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frankendykes-monster · 3 years

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Space Jam: A New Legacy is content to be content.

The original Space Jam was a calculated marketing exercise. Michael Jordan was the biggest sports star of the nineties, and Space Jam capitalised on Jordan’s brand potential while also allowing the athlete to refashion his own narrative into a family-friendly mythology. Space Jam packaged Jordan for a generation, smoothing the wrinkles out of his story by presenting a wholesome family man making an earnest transition from basketball to baseball.

It also helped Warner Bros. to figure out what to do with their Looney Tunes characters, which had largely laid dormant within the company’s intellectual property vaults. There had been a conscious effort to revitalised the company’s animation with shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and even Animaniacs, but those classic and beloved cartoons were a merchandising opportunity waiting to happen. So the logic of the original Space Jam was clear, it was an excuse to tie together two potentially profitable strands of intellectual property.

Space Jam itself was something of an afterthought. The movie struggles to reach its ninety-minute runtime. It often feels like the production team have to utilise every scrap of film to reach that target, with extended riffs focusing on Bill Murray and Michael Jordan on the golf course and with a lot of the improvisation from the voice cast included in the finished film. The movie’s ending comes out of nowhere, and Space Jam struggles to hit many of the basic plot beats of a scrappy sports movie.

The movie itself was immaterial to the success of Space Jam as a concept. After all, the film only grossed $250m at the global box office, enough to scrape into the end of year top ten behind The Nutty Professor and Jerry Maguire. However, the film’s real success lay in merchandising, with the film generating between $4bn and $6bn in licensing and merchandising. Key to this was the success of the six-time platinum-certified soundtrack which remains the ninth highest-grossing soundtrack of all-time.

In some to trace a lot of modern Hollywood back to the original Space Jam. So much of how companies package and release modern media feels like an extension of that approach, the reduction of the actual film itself to nothing more than “content” that exists as a larger pool of marketable material. After all, the unspoken assumption underlying AT&T’s disastrous decision to send all of their blockbusters to HBO Max was the understanding that HBO Max itself was often packaged free with company’s internet. Movies would no longer be their own things, but just perks to be packaged and sold as part of larger deals.

In the decades since the release of Space Jam, the industry has become increasingly focused on the idea of packaging and repackaging intellectual property. It has become increasingly common for films to showcase multiple intellectual properties housed at the same studios. Simple crossovers like Alien vs. Predators or The Avengers now seem positively humble when compared to the smorgasbord of brand synergy on display in projects like The Emoji Movie or Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Interestingly, as Disney have steadily securing their intellectual property portfolio with additions like Pixar and Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. have becoming increasingly bullish about showcasing the depth and breadth of their bench. The LEGO Movie imagines a wide range of properties consolidated under one brand. Ready Player One depicted a pop culture user space lost in nostalgia for properties and trinkets. However, those movies also managed to tell their own stories, even as they grappled with the weight of brand synergy pushing down on top of them.

Space Jam: A New Legacy has no such delusions. It understands that it does not exist as a story or as a feature film. Instead, it has distilled cinema down to a content-delivery mechanism. The plot of the movie finds basketball star LeBron James sucked into the “Serververse” and forced to ally with the Looney Tunes in order to play a basketball game with the fate of the world in the balance. However, while the original Space Jam ran a brisk and unfocused ninety minutes, A New Legacy extends itself to almost two hours. There is always more content to repackage and sell, after all.

A New Legacy slathers its cynicism in nostalgia, directly appealing to a generation of audiences who have convinced themselves that Space Jam was a good movie and a beloved childhood classic. A New Legacy is built around the understanding that the original Space Jam walked so that it might run, counting on the audience’s nostalgia for the original film to excuse a lot of its indulgences. After all, it would be a betrayal of the franchise if A New Legacy wasn’t a crash and vulgar cash-in. In many ways, A New Legacy does what most sequels aspire to do, scaling the original film’s ambitions aggressively upwards.

As with the original Space Jam, there is layer of irony to distract from the film’s clear purpose. In the original Space Jam, the villainous Swackhammer planned to abduct the Looney Tunes and force them to play at his themeparks. The implication was that the characters did not want to be sold into corporate servitude, stripped of their own identity and rendered as crass tools of unchecked capitalism. The irony of Space Jam lay in the fact that the entire movie was a variant on Swackhammer’s themepark and the Looney Tunes were dancing to that theme anyway as Daffy puckers up and kisses the Warner Bros. stamp on his own ass.

In A New Legacy, a sentient algorithm – Al G. Rhythm – is cast as the movie’s primary antagonist. The film gestures broadly at a satirical criticism of the modern film industry, with Al G. Rhythm shaping and warping the future of movie-making by suggesting things like computer-generating movie stars and producing a constant array of recycled intellectual property. A New Legacy recognises the machinations of Al G. Rhythm as unsettling and horrifying, with throwaway jokes about the theft of ideas and the violation of privacy, but the villain largely serves as a smokescreen to let the movie have its cake and eat it.

After all, A New Legacy revels in Al G. Rhythm’s plans. LeBron James is turned into an animated figure and dumped into classic Looney Tunes shorts like Rabbit Season and The Rabbit of Seville. The film understands that while the audience might be afraid of the algorithm, they also yearn for it. After all, it isn’t Al G. Rhythm who structures A New Legacy so that the film spends an extended sequence touring the company’s beloved intellectual properties.

A New Legacy is really just an investors’ day presentation that celebrates the sheer amount of content that Warner Bros. own. It’s not too difficult to imagine the film screened investors before the Discovery deal, as proof of just how many viable franchising opportunities existed within the copyright of the company itself. It’s a weird and unsettling showcase, in large part because it feels like that warning from Jurassic Park. The studio were so obsessed with whether they could do a thing that they never stopped to consider whether they should.

The film’s middle section includes a whirlwind tour of the properties owned by Warner Bros. After Bugs “plays the hits” with James, the two set off on an adventure to recover the other Looney Tunes from other beloved Warner Bros. properties. Some of these advertisements make sense: Daffy and Porky are living in the world of Superman: The Animated Series, while Lola seems to have found the Wonder Woman from the Bloodlines animated films. Others make much less sense in a movie aimed at kids, like the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote hiding in Mad Max: Fury Road or Yosemite Sam living in Casablanca.

Of course, it’s debatable how much of A New Legacy is aimed at kids, as compared to the kids of the nineties. Its target market seems to be kids in the late nineties who never grew up, because they never had to. Elmer Fudd and Sylvester are hiding out in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Granny and Speedy have taken refuge in the opening scenes of The Matrix. While the original Space Jam featured odd pop cultural shoutouts to things like Pulp Fiction, at least that was somewhat contemporaneous.

To be fair, there is no art driving these choices. Many of these references serve to point the audience towards established properties. It is a sentient recommendation algorithm for HBO Max and a handy way of stoking audience interest in upcoming projects like The Matrix 4 (December 2021) or Furiosa (June 2023). It is a helpful reminder that Superman: The Animated Series has been remastered in high definition to stream on HBO Max. Foghorn Leghorn even rides a dragon from Game of Thrones to remind viewers that the show is streaming on HBO Max and that there are prequels coming.

It’s all very bizarre, but also strangely lifeless. The climax of the film finds the inevitable basketball game played in front of a crowd of familiar pop culture icons drawn from a wide range of sources: King Kong, The Iron Giant, Batman ’66, The Wizard of Oz, The Mask and many more. It feels very much like a surreal power play, a company showcasing the depth of its own vaults at a turbulent time in the industry. It leads to weird moments, like Al G. Rhythm even quoting Training Day, perhaps the film’s most unlikely draw from the “Warner Bros. Intellectual Property Vault.”

The most revealing aspect of the movie is its central conflict, with Al G. Rhythm cynically manipulating LeBron’s son Dom. Dom is convinced that his father doesn’t understand him, that his father is unable to see that his skill lies in video game coding rather than old-fashioned basketball. Rhythm is able to create a schism between father and son, using Dom’s code and his anger to attack and undermine LeBron James and the Looney Tunes. It’s a very broad and very archetypal story. There are no points for realising that Dom eventually comes around to his father and accepts that Rhythm is a villain.

However, it signals an interesting shift in these sorts of narratives. Traditionally, these sorts of generational conflicts played out between fathers and sons, with fathers presented as antagonistic and sons presented as heroic. The original Star Wars saga is built around Luke Skywalker trying to wrestle and grapple with his father Darth Vader. In Superman II, the eponymous superhero is forced to confront Zod, a representative of his father’s generation and the old world. Even in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is set against his surrogate father figure Ra’s Al Ghul.

The metaphor driving these sorts of stories was fairly simple and straightforward. Every generation needs to come into their own and take control of their own agency within the world. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi ends with Darth Vader dead and Luke staring out into the wider universe. Times change, and each generation has an obligation to try to create a better world than the one left to them by their parents. In the conflict between parents and children, it has generally been children who have prevailed.

However, in recent years, the trend has swung back sharply. It’s notable that the villain in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens is an errant child who doesn’t properly respect his parents, and that Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker ends with order restored when the protagonist takes the name of the beloved heroes of the older films. Shows like Star Trek: Picard are built around the idea that kids need their older generation of parents to swoop in and tell them how to properly live their lives.

A New Legacy is an interesting illustration of this trend. The movie ends with a reconciliation between LeBron and Dom, but it is very clearly on LeBron’s terms. Dom is manipulated and misled by sinister forces, and his father has to save him while realigning his moral compass. Father knows best. It demonstrates how the underlying logic of these stories has shifted in recent years, perhaps reflecting the understanding that perhaps the older generation won’t surrender the floor gracefully.

As with Ready Player One, there’s a monstrous Peter Pan quality to A New Legacy. It is a film about how the culture doesn’t have to change. It can be recycled and repurposed forever and ever and ever. At the end of Space Jam, Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny parted ways. There was an understanding that the two worlds existed apart from one another. However, A New Legacy ends with the collapse of these worlds into one another; the “Serververse” manifesting itself in the real world. As LeBron walks home, Bugs asks if he can move in.

Of course, with HBO Max subscription, the audience can take Bugs home anytime they want

#long post

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yanyan0521 · 3 years

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Performance Task #1 = Educational/Informative

Blog Members:

- Kristian Cain L. Nadela -

Brian Segarra Ylaya -

James Christian B. Gutierrez

In this blog, we will present 5 theories of entrepreneurship, with short descriptions and videos to further support the theories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Bup5tXFYwVA&fbclid=IwAR3E2BFIP4ymIOCTXIPSCJcDkUTVVm9N5tmSvHOLb1rwINQRJIEn10GCjpk

1. Innovation Theory

Innovation theory was created by Joseph Schumpeter in his book entitled "The Theory of Economic Development" published in 1911. Schumpeter believed that innovation was the key to economic growth. According to Schumpeter, innovation can be categorised into five different types. These types are; the creation of new products, introduction of new market, formation of new organization, creation of new production processes, & discovery of new sources of supply. Joseph believes that without the introduction of modern, innovative change, the economy would progress slowly, or not at all. The video we have chosen to support this theory is made by Manish Amrute. He discusses the theory in a 6 minute video, covering a short description of Schumpeter and discussing the theory itself. His discussion includes the five factors of innovation, each described in detail. Introduction of new goods, introduction of new methods of production, opening of new market, new sources of supply of raw material, and new organization are indeed observed in Schumpeter's theory, and with the examples provided by Manish, the theory is then supported. His short description of Schumpeter further adds to the theorist's credibility as well.

2. Keynesian Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=pqecyhOASnU&fbclid=IwAR2ytphOqfmrlKG3BZ9S7lv842M1XxgnpqI5qjzeINM4X8aElB7vjn6PIeA

John Maynard Keynes first introduced the Keynesian Theory in the 1930's. Keynes is also regarded as the creator of modern macroeconomics. His theory states that aggregate demand is an important factor, and as it increases, so too does the economy. The theory also insinuates that increased government spending and tax lowering can stimulate the growth of aggregate demand, and in turn solves certain economic problems. His theory was birthed in an effort to understand historical economic problems, such as The Great Depression in the 1930's. We have chosen a video entitled "Keynesian Economics Explained" posted on YouTube by Explified. The video reviews Keyne's reason for establishing the theory, which was the Great Depression. The discussions focuses on aggregate income and expenditure. The video also emphasizes the importance of government involvement in the economy to boost consumer demand in order to achieve economic growth. Overall, the video's content further supports and elaborates the Keynesian Theory.

3. Alfred Marshall Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=oTd0nQeW05U&t=44s&fbclid=IwAR25mnfYEn41chpPaOGjWRFnvjVO0zSyyY5lUnLdrwZAViMeGQFz1JCxZjQ

Alfred Marshall specialized in microeconomics, which concentrated on single markets and industries rather than the economy as a whole. His theory denotes factors needed for production. These factors are identified as capital, labor, land, and organization or entrepreneurship. Marshall believed that entrepreneurship was the driving force behind businesses. According to Alfred, entrepreneurs predict patterns within supply and demand, hence being important. We have selected the video entitled "Thinking like an economist - Alfred Marshall [Principles of Economics Graphic Edition]" to serve as support for Marshall's theory. The video first discusses about the achievements and contributions of Alfred Marshall in the development of economic theory. Marshall's prediction of supply and demand is also stated in the video, presented as the prediction of the mobile phone's price as an example. His definition of price is discussed as "the point where production cost meets consumer's marginal utility", where production cost represents supply and marginal utility represents demand. The video's key points, along with additional information about the theory's author, provides ample support to Marshall's theory.

4. Risk & Uncertainty - Bearing Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJh2TxFQeEo&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1B8mBTcQZghRPmEQHfgC8XbiPni39czNv_l3A6t7llWN5Rl47bfSoS-48

The Risk and Uncertainty - Bearing Theory proposed by Frank Hyneman Knight is another theory involving entrepreneurship. His theory was first stated in his book entitled "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit" published in 1921. The theory suggests that entrepreneurs are to take risks and uncertainty in order to achieve high profit. Knight also states that risk - taking is inherent in entrepreneurs and differentiates them to generic workers. In this theory, risk and uncertainty are uniquely defined, with risk being associated with known probability, and uncertainty defined as being without known probability. Our selected video for this theory is "Entrepreneurial Uncertainty and Risk" posted by Oleksiy Osiyevskyy. In his video he mentions Frank Knight and his book "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit". He elaborates that entrepreneurship is a risk - taking venture, and the risks mentioned can be understood in order to be more successful. He classifies risks as being three types; mathematical probability and statistical risk, which falls under the classification of risks, and true uncertainty. With the examples provided in the video, and its applicability in real - life situations, this video supports Knight's theory.

5. Sociological Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICppFQ6Tabw&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2sX35KYPDapRWAe5V066XLKm9WYT1mGWc1S5dEieuvSn4qh_dpaQDSYMY

The Sociological Theory by Max Weber is our last theory to discuss. Though his theory is involved in entrepreneurship, it is mainly concentrated on the study of society. Weber's theory states that culture defines the demands of consumers. As entrepreneurs perform entrepreneurial activities according to the customs, morals, traditions, and beliefs, they become constituents of good stature. Max also states that religious dogma can be utilized by entrepreneurs to further their interests. The video we chose to support Weber's theory is entitled "SOCIOLOGY - Max Weber", posted by The School of Life. The video states that ideas, possibly from entrepreneurs, are far more likely to boost the economy, as opposed to tools or money. Ideas such as religion and culture influence the masses into industrialisation. The video discusses Weber's study of capitalism and how the people's mindsets came to aid its further growth. The video's brief and straightforward explanation of Weber's theory aids in its credibility.

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strangledeggs · 4 years

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Strange Nostalgia For The Future – or: Death By A Thousand Taylor Swifts – or: This Is Pop?

Holy shit, when did this article get to be over 8 pages? Sorry everyone, Tumblr isn’t letting me do a cut, so this is just going to clog your feed for a while.

This began as a long-form review of Dua Lipa’s album “Future Nostalgia” with comparisons to the styles of a variety of other pop artists, but has since turned into something much broader and more nebulous. Call it my (incredibly subjective) attempt at defining a current “state of pop music” as it stands in the year 2020.

I’ll admit, I have a bias here, so I’ll lay that on the table: I didn’t particularly care for Dua Lipa prior to the release of “Future Nostalgia”. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, she didn’t really register on my radar until the album’s release, and so I didn’t hear any of her earlier songs until I spent a few minutes on Youtube scrambling to remember who she was and why this release was supposed to be such a big deal. I came up relatively empty-handed, with “New Rules” having more interesting production than anything in the way of a vocal hook and “Be The One” sounding blandly forgettable.

But music journalists were spinning this narrative that “Future Nostalgia” was Dua Lipa’s big moment, her “disco” album, her album full of “bangers” (yes, I know, that’s an archaism at this point, but what am I going to do, call them “vibes”?). We’ve seen hype like this before (at least I have), so we should always take some time when an album arrives with this much fanfare to ask that crucial question: is it justified? Does it live up to expectations?

I’m going to answer that question, but before I do, I want to take a step back and place that music journalism narrative within a broader music journalism meta-narrative that has been slowly gaining traction over the last decade. About 7 years ago (so around 2013), I wrote a guest article for the (what I assume is now defunct) blog Hitsville UK on another meta-narrative called “rockism”, by which older listeners and journalists tended to use to justify their dismissal modern pop music through the glorification of (and comparison to) the canon of rock music. This was not a unique article – many music journalists were writing about this same phenomenon that year; it will likely mark some sort of watershed moment in music journalism. Frequently contrasted with the meta-narrative of “rockism” (not so much in my own article, but definitely in others’) was a countering meta-narrative named as “poptimism”. It’s basically what it sounds like: an optimism that current pop music could be just as good as music of the past, or even better. This was, of course, already known in a lot of mainstream music journalism circles, but it did cause a bit of a stir in independent music journalism, especially since it seemed awfully hard to deny; then-recent examples of indie stars like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean* aspiring to make genuinely great pop music seemed like they were making a pretty good case for the poptimist outlook. Plus, as a new generation of music journalists raised on hip-hop began to cover the genre more seriously, it soon became clear that, given the crossover-laden history of rap, they would have to take pop music seriously too.

Needless to say, poptimism gained a lot of traction as a new paradigm, until it became the default outlook of music journalism by the middle of the decade. It has, as far as I can see, yet to relinquish its grip, and that’s not such a bad thing; arguably, a lot more women, queer people and people of colour have had their music taken more seriously since the shift. Before we get back to “Future Nostalgia”, however, there’s one more piece of this puzzle I want to put in place: coinciding with those early years of poptimism, pop itself hit a bit of a turning point in the year 2014. This was, of course, the release of Taylor Swift’s album “1989”.

What was so special about “1989”? It’s still a bit hard to answer that completely coherently, but it clearly changed the pop music landscape in meaningful ways. For one, it demonstrated that the overcoding of global pop music made at the hands of big-name producers was not just an approach reserved for the “born pop star” figures of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. Taylor Swift, formerly a country singer with pop leanings, now went headlong into Max Martin-penned chart-topping smashes, and just like that, she had become deterritorialized. It was a huge success, and, interestingly, one of the first albums that got a lot of independent music journalists (and me) to take her seriously despite being her most overtly commercially-driven. I think this speaks to the power of poptimism in 2014 from two angles: for the journalists, the lesson seemed to be that if someone is already doing something near-enough to mainstream pop and then breaks through with a mass-appeal hit, why not see this as a kind of fulfillment of artistic intent? And for Swift, if you’re already doing something near-enough to what’s playing on pop radio, why not go all the way with it and sacrifice your country “credibility” for the ability to have hits beyond the genre-specific? “1989” marked a turning point at which pop music, formerly seen as something people “sell out” to make, became something you “sell into”, erasing a specific, localized identity that could be exposed as a construction anyway and replacing it with the ambition to conquer the ears of the masses.

I should clarify here, however: there are two possible conclusions one can draw from poptimism. The one I just documented, that pop music as a global/commercial phenomenon can be great and should taken seriously by music journalism, is the more frequently-taken interpretation, but it’s not my preferred one. I would rather the alternative view, which is that most music that people have tended to hear the last several decades, whether marked by the seal of “pop” or not, has been pop music. Rock is a form of pop. So is country, so is hip-hop, so is jazz, folk, metal, etc. We can distinguish between, say, the commercial radio pop – which I’ll from this point on designate as “Pop” with a capital “P” – and the pop tradition, but everything descends from pop tradition in the end, and Pop is just one more subgenre among many, albeit by definition the most popular at its given moment. Seeing that this is pretty indisputably true (and if you don’t believe me, you a) haven’t been reading my blog for long enough and b) have some serious research to do), we might as well take Pop as seriously as any other form of pop and subject it to the same criticisms, while simultaneously adjusting our criticisms of other pop subgenres in relation to our new appreciation of Pop. Who created the texture of this Pop song? Does this metal song have a hook? Is the phrasing in this hip-hop song conducive to its overall rhythmic feel? And so on, and so on.

I prefer this approach because it doesn’t necessarily assume a supremacy of one genre so much as level the playing field to allow for a more robust and less prejudiced criticism. It also doesn’t let listeners off the hook, as many (non-critics/journalists, most likely), given the opportunity raised by the previously-detailed interpretation of poptimism, would lazily slip back into listening to Top 40 radio without attempting to seek things beyond the charts; this alternative interpretation challenges us to try and hear the similarities between Led Zeppelin, Rihanna, Young Thug and The Clash while recognizing what each do uniquely. Unfortunately, it seems like the former interpretation has won out, at least for most audiences, and we now have a listener-base that, instead of keeping their ears peeled for next-big-thing indie groups like Arcade Fire as they might have circa 2008-2012, is content to wait for an already-famous star to drop the next “1989” crossover smash**.

This brings us back to “Future Nostalgia”, the latest in a line of Pop albums that seem primed to vy for that coveted position. There is, however, a bit of a gulf between “1989” and “Future Nostalgia”, and it’s not just because the moment of “1989” and poptimism has already happened. It’s also not because Dua Lipa isn’t “crossing over” from any outsider genre like Swift did with her move away from country – if anything, Dua Lipa is doubling down on her Pop ambitions here by putting them up-front and trying to make this album as blockbuster-signalling as possible. The biggest gulf is the musical one: compared to “1989” (and, I should add, a slew of other blockbuster Pop albums from the last decade, which I’ll get to discussing soon enough), “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are oddly lackluster.

Let’s start with the good, though. On my first listen to the album, I wasn’t completely baffled that critics were hearing something momentous in it. There are absolutely (again, sorry) bangers on this. Ironically, the two that stood out to me immediately were two that I later learned weren’t even released as singles, which might speak to the marketing team’s inability to judge the quality of the music they were handling here. “Cool”, easily the best thing on “Future Nostalgia”, rides a sort of bouncy warping of the riff from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” as Dua Lipa gushes about how she just can’t control herself in front of her lover; it’s sweet, both lyrically and musically. “Love Again” (no relation to the Run The Jewels song) is perhaps the album’s most explicitly “disco” song with swelling strings and everything, and expresses a similar sentiment to “Cool”, though perhaps from a more reluctant angle: “God damn,” Dua Lipa sighs in the chorus, sounding simultaneously annoyed and amused, “you got me in love again”.

The songwriting on “Cool” and “Love Again” also happens to be some of the most basic on “Future Nostalgia”; the beat loops, albeit with some nice flourishes and rhythmic quirks, and Dua Lipa cycles through a few simple melodies, the catchiest always winding up in the chorus. “Love Again” is practically a blues song with its AAAB-repeat phrasing. I highlight the virtues of this simplicity because it throws much of the rest of the album into a stark contrast and exposes its greatest weakness: many of the other songs on “Future Nostalgia” feel fussed-over and patched together out of pieces that don’t always fit, as if the several writers*** involved in these songs weren’t in the same room when the track was finally put together. The album seems to be a case study in throwing everything at the wall and not bothering to consider whether it will stick. And yet it seems to have a small army of critics defending it, even going so far as to call it the pop (or at least Pop) “album of the year” – which has me wondering exactly what all the hype is about.

“1989” has something that a lot of other blockbuster Pop albums since its release do not: a personal touch. Taylor Swift worked hard prior to that album at building her brand as a confessional singer-songwriter, and even with the big-name productions and radio-primed hits, she maintains that image: one of her biggest “1989” hits, “Blank Space”, explicitly addresses her (supposed) romantic history and relationship to the media. Elsewhere, she does some fantasizing about classic movie archetypes and the impulse to drop everything and run away from it all, strongly reminiscent of her past work. It’s not as easy as it might sound to pull off this kind of thing, and I think Swift deserves credit not just for the excellent musicality of the songs she put her voice to, but the consistency of the strong personality she built across her career (with misstep “Reputation” sticking out as the glaring crack in the portrait).

So I won’t compare “Future Nostalgia” to “1989” beyond the initial poptimism narrative it bolsters. No, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t particularly personal – its mode seems to be more in line with what Robyn was already doing a few years before Swift, anticipating a poptimism that would effectively result in her deification over the course of the 2010s. Similar to Robyn in her “Body Talk” series, Dua Lipa seems to approach “Future Nostalgia” with a kind of assumed confidence as a dancefloor queen – more celebratory than confessional.

The celebration, however, proves to be pre-emptive; “Future Nostalgia” lacks two crucial things that “Body Talk” had in spades. The first is a general willingness to experiment. Robyn’s albums were packed with silly throwaways, but some of them stuck, and the best are featured on the collected version of the album, from the Snoop Dogg collaboration “You Should Know Better” to the cybernetic-pop-anticipating “Fembots” to the sassy “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do”. The title track of Dua Lipa’s album demonstrates a little bit of adventurousness, but it unfortunately flops, arriving in the form of awkward half-rapped verses that aren’t fun enough to leave a lasting impression. The only other potential outliers are the aforementioned “Cool” (which just happens to sound less disco than the rest but is otherwise a fairly standard, if well-written, pop song) and the album’s absolute nadirs, “Good In Bed” and the closing ballad “Boys Will Be Boys” (we’ll get to that in a bit). Otherwise, the album carries its aesthetic pretty consistently between tracks, giving little impression of any desire to experiment.

The second missing element is the consistency of the songs themselves. When Robyn’s songwriters toss her, say, a pseudo-dancehall song, they commit to it, making sure there are no weird melodic/harmonic/rhythmic hiccups and that the pieces fit together. And unfortunately, the majority of “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are full of exactly those kinds of hiccups and disjointed structural assemblages that leave me scratching my head. A lot of it’s subtle to the point that I can almost understand other critics missing these details, but I pick up on this stuff fast, and once I hear it, I can’t unhear it.

A lot of it’s in the phrasing; too often, Dua Lipa will go for a quick succession of staccato notes in a chorus when a simpler, slower phrase, or maybe just silence would have worked better (see “Break My Heart”, or the post-chorus of “Future Nostalgia”, in which she sings the 100% non-credible line “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha” – side note, has she even listened to top 40 radio in the last decade?). “Physical” is almost fun until you realize that the phrasing, melody and harmonic structure of the chorus would fit perfectly into any godawful Nickelback song.

Actually, “almost fun” is one of the phrases that I feel best describes so many songs on this album. Too many of the tracks set up something great only to follow through with some baffling songwriting choices. The second track in, “Don’t Start Now”, disrupts an excellently-phrased verse and infectious bassline with a chorus awkwardly parachuted in from what sounds like a 90s house song. The more in-character post-chorus that follows can’t help the song recover once you realize that it’s nowhere near as endearing as the original verse melody. That half-assed rapping makes a re-appearance in the bridge of “Levitating”, which is otherwise perfectly acceptable. If not for that moment, “Levitating” would come close to being the third pick of my favourite songs here, although you can’t fool me, Dua Lipa: I know that chorus is just a sped-up re-hash of the Jacksons’ “Blame It On The Boogie”. “Pretty Please” is also fine, funky and subtle, displaying some restraint on part of the songwriters and producers for once – though there’s also nothing about it that jumps out and grabs me. Besides the two standouts, is that the best I can hope for on this album, a song where nothing goes horribly wrong? At any rate, it’s better than the bland, shameless Lily Allen rip “Good In Bed”, which also features an utterly confounding “pop” sound effect in the chorus replacing one of the mind-numbingly repeated words.

There are some exceptions with regard to singers that can make use of this kind of disjointedness. Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener” walks a thin line, but it often pays off. See, Grande is a singer’s singer, at least by Pop standards; she’s known for crooning, for belting, for singing her lungs out. But she also wants to be a Pop icon to young people right now, and that means staying up-to-date in her production and songwriting. The trouble is, one of the most popular genres with the kids these days happens to be trap, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to Grande’s showboating vocals, favouring short, choppy phrasings and half-mumbled half-singing mixed almost low enough to blend with the music. So she compromises: some of the songs on “Sweetener”, such as the title track, have verses and choruses that feel as though they’re pulling in opposite directions, with Grande getting an opportunity to flaunt the long high notes in a percussionless section before dropping into those staccato bursts that suit the heavy 808s of trap. Despite it being more drum’n’bass/R&B throwback than trap, a similar dynamic is at play in Grande’s biggest hit from that album, “No Tears Left To Cry”. Unlike Dua Lipa’s lurching song structures, Grande’s feel intentional and thematic; the songs aren’t always bulletproof, but I feel like I learn something about her by hearing the tension of styles she’s struggling to stretch herself between. All I feel like I learn about Dua Lipa from the messiness of her songs is that either her, her songwriting team, or both are very confused about what goes into an effective pop song.

Of course, Ariana Grande is also operating in a slightly different mode than Dua Lipa in the first place: whereas Dua Lipa is engaging Pop radio in the recent tradition of satisfying formulaic hits like those of “1989”, Grande has one foot (or maybe even one and a half?) in the parallel tradition of R&B. While the two traditions frequently mix and crossover on the radio, they represent very different approaches to music whose distinction might provide some insight into why some of what Dua Lipa is trying to do isn’t working.

To put it simply, the basic unit of what we’ll call traditional pop is the song, and the performer of the song is meant to convey the essence of that song as a relatively unwavering whole – the performer is effectively the conduit for the song, which reaches the listener through the medium of the performer. The singer has some room to “interpret”, but once a given interpretation is found to be effective in its “hook” potential, it’s typically kept as part of the formalized song, written in stone, more or less.

R&B, true to its roots in “rhythm and blues” and, before that, jazz, essentially reverses this. Songs are present in R&B and not necessarily unimportant, but they typically become conduits for the performer’s own expressiveness. In this setting, the performer’s “interpretation” is actually the most important ingredient, as the performer’s style is effectively the product, the listener’s focus. This places greater emphasis on experimentation with phrasing, melody and other aspects of a song, as well as the potential differences between multiple recordings and performances of that song.

These two paradigms have consequential implications for singers of songs operating in a given mode. A traditional pop singer, for example, is going to be more likely to defer to the song as-written in their performance of it for a recording. An R&B singer, by contrast, is more likely to improvise, often delving into explorations of how to make their voice a more expressive instrument – in many cases, actually, it can be a matter of making their voice more like an instrument, full stop. The notes aren’t sung to express words so much as they are sung to express pure sound. Vocals can vary wildly in rhythm, giving off phrasings that might normally be considered unnatural, but, if placed artfully enough, can re-shape our expectations of pop music in the first place. These aren’t ironclad rules, by the way – the genres cross over frequently and the lines are often ambiguous. But I think defining the differences here can at least help us understand the split in the approaches of, say, Taylor Swift vs. Janet Jackson.

Arguably, the biggest R&B star in the world at the time of writing this remains Beyonce, and with fairly good reason: her powerful voice brings a lot to what are often already well-written songs. Take note here: something like “Formation” (which I have previously written about in my article on hip-hop’s inheritance of the post-punk legacy) or even “Drunk In Love” probably wouldn’t fly in the realm of Pop. Tracks like these are mainly embellished not necessarily with flashy songwriting or production flourishes (although they can have those too), but with Beyonce’s vocal interpretations of them, sometimes approaching something more like rapping than singing****. Note also: vocalizations in this context are given a certain freedom, a license to be weird within a certain range of acceptability. Need I remind you of “surfboard, surfboard, / Grainin’ on that wood”?

My point here is that R&B singers are playing by different rules than Dua Lipa. This isn’t just me arbitrarily deciding that what she’s doing isn’t “R&B enough” – you can here it in her approach. My criticism of her awkward phrasing is based largely on the fact that it doesn’t sound like she’s doing it to “experiment” with the songs she’s given. She repeats these phrases exactly the same way each time, as in the chorus of “Break My Heart”, just so you know it’s intentional. If she is, in fact, improvising, the songs aren’t very suited to it and her attempts are mostly unsuccessful; they become hooks that highlight their own weaknesses rather than bold forays into new rhythmic territory.

The most interesting part of “Future Nostalgia” is, by far, the backing music. Even when Dua Lipa’s singing and hooks fail, the production shines through (even here, though, there’s a caveat with regard to the last two tracks). Consider the sublimely gauzy vocal(?) loop at the beginning of “Levitating”; the sweeping disco violins of “Love Again”; the finger-popping funk bassline of “Don’t Start Now”; even the Justice-lite bass synths in the chorus of the otherwise by-the-numbers “Hallucinate”. “Physical”’s best aspect is, in fact, a small countermelody running in the background of the obnoxiously bland chorus.

This is where I can most understand what got music critics hyped up on this album in the first place: superficially, at least, it sounds pretty damn good. But I suspect the willingness to overlook its other obvious faults stems from a tendency among “poptimistic” critics to treat singers as interchangeable in a system they perceive to be dominated more by “sounds” than by music proper. In fact, the singer is a real make-or-break point in much of modern pop music (Pop or otherwise), likely due to the focal point they occupy; a great singer can occasionally salvage a terrible song, while a bad (or even just mediocre) singer can easily bring down the most well-constructed powerhouse hit.

A case against valuing “Future Nostalgia” solely on the basis of its production: the last Pop album I remember listening to where the production outshined the songwriting was Billie Eilish’s “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO?” Eilish’s songs aren’t bad, and are frequently even good – but I was surprised at how conventional, or even “traditional”, most of them were. “Bad Guy” and “All The Good Girls Go To Hell” are basically jazz songs. “Xanny” and “Wish You Were Gay” (the most lyrically immature, it must be acknowledged) are pretty standard singer-songwriter fare. Others tend to play to a type: either sleepy ballads (“When The Party’s Over”) or, the most interesting songs on the album, the hip-hop influenced minimalist pieces (“Bury A Friend”, “You Should See Me In A Crown”).

But of course almost all of these songs are transformed in part by some rather astonishing production. No one who’s heard “Bad Guy”’s synth-squiggle chorus would mistake it for jazz, and the chorus of “Xanny” squirms in a shroud of distorted bass that pull back when you least expect it – hardly typical sonic territory for most singer-songwriters. Even the already-powerful “Bury A Friend” hits harder than it might have without the surging crunches it’s afforded in the production.

My point, however, is not that the production is what makes this album – it doesn’t, at least not entirely. The production is roughly half of what’s interesting here. The other half is comprised by two things: the fact that most of the songs are fairly strong already (though I think Eilish could lose a few of the ballads and come out better from it), and the fact that Billie Eilish also happens to have a very distinct vocal style. Actually, that last part alone is probably the selling point for most people: Eilish’s eerie half-whispered delivery plays more of a role in constructing her album’s overall dark mood than the production. It has its limitations, and I wonder what her future will bring in terms of her ability to move beyond the role she’s effectively typecast herself in, but it has something on Dua Lipa: it has personality.

So vocal style is important, but that’s not all: as I mentioned, Eilish’s songs are also consistently stronger than Dua Lipa’s, even when both are at their lyrical worst. Sure, “Wish You Were Gay”’s self-absorbed whining about unrequited love and sexuality sounds exactly like what you’d expect to come from a undeveloped teenage singer. But the lyrics are the only thing wrong with that song; take those away, and the melodies and instrumentation sound pretty damn great. The same cannot be said for the overblown dollar-store balladry of Dua Lipa’s execrable “Boys Will Be Boys”, which, despite projecting an ostensibly more “progressive” outlook than “Wish You Were Gay”, falls flat on its face anyway. And I’ll take an Eilish ballad over “Good In Bed”, which sports an obnoxiously repetitive chorus – static, plastic, it sounds like a strained smile looks, desperately trying to convince you that this is fun, right?

“But wait,” you might say, “pop music is supposed to be fun! And isn’t that what most of ‘Future Nostalgia’ aspires to? Shouldn’t we forgive Dua Lipa for some of her mediocre songwriting if her goal in making us dance is at least a defensible one?”

And the answer is no, because Pop is already full of music more fun than this. The way I see it, there are several ways in which one could make music more fun than “Future Nostalgia” (better songwriting being one I’ve already discussed to death here), but I’ll wager that a fairly reliable method is that frequently employed by Lady Gaga: do something musically outlandish and downright weird.

“Bad Romance” is the obvious lodestar here, but Gaga’s career is full of the absurd: just take pretty much any song off of “Born This Way”. Even the “normal” songs like “Yoü and I” (at least pre-“Joanne”) come across as weird by virtue of being placed next to something like “Electric Chapel”. And all this is done in the service not only of raising eyebrows, but in the name of fun. Even some of Gaga’s weaker efforts like “Venus” (or many others on “Artpop”) have a winking slyness to them that lets you laugh along with her. It rarely feels like she’s “serious” when she’s singing about love, sex, or dancing all night, but she gets you dancing anyway.

“Future Nostalgia”, by contrast, has few attempts at any kind of weirdness, and those it does have fall flat. I’ve already mentioned the cringe-y pseudo-rapping, but the spoken-sung pre-chorus of “Physical” is just as embarrassing, bringing the song’s momentum (its second-greatest virtue) to a screeching halt with an awkward phrase that feels totally unnecessary. And then there’s that sound effect on “Good In Bed”. These moments detract from the album because they feel half-assed, like Dua Lipa never bothered to commit to the bit she tacked on. And aside from this, “Future Nostalgia” remains pretty conventional Pop – she’s not exactly reinventing disco here, just emulating it for a new generation with mixed results. If only she could pull a “Heartbeat” or “Love Hangover” out of her bag, but the album is so radio-oriented that the songs rarely reach the 4-minute mark even when they find a groove worth hanging on to. It’s as if she mistook the law M.I.A. ironically lays down at the end of her biggest hit for sage advice: “Remember: no funny business!”

There is one more aspect of the poptimism that helped propel this album in the eyes of critics I have yet to discuss: the paradigm’s coinciding with the recent wave (is it the fourth? I’ve lost count) of popular feminism. This was significant for Taylor Swift at the moment of “1989” because it allowed for interpretations of songs such as “Blank Space” to reach beyond a simple commentary on her stardom and discomfort with media coverage, branching out into a more expansive reading of the song as representative of the ways in which women in general are demonized for their past relationships. Feminism, as a cultural framing device, was crucial in shaping listener perceptions not just of “Blank Space”, but of many other songs on the album. It also helped to launch a whole wave of emerging and returning Pop artists’ albums and singles that traded in similar (vaguely) politically-charged lyrics.***** In the years that followed, a veritable opening of the floodgates would happen with regard to public feminist consciousness-raising, culminating in specific incidents such as the #metoo movement.

For the record, I think this was largely good. I’m under no illusion that “1989” is in any way a politically radical album, but I think the return of pop feminism has generally had a net positive influence in getting pop artists of all kinds of re-think their music’s relationship to gender politics. That being said, there are two things I resent about its lasting impact. The first is the kind of forced extrapolation of songs that bring up gender in any way into “feminist” anthems when they’re largely about relations that have little to do with the matter. One case in point might be Dua Lipa’s pre-”Future Nostalgia” hit “New Rules”; inexplicably, I often see fans trying to make the song’s lyrics out to be some kind of political diatribe about the cruelty of men to women or something like that, when in fact it sounds more like a typical “bad relationship” song, the kind that have been on the charts for decades by now.

But the other thing I’ve come to dread from pop-feminist Pop is the inevitable half-assed “message songs” that seem designed to cash in on using feminism as a signifier that an otherwise apolitical artist is still hip and knows what’s up. Whether through “New Rules” fan encouragement or her own hubris, Dua Lipa has regrettably chosen to end “Future Nostalgia” with such a song: “Boys Will Be Boys” (no relation to the significantly better-written song of the same name by Stella Donnelly). I don’t really want to write a lot about this song because part of the problem with it is that it’s bad in a lot of boring ways, but I do think it’s significant that it was singled out by several other critics (even those who liked the album) as the album’s worst song by miles. I’m hoping this shows a change in perspective here, as critics get harsher about flops like this one, and hopefully the eventual end result from this pushback is that Pop stars will stop trying to convince us they’re “real feminists” with empty songs like “Boys Will Be Boys” that are tacked on to the end of their “bangers” album as a kind of placating afterthought.

So a number of critics have indeed placed too much stock in this album: contrary to the feeling you may have gotten from my relentless criticisms here, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t call it “good” either. It sits in a mid-tier of Pop albums over-enthusiastically pushed out during this era of high poptimism. It’s not the next “1989”, or “Lemonade”, or “Body Talk”, or “WHEN WE ALL ETC.” It’s just a mediocre album with a few great songs that were somehow never released as singles.

Is the inflation of “Future Nostalgia”’s reputation a sign of poptimism’s imminent bust? Are we entering a period of critical groupthink and gradual decay? These questions are too big to answer here, or perhaps at all for now (likely we’ll know the answer for sure in another decade). But I want to end this on a positive note by singling out a singer I haven’t mentioned yet as perhaps the greatest Pop artist of the last 20 years: in all these comparisons, I never got around to bringing up Rihanna.

On one hand, much of the poptimist revolution in criticism has involved taking the studio albums of Pop artists as seriously as their counterparts in other genres. On the other, Pop has never really stopped being a singles genre, and few have demonstrated this better than Rihanna. This is not to deny that she’s released some totally listenable, or even great, albums in her own right: “Talk That Talk” and especially “ANTI” stand as excellent records that came along relatively late in her career. But, well, raise your hand if you’ve actually listened to, say, “Good Girl Gone Bad”. Now raise your hand if you know “Shut Up And Drive”, “Don’t Stop The Music”, “Disturbia”, and, of course, “Umbrella”. See what I mean?

Perhaps I could blame “1989” again in part for this shift in focus from Pop singles to Pop albums. It’s pretty remarkable, after all, that the album is as consistent as it is, and I think that might have caught a lot of critics who were expecting otherwise off-guard. I think another problem, however, resides in the dominant mindset among critics in the first place, the idea that albums are the more valuable art form, the standard by which greatness is measured. Even I find myself incapable of breaking free of that format of evaluation – I’m much less likely to seek out more of an artist’s stuff based on a few great singles of theirs compared to if I hear an entire album from them that I like.

This might be slightly unfair of us critics, but there are workarounds to help correct this bias. One of those workarounds is the compilation. If an artist can make an album’s worth of great songs, but they happen to be spread across a number of their otherwise-mediocre albums, they can still win favour by collecting all (or most) of those gems in the same place, a “greatest hits” collection being the most common******. This seems like a pretty reasonable way of enjoying singles-oriented artists for those of us who are still stuck on the old album format.

But compilations have also never been as popular to review among critics as studio albums (I don’t know, maybe many feel like it’s cheating to collect the best stuff in one place?) and, as stated, it seems like poptimism’s paradigm shift has only reified the bias towards albums by putting more weight on Pop artists’ studio albums than before. Further, as compilations have started to die out (since anyone in the streaming age can assemble their own “greatest hits” playlist that will have all their own personal favourites on it), recent Pop artists often aren’t even given the chance to be evaluated at their best in a compilation format. I wonder if this is also a contributing factor in the hype surrounding “Future Nostalgia”; though it would probably be better remembered for its singles which could be collected on a later “Best Of Dua Lipa”, the fact that such a collection is unlikely to materialize pushes critics towards trying to sell listeners (and themselves) on this being Dua Lipa’s “definitive statement” and reason to take her seriously as an artist simply because it’s the most consistent thing she’s released so far.

Regardless, Rihanna is a model artist in terms of being a singles-oriented Pop singer deserving of a great compilation. If someone were to put it together, I’m fairly certain it could rival Madonna’s “The Immaculate Collection”, the former (basically archetypal) gold standard for a Pop artist’s greatest hits. Imagine hearing “Umbrella”, “Work”, and “We Found Love” all in the same place, uninterrupted by the inevitable string of lesser artists’ hits you’d inevitably hear if that place was the radio or some poorly algorithmically-generated playlist. My concern is that with the death of the compilation and shift in the expectation for the Pop artist’s studio albums to be their defining moments, such an album will only ever exist in an unofficial capacity. Which is fine, I guess – if you hate pop canon. But I don’t, so I patiently await the return of a collective memory for singles that extends beyond the radio and the playlist.

*Interesting to see how these examples have aged.

**Don’t get me wrong, I like “1989”! But its potentially negative influence will be detailed further as I continue.

***This isn’t a criticism of songwriting teams in general – certainly great songs have come out of the modern collaborative approach to pop songwriting, and I’ll get to those soon.

****And of course there’s a whole other conversation to be had about the ways in which hip-hop and R&B, formerly more separate genres, have been in the process of merging for the last two decades as performers in each have realized how much their interpretive approaches have in common.

*****It should be noted that this trend started several years earlier in “underground” and “indie” scenes and only just made its way into the Pop mainstream around 2014, but that’s a discussion for another article.

******Actually, even if an artist has only one great song, multi-artist compilations can step in to help. But since I’m focusing mainly on the respective cults of personality of specific Pop artists here, I won’t get into those. I should also add that Pop is by no means the only genre in which this happens: there are definitely so-called “classic rock” artists who I wouldn’t bother listening to outside of a compilation of their best stuff (Queen, for example).

#Music #Music criticism #Pop music #Dua Lipa #Future Nostalgia #Rihanna #Billie Eilish #Beyonce #Taylor Swift #Robyn #Lady Gaga #Ariana Grande

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appears · 5 years

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Has it been two weeks or two years? Notes on Taylor Swift's Lover

I got swept up in all of the hype of the new Taylor Swift album, reading retrospectives and reviews and analyses and theories, and listening and re-listening to what is basically another carefully crafted season of the Taylor Swift show. It was both over- and underwhelming, and though the album has been out two weeks now, it feels so much longer.

What Swift is really great at is good old-fashioned song-writing, the type with easy and instantly recognizable hooks and personalities, such that a listen or two is all it takes to get to know a song. I have listened to my favorite tracks a dozen times at least and the entire album straight through four times and it already feels as comfortable and familiar as an old sweater; this speaks to both an achievement of an album that contains eighteen songs and a failure of its level of sophistication. But no matter how catchy an album is, once the trail of breadcrumbs left in the form of puzzles and clues and hints and references and Easter eggs have been eagerly plucked, gobbled up and spat out solved, some of the excitement and almost all of the novelty disappears. Something gets lost. Something new takes its place. Longevity will vary according to fan-level, but as Swift herself once said three albums ago, I'm like, I just, I mean this is exhausting, you know.

This album cycle was not unlike the fatigue that follows binge-watching, like waiting a year and a half for your favorite sci-fi homage to return only to greedily consume all eight episodes in a nine-hour fog of sensory overload, blearily stumbling away from the screen to wonder if having instant access was a Pyrrhic victory, not because the show itself wasn't entertaining, but because it seems somehow a little sad and cheap, that something that could take so much time and care to put together, and generates so much excitement, can be consumed in a few hours and forgotten in a few days. What a banquet we can all feast upon at once! but reviews of Orange is the New Black's last season are already buried somewhere in the archives. Hey, people want they want, and they usually want it all right now; the fact that human beings are typically very bad at understanding what they actually want is irrelevant to the current pace of pop culture. If you're dizzy, the only solution is to get off the ride, keeping in mind you've exiled yourself from the conversation -- sorry, it’s been almost four months, no one cares what you think about Game of Thrones’s last episode anymore. It's no wonder Netflix is experimenting with the traditional model of staggering episodes on a weekly schedule rather than dropping them all at once: all the ice cream and pool inflatables are no match for the emotional and physical capital that can be generated from a sustained, long-term hype machine with weekly beats, like pulse rates that spike sales and interest intermittently, rather than once, all too briefly.

But this is where we live now, and Swift either shrewdly or stupidly tapped into the phenomenon, having us all spend the majority of the album's peak in the inception and pre-order phase, nudged with the help of a de rigeur Japanese model of releasing various editions with slightly different content to scoop extra sales during the album's limited maximum-sale window: the first week ("[b]ut it also leads to a front-loaded first week, as Lover burned off much of its sales once the pre-order period ended. Fans will certainly continue to buy Lover in big-box retail stores and on her website, but we’re not going to see the same astronomical traditional album sales week after week" -Forbes). And like the end of all major events we spend so long awaiting, we now just live in its memory, a little burned out.

I grow weary with Lover. I find it interesting, a sort of pop-music quilt of patchy trends and too-little, too-late band-wagon jumping like “You Need to Calm Down,” and “The Man” two songs that have frustratingly great hooks (and wow “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” which I initially loved because it sounded like a lost track off of Born to Die, but which I'm starting to resent for the same reason), a couple of surprisingly nice old-Taylors (“Lover,” “Daylight”) a few hints of interesting new-Taylors (“False God,” “It's Nice to Have a Friend”) and filler “content” that is far too specific to be universal in any way that I now mostly skip over (you know the ones, and also the ones that sound too much like stuff off of Reputation). I've never been one to listen to lyrics over the actual music, but Swift makes it impossible not to, and I find myself so lost in her head that I can't really enjoy the forest for the trees.

I now find myself enjoying Reputation a lot more. It feels unfair to compare it to Lover, with its Max-Martin-and-Shellback-pedigreed production, and I certainly don't want to turn this into a case of Antonoff versus the traditional Swedish school of pop, but Reputation’s theme feels more cohesive and confident as a whole, and somehow more honest in its spite. The music is also better. Anyway, don't ask me, I'm a 1989 girl. Everyone reacted to it and everything we missed is in a YouTube video uploaded last week, and up next, here are some plan with me Taylor bujo spreads and I listened to every Taylor song for the first time and a mukbang set to Taylor songs, probably, but only for a few days more before it all disappears into the Internet’s deep drawers because the ride is already over now with too much to keep us busy until TS8, and I'm happy to get out of this only $12.99 poorer.

#pop #music #taylor swift #lover #ts7

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sarastudiesstuff-blog · 5 years

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Network: On How to be Subversive and Sexist

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" (Chayefsky 1976.) is the angry cry, turned meaningless mantra, yelled by both an angry disparaged man, Howard Beale, and his masses of young fans fed up with the way the world works. This film is a sharp satire on television culture, infotainment, and reality tv. However, in spite of it’s subversion of other media texts it still manages to espouse the dominant ideologies of gender and age. Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen is the leader of a television channel, but she's also a cold, stereotypical "Frigid Bitch", the sort of woman often demonized in media as an emotionless homewrecker (which she is). She also encapsulates the fear of the detached younger generation, so brainwashed by TV that they do not have feelings the same way the older generation still does. Howard Beale’s masses of fans also contribute to this narrative, as they are easily manipulated by the shows they consume. Media had a heavy influence on this films creation, as it is about media itself, as through the medium of film it is found easier to represent television in such a similar medium. As subversive as the film is to television, it is still a film, created to make money, which means many people control the production. The ratings board, the studio, and the director can all make executive decisions that can make or break a film. Though this film attempts to make audiences think critically about what they're watching and seeing, and think about how media giants manipulate us to their own ends, the film itself often fails to question the status quo in favor of a slightly less controversial piece.

Network is a satirical film about the television industry. The characters, all television personalities, directors, or organizers must deal with a changing media landscape and attempt to up their ratings. When news anchor Howard Beale learns from longtime friend Max Sc that he will be fired, he goes on air and claims he will kill himself during the next broadcast, and goes on a tirade about what is wrong with the world, uttering the famous line “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore” (Chayefsky, 1976.). After his tirade gets some of the highest ratings in television history Diana Christensen, up and coming television programming director, decides to capitalize on it and create the Howard Beale show, featuring Beale as a “mad profit of the airwaves” to espouse his violent, but ultimate meaningless, complaints about the world (Chayefsky 1976). The Howard Beale Show is the most direct satire we have, as the show gets many other vague segments, and turns what was once a news anchor into a cultural icon, a symbol with no meaning behind it; “his ‘news’ show evolves into what we now call ‘infotainment’ ” (Trier 2006.) . Not only does the show satirize the infotainment style of news broadcasting that has now become so prominent online, but also the lengths to which one will go for ratings. Indeed, Diana’s other show project is a satire of the reality tv market getting more and more sensational and violent as she strikes up a deal with a terrorist group to make a reality show about their lives as terrorists, stating :“I want counter-culture, I want anti-establishment” (Chayefsky 1976). The two collide when The Howard Beale Show’s ratings dwindle, and Diana decides to let it go off with a bang by organizing for the terrorists to kill Howard on screen, ending the now less profitable Beale Show, and setting up a truly enticing second season of the now more popular terrorist reality tv. Hemmed amongst the satire is a portrait of characters Diana and Max, as they begin and end a relationship that ruins Max’s marriage, and heavily criticizes a so-called ‘television generation’ brought up on tv to have no real emotions, they play out the phases of their lives like television shows without any real connections. In these sections the film seems to uphold an older predominantly male generation as the last ‘good one’, and a younger generation, represented primarily by Dunaway, as emotionless or naive, with only the tv to guide them. That brings us to the dominant ideologies upheld in the film.

While intending to criticize the media and it's often unethical, callous way of working, Network seem ignorant to the marginalized groups the media ignores, undermining the media, but not the status quo. It seeks to be a harsh criticism of tv culture, and of the 'infotainement' we still see today, sensationalizing news stories while offering no solutions for the problems they espouse. Yet the female characters are polarizing. Diana Christensen is a hard, cold woman, Max is “not sure she's capable of any real feelings” because “she's television generation” (Chayefsky 1976). There is a tension in her character that serves to uphold the existing power structure because in spite of her role as a sharp satire on the sort of people who make and write the films and media texts that exploit the world, as written her character plays as a stereotypical cold woman. In addition, the actress playing her was not well treated after the film came out, Krishner’s 2014 review of the book about the making of the film he describes how “Mad as Hell pauses on three separate occasions to elaborate fights over just how much (and which bits) of Dunaway’s breasts might appear on screen”. A definite detriment to the treatment of her character both on and off screen. Also damningly, she seems to serve the purpose of showing that audience that the older male generation is better than the younger, more diverse generation, though not in so many words. The only characters who question Diana’s morality are the older male characters, Max and Nelson Chaney, claiming “this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting”, upon keeping the now obviously mentally ill Beale on air, and later describing ‘The Howard Beale Show’ as “gutter depravity” (Chayefsky 1976). Diana and the mindless hordes of youth who are angry at something they don’t understand are the only other young people we see. The other woman is Max’s wife, a put upon woman from an older generation who has lived through max’s infidenlity, suffering many a “convention weekend with [his] secretary” for reasons we are never privy to, because Louise Schumacher does not get to be a fully rounded character (Cheyefsky 1976). An audience member can read into her character and see her as a woman trapped by the society she grew up in, and stuck in her ways, even when they harm her, but with her whopping two minutes of screen time we only hear her lament about her husband. These women serve to paint a very madonna/whore picture within the film. The cold calculating bitch, and the kindly put upon wife are the two options shown to women. The cast of male characters is more nuanced and diverse, as usual, and serves to uphold the power structures they put in place as their portrayal is more sympathetic.

The film posits “television is not just dehumanizing;it establishes a divide between those who were brought up on it and those from an earlier era”, but in the view of this divide the perpetrate a negative bias towards a younger generation (Krishner 2014). The youth of the film are most shown as reactions to Beale’s famous ‘mad as hell’ speech, and are so easily influenced by the messages on their screens that they are convinced to angry, without any idea of what they’re really angry at. The manipulable youth flocking to Howard Beale, and watching his show en mass are certainly not upheld as the sort of people one should want to be. They, like Diana, are “television generation”, criticized for being “an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube” in one of Howard’s rousing speeches. While Max and Howard are flawed, they are beat down by the world around them, the picture of them as men with no generation left, seeking meaning and emotion in a world that seems to have shifted away from both is the most sympathetic in the film. Yet it blames the world, not the characters who made it. The ‘things were better the way they used to be’ narrative is never really challenged in the film, unless the audience to read into Max’s wife’s performance as a true vindication of him, and not simply another displaced person calling on the sins of a broken man. Max is in fact the most sympathetic character in the film, as his wife gives her one and only monogue, the camera often trains on his reaction instead of her, painting a clear picture of who we are really supposed to care about.

This media text is a film about technology, something that would not have been created without the existence of film or television in the first place. The film explores the dangers of a medium that, according to Itzkoff (2011), the screen writer “described in another note as ‘an indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government’ ” , so the film would not exist without this supposed superpower. A film about the dangers of the television generation seems almost ironic as the two are so closely tied together it seems farcical for one to truly criticize the other. The media was instrumental to the creation and distribution of this work. Writer Paddy Chayefsky “made his early reputation in 1950s live television drama” (Kirshner 2014), giving him a direct pipeline to the world he intended to criticize. This film is about the influence that technology can have over the masses, and how that is used to pacify and distract them. Beale’s speeches are only about needing to “get angry”, because “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them”, but at first never asks them to do anything (Cheyefsky 1976) . The influence of technology is the choice of medium, the fact that this is a film presumes a separation between the world of film and tv that in the current technical climate grows smaller every day. However, in the film television looms over the characters as a specter to be criticized. The characters understand the world through tv, and interesting thought as film is much more global medium. Though Network isn’t concerned with appealing to a non-american audience, it seems only interested in an america-centric narrative. Globalization was, however, on the mind of this film. When Howard Beale does finally demand his audience “send a telegram to the White House”, ironically after exclaiming minutes of screen time earlier “I don't want you to write to your congressman”, he is lampooned for it by the network higher ups. In a meeting with the new head of the network he is told “There are no nations, there are no peoples”, and that instead “the world is a college of corporations” (Chayefsky 1976). An apt description of a future controlled by TNC’s instead of governments that has already begun to take up. In this way the film criticizes that while tv shows themselves are often not global television corporations certainly are, and that these transnational corporations have the capacity to run everything.

Structural powers that be are always limiting to any art that must turn a profit and Network is no exception. Any film is at the mercy of the studio distributing it, lest it never see the light of day, and so the film couldn’t be too offensive. In his book Mad As Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in the Movies David Itzkoff (2014) “notes an important curiosity-at the urging of the studio, Chayefsky dropped a scene in which Diana(Faye Dunaway) picks up a bisexual hustler in a gay bar and has an emotionally complex sexual encounter with him” (Krishner 2014). This moment, that could have humanized the cold Diana, and provided some lgbt representation is taken away not by the artist, but by the powers that be that deem it too salacious for a film that needs to be sold to the masses. Instead we get a glossed over line about how Diana’s “husband ran off with his boyfriend”, which certainly does not count as representation. An interesting change, as one of director Sydney Lumet’s previous films, Dog Day Afternoon, features a man needing money to help his transgender girlfriend fully transition. As much as the characters on screen are trying to sell their tv shows to the fictional masses, so too are the makers of the film trying to sell you their product. In that way it still had to be accessible and enjoyable to a large audience, so the masses of young people arise, and the older generation can be secure in their superiority. So it appeals to that market, and makes the studio feel secure in it’s distribution. Men fill most of the lead roles, so it will appeal to men, so it will secure in its final gross. Any art made under the sort of studio system film operates in is at the mercy of capitalism, no matter how artistic it may attempt to be, or even succeed in being. As much as the film criticizes the television industry, it is still a part of the film industry. In seeking capital any film is prevented from being too risky or critical, though this one manages to still get it’s message across.

Though Network criticizes the excess and culture of television, it lacks the foresight to also subvert the existing status quo of gender, and age, and the all too common narrative that in the past things were better. It’s creation was heavily influenced by the tv industry, as that is what it is about, and of course the powers that be in the film industry put certain restrictions on the finished product. In the end it is a creative endeavor made under capitalism, and therefore still in search of profit. The tension between the existing status quo and the technology that Network works so hard to subvert create a very interesting work in which some facets of modern life are heavily satirized, and others stay in line with the dominating ideologies.

#essays #posts #movies #film #feminist #feminism #critique #feminist critique #writing #my writing

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myhahnestopinion · 5 years

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REVIEW: The Lego Movie 2 - The Second Part

The Lego Movie's great success was not only how it managed to build its toy advertisement origins around an affecting emotional core, but the surprising use of its intricately animated world as an additional metaphorical layer for its celebration of creativity with its reveal the characters are acting out the fantasy of a young child. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, as the fourth installment of the cinematic universe, can no longer hide behind such charades, making much of the movie feel like a waiting game for the real-world shoe to drop. But while its far less fresh, funny, and free-spirited than its predecessor, The Lego Movie 2 still delights because it realizes this, and switches its focus from building up these walls to emphatically breaking them down, in an arc that miraculously manages the same emotional resonance as the original. The film has a clear message and just enough clever jokes and catchy songs to keep the audience engaged in order for it to land: everything can be awesome as long as we open our hearts to one another, toxic masculinity is just as cruel to ourselves as it is to others, and you should go out and buy some Lego Movie Branded Legos and the complementary soundtrack album.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, like the cheeky title implies, connects directly to the end of the first film, opening with the invasion of Bricksburg by Planet Duplo, a representation of a young boy’s playscape becoming suddenly shared with his younger sister. The film cuts to five years later, the same passage of time experienced by viewers, and the Lego universe has become a dark-and-gritty riff on the high-octane world of Mad Max, with its citizens in a constant state of panic of another invasion. This fear is soon proven right when ever-cheery Emmet (Chris Pratt) accidentally attracts the attention of the intergalactic General Mayhem, who kidnaps his friends and departs for the Systar System, raising the threat of a foretold “Our-Mom-Ageddon.”

Just as the young boy’s world is upended, the sequel immediately has a noticeably different rhythm to it, with directorial duties shifting hands from Phil Lord and Chris Miller to Trolls’ Mike Mitchell. Lord and Miller remain screenwriters, stacking their script with another round of manic energy and irreverent jokes, but the abundance of poppy musical numbers and a more absurd visual styling bear the trademark of its director.

The eclectic cast of characters returns, including Allison Brie’s Unikitty, Charlie Day’s Benny the Spaceman, and Will Arnett’s Batman, with several winks to the character’s amusing Lego Movie spin-off. His personal growth from that film is lightly retconned to make his story work here, just as most of the cast are just along for the ride this time, striped of larger complexity and roles to compensate for several prominent new additions. These new characters include Stephanie Beatriz as the aforementioned General Mayhem, and Watevra Wa-Nabi, a shapeshifting alien queen played by Tiffany Haddish, thriving in the madcap world of animation and shining in several songs

While the cast is packed, notably absent from any of those major behind-the-scenes roles is a woman, an odd choice for a film all about the conflicts of a brother and sister learning to build a creative vision together. The Lego Movie 2’s toy-ad origins bleed through in the film’s targeted approach to male viewers, and targeted approach overall. In contrast to his lore-traversing spin-off, Batman spends much of the film out of his classic comic book suit and in pieces likely available for purchase as soon as one leaves the theater. Similarly, Aquaman returns in a cameo role, but with a face-lift and voice-lift to promote corporate synergy with Warner Bros. Pictures shiny new billion-dollar-grosser. The film gorgeous animation continues to reflect true-to-life Lego pieces, but for all of its satire, there’s no comment of Lego’s practice of making distinct figurines for its girl-marketed sets that subtly widens the divide the movie wants its viewers to bridge, because certainly the parent company needs those toys sold as well. The first Lego Movie also had this imperative to contend with and managed its task far more gracefully, though The Second Part is additionally forced to deal with “Lego Movie” becoming a brand onto itself.

As the plot progresses, however, the movie’s laser-focused targeting slowly shifts from frustrating to powerful, with a message directly addressed to young boys being pressured to close themselves off emotionally to be perceived as grown-up and masculine. Marketing images such as these switch from being pushed to being lampooned, most prominently in Chris Pratt’s secondary role as Rex Dangervest, a parody of those tough action-heroes that dominate cinema and the actor’s recent career. Dangervest is contrasted with the affable Emmet, a holdover from Pratt’s comedic origins, in a bit of meta-commentary so brilliant it might even go over the actor’s head. The first Lego Movie was about creation, the second about destruction; specifically, the destruction of self and social bonds that results from the damaging desire to exorcise one’s self-expression and reject the effort needed to ensure that “everything being awesome” is all-inclusive. With no need to maintain that original duel-world façade, The Lego Movie 2 hits this message hard, but that message hits hard because of its importance. If The Lego Movie 2 wants to speak to young boys in order to sell more toys, it certainly found a noble method with which to do it.

Like Ralph Breaks the Internet, which combined the intrusiveness of internet advertisements and Disney cross-promotion with a surprising examination of toxic relationships and unhealthy insecurity, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part lies in a very peculiar realm of late-stage capitalism. It’s a confrontation of societal ills packaged inside a brightly-colored, melodious product, and is quite proudly, and effectively, both. The major musical number of the film is entitled “Catchy Song,” with lyrics proclaiming the inevitability of it getting stuck within your head, and, while far from the show’s best tune, its frustratingly correct. The film is clearly commercial, but never crass. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part replicates, to varying degrees of success, the zany humor, quirky characters, and gorgeous animation that made the first film such a hit, but also doesn’t forget to properly place its most important piece: the heart. And maybe there’s room for a shiny new box of Legos right beside it.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, also starring Elizabeth Banks, Nick Offerman, and Maya Rudolph, is in theaters now.

#film #2019films #review #thelegomovie #thelegomovie2

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porcileorg · 4 years

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A conversation about Kunstverein München’s group show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class’ (2020-09-12 – 2020-11-01)

Conversants: The Bensplainer, Magda Wisniowska, and Victor Sternweiler [talking on Skype, in the evening of Nov 11, 2020.]

Victor: We should start our conversation about Kunstverein München’s show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class,’ [online through 2020-11-22] curated by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, while making clear that we were not able to attend the parallel program, consisting of tours, lectures, performances, and video screenings, which were partially screened online, and an extensive reader was published too. This will simply be a conversation about the actual show. One could claim that such a review can’t do justice to the whole project, but I claim that nobody was able to attend everything, except for the makers, so one can only have a fragmented take on it, and therefore it is legitimate to, mainly or solely, talk about the work installed in the space.

Exhibition consisted work by Angharad Williams, Annette Wehrmann, Gili Tal, Guillaume Maraud, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Lise Soskolne, Matt Hilvers, Stephen Willats.

A film screening series selected by Nadja Abt, showing work by Adrian Paci, Agnès Varda, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Kopple, Berwick St Collective, Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant, Max Göran.

A single event screening with films selected by Simon Lässig.

Accompanying program consisting of a book presentation (Düşler Ülkesi) by Cana Bilir-Meier (in conversation with Gürsoy Doğtaş), lectures by NewFutures, Ramaya Tegegne, Tirdad Zolghadr and a publication presentation (Phasenweise nicht produktiv) from a collaboration by Carolin Meunier and Maximiliane Baumgartner.

The reader containing contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, Steven Warwick.

Exhibition documentation: https://artviewer.org/not-working-artistic-production-and-matters-of-class/

Magda: To help, I was rereading today the booklet accompanying the exhibition, although I don’t see how the text is really going to address what we see in the actual Kunstverein space. For example, I quote, “The works on view are characterized by a consciousness of how background, socialization, education, and artistic practice are inevitably entangled. They hence allow for a consideration of these categories in relation to the actual lived realities of their producers.” Does it mean that the artists somehow reflect their own social background? Autobiographically on their own lived reality? Well, by large, they don’t. We don’t know what social background these artists are coming from.

Victor: How would you know anyhow?

Magda: Instead, the coherency of the exhibition relies on going through all the positions which were outlined in the booklet’s introduction. So, Stephen Willats investigates the historical aspect of class, Annette Wehrmann performs the interrogation of the economic model, Josef Kramhöller’s is a more personal approach to consumerism, Gili Tal tackles gentrification and cosmopolitanism, and Angharad Williams addresses the performative and fashion , and so on. And at least two of the artists are no longer alive.

Victor: In the time of Covid, where you try to make ends meet, how can you say no? What I’m trying to say is that the precariousness of their class is testified also by artists not being able to nowadays refuse to participate in an exhibition in which they potentially don’t think they fit in. They do it, plain and simple.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think it is due to Covid. It’s a general trend. If you're invited by the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, whatever their exhibition idea is, you participate, as an artist. It’s not anymore the time when an Alighiero Boetti could angrily refuse an invitation by Harald Szeemann.

Magda: Is that really the central problem of this exhibition? There are a lot of problematic issues, and I am now again looking at the text, especially at the end, where it states that “today the question of class is not addressed anymore.” That is completely untrue. Much of postmodernism consisted precisely of the critical inquiry into questions of class. I don’t know about you, Bensplainer, but in my time in London we had to read a lot of Bourdieu, especially his idea concerning cultural capital.

The Bensplainer: Jameson was my lighthouse at that time!

Magda: It was a big thing! You can’t say really the topic had been ignored since then.

The Bensplainer: Especially after the last Documenta in 2017.

Magda: I acknowledge that the question of class is no longer about a white male perspective, defined by simple economics. But really? What does this exhibition add to this conversation?

The Bensplainer: I think that the main problem here is when you set up a thematic exhibition. If you, as a curator, have some aprioristic ideas about the specific interpretations on cultural work, then you tend to apply them to your own exhibition making. Although, you tend to lose contact with the works themselves. You tend to look more at the anecdotal parts of the work and at its processes. Let’s be honest, there are no great works in the exhibition, the ones being able to question your own vision of forms and of the world in which these forms happen.

Magda: I think the older works displayed here, as Stephen Willats’ ones, from the 1980s, present some problems: they are, in fact, historical, and at that time had a certain currency, whereas they seem today …

The Bensplainer: … nostalgic.

Magda: And dry as well: this kind of class idea, of people living in a housing block – like he documented and interviewed – it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. The other thing is that it seems so British, so entwined in that specific culture. We know this Monty Python sketch, right? This kind of satire, for example, wouldn’t fit German society at that time, I think.

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Magda: The other thing I was thinking of, while walking through the exhibition, was Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ (1995) Did anyone think of that? The song is about a girl from the upper classes, who wants to behave as being from the lower. But she never achieves that, because she always has her rich daddy in the background. I think that a potential problem this exhibition faces is of glamorizing this kind of a working-class cliché.

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Victor: That song is especially ironic, as it was brought to my attention by a friend that Danae Stratou, the artist, industrialist heir and wife of Yannis Varoufakis, is the subject of that song.

Magda: Yes, that’s why I mention it.

Victor: I had a chat with The Bensplainer at some point and we had concerns about the installing too. It seemed, we agreed, like an art fair show display. The question is: how do you display all these works like a survey of an idea?

Magda: It is about all the artistic positions that the text referred to. As I said before.

The Bensplainer: If you see such an exhibition, you might consider how it fits a piece of writing, it being a master or a PhD thesis. On the other hand, it really lacks the viewer’s possibility to freely interact with the works. In other terms: how could you translate an idea for an exhibition, if the exhibition itself follows a logocentric and rational process? There is no surprise, indeed: I wanna see something, I don’t wanna learn something.

Victor: This is a kind of philosophy made clear by the exhibition makers: what can art do and how it can utilize itself, in order to convey politics?

The Bensplainer: Do you mean how art can be utilitarian?

Victor: Let’s say you have a curatorial agenda, or an hypothesis: art-making as a precarious condition. And then you, as an exhibition maker, attempt to visualize that. In this sense, these works witness this very aspect, like art illustrating an intellectual point of view.

Magda: Otherwise said, either it is the work that is convincing, or the hypothesis. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. About the works I don’t wanna say much, but the text, its arguments can be easily dismantled. In many places, it is simply not coherent. For example, why do you state in the exhibition text that the coronavirus pandemic is what makes visible the rise of social inequalities the exhibition addresses, and then you show works from the 1980s? It makes no sense.

The Bensplainer: Works from the 1980s which recall works from the 1960s.

Magda: Exactly! If you were really consistent with your method, you would research the topic, then find out who’s working with it now. Not the artists who kind of work with the idea… just a little bit, so that they can fit your curatorial idea.

Victor: On the behalf of the curators: why should you do a show like that? What are their motivations?

Magda: Of course, you can do a show addressing the notion of class. There’s nothing wrong about that. Even if it were an illustration of ideas, it could work. But you need a good thesis first, while here the positions that are supposed to illustrate it, are weak. Who liked Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky’s installations?

Victor: As a person who attended some performances by Ziegler and Janitzky previous to the KM show, but not to the last one actually at KM, I would say I see their sculptures as stage props. These performances enchanted or activated their sculptures. So, I’m quite neutral about their works in the show, but at the same time I’m neutral about all the works featured. It seems to me that the show has an agenda in representing all kinds of mediums. Photography, video … like a checklist.

The Bensplainer: Maybe old-fashioned?

Magda: It is a safe agenda. If you take Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism,’ he states that museums and related institutions are safe spaces where we can make criticism of capitalism, while capitalism itself allows it.

Victor: Yeah, Roland Barthes already said that. On my part, I am totally opposed to the idea of ‘making art’ as a profession, in the capitalist sense. When paying your rent depends on the money from selling your art, then soon you’ll be under pressure to produce, and that in return, I think, ultimately leads to overproduction and junk.

Magda: Then we ought to know more about the artists and how they position themselves to the capitalist model.

The Bensplainer: I think we are derailing the conversation. I mean, after 1989, there is only one religion, which is capitalism, and you hardly can escape this fact (I agree with Giorgio Agamben on this). Insisting on this leftist nostalgia is counterproductive. Art is luxury. Some artists are fighting against this mindset, but we are still in such a system.

Magda: Indeed – and yet the exhibition promotes an anti-capitalist position. For example, The Coop Fund’s aim is to provide an alternative funding, so that is very clear. Guillaume Maraud is also doing a standard institutional critique by creating an alternative fund.

The Bensplainer: At the same time, these practices are canonized. When KM showed Andrea Fraser in 1993, the questions she raised were novel and on the point. The visuals in this present show are canonized. Stephen Willats repeats a visual language of more established artists, as Hans Haacke for instance.

Magda: Yes, maybe the only thing Willats adds is a British perspective on the problem.

The Bensplainer: Victor, you said on the occasion of our NS-Dokumentationszentrum conversation [link]: „Preaching to the converted.“ Basically, we find here the same pattern. So, you can argue with a lot of reasoning about a motivation for an exhibition – in this case an anti-capitalist agenda – but what I expect is to see works and practices which change the way I see. Sorry if I repeat myself, but seeing works which repeat, without a difference, canonized visual experiences from the past gives me such a kind of déjà vu effect. What is this exhibition about? What are the politics that motivated it? From the point of view of the exhibition making, it is in itself a sort of repetition. In the last Documenta, the assumptions were similar: a lot of nostalgic Marxism and related leftist theoretical positions, which are good, but at the end of the day, the works become an illustration sketched aprioristically by the curators and the artistic director. Here lays the critical point which we really have to address. Paradoxically, if the works are repeating themselves, aren’t also the politics of exhibition making repeating themselves?

Magda: Yes and no. My question is: why are you repeating these positions? You can repeat a practice under the change of circumstances: the pandemic has changed the parameters.

The Bensplainer: I agree: the pandemic has unveiled changes which were not so clear before that.

Magda: So, does the repetition offered in this exhibition reflect that? Does our present context require repetition? How are the works from the 1980s and 1990s relevant now?

The Bensplainer: Let’s be clear: I don’t consider repetition with a negative value. I remember a wonderful group show at KW, Berlin, in 2007, titled ‘History Will Repeat Itself.’ Precisely, it was interesting because it focused on repetition as a visual device, that’s to say how artists and works dealt with the notion of repetition, be it of other works or of overarching experiences. I remember this great video by Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001), directed by Mike Figgis, in which the artist reenacted the famous 1984 clash between workers and police in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, England, and interviewed some participants from both sides too. By the way, it was a ground breaking show, but if you now repeat because it is fashion, a canon, then repeating loses its critical charge. Moreover, works become simply an illustration of the curator’s idea. It seems to me so frustrating now, especially when Anton Vidokle already addressed the question in his seminal and controversial article ‘Art Without Artists?’ on e-flux already in 2010. [link]

Victor: Yeah, that’s what I find problematic with this show: in this time of existential precariousness, how can an artist be critical or be able to question the politics of an exhibition? You’re invited, you get attention and funds, you simply go along with it. The institutions are creating ideological precariousness by wagging with the money. Nonetheless, I see that an artist needs the money. I think it is an inherent issue of institutional exhibition making, but I can’t see an immediate way out of it. It is a trap. The people in the institutions are also paid to play their role, and if they refuse to, replacement will be found quickly.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think that it is the main point here.

Magda: I recognize that there are many artists that suffer contemporary financial precariousness, but there are equally many who do not. Let’s be honest, how many artists, or student artists, may claim that they are coming from working class families? I mean, many are playing the role, but really?

The Bensplainer: I have to check it again, but there is a statistic in Bavaria that states that families on the edge of or below existential and financial poverty who are able to send their kids to higher education are 6 or 7%. That’s a ridiculous percentage, especially because these underprivileged students or artists have then a structural difficulty in order to enter the so-called art system.

Magda: Mid- or upper-class people study art. They come from that comfortable background. At any given time, they may or may not have money, but they indeed have a safety net.

Victor: People that I talked to were missing a critical view on the institution itself and how this show sits within its history and why they did the show there, since the Kunstverein was developed specifically to cultivate an image and space for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, by propagating aesthetic values from the upper class. It was the beginning of the ‘public sphere’ separate from the court, but also was the image of upward mobility and how its members today, generally upper middle class, use the space as a form of patronage and charity as an additive to their cultural capital. So, one might interpret this show as cynical, but I personally think that there is also the possibility of freeing yourself up from that tradition and subverting or bastardizing that project of that middle class of 200 years ago. However, I think that the show is too conventional and there is an opportunity missed here.

The Bensplainer: Sorry if I always bring up my PhD topic about the Russian so-called Avant-Garde. If you analyze it socially, the Avant-Garde cloud was also animated by class and social warfare. Practitioners from the periphery came to the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they had to fight with their contemporaries belonging to the urban mid- or upper-class world. For instance, you have Malevich who needs to rent a big apartment for him and his family, in order to sub-let and make a little profit from other people. But he also has to provide meals for them and he can paint only when he has some spare time. You still have today this romantic idea of the Avant-Garde, forgetting that it was also a very hard social situation.

Magda: But, the thing is that the economic or even its symbolic model, doesn’t seem to be really relevant. Class as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. What about class and technology? You can’t apply for jobs because you don’t have easy access to the Internet, because you don’t own a laptop or a smartphone. You can’t have a flat because you don’t get the notification on time. And flexibility changed the notion of work. There are a lot of structural changes in our societies, which the show’s accompanying text acknowledges clearly, but they are not examined in the work, or at least only in the orthodox leftist way. These positions are repeated nostalgically in the art. To me, the working class today is exemplified by DHL delivery workers.

The Bensplainer: I would add this. Today's working class might also be embodied by wannabe successful TikTok accounts! You may immediately perceive the fakeness in appropriating models from the supposed upper class in order to convey a different idea about yourself.

Magda: Fake it until you make it! TikTok responds to an already established model.

The Bensplainer: The novel level conveyed by TikTok is that it is not about hustling or conning anymore. Everybody knows everything is fake, so everybody accepts the coded rules.

Victor: That’s the classic definition of Žižek’s ‘ideology.’

Magda: Coming back to the show, I was surprised that urgent political issues were not questioned. I mean, the rise of populism is an issue, and it is class oriented. I don’t know much about Berlusconi and his years in power, but he did address the narrative of his politics to a certain class and set up a model for the recent years, didn’t he?

The Bensplainer: We Italians are not recognized in such a way anymore, but we’re still at the verge of the Avant-Garde! If history repeats itself as a farce, after Berlusconi everything is a farce. He had – and to some extent still has – an appeal to the working class, in the sense that he sold a narrative through which you can change your life only by willing it. At his first election run in 1994 he won in working class’ bastions, where traditionally the former Communist Party won with ease, efficiently selling his abstract ideas on liberty through his glittering television sets. So, already then, you might perceive that categories such as the Left and the Right were structurally changing. And this historical and epochal shift, so charged with ideological questions, is totally forgotten in this exhibition.

Magda: Thus, I could have accepted as legitimate the exhibition’s assumptions, even if illustrational, if they would have addressed the ongoing complexity of the topic of populism, digitalization, 0-hours contracts, and so on, all related to an idea of the working class. Then it would have been fair enough!

The Bensplainer: I would add another topic to this. If you consider the state of satire, especially from the US, comedy is way ahead of visual art. It addresses those topics in a much more effective and creative way than visual art is actually doing. Only because they’re really reaching millions of people.

Magda: Yes, John Oliver, for instance.

The Bensplainer: I became a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues in the last two years, because he and his authors adapted his style of comedy shifting from weird Hollywood absurdities to overall US social and political issues. So, his and his authors’ craft reached a new level of satire, and the audience’s awareness. What can visual art do, as powerful as it might be, in comparison to mainstream satire? Let’s simply think about how Kimmel dealt with the topic Obamacare and how he related to – his personal history.

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Magda: This is important, as access to healthcare in the US especially, is a class issue. But then, yeah, why don’t you simply invite a comedian to KM, then? Ok, you could never afford that, but who knows?

The Bensplainer: It would be so wonderful! But this idea should also be declined in a weirder approach.

Magda: For sure, a comedian in an art space could have more freedom compared to the one he could have on national television.

The Bensplainer: Victor, do you remember Olof Olsson’s performance at Lothringer 13’s cafe in Munich in 2017?

Victor: Yes.

The Bensplainer I found it brilliant, mixing visual and comedy devices, and very generous, because it lasted so long! This kind of transdisciplinary performance says more about social, political and economic issues, than a conventional show, like this one at KM. If I had to make a single critical statement about this show at KM is that it doesn’t move our present cultural perception to a different plane, as satire does.

Magda: My impression is that a student went through their assigned reading list, without going to the library. Everything which was required was read, but no insight was then further researched.

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delicatelythoughtfulpatrol · 4 years

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How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended

A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

Story by Spencer Kornhaber

“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette.

Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No. 1 singles in the United States—a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and it went platinum eight times.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge. A light disco resurgence may be brewing—BTS just strutted to No. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it—but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream; almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments; it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness.

The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D.

Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability—in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes.

But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination.

Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. Gwen Stefani moved from rock-band frontwoman to dance-floor diva during this period as well. Such performers, though often assisted by the same producers and songwriters who helped mold Spears, flaunted unruly personalities to a reality-TV-guzzling public hungry for a kind of curated grit.

Katy Perry capped off this rock-pop boomlet. The California-born Katheryn Hudson had kicked around the music industry for years, first as a Christian singer—her parents were traveling evangelists—and then as an Alanis Morissette–worshipping songwriter.

She finally hit on a winning combo of sounds for One of the Boys, her delicious 2008 major-label debut, whose spiky rhythms, crunching guitars, sneering vocals, and juvenile gender politics earned her a spot on the Warped Tour, a punk institution. But the gooey, sassy hooks of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Waking Up in Vegas,” and “Hot n Cold” really made her a household name.

Some of those songs benefited from the touch of Max Martin and Dr. Luke, songwriters-slash-producers of 2000s pop legend. (In 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit accusing Dr. Luke, her producer and manager, of rape and abuse; he denied her claims and eventually prevailed in a years-long, very-public court battle over Kesha’s record contract.)

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof.

Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry.

Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

The conceit of Teenage Dream’s title track—“you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream”—really boils down pop’s appeal to its essence: indulging a preposterous rush while also reveling in its preposterousness. “It is Perry’s self-consciousness—her awareness of herself as a complete package—that makes her interesting,” went one line in an NPR rave about the album. Even skeptical reviewers gave credit to standout singles such as “California Gurls” and “Firework” for being effective earworms. Perry had laid out her intended sound by sending a mixtape of the Cardigans and ABBA to Dr. Luke, who was part of a production team that pushed for perfection.

“People on the management side and label side were pretty much telling me that we were done, before we had ‘Teenage Dream’ or ‘California Gurls,’” Luke told Billboard in 2010. “And I said, ‘No, we’re not done.’”

Such efforts ensured Teenage Dream’s incredible staying power on the charts through early 2012. The album’s deluxe reissue that year then generated a sixth No. 1 single, “Part of Me,” which also provided the title of a self-produced documentary that Perry released around the same time. Much of the footage showcases the stagecraft behind her 2011–12 world tour, a pageant of dancing gingerbread men and poofy pink clouds that would presage her hallucinatory 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Perry comes off as charming and willful, and the film currently sits as the 11th-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. box-office history.

Yet the movie is best remembered today not for the way it shored up Perry’s shiny image, but for the way it complicated it. Over the course of the tour, Perry’s marriage to the comedian Russell Brand dissolved, and the cameras captured her sobbing just before getting on stage in São Paulo. It’s a wrenching, now-legendary scene. But elsewhere in the film, the viewer can’t help but experience cognitive dissonance as the singer’s personal dramas are synced up to concert footage of grin-inducing costumes and schoolyard sing-alongs. By hitching Teenage Dream’s whimsy to real-life struggle, the movie seemed to subvert exactly what had made the album successful: the feeling that Perry’s music was made to escape, not amplify, one’s problems.

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic Artpop, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales.

It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves.

Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough.

Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft.

The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers.

“When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are.

There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore.

Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”)

connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match.

This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B.

The current status of Dr. Luke, who has retreated from the public eye but still works with lesser-known talents and while using pseudonyms, seems telling too. He can’t land a hit with Kim Petras, a dance diva in the Katy Perry lineage. But he can land a hit with a rapper: He’s behind Doja Cat’s recent smash “Say So.”

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life.

Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive.

It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality.

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dweemeister · 6 years

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Pete’s Dragon (1977)

Combining live-action and animation in film has been around longer than you may think. Among those pioneers included Winsor McCay, who synchronized an on-stage performance with Gertie the Dinosaur’s (1914 short) on-screen performance; Max Fleischer’s Koko the Clown short films also experimented here, as did Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks for the Alice Comedies (1923-1927). Of those names, it is Disney’s that is most associated with live-action/animation hybrids – Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), and the subject of this review, Pete’s Dragon, which is directed by Don Chaffey. The rights to Pete’s Dragon – based on the unpublished short story by Seton I. Miller (better known for hard-edged film noir and 1938′s The Adventures of Robin Hood) and S.S. Field – were purchased by Walt Disney in the 1950s, who hoped to use it for his anthology television series. The project languished for years, outliving Walt, and is one of the better live-action Disney movies released in a difficult decade for the studio.

The 1970s and early 1980s were marked by the studio’s shifting approaches to its movies by catering more exclusively to children. This is reflective of the Dark Age of Animation (historians and other writers will differ, but I label this as beginning after Walt Disney’s death to 1988), where the overlaps between films intended for children and those intended for adults almost disappeared. Pete’s Dragon is expressly for children, but contains just enough appeal to save itself from being all but permanently locked inside the Disney Vault.

It is the 1900s in coastal Maine. An orphan named Pete (Sean Marshall) is escaping his abusive, bedraggled caretakers, the Gogans (Shelley Winters as the matriarch, Lena). Unbeknownst to the Gogans, Pete has befriended a dragon named Elliott (incredibly, even official sources differ between one “t” or two in his name), who is determined to protect Pete from any danger and can alternate between visibility and invisibility at any time. Pete and Elliott escape to Passamaquoddy, where the local lighthouse operator Lampie (Mickey Rooney) and his daughter Nora (Helen Reddy) provide a place to stay. Elliott, being too large for the lighthouse, stays in a spacious cave nearby. Pete loves Elliott, and speaks of length about him – Nora, Lampie, and other townspeople think that the dragon is just an imaginary friend. In town, snake oil salesman and quack Dr. Terminus (Jim Dale) and assistant Hoagy (Red Buttons) arrive to turn things upside down; the Gogans, too, eventually arrive. As time passes, Pete finds a home and family with Nora and Lampie – but this is a Disney movie, so chaos must ensue first.

After the release of Mary Poppins, a formula of a magical person/creature saving the lives of a hero became the tonic of Disney’s live-action movies. Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971; which is Mary Poppins lite), and Pete’s Dragon rigidly adhere to that structure. Pete’s Dragon offers nothing innovative or profound in terms of its storytelling, and anybody who goes into this movie with slightest expectation of any of that will come away frustrated. This is a safe comfort movie with its messages – depicted with more invention and grace in earlier decades – muted.

Even a young, talented animation team boasting names like Don Bluth (the American Tail series, 1988′s The Land Before Time); Glen Keane (who worked at Disney from 1977′s The Rescuers to 2012′s Paperman) as Elliot’s character animator; Ron Clements (who later directed eight Disney animated features, including 2016′s Moana); Ken Anderson (who worked at Disney from the 1930s-1970s); and Don Hahn (best known as a producer for various films in the Disney Renaissance) were unable to navigate around a breakneck production schedule. This leaves Pete’s Dragon with worse animated effects than even Mary Poppins and Song of the South as characters clip into the animated Elliott and the background-foreground composites are more distractingly artificial than they should be. Given the restrictions and the fact Pete’s Dragon is the first animated or partially-animated Disney movie without the input of the Nine Old Men, the animation’s efforts are valiant, but too limited given the technology of the era.

The screenplay, penned by Malcolm Marmorstein (primarily a television writer for the original Dark Shadows series), is filled with cockamamie characters and cringeworthy attempts at humor. As Pete and Elliot descend upon the unsuspecting population of Passamaquoddy, we are introduced to the mayor, trying to propose a new town motto:

Passamaquoddy... where the sun always rises and where the sun always sets!

Oh brother.

Too many of the supporting characters seem to have a single quirk that defines them throughout the film – a punchline with no modification or a person who adopts a behavioral tone and never alters it regardless of the situation. As Lampie, Rooney is a caricature of crassness (albeit appropriate within the bounds of Disney family movies) in public while almost inexplicably dropping that persona around Pete and Nora. Nora is pining for her beloved, lost at sea for a year, becomes a mother figure to Pete (this part is not a criticism and will be expanded upon shortly, because Nora’s nurturing results in the most genuine moments in Pete’s Dragon), and little else. The schoolteacher, Ms. Taylor (Jane Kean), is a frumpy, no-nonsense woman with little sympathy for misbehavior. And the Gogans? Good lord, the Gogans. Unhygienic backwoods hillbillies with tendencies towards kidnapping and post-Thirteenth Amendment child slavery are as easy to write about as villains can be.

But enter Nora and, to a lesser extent, Lampie. As justified as many of the criticisms directed towards the Walt Disney Studios’ there are, even the bitterest critics concede the studio’s films have long championed non-traditional, surrogate families. Without questions, judgment, they take in Pete as their own. And though their acceptance and early days of taking Pete in seem a little too easy, without conflict, Nora and Lampie (Reddy and Rooney give good performances) give the constancy and nurturing that Pete has been lacking from others. Well, that is if you exclude Elliott, who – at the end of the film – is revealed to be a benevolent soul who goes around helping frightened, vulnerable children. Elliott – imaginary friend to some, menace to others, but a steadfast guardian to Pete – might be the eponymous dragon in the film’s title, but this is still Pete’s story. Sean Marshall is serviceable and never grating as Pete, a character too passive for my liking, but makes up for in his kindness.

Composer Irwin Kostal centers his score around the songs penned by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. The Kasha-Hirschhorn musical numbers are as uneven as can be. Starting with insomnia-inducing jumpscares, “The Happiest Home in These Hills” opens the film by introducing the audience to the Gogans. Oh yes, the so-called Disney Villain song opens the movie! This is the most menacing the Gogans ever get (thankfully; their other song, “Bill of Sale” makes so little sense in every way imaginable). with threatening lyrics regarding Pete like:

Gonna snag him, gag him, drag him through town. Put his head in the river; let the pup drown. Trap him, strap him, wrap him in a sack, yeah, Tie him screaming to a railroad track.

It’s a juvenile, difficult way to start a movie, and that’s not even mentioning a lyric that has something to do with lynching Pete (which, as a Disney fan, gave me weird flashbacks to the Ku Klux Klan’s appearance in 1976′s Treasure of Matecumbe). Other weak entries include: “Boo Bop Bopbop Bop (I Love You, Too)” (in addition to its shoddy special effects) and “I Saw a Dragon” (Onna White’s choreography recalls her work for 1968′s Oliver!, but this is discount Oliver!). More creative are the likes “Brazzle Dazzle Day” (songs that capitalize on nonsense words are risky, but this one is okay) of “Every Little Piece” (because songs about con artists licking their chops about imminent fortune are usually hilarious).

But the two best songs in the film are the most lyrically modest in this score. “It’s Not Easy” is sung on Pete’s first night with Nora and Lampie, and where Pete talks about Elliott to Nora for the first time. Upon my first listening (as some may know, I get picky with music), I rejected the song because I found the rhyme scheme awkward: early in the song, Nora interjects between Pete’s first rhyme describing Elliott:

PETE He has the head of a camel, The neck of a crocodile... NORA It sounds rather strange! PETE He’s both a fish and a mammal, And I hope he’ll never change.

Soon after, Nora completes one of Pete’s rhymes, throwing off my expectations of a constant rhyming scheme. But as the song progresses, they sing together (when Nora sings her aside about the one she loves, she changes key and breaks the consecutive rhyming scheme) and their rhymes come together as they begin to better understand each other. In a very subtle way, keeping rhymes close together in a duet can heighten emotion, develop a relationship.

But the film belongs to “Candle on the Water”, a torch song that is referenced throughout the film in Kostal’s score and that might not have been out of place in any musical movie decades earlier. The staging might be unimaginative and the gradual close-up a dreadful decision, but it is Reddy’s performance that defines this scene. “Candle on the Water” should be considered an essential entry in the esteemed Disney songbook, yet it does not appear to be in the canon (why is Mary Poppins the only Disney live-action film that receives that treatment?).

Pete’s Dragon would be the last live-action/traditional animation hybrid released by Disney until Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988; released through the company’s Touchstone Pictures label). These techniques, now even more of a curiosity in times where movies featuring human actors interacting with CGI environments and characters are commonplace, were the culmination of decades of experimentation and punishing handiwork. For the film’s value to today’s audiences, its messages will be fine for children, if they can get past the first musical number featuring the Gogans (if I was younger and watching this for the first time, I would not have accepted those jumpscares if I did not know in advance that this was a Disney movie). Elliott is selfless and lovable to a fault; Pete displays an understandable mixture of courage, courtesy, and fear.

The version shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) on December 20/21, 2017 shows how much Disney cares for its older movies – the print was beautiful to look at, despite the questionable yellowscreen. But is the company interested in having their older live-action films not called Mary Poppins a chance to connect to younger viewers? That is something to ponder about as live-action remakes only do so much to raise awareness or interest for the original versions.

My rating: 6.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#Pete's Dragon #Don Chaffey #Sean Marshall #Helen Reddy #Mickey Rooney #Jim Dale #Red Buttons #Shelley Winters #Jane Kean #Jim Backus #Malcolm Marmorstein #Irwin Kostal #Al Kasha #Joel Hirschhorn #Don Bluth #Glen Keane #Onna White #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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chardscarf12-blog · 5 years

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What the Label Won't Tell You: How to Buy a Good Bottle of Olive Oil

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz unless otherwise noted]

Have you ever tasted a tomato leaf?

As a bona fide black thumb who’s never taken to backyard gardening or the great outdoors, I sure haven’t. But ‘tomato leaf’ is a big tasting note in the olive oil industry, apparently, and at Cobram Estate’s reception lounge in Woodland, California, technical director and chief olive-oil maker Leandro Ravetti tells me it’s a common characteristic of oil made from picual olives. A minute before, I’d swigged a dram of chartreuse oil from a plastic pill cup, and sure enough, it tastes vividly of ripe tomato flesh warm from late-summer sunlight. There’s also a touch of bitter and bracing, as if I’d just mainlined a pile of fresh basil leaves. No—not basil, the taste is meatier, muskier in that compelling tomatoey way, but also inescapably verdant. It’s a breezy October morning and all I can think about is my sudden roaring hunger for raw tomatoes on toast.

Huh. I guess that’s what tomato leaves taste like.

Olive oil is one of those foods we embrace on faith. Science says it’s good for you, chefs say the quality stuff makes other foods come alive, and pretty green bottles of it can hit $40 on store shelves. We accept the idea of ‘good’ olive oil the way we accept the idea of ‘grassy’ flavors, despite never munching on blades of grass. But what is good olive oil? What makes it good, what should it taste like, and how do you shop for it if you can’t taste it beforehand?

These are the questions I came to California to figure out. Little did I realize the answers have as much to do with the weird world of food supply chains as they do with growing olives.

Most people can tell you how to spot a good tomato, but the traits of good olive oil, a food many of us eat every day, are surprisingly opaque. Take Colavita, which is Amazon’s best-selling extra-virgin, and at 29 cents an ounce you could call it the Two Buck Chuck of cooking fats. If you shop at a major American supermarket, you’re likely buying a commodity extra-virgin like Colavita. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but you should know what you’re paying for.

To vastly over-generalize the byzantine global olive oil trade, large commodity olive oil companies buy oils from all over, then blend them into a consistent product. The brokers and aggregators they buy from are in turn buying smaller lots of oils from regional producers, which are in turn buying harvests of olives from dozens to hundreds of small farms. A three-liter tin of commodity extra-virgin could conceivably contain oils from thousands of orchards, which is pretty cool when you think about it, but consider that for every one of those sources, there’s that many more ways for the processing to have gone wrong, or for the oil to have been mishandled. Assuming, of course, that it’s actually pure olive oil sitting in there, and not, say, adulterated with half a dozen refined fats.

Amazon says that bottle of Colavita is "imported from Italy," which is a clever way of saying the bottle itself was shipped from Italy without guaranteeing the provenance of the oil inside. If you squint at the back label though, you’ll see a fine print disclaimer: "Contains oil from one or more of these countries," with a legend you can use to decode the country codes printed on the bottle itself.

By olive oil standards, this is actually pretty responsible labeling! Other brands aren’t as above-board. The famously fraudulent global olive oil industry has little interest in arming consumers with actionable information about their product. Agents along a complex supply chain often blend Italian oils with olive oil from other countries and sell it as pure Italian. Companies stretch good batches of extra-virgin with tasteless soybean or safflower oils, or blend in oil made from older olives that’s refined just enough to make it palatable. A 2014 congressional report on adulterated foods, including olive oil, details these scams.

Fraud aside, even 100% pure extra-virgin olive oil will deteriorate in the bottle, and if it’s stored improperly or sits on a supermarket shelf for a year or two, it could taste rancid before you break the seal. Regulations exist to combat these practices, but they’re rarely enforced. After all, olive oil is a commodity governed by the iron laws of capital; for much of the industry, yield and profit matter far more than quality.

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

Then there’s the minority: small-batch boutique olive oils made by skilled producers around the world, either directly from their own olive orchard or from nearby sources. If Colavita is the Two-Buck Chuck of olive oil, these specialty brands are the natural wines and grower Champagnes. They’re intense and complex. They taste vividly of olives and give you a sense of place. They are, theoretically, good olive oils. You can expect to pay $1.50 to $3 an ounce for these, a price that reflects not just ostensibly higher quality olives, but the higher cost of labor, manufacturing, and distribution that accompanies artisan food production. Of course, there’s no guarantee that a $40 bottle of olive oil will actually be good, or if it is, that you’ll like its particular character. Like any specialty food, the relationship between price and value gets tricky on the high end of olive oil.

So what if you just want reliably good olive oil—less expensive than the boutique stuff, but still responsibly made, fresh, and delicious enough to make you smile? You know, like a good table wine, a bottle in the $15 to $20 range that has a lot going on but won’t break the bank. Brands like Manfredi Barbera & Figli's Frantoia, California Olive Ranch, and Cobram—where I visited—excel in this category. These are companies that sell olive oil in the vicinity of 75 cents an ounce, about triple the price of that Colavita, but half the price of a super-premium bottle.

Just like in wine, a lot of California companies are making good olive oil these days. California Olive Ranch is the biggest, but since launching in the US in 2014, Cobram Estate is one of the fastest growing brands in the category. It’s actually an offshoot of an Australian company called Boundary Bend, founded by agriculture school buddies Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan in 1998, that’s captured 30% of the Australian olive oil market. In addition to loving flat whites and having funny accents, Australians are big fans of olive oil; the average Australian consumes 1 3/4 liters per person per year, compared to just under a liter per person in the US. (Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards consume about 10 times that American figure, just so you know.) Boundary Bend’s success in Australia has translated to winning dozens of international olive oil competitions and a $360 million valuation.

So when Cobram’s PR team offered to fly me out to see their Central Valley orchard and factory firsthand, I was intrigued. I’m skeptical of press junkets, but the Cobram people pride themselves on transparency, from their on-site lab that reports findings to the California Olive Council to more than a dozen peer-reviewed industry papers on olive oil science. Besides, I’ve liked their olive oil for years. The first time I tried some, as an editor at a magazine that received free food samples several times a day, I swiftly palmed the half-liter office bottle to hoard in my home kitchen. It lasted about a week.

In a stark departure from the big commodity brands, Cobram Estate is completely vertically integrated: the company grows olives (directly or through contracts), picks them, mills them into oil, then bottles and ships them, all on-site. Most of California’s olive oil companies work the same way, but thanks to Boundary Bend’s vast coffers, Cobram has been able to expand aggressively, scale up production, and invest in pricey equipment. The idea, McGavin says, is to couple stringent boutique standards with a massive supply of raw material, using advanced technology and industrial scale to raise the standards of oil-making while keeping competitive with larger commodity brands. Here, then, was a chance to see what ‘good’ olive oil means at both ends of the manufacturing spectrum, and how they might meet in the middle.

A mechanical olive harvester looks like a car wash on wheels. As the 14-foot-tall leviathan rolls through the orchard, it swallows olive trees whole while rotary bristles inside the arch whack olives off their branches. While the harvester trundles down the row, a truck drives in tandem one row down, and a conveyer belt on the harvester reaches over the trees to deposit fistfulls of olives into the truck’s hopper.

The olives that Cobram is harvesting the morning of my visit are a mix of green, purple, and black; while color is an indicator of olive ripeness, Ravetti’s team relies more on the olives’ oil accumulation, flowering times, moisture levels, and other environmental factors. In July, the team starts testing olives, lot by lot, to determine the order in which they’ll be picked. Then they work out an action plan with president of US business, Adam Englehardt, to match that picking order with the factory’s capacity. California olive season runs a tight eight weeks in October and November, and once it starts, picking, processing, and milling becomes a 24/7 operation. Cobram’s factory sits in the middle of their 475-acre orchard with 10 different olive varieties planted, though as most of those trees are too immature to bear fruit, 90% of the company’s olives right now come from nearby growers that in many cases have exclusive contracts with Cobram.

With an orchard that size, scheduling picking and milling becomes a massive challenge of logistics and engineering, Englehardt explains. That’s because every olive is milled the same day it’s picked, usually within just a few hours, so it can be blended into larger batches for a consistently fresh product. Olives left off the tree too long undergo an enzymatic process called hydrolysis, where triglycerides (fat molecules) in the presence of water break down into diglycerides and free fatty acids. Meanwhile, oxidation breaks down chemical bonds in fatty acids, releasing peroxides that further break down into other compounds that cause rancidity in oil. Eventually the olives ferment, and after that, rot, and every stage of this degradation introduces off flavors to the finished oil. This happens a lot in regions where small commodity olive growers have to wait for space in a nearby crushing facility to become available. If the facility is backed up enough, the olives turn before they can get crushed, and the resulting oil will have to be heat- and chemically-refined in order to be edible. So once the olive is off the tree, the clock is ticking.

Cold-pressed olive oil is just that: olives crushed and ground into an oily juice, solely with mechanical pressure. About 20% of an olive’s fresh weight is oil, McGavin explains, but the oil itself is essentially flavorless. You have to rupture an olive’s oil sacs so the fats can marinate with the fruit’s flavorful skin, flesh, and seed. Cobram grinds the olives into a paste for about 45 minutes using a traditional hammer mill, which works on the same basic principle as those giant car crushers, then runs the paste through a 3,000 RPM centrifuge to separate out the now olive-infused oil.

But the clock ticks on. For one, the newly freed oil needs to rest so any residual water and solids can separate out. But even once you’ve removed any hydrolysis-inducing moisture, fresh oil in the presence of air will keep oxidizing. So after Ravetti’s team takes initial readings of the fresh oil and tastes it to see which batches to blend it with, it gets piped into steel tanks for cold storage, which are flushed with nitrogen to halt further air exposure. Sitting in these tanks, sequestered from heat, light, and oxygen, is as close to cryogenic storage as olive oil gets. But even under optimal conditions, the oil is deteriorating: you can’t halt oxidation completely, and enzymatic activity that began the minute the olive was crushed continues on, though at a slower pace. As we talk through the forest of tanks, Englehardt says that they aim to keep oil in this condition for no more than a year.

We move on to a smaller room with some crates on wooden pallets. Englehardt explains that these are boxes of bottled oil, ready to be shipped. “Is this it?” I ask, surprised by the meager size compared to the giant tanks we just left behind. He nods. Even the minimally air-exposed act of transferring olive oil to nitrogen-flushed bottles accelerates the oil’s deterioration. “We try to keep only four weeks’ worth of inventory in these bottles,” he says. The rest is sitting in cold storage as oil or still on the tree as whole olives.

Extra-virgin olive oil is generally defined as 100% cold pressed olive oil with a maximum of .8% acidity and no sensory defects. Virgin olive oil, the next grade down, allows up to 2.5% acidity with minor defects. Beneath these two tiers lie an assortment of lower quality grades that all require heat and/or chemical refinement to taste palatable; these make up the bulk of the commodity olive oil market.

You can measure acidity—and a whole host of other related critical factors, such as peroxide counts and signs of pests or disease—in a lab, but sensory defects come down to a tasting panel of experts trained to look for flaws like rancidity, barnyard or alcohol flavors, and ‘fustiness,’ a sign of fermentation. Nancy Ash is one of those experts. In addition to working as an California Olive Oil Council, a regional trade organization dedicated to raising standards for the California oil business and communicating those standards to the public.

“An olive oil that shows no flavor defects and passes chemical analyses such as acidity tests can be called extra-virgin,” she says, “but a passing grade just means you didn’t fail. It could be a D; would you be happy with a D?” An oil that lacks manufacturing defects could still taste bland, unbalanced, or just plain unenjoyable, yet it can earn the same grade as an award-winning bottle. That may be for the best, since the alternative, maybe something like a Robert Parker-esque point-based scoring system, is probably more cumbersome and subjective than it’s worth. The bigger issue, Ash goes on, is that since olive oils deteriorate over time, the grades they receive from a tasting panel aren’t necessarily reflective of what you get when you open a bottle.

“Even the best extra-virgin olive oils are going to taste rancid three years later.” For regular cooks in search of great olive oil, this is the most important thing to keep in mind. If you buy or receive some fabulous bottle of extra-virgin olive oil, don’t save it for special occasions in the back of the cupboard. Use it now, while it’s fresh and punchy and delicious. It’s not a collectible.

[Photographs: Vicky Wasik]

So what, then, is a regular American cook to do? Ash’s biggest piece of advice is to seek out oils with best-by dates as far ahead into the future as you can find. Very small specialty producers may put harvest dates on their bottles, but larger companies working with multiple lots and orchards, as well as the commodity giants, mostly go by bottling dates. In the EU, a best by date is typically 18 months after the bottling date, while in the US it’s closer to two or three years. A far-in-the-future best by date doesn’t guarantee an oil has been handled well along the supply chain, but it at least increases the likelihood that the oil in the bottle isn’t too old. Dark bottles are more resistant to heat and light deterioration than clear, and even though small bottles might cost more per ounce than three-liter tins, they’re generally preferable; once you open the bottle and expose the oil to air again it’ll begin to degrade even faster, and unless you’re cooking restaurant-sized batches of food on the regular, you probably won’t finish a hefty tin of olive oil before those flaws become noticeable.

Ash goes on to explain how California producers are getting more technical on labels to build demand for higher quality oils. The California Olive Oil Council has launched a pilot program of an endorsement seal for certain brands. Some producers are putting harvest dates on their labels, and others are listing polyphenol counts, which range from 150-200 on the lower end up to 600 or so. Higher polyphenol counts generally correlate to oils that last longer, Ash says, but that’s not a guarantee, and some may find the bitter, pungent taste that comes with super-high counts to be unpalatable. Cobram’s Australian division prints antioxidant data on each bottle, and McGavin says that once the US team gets enough data, they’ll replicate the practice here, possibly even this year.

For Cobram, coming to America was about more than venturing into a new market. With orchards in opposite hemispheres, the company enjoys the nifty advantage of two separate growing seasons roughly six months apart, which translates to fresher olive oil year-round.

Which has me thinking, finding a bottle of good olive oil is a lot like buying a tomato after all. Buy from reliable purveyors, seek out what looks fresh, don’t rely on fancy names and labels, and trust your instincts. After all of one day in a field and a few months spent thinking about olive oil, I don’t feel qualified to say what good olive oil really means. But I know it involves a lot more than the words ‘extra-virgin.’

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

When it comes to oils that she keeps in her pantry, Ash admits she’s a biased source—many of her favorites are made by friends, clients, or both. But she says she happily "blind buys," that is, orders without tasting the new batch to make sure she’ll like it, from Katz Farm, the Sicilian-leaning Bondolio, Grumpy Goats, and Frantoio Grove. I was also curious about great olive oils made in Europe, so I reached out to Nick Anderer, the founding chef of New York’s Marta, Martina, and Maialino, a trio of Italian restaurants from Danny Meyer that specialize, unsurprisingly, in high-end regional Italian specialty foods. Every fall, he and his team place advance orders for the first pressings of the following year’s olives from a small list of Italian producers he’s come to trust year after year.

“I’m looking for oil that’s alive,” he says. “I want vibrancy; I should cough if I’m tasting it raw, and I want peppery and grassy notes that feel very present.” Beyond that general principle of robust intensity of flavor, Anderer prefers different producers’ oils to finish different types of food. “For red meat dishes, I want more of a gut punch of bitterness,” he says, so he reaches for a high-polyphenol Tuscan oil by Laudemio. But an oil that strong would be overkill on, say, delicate fish or vanilla ice cream. His “rounder, almost drinkable” oil of choice for those foods is an unfiltered bottle from Capezzana, a deep-green oil that’s “super rich on the tongue,” ideal for a simple pasta like aglio e olio. He’s also a fan of Olio Verde, a Sicilian oil made exclusively from Castelvetrano olives, as its brininess works wonders with seafood. And for special occasions, he breaks out his bottle of Manni, a super-premium bitter Tuscan oil that mostly sees action in the fine dining restaurant market.

If you’re just starting to explore the world of high end olive oil, go try something similar. Hit up your favorite Italian restaurant—or Spanish, or Greek, or New American, or Lebanese—and ask what olive oil they keep in the kitchen. Then splurge on a few bottles, buy some pita or baguette, and get to tasting as much as you can. After all, they say olive oil is good for you.

This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.

Source: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/02/what-the-label-wont-tell-you-how-to-buy-a-good-bottle-of-olive-oil.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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jewishphilosophyplace · 7 years

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A Cinematic Christian-Pagan Philosophy of Life (“What Now? Remind Me”) (Joaquim Pinto)

Joaquim Pinto’s Portuguese language film What Now? Remind Me is too big a film to lend itself to a narrative or scene-by-scene exposition. Along with a conversation with the director, it was screened as a plenary session at “The Place of Religion in Film,” a conference organized by Gail Hamner at Syracuse University. It is what they call “spiritual, not religious” while explicitly steeped in Christianity and Christian categories, which the film sets in nature as a philosophy of life. As film, the spiritual effects are entirely mediated. A Stoic production in its philosophical orientation, Pinto’s film resembles a sort of biblical wisdom or anti-wisdom literature. It is at the cross between Psalms and Ecclesiastes, saturated by a euphoric but knowing sensibility of life and human limit whose milieu is Mediterranean.

What Now? Remind Me moves slowly following Pinto through the course of a year or so of treatments for hepatitus C related to the AIDS virus. The film is comprised of a set of shot-types. These include [1] Pain: Pinto speaks with great labor and quiet intensity directly into the camera. He seeks with painful eloquence to convey his condition at various stages of the treatment and his recuperation as a mirror of the human condition writ large. Ecce Homo, the director-protagonist is “Everyman.” [2] Nature: The camera tracks the motion of a slug, the replication of viruses from under a microscope, a dragonfly in suspended animation, dogs at home in the Portuguese countryside, dogs abandoned by hunters on the side of a road, human architectures of modern life such as airports and hospitals, and basic elements such as earth, water, and fire. [3] Politics: Shots of news footage as mediated on television or a computer screen convey the sense that we are living in a state of political and ecological emergency. [4] Domesticity: Eschewing the friend/enemy distinction that defines the public agora in radical/fascist political theory, the place of the film is set in the oikos set in nature.

Pinto himself together with Leonel shot the film without the interventions of camera crews and production companies. The viewer is, at were, at home alone with the creators of this film. An intimate cinematic portrait of a life and life, What Now? Remind Me is Aristotelian in its intellectual scope. But the world picture is flattened in that lacks any hierarchical, metaphysical structure. In this meditation, all things are first things: a philosophy of nature, a philosophy of history, aesthetics and ethics, a philosophy of religion, a philosophy of politics, a phenomenology of perception, a philosophy of life, an ontology.

The main motif is our being in the world –marked out in terms of corporeal vulnerability, bio-technological and bio-political structures, the ethical care of the self and of others, the miracle of spiritual regeneration and the inevitability of death. Its version of Christian religion sets the institution of the church and church dogma aside, living in the sense of a quiet finitude of the present moment. Himself silent throughout the film and frequently naked, with a thick beard and a heavy mane of hair, Leonel, compared to Pinto’s loquaciousness, is a symbol. At first I thought, here’s the Christ figure, but that’s not quite right. Leonel’s is the screen presence of St. John, around whose gospel the film is explicitly themed, and about whom Pinto and Leonel made another film, The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John. To follow the explicit scriptural citations, what Pinto takes from the Gospel of John is the imperative to love and only to love, which he couples with the depth ecology of the law regarding sabbatical year and jubilee in the book of Leviticus.

Looking online for information, I found this bit of commentary here by Francisco Ferreira, which you can read in full here. I’m citing this long passage because, starting off with an exceptional moment in a film full of exceptional shots, Ferreira evokes so well the large canvas of the film. He writes, “There is a book in the movie, a fabulous and mystical one, illustrated by one of the most important figures of the Renaissance in Portugal, Francisco de Holanda (1517-1585). Housed in the National Library in Madrid, De Aetatibus Mundi Imagenes (The Illustrated Ages of the World) tells us the story of the world in images, and its importance in the organization of the film is crucial. When Pinto, loaded with pills and interferon, remembers his time in East Germany (where he met a certain ‘activist’ named Angela Merkel while living in Leipzig), when he leaves a car with Nuno, extinguisher on hand, to fight a fire, or approaches a pack of dogs abandoned by their owners, when Pinto has sex with his partner, goes down the Castro da Columbeira caves, questions the Neanderthals, and quotes, like Monteiro, the Portuguese poet Ruy Belo, Saint Augustine, or the Gospel According to Mark, there’s something chimeric that comes from the Francisco de Holanda book that acts like a contagion in the film’s structure, changing our perception of reality.”

It would be entirely erroneous to read Pinto’s work as expressed here in the short blurb of a review in the NYT that “the film repeatedly erases the neutral hues of sickness with the lush vibrancy of nature.” This is utterly mistaken of the perception of reality in this film. What Now? Remind Me is not a theodicy. Nothing is forgotten or erased. Personal distress is just one among others, ecological and political stress points all subsistent as the condition of late capitalism. The suffering wrought by and upon human life is seen as all carried further until some later point of extinction. Said not in anger, human life will end. What marks, then, this life in the meantime is the sheer will exemplified by the sick person in the process of recovery who understands better than most people the difficulty under which one has to will, to will oneself to move, to will oneself to breathe, to will oneself to believe. And then the miracle? Towards the end of the film, Christmas is literally announced as the good news, natal figure of hope. This message is then hedged in by a long, ironic shot of caged turkeys shipped off in a lorry for holiday feasts. If I remember correctly, it was soon after this shot that Pinto’s intones with the sense of sad wisdom, “When we go back to dust, life will sigh with relief.”

I also found online this insightful piece by Max Nelson, which goes to the philosophical and theological heart of the matter. You can read it here. Nelson is writing about The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John. Modelled more brightly than Pasolini’s movie on the Gospel of Matthew, in this film, the complete text of the Gospel of John is read (by Luís Miguel Cintra) juxtaposed with images drawn from nature. Nelson understands the film as building on the idea of revelation. He explains, “It is this theme, one senses, that most interested Pinto and Leonel, who transform The New Testament into a demonstration of what it looks like for a text to find a material voice: literally, by virtue of Cintra’s voiceover, and figuratively, in the movie’s stream of beguiling, tactile images. This exercise in reading the physical world as a kind of mouthpiece for the revealed Word would, as it turned out, heavily inform Pinto’s next film.”

In What Now? Remind Me, it is “life,” not “God,” that finds its material mark in the space in between the physical voice and the moving image. Again, Max Nelson: “that plants, animals, and natural phenomena have something to tell us—a message to reveal, a Word to make incarnate, an inheritance to bestow—that can only be heard by careful listening and re-listening, which is to say, recording.” I’m not sure if “message” is the right word for this unspooling of images. But Nelson’s use of the word “Word” suggests that, such as it is, the divine in What Now? Remind Me is presented as epiphenomenal. The revelation would be the revelation itself, an old idea that goes back to Martin Buber, the idea of revelation that begins in nature, that proceeds from this world and from this world alone, this lively world of earth and decay. There is not a trace of negative theology. The sense of the spiritual is given in the relational-aesthetic juxtaposition of one image and world followed by the next image and world. (I expect to find something of the exact same when I go see the movie on the Gospel of John.)

You can find What Now? Remind Me on Amazon, but do not be misled by the picture of Pinto’s ravaged face with which the distributors, for some reason, thought wise to pitch the DVD. The film is nothing like that. I don’t usually show trailers here at the blog, but this here will give you the sense of this meditation, which is simultaneously sad and ecstatic.

http://ift.tt/2oafQcf

#uncategorized #Christianity #cinema #nature

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khrsnabagus · 3 years

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False Rationality Within Irrationality

Title: The Dilemma of Rational Human Effort: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

Author: Sindhunata

Publisher: Gramedia Pustaka Utama

Published Year: January 2, 2020 Print

ISBN: 9786020630120

Thickness: XXXV+292 pages

Price: Rp. 80,000

Has it ever occurred to us, "Does this history lead to progress or setbacks?" "Is our life in this post-modern era better than in the pre-modern era?" or maybe “I wish I had never been born into this world because this world is getting worse and not getting better?” If the above questions have ever crossed your mind, then this book is suitable as an analytical knife and surgical tool to criticize the world and ourselves.

Critical theory first shocked the world of German philosophy in the twentieth century, the theory pioneered by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno from the Frankfurt School, Germany is still being studied and is suitable as a new point of view to see the symptoms of post-Modernism, post Truth, consumerism, and identity politics that have been very disturbing.

The advantage of this book is that the author can describe the development of critical theory from its inception, although perhaps some readers have never or have not heard of philosophical figures such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Sigmond Freud. With simple languages, all readers, including ordinary philosophy book readers can follow this book.

However, the weakness of this Sindhunata book is in the explanation of the material and words that are repeated, even though without repeated explanations the reader can understand from the material presented and there are still some typos in some words.

What's the page, other than that it's unfortunate that there is no section on "critical questions" to criticize Horkheimer and Adorno's Theory, it's natural as a scientific science every theory must able to be validated, the rest I don't see any problem in this book.

So this book is divided into 6 Chapters, and from each of the chapters it is divided again into several parts, I will get to the gist of each part of the chapter.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Here we are introduced to the origins of Max Horkheimer finding his career as a philosopher, he is a Jew and his father is a businessman, by the time Horkheimer was just 21 years old he had become a Director at his father's company.

As a man born into a genuine Jewish family, his father from childhood educated him harshly and authoritarianly, besides that Horkheimer had a sense of compassion for one of the workers in his father's company who had an epileptic seizure, this is where the desire to create a new society emerged from Horkheimer's self, and also the origin of his thoughts. theoretical at the Frankfurt school.

Chapter 2. Historical and Theoretical Background of the Frankfurt School

In this chapter, it is explained, the journey and how the Frankfurt school formulates critical theory, they combine 4 philosophers' thoughts, Immanuel Kant's Critique, Friedrich Hegel's Dialectic, Karl Marx's Political-Economic Criticism, and finally Immanuel Kant's Psychoanalysis. By combining the 4 thoughts of the philosophers above they can create an analytical knife to critical of society.

Chapter 3. Critical Theory as Emancipatory Theory

Critical theory is different from traditional theory, traditional theory is neutral to external facts and does not intend to influence these facts. For Horkheimer the traditional theory failed to become an emancipatory theory. Horkheimer established the goal of critical theory which

Later it will create a new awareness which then tore the irrationality of this era.

For Horkheimer today's society has lost its rationality, it can be revealed if we tear the current economic system, and Horkheimer believes that critical theory can be an emancipatory theory that helps society.

Chapter. 4. The Dilemma of Rational Human Effort: The Emergence of Objective Intellect and the Rise of Instrumental Intellect

Well, this chapter is my favorite part of this book, because it explains the essence of critical theory criticism. Horkheimer divides the mind into two, namely the objective and the instrumentalist mind.

Objective reason is the mind that exists in the objective world outside the individual and the opposite of objective reason is the instrumentalist mind which emphasizes itself as a tool to produce use, and in the human journey, objective reason gradually becomes instrumentalist which ultimately preserves the system. and circumstances, we can see examples of this in various tragic events in modern times.

We make religion a mere commodity, for example, Eid al-Fitr, where a large discount is held, Eid al-Fitr is only a mere skin, the big discount is not to celebrate the day of victory, but there is a goal of how to increase production for the owners of capital, and on the consumer side to vent consumerism lust to buy new clothes.

In addition, Horkheimer also explains how we who initially wanted to control nature for the sake of production ended up oppressing nature AND SUCCESSFUL but eventually nature turned to oppress us, as well as the era of the Technocracy government, where currently the Technocrats who hold power, often not paying attention to society.

Chapter 5. The Dialectic of Rational Human Effort: Rational Human Effort is a Myth

In this last chapter, Horkheimer finally fell into pessimism, he who initially believed that his Critical Theory would become an emancipatory theory thought it would be useless, because in the history of mankind, it began when Greek philosophers developed the science of philosophy which at its peak was the Aufklarung Age, when people think they have attained enlightenment, when in fact it is the opposite!

Rationality turns into Irrationality, and enlightenment becomes myth, human history has always been like that based on its Dialectic of Enlightenment method, because every rational human effort results in irrational, Horkheimer's critical theory eventually becomes irrational because it includes that effort!

Closing. Analyzing the Technocratic System in the World Using Critical Theory

In the last part of this book, actually, the author wants to invite us to criticize today's phenomena by using the Dialectic of Enlightenment method. However, I feel that I should not discuss the last chapter in this book review because it is better for the reader to read on their own so that they feel slapped and critical when thinking.

Instead, I will replace the topic of the last chapter with a critique of the Technocratic system which the author regrets not discussing, even though the Technocratic system is currently running rampant due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and I will use the example of Indonesia where Technocratic first appeared during the New Order government.

For those of you who don't know what technocracy is, technocracy itself is a form of government when technical experts master decision-making in their respective fields. Engineers, scientists, health professionals, and people with knowledge, skills or abilities will form governing bodies. The critique of the technocratic system itself is one of the criticisms developed by Max Horkheimer which does not contradict the political-economic critique of Karl Marx,

Why does the technocratic system happen? There are two main reasons, namely that technological developments are increasingly obeying their own laws and getting out of human control and thus modern technology does not humanize the work process, instead enslaving humans. This is what brings us back to Chapter V, because Horkheimer deeply regrets when efficiency, productivity, and planning and technocratic policies are highly upheld, even though technocrats are "gods of instrumentalist reason" humans are willing to obey what the technocrats say whose truth is guaranteed from politics and economics?

But is it true? Should we reject Technocrats and Technocrats? If we look back, technocracy in Indonesia was born by the authoritarian New Order regime, so the word technocracy is synonymous with the government of that regime. At that time, Suharto asked for the help of Widjojo Nitisastro, Ali Wardhana, Emil Salim, Moh Sadli, and Subroto as the President's Team of Economic Experts. They were dubbed the “Berkeley Mafia” by David Ronsom in reference to the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, where most of these economics technocrats received their doctoral education.

The four technocrats in the economic field initiated the "Developmentist Country" project which relies on Indonesia's economic planning on the Neo-Classical economic paradigm, Keynesianism, and the five-stage theory of development by Walt Whitman Rostow. Unfortunately, like the “Developmental State”, the “Technological State” project also failed in the end.

The reason is the failure of the group of engineers or technologists to determine the right technology development priorities. Trillions of rupiah are spent on developing aerospace technology. Meanwhile, the budget for developing appropriate technology that has a direct impact on society is ignored. The failure to prioritize technology development is also supported by symbolic nationalism in the style of the New Order which is more concerned with the grandeur of technological development achievements than its benefits to society (tends to lead to a Fascist government system).

In the 21 years of the collapse of the New Order, the technocratic system reached its peak at the end of 2019, when the Covid-19 Pandemic grew. The COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia and other countries has again made people worry about the involvement of scientists in public policy making. COVID-19 is a phenomenon that requires the intervention of experts in the fields of science and health to make policies with the scientific method. The discussion about the involvement of scientists and experts reminds us of the form of public policy making that was popular during the New Order era, namely technocracy.

A good question is not, “Should we submit to technocrats?” but "How can we participate in order to control the policies of technocrats for the public interest?". The public must have a high and objective political sensitivity that is not based on scientific conspiracies against technocrats as they do with politicians.

No matter how much the technocrats claim to be "neutral" and "free of interests", in essence, when they are given the opportunity to formulate public policies, they are determining the lives of many people. Here we can refer to Horkhemier's criticisms and concerns when he considers that the technocrats do not understand humans in themselves, they only see humans as mere tools. Therefore, it is our duty to monitor them and if necessary give criticism as society does to politicians.

Even though Horkheimer uses the notion of totality to formulate his critical theory, it is unfortunate that this also makes him a pessimist, he is trapped in 2 conditions, completely free or completely isolated. As a scientific theory, we have the right to criticize Horkheimer's Critical Theory, because criticism of a theory does not mean that the theory is "useless!"

#critical theory #max horkheimer #theodor adorno #frankfurt school

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dippedanddripped · 4 years

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As the world continues to come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic, there's palpable uncertainty surrounding the future of retail. The virus has instigated a global economic disaster, which has left sneaker stores around the world, especially independents, with an up-hill battle. We know that online sales are booming, but we must remember that those numbers aren’t doing enough to offset the losses that stem from bricks-and-mortar lockdown.

With that in mind, we hit up our retail homies from all corners of the globe to discuss the future of the sneaker scene. Special thanks to the crews from atmos, Lobby, Brooklyn Projects, VegNonVeg, Bodega, Overkill, Latte, Black Box, Up There, and Foot District! We're wishing you all the best.

ATMOS, TOKYO

LOBBY, HAMBURG

VEGNONVEG, NEW DELHI

What the Coming Months has in Store...

atmos (Tokyo, Japan): I think it will be a long battle, so the focus will be on online business and reinforcing the personnel. Online sales are now growing, as store sales are going down. We have opened stores in Southeast Asia recently, but due to the virus, now is a good opportunity to review problems and make improvements. There will also be a continued focus on marketing activities such as digital activations and community content. We recently did an ‘AIR MAX QUIZ’ online event for atmos members, which was well received.

Lobby (Hamburg, Germany): For shoe releases, it’s not gonna change too much. We had a couple of nice things planned for the Nike SB 420 release and some other QS, but that couldn’t happen, and will most probably be online raffles now. Besides that, we are thinking of doing a delivery service within Hamburg. It was originally planned so that skaters could get boards and stuff, now that the weather is constantly nice - we don’t mind anyone ordering shoes as well, obviously!

Brooklyn Projects (Los Angeles, USA): With Brooklyn Projects, it has always been the experience of the shop itself, and the environment. It will be a challenge to create that online, but that’s the focus right now. Then it’s also planning on what’s coming next - talking to brands on what are we’re going to do together once we open to get some sort of normalcy going. Business will not be the same as it was pre-COVID 19. The retail landscape has changed forever, that I can tell you. Now it’s trying to figure out what it’s going to be like. People want to think that once it’s over, people are gonna want to come out and shop after being cooped up so long. However, most people have lost their jobs, so I think people use discretion on what they will buy, at least for the first year.

VegNonVeg (New Delhi, India): Our focus right now is to try to create unique digital content and experiences to keep our community engaged and growing. This includes live music gigs, art workshops, sneaker history, lacing tutorials, photography tutorials etc. We’re a relatively young company and community, so there’s a lot to do and learn. We’re also busy with future buys and are looking harder than ever at the customer and sales data. We’re using forecasting models to look at future scenarios to make sure we can anticipate how consumer behaviour will change or evolve. In essence, we’re working on being better and doing better.

BODEGA, BOSTON

OVERKILL, BERLIN

LATTE, LISBON

BLACK BOX, ROME

FOOT DISTRICT, BARCELONA

UP THERE, MELBOURNE

Forecasting the Future of Sneaker Retail

Bodega (Boston, USA): Long-term, the sneaker scene will still dominate the world. This is just a road bump. We’ll keep growing and taking on more untapped markets, but with the principles of sustainability and compassion more in the forefront.

Overkill (Berlin, Germany): At present, maybe people are reflecting on themselves and their consumer behaviour. Maybe they’re gonna be more selective when buying sneakers in the future, and won’t be copping the fourth and fifth all-white classic sneaker. However, on the other side, I’m also pretty sure that when the global recession comes to an end, the regular capitalism will catch up with us again.

Latte (Lisbon, Portugal): The first thing that comes to mind is how camping and lines for certain drops will work - if at all. I believe it will be very different in the future. In Portugal, it won’t affect much, because it’s still very difficult for stores to have access to any type of tier 0, limited releases, and quick strikes, so camping is rare. In general, I believe that demand will continue for certain releases, if not increase due to all the limitations. However, in-store drop mechanics will surely change. We have definitely seen an increase in footwear sales so far, if that means anything.

Black Box (Rome, Italy): I think we will live two phases, one until the end of the year, and a second one in 2021 when we will really see what the real impact has been. It’s hard and sad to say, but I think in the future, we won’t have small players which are not financially strong. Suppliers already started this process a couple of years ago, in reducing the access point in the market, now this emergency has accelerated this process. Online will grow and grow, but beautiful retail stores are needed to connect with the local community.

Up There (Melbourne, Australia): The long-term affects are hard to predict – a lot will come down to how quickly the recovery is across the world. It’s a global community, so a quick recovery in Australia doesn’t mean that everything is on the way up. It will certainly push more business online, forcing them to offer a truly unique in-store experience to garner the consumer’s time and attention.

Foot District (Barcelona, Spain): It’s likely that the brands will release less models, and less frequently. This will directly impact on the quality of the products that are released. It will surely also impact us and our way of appreciating each piece, forgetting about the hype commercialisation, and stopping the cash-grabs.

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cathrynstreich · 4 years

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Power Brokers: ‘Constant Communication Is More Essential Now Than Ever Before’

Editor’s Note: Before the coronavirus pandemic progressed in the U.S., RISMedia asked Power Brokers to offer their take on the upcoming year, from the current and future market outlook, to overall strengths and weaknesses. Below are excerpts of their perspectives, included in RISMedia’s 32nd Annual Power Broker Report. Hadi Atri, President & CEO, RE/MAX Executive

Ken Baris, CEO, Jordan Baris Inc., REALTORS® Real Living

Larry Flick V, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS® and The Trident Group

Hoby Hanna, President, Howard Hanna Real Estate Services

Chris Kelly, President & CEO, Ebby Halliday REALTORS®

Ben Kinney, Founder, Keller Williams Realty – Ben Kinney Companies

Rosey Koberlein, CEO, Long Companies

George Q. Morris, Co-Founder & CEO, CENTURY 21 Everest

Gary Rabon, President & CEO, Coldwell Banker Advantage

Diane M. Ramirez, Chairman & CEO, Halstead Real Estate

Joseph Rand, Chief Creative Officer, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Rand Realty

Neil Walter, CEO, ERA Brokers Consolidated

What have you done recently to pivot in order to meet a market need or overcome a challenge?

Ken Baris: The climate of concern with the stock market and coronavirus is certainly unsettling for many. In response to the volatile stock market, we ran ads: “Looking for Leverage…’Stock Up’ on Real Estate.” Keeping clients in constant communication is more essential now than ever before. We are educating on the opportunities that have emerged due to the unique and changing environment.

Hadi Atri: We have created a division that will help our potential clients update their homes prior to putting them on the market. This will help get a more favorable price for the sellers. Also, in order to confront iBuyers, we are working on a Guaranteed Sale program.

Larry Flick V: One of the challenges we face is staying in touch with and providing value to our clients after they complete their real estate transaction. As a result, we launched “Forever Concierge” on March 4. This program goes beyond transaction management by helping buyers and sellers navigate everything they need to do from agreement of sale to settlement. After settlement, we provide a library of contractors and vendors that clients can access any time, whatever their needs may be—and our clients complete all these tasks within our system. Additionally, Forever Concierge allows our sales professionals to invite their past and future clients who are homeowners to benefit from access to a home-management assistant. This will allow them to cultivate a customer for life—forever.

Hoby Hanna: We introduced a program last June called Find It First, and it’s been a big difference-maker for us. We found that we, as an industry, were doing a disservice to the seller by taking their listing and putting it online only to have inquiries on those properties sold off to agents who had never even been in the house. This was hurting the seller’s value and expediency. Why wouldn’t we make sure that the buyers who are actually out there looking know about the house first to help sell the home faster? With the challenges of low inventory and so much business being siphoned off by Zillow and the aggregators, we pivoted. Customers have a relationship with Howard Hanna that they trust and value, so we looked at how we could lean into that better.

Gary Rabon: The Triangle has been a very robust market for the past few years; in fact, we have had over 80,000 transactions between 2018 and 2019 alone. We decided to move our business model toward being a business incubator for our agents. We feel it’s our responsibility to partner with our agents to build the business they desire. Whether that business is a traditional team, horizontal team, hybrid team or simply just partnering with another agent to create a more balanced life, we have morphed our consulting, marketing, training, accounting and management structure to help agents build the business they want to build and embrace the ever-evolving consumer trends.

Diane M. Ramirez: In this whole new arena of technology, we’re very excited and proud to have created our own listing system, RESource. We did it in collaboration with Brown Harris Stevens, and it’s a Terra Holdings (Halstead’s parent company) initiative. Competitively, it’s a home run. Having the best listing system is not necessarily a silver bullet, but we knew it was something we needed to have in order to be competitive. We also sold part ownership to our competitors, Douglas Elliman and Corcoran. The three top firms using the same data makes it better data. It’s something New York has never done.

What’s the biggest stumbling block for agents, and how are you addressing it?

Ben Kinney: The biggest stumbling block is probably fear. There are lots of things for those in the industry to worry about, like iBuyers, portals and discount brokerages—not to mention the economy, interest rates, politics and now pandemics. We need to keep our agents focused on providing value and service to their databases and doing the daily lead generation. We’re providing the tech, training and accountability that helps agents survive all of the above.

Chris Kelly: We believe what separates real estate professionals with sustained excellence from those who are unable to create a lasting career comes down to having systems and processes for repeatable and predictable success. The creation of goals, measurement of lead-producing activities, tracking success and embracing accountability are all traits and predictors of highly achieving sales professionals. As crazy as it sounds, less than 20 percent of sales professionals will embrace this proven path to success, and will find themselves subject to the winds of changing markets. Our company is working to ensure every professional that joins us is taught this system to provide the best opportunity to create a successful and lasting career with us.

Neil Walter: Agents being susceptible to short-term thinking is a stumbling block. There are a lot of changing dynamics in real estate, and agents often think that those things don’t apply to them. This is a long-term industry, so this kind of thinking leads to misalignments.

Rosey Koberlein: Allowing the mindset of the shortage of inventory to be a reason they are not doing enough business. We are changing this mindset through hitting it straight on—teaching tried-and-true techniques for creating listings.

Gary Rabon: Inventory and thought leadership are two of the biggest stumbling blocks. While we have a partner who builds homes, we also believe that we need to help our agents find the hidden inventory that exists in every market. Hidden inventory are those homeowners who have thought about selling but have not decided to pull the trigger for a variety of reasons. We have embraced Ninja training and are augmenting that training with additional coaching to teach our agents how to build and mine their spheres using techniques like real estate reviews.

George Q. Morris: The biggest roadblock is mindset. Agents focus on all the things they cannot control: lack of inventory, pricing, mortgage rates, unemployment, good markets, bad markets. My job as the CEO is to assist them with focusing on the right things. So much of the activity level of the agent has to do with the messaging that comes from their leader. If you have an inconsistent message and, as a leader, get pulled into every different dogma and philosophy, you begin to speak to that inside your organization, and your people get confused.

Deirdre O’Connell: As a whole, managing the tools necessary to support their business has proven to be challenging for real estate advisors. They need CRM tools to increase their productivity and service, and must be digitally adept to reach current and prospective customers and clients. Some real estate advisors shy away from technology and others embrace it so much as to neglect the importance of personal interaction when selling. We are supporting our agents through intergenerational mentoring, training and networking.

Hadi Atri: The speed in which technology is affecting our business. There are many REALTORS® who have not accepted the fact that they must learn to use the new tools in our business in order to be competitive. Many don’t like change and don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. We have monthly classes that teach our agents how to use and take advantage of all the tools and services we offer.

Joseph Rand: I think that agents are suffering from informational overload—so much technology, most of which is not integrated all that well. What we’re trying to do is isolate the technology so that it’s subordinated within the elements of our training program—that is, we don’t teach the tech itself; rather, we teach the skill, and how the tech is just a tool for helping to build or execute that skill. If agents see the connection between the tech tool and what they’re trying to accomplish for their business, they’re more likely to get over the learning curve.

Jennifer Shemwell: Technology is always a stumbling block. We have a full-time trainer. We try to make shortcuts for agents, like producing social media that agents can tag and share, to make it easier for them.

Matt Widdows: The noise about technology and the continued crunch on commissions that we’re seeing are some of the biggest stumbling blocks today. That’s why we provide agents what they need and help them focus on what resources they should be capitalizing on. Besides offering 100-percent commissions, we also give agents the technology and the tools to be successful without continually increasing their monthly out-of-pocket costs. We embrace the fact that consumers are coming to the table with more information and expect the agent to be consultative throughout the process.

Hoby Hanna: I’m a big believer that the agent is going to stay at the center of the transaction. There is no technology alone, no different business model, that is going to change the face of the business—but today, distractions are heard so loud, from online sources and social media, that people can get a little paralyzed.

RISMedia’s 2020 Power Broker Report & Survey is sponsored by American Home Shield, Homes.com, HSA Home Warranty, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® and Pillar To Post Home Inspectors. The Power Broker Survey ranks brokerages by residential sales volume and transactions in 2019.

The post Power Brokers: ‘Constant Communication Is More Essential Now Than Ever Before’ appeared first on RISMedia.

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andrewdburton · 4 years

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The best cash back credit cards for 2020

Advertiser Disclosure: I Will Teach You To Be Rich has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. I Will Teach You To Be Rich and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Editorial Disclosure: Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

You know what’s awesome?

Free money.

With a cash back card, you get free money. That’s a hard deal to beat.

Featured Cash Back Card – Chase Freedom

The Chase Freedom is the best cash back card for rotating categories. Learn More.

Take your current spending and pretend someone cut you a check for 1-5% of that spending. You don’t have to lift a finger or do anything, the check magically shows up in your account automatically. That’s what it’s like having a cash back card.

There’s really no catch either.

As long as you already pay your credit cards off every month, there’s no downside. To be honest, you shouldn’t be using credit cards if you don’t pay off your balance each month anyway. Every credit card is a terrible deal if you don’t.

For those of you that do pay off your cards every month, a cash back credit card is one of the best deals in personal finance.

Before breaking down the best cash back cards, let’s make sure a cash back card is the right type of credit card for you.

There are two types of rewards credit cards: travel cards and cash back cards.

We go into a lot of detail on how they differ from each other in our best rewards credit cards guide. The quick summary:

Get a travel credit card if you want to maximize the value of your rewards and perks

Get a cash back card (like the ones below) if you want to maximize simplicity or your don’t travel

So what are the best cash back cards?

The Top 5 Best Cash Back Cards for 2020

After scouring all the cash back offers out there, we’ve found these cards to be the best options in 2020:

Citi Double Cash

Chase Freedom

Blue Cash Preferred Amex

Capital One® Quicksilver® Cash Rewards Credit Card

Capital One® SavorOne® Cash Rewards Credit Card

How we evaluate cash back cards

For a card to make it on our list of best cards, we evaluated it using this criteria.

Bonus value

We don’t put much weight on the signup bonus. In fact, we ignore them for the most part.

Yes, the bonuses are great. Always take advantage of them.

But I never pick my credit cards based on the bonus itself. Since I never chase credit card promos, I stick with the same set of cards for years. The rewards program, perks, and fees will all outlast the bonus. In the end, the bonus is a minor benefit.

Pick the card you want without worrying about the signup bonus.

Cash back system

This is the most important part of your cash back card. Sweat the details here.

Lots of cash back cards advertise amazing cash back rewards (get 5% cash back!) and then severely limit it with spend limits, rotating categories, or other nonsense.

As a general rule, the simpler the cash back program, the better. I’d much rather get 80% of the potential cash back if it means I never have to think about anything.

That said, if you’re trying to push your cash back rewards to the limit and are willing to take on the extra complexity, playing these games is the key to maximizing your rewards. It’s not how I personally want to spend my time, but if you do, all the power to you.

Fees

Keep a close eye on foreign transaction fees with cash back cards.

The best travel credit cards usually don’t have foreign transaction fees. That makes since they target travelers.

But cash back cards aren’t as generous. Many of them do have foreign transaction fees. This is a 1-3% fee on top of every transaction from a foreign bank. If you travel once per year, you could easily negate all your cash back rewards by paying hefty foreign transaction fees on your whole trip.

Otherwise, cash back cards don’t have many fees, and almost all of them don’t have an annual fee.

As long as you’re paying your card off every month (which you absolutely should be doing), you’ll be able to get your cash back rewards without ever having to pay a single fee.

Simplicity

As you pick your cards, keep an eye on how many banks you’re using.

Managing 2-3 logins across different banks isn’t a big deal but having a dozen or more logins starts to be a real headache. With a spouse and family, it’s surprisingly easy for bank accounts to get out of hand.

Whenever you’re trying to decide between two cards with similar offers, picking the option with a bank that you already use will help keep things simple. Not everything is about optimizing for every last dollar, simplicity and fewer headaches go a long way.

Bank reputation

At I Will Teach You To Be Rich, we have zero tolerance for banks that gouge customers on fees or treat customers poorly. Having a reliable bank is too important to put up with horrible treatment.

Unfortunately, Wells Fargo has a long history of doing terrible things to their customers. We recommend avoiding them entirely. In fact, we didn’t even consider any cash back cards from them.

Reviews of the best cash back credit cards

Here are all the cash back cards in 2020 that you should consider.

Citi Double Cash

The Citi Double Cash card offers some of the highest cash back rewards that are super simple.

This is our favorite overall cash back card.

You get 2% cash back on everything, which is a very good rewards rate. There aren’t any rotating categories or spend limits either. It’s truly as simple as it gets.

The only downside is the 3% foreign transaction fee. So definitely avoid using this card when traveling internationally.

*Terms Apply – Learn how to apply online.

Chase Freedom

The Chase Freedom is the best card for those willing to use rotating categories.

The 5% cash back is impressive. Each quarter, you’ll have a new spending category that gets the 5% cash back up to a certain limit. One quarter might be groceries, the next might be Amazon.com and Walmart.com. Everything else gets 1% cash back.

I prefer to avoid rotating categories, I don’t want to spend the mental energy keeping track of this stuff.

But if you were trying to maximize the rewards from your cash back cards, having one rotating category card could be worth it. You’d only have one set of rotating rewards to worry about. That would give you a few simple rules for spending:

Check the new category once per quarter to see what gets the 5% bonus

Use the Chase Freedom card for that category

Use your default cash back card for all other spending

As long as you remember to check the rewards category each quarter, this is still a simple system to follow. I’m not going to do it, but I totally understand if you want to.

The 5% cash back does have a quarterly spending limit, usually about $1,500. So the cash back will be limited to about $75 per quarter.

*Terms Apply – Learn how to apply online.

Blue Cash Preferred Amex

An excellent secondary card to maximize specific spending categories

If I had two cash back cards, the Blue Cash Preferred would be one of them.

I’d use my Blue Cash Preferred Amex on all my transit, supermarket, gas station, and streaming subscriptions. That would allow me to get 3-6% cash back on all that spending. For everything else, I’d use a card like the Citi Double Cash which would then give me 2% cash back on everything else.

That’s a good way to maximize cash back rewards and still have a very simple set of credit cards.

The annual fee makes this card a bit more complicated though. Not only do we need to earn enough cash back to cover the fee, we also need to earn enough cash back to outweigh the standard 1-2% cash back rewards from any other card.

We could build a super fancy spreadsheet with rewards projections based on your annual budgets. Let’s skip all that. There’s a simple way to find out if Blue Cash Preferred Amex is worth it for you.

I’m going to assume that you spend about:

$50/month in streaming subscriptions. That’s $36/year cash back.

$100/month in taxis and other transit. That’s $36/year cash back.

$100/month in gas. That’s $36/year cash back.

Combined, you’ll get $108/year cash back which covers the annual fee.

Now, if you max out the 6% supermarket category with $6,000 in annual spending, you’ll get another $360 in cash back. That easily covers the opportunity cost of sticking with a straight 2% cash back card.

In other words, if you spend over $100/week at the grocery store, it’s worth getting this card as your second cash back card. You’ll max out the grocery benefit if you average $115/week in spending.

And if you spend more than $100/month in taxis or gas, this card gets even more valuable.

*Terms Apply – Learn how to apply online.

Capital One® Quicksilver® Cash Rewards Credit Card

The best cash back card for travelers

One thing to watch for on cash back cards is the foreign transaction fees. A lot of them have it, which adds 1-3% to any foreign transaction. If you travel internationally at all, you’ll want a card that doesn’t have it.

If you want to use a cash back card while traveling, the Capital One Quicksilver Cash Rewards is a great option. You get all the benefits of having a super simple cash back rewards program, an easy 1.5% cash back on everything, and no foreign transaction fees to worry about.

This also makes an excellent second card when paired with the Citi Double Cash card. Use the Citi Double Cash when in the U.S. to get 2% cash back on everything. Then use the Capital One Quicksilver when traveling to get 1.5% cash back and avoid foreign transaction fees.

*Terms Apply – Learn how to apply online.

Capital One® SavorOne® Cash Rewards Credit Card

The best cash back card for dining and entertainment purchases

With the 3% cash back on dining and entertainment, this card makes a great option as a secondary card to maximize your returns in that category.

If you eat out a lot or attend a lot of events, it’s definitely worth considering this card.

It also makes a great backup card for when you’re traveling, since it doesn’t have any foreign transaction fees.

*Terms Apply – Learn how to apply online.

How to use multiple cash back cards to maximize your rewards

Honestly, you can get 80% of the potential cash back value from getting a single cash back card and using that card for everything.

To maximize simplicity, sticking to a single card really is a great move.

But what if you really want to get a couple of cards to maximize your cash back benefits? What does that system look like?

I’m going to walk you through a three-step system on how to build your cash back machine using multiple cards.

You will have to pay attention to a few spending categories and the rules will be a bit more complicated. But if you’re looking to maximize your cash back rewards, this is the simplest way to do it.

Step 1: Pick your default cash back card

Even if you plan on having multiple cards from the get-go, you want to start with your “default” card. This is the cash back card you’ll use for all purchases that don’t fall into any of the spending categories that we’re using other cards for.

For most folks, we highly recommend the Citi Double Cash card as your default cash back card.

The only downside is that the Citi Double Cash does have a 3% foreign transaction fee, which is pretty high.

If you travel regularly and don’t want a travel rewards card, consider using the Capital One® Quicksilver® Cash Rewards as your default card. There’s no foreign transaction fee, and you’ll get 1.5% cash back on everything. It’s not quite as high as the 2% from the Citi Double Cash, but avoiding foreign transaction fees will easily cover the gap.

Step 2: Pick one maximization card

Now we get to have some fun.

It’s time to pick your maximization card. You’ll use this card only when you make purchases that take advantage of the increased cash back rewards in the categories for that card. For everything else, you’ll use your default card that you already picked during step one.

Depending on your personal spending, you have a few options.

Option 1: Blue Cash Preferred Amex for groceries and gas

If you spend $100/week on groceries, you’ll easily max out the benefits of this card. Start using it for your groceries, streaming, transit, and gas. Even with the annual fee, it’s a fantastic card for anyone that spends regularly in these categories. Terms apply. Learn more about this card.

Option 2: Capital One SavorOne for dining and entertainment

You’ll get 3% cash back on all dining and entertainment. I tend to eat out a lot, so this is a great fit for me. It also has a 2% cash back on groceries, but that doesn’t really matter if you get the Citi Double Cash as your default. You’ll already be getting 2% on every purchase. Terms apply. Learn more about this card.

Option 3: Chase Freedom for maxing returns with rotating categories

If you really want to maximize your cash back, you’ll need to get a card with rotating categories. This gets you a 5% cash back, but you have to deal with the headaches of remembering which categories are active. I would never do this myself, it’s too much trouble. But if you don’t mind remembering which categories have the 5% bonus, you’ll be able to maximize your cash back. Terms apply. Learn more about this card.

Also remember to watch the foreign transaction fees on cash back cards

When getting a second cash back card, try to get one card without foreign transaction fees. Then you’ll be covered whenever you travel internationally. The Capital SavorOne is a great option for this. You can use it for the 3% cash back on dining and entertainment when stateside, then use it for everything to get 1% cash back and avoid foreign transaction fees when traveling.

Step 3: Optional second maximization card

If you’re looking at the list of maximization cards above and having trouble picking between two of them because they both fit your spending really well, consider grabbing them both.

This would give you a total of three cash back cards. One is your default, the other two are maximization cards.

For example, let’s say that I spend hundreds of dollars every month on groceries, gas, dining, and entertainment. There would be a strong case for me getting three cash back cards:

Citi Double Cash as my default card

Blue Cash Amex for my groceries and gas

Capital One SavorOne for dining and entertainment

This setup would allow me to maximize my cash back across several spending categories. I’d have 2% cash back as my default and 3-6% across a few categories. That’s a really nice return with a cash back machine that’s still simple enough to remember.

Should you ever consider more than three cash back cards?

I strongly advise against it.

You could get more than three and it won’t hurt you.

But I consider it completely unnecessary.

After three cards, any additional cards will have diminishing returns. They become more trouble than they’re worth.

Definitely get a default cash back card, get a second if you want to bump your returns, consider a third if your personal spending fits multiple cards, and don’t go past that.

Out of all of the options out there here are my top 5 picks for the best cash back cards for 2020.

Top 5 Best Cash Back Credit Cards

Citi Double Cash

Chase Freedom

Blue Cash Preferred Amex

Capital One® Quicksilver® Cash Rewards Credit Card

Capital One® SavorOne® Cash Rewards Credit Card

The best cash back credit cards for 2020 is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/best-cash-back-credit-cards/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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