righteous drag who kills everybody’s buzz with your multiple viewings of long movies with heavy themes who doesn’t lift a finger when a DePalma movie gets booedn OR you’re a kicky cinematic free spirit who isn’t snooty about liking brisk thrillers and is fun to be around. The idea of someone getting off on “Premium Rush” AND soaking in multiple viewings of “The Master” isn’t undreamed of in this philosophy; it’s inimical to this philosophy.
Dogs, meanwhile…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIZZjkzWXeY
I don’t know if this will fit well with the line of discussion here (e.g. Zacharek), but it can’t be helped. As one of the most committed Cat Persons in this hemisphere – and one who bade farewell last year to a most eccentric and incorrigible companion named Pearl – this post struck an unreasonably deep chord. Just the last full sentence bolstered my already lofty image of our host. Those who think that’s comical will think it’s comical, but there you have it.
So I raise a toast to Pinky, and extend an awkward cyberhug to all his friends.
Irving Rosenthal is my favorite writer next to Proust.
When last heard from he was still in S.F. working in a homeless shelter.
He is the eminese gris of “The Cockettes.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKcSOykgdgM&feature=related
Another irksome thing about Zacharek’s article is the way she champions “messy” filmmaking that appears “tossed off”, as if someone who’s movies seem improvised on the spot are by definition better than those that are arrived at through careful planning. It’s a sentiment that came up back in her negative review of Fincher’s Zodiac, where she noted that Fincher demanded dozens of takes on a shot, as if that should influence how we should view the finished movie. And it was in David Edelstein’s obnoxious comment on a Charlie Rose panel from a while back that the Coen brothers “storyboard within an inch of their lives” when making No Country. I feel like it goes along the idea definitely put forth by critics like Zacharek that the worst sin a movie or filmmaker can make is to take themselves seriously, and that a film’s worth is to be judged solely by how “jazzed” it makes you feel.
Note to self: Auto-award +1 vindication point for ceasing to pay any attention to the AV Club’s take on movies after they started championing the likes of ‘Cabin Boy’ and ‘The Tourist’. (And their reference to Ozu as “hostile to the younger generation” didn’t help much either.)
@Jose: This is partially the legacy of Pauline Kael, I would imagine.
I’m with Jose. And the “tossed off” nonsense is especially irksome if we wander into production budgets.
PREMIUM RUSH reportedly cost $35 million to make. THE MASTER? $30 million. (Neither has made its money back yet.) Former budget went to logistics and fees. The latter, to aesthetics and (almost surely) lower fees.
But yes, Koepp did get that sloppy, crappy look and feel that he was going for.
I understand celebrating a “tossed off” feel, à la Altman in his prime. But PREMIUM RUSH just feels like bargain bin filmmaking.
Shorter: Guessing how “planned out” or “made-up-on-the-spot” a production was, based on any other evidence than yourself being one of the people involved in actually making the film, is a fool’s game of the highest order.
I was speaking to an esteemed director both of films and theater whose pet peeve was coming across lines in reviews that oozed such presumptuous, and whose conclusions were invariably way, way, way off. Pace J.Lo in OUT OF SIGHT: “You have to KNOW what you’re talking about.”
I have a new cat CD called “Purr For Me”. Check it out and keep me posted.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/178–4357687-4921415?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=geoffrey+vey
Pinky is so adorable.
Our cat Harry (1967−1986) never showed any interest in music.
Except: trumpets seem to hurt his ears.
He was totally freaked out by the catbird that showed up one day. The catbird looked like bird. But it mewed like a cat.
Harry was not amused.