Tynan's Anger

Paul Lester has a post up on the Guardian's blog about how rock and roll has lost its ability to shock. He argues that between the fallouts of R. Kelly, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, there's not much material left for music that can shock a society that no longer embraces a genteel spirit:

I went to review The Zutons, expecting to be surrounded by tweedy toffs and straw-chewing yokels, the only 21st century boy in the village. But distressingly, the locals in the pub where I stopped to ask for directions to the gig didn't resemble extras from An American Werewolf In London; they looked just like their big city counterparts, all 3G mobiles, designer jeans, sharp haircuts and T-shirts emblazoned with the usual sexually audacious slogans (the blokes, too). And I finally realised: everybody is cool, everybody is hip, everybody knows. It was a sad moment.

I believe Lester misses an enormous point. The past ability to shock comes not from the substance of the music, but from the style. Lester uses The Sex Pistols as a sort of gold standard for shocking music. But the enduring shock of The Sex Pistols was not their calls for anarchy or allusions to gas chambers, but by how little they actually resembled rock stars. The band were spazzy, outsider weirdos with more than a little attitude to spare, and by giving the impression of not caring while still rocking out, they inspired the whole British punk movement and everything that followed.

While yes, there's very little topical subject matter that can be still be found shocking, there's still room to take people aback, and Lester even alludes to it in his column. The conversion of anti-cool punk rock into cool indie rock is a major source of the problem, which is why a band that doesn't give a crap about fashion, isn't afraid to talk politics like most current bands are, but still finds some way to take their music in a new direction, is exactly the kind of band we've been needing for at least 5 years. I would argue we haven't had a band like that since The Jesus Lizard broke up.

Labels: indie rock, nothing's shocking, punk rock, the guardian, the sex pistols

If you're as sick as Holocaust films as I am (I was raised to regard Schindler's List as Disney Does the Holocaust), you owe it to yourself to see the Counterfeiters. It's the only Holocaust film I can think of that completely inverts the traditional structure, with a tough, no-bullshit Russian Jew subtly manipulating the S.S. to keep him and his fellow prisoners alive. There are so many ways this could have been fucked up, but director Stefan Ruzowitzky helms the film brilliantly. Who would have thought that arguably the most mature Holocaust film ever made would come from Austria? Ruzowitzky has an excellent article in The Guardian addressing the larger political implications of the film in his native Austria, as well as how he expects it to be received in the U.S. and U.K. So far the reception has generally been good, but not good enough in my mind.

Labels: schindler's list, stefan ruzowitzky, the counterfeiters, the guardian

During my perpetual self-googling (no I have NOT seen this play), I have apparently gotten recognition from the Guardian's Noises Off Blog. Kelly Nestruck at the Guardian recognized the aptness of being in theater and having the name Stanislawski, and provided free publicity for this blog. He blogs at fence.blogspot.com, so I thought I'd return the publicity favor. Seriously, my last name is turning into the gift that keeps on giving.

Labels: kelly nestruck, noises off blog, stanislavsky, stanislawski, the guardian

Allison Krogan at The Guardian poses a question that's trickier than it initially seems: what is the difference, from a semantic standpoint, between "theater" and "drama"? She uses an interesting quote by Edward Bond to launch the debate:

"I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'."

Her thesis, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that "the implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art." One would be hard pressed to find someone who would call The Little Mermaid "drama (Ben Brantley certainly wouldn't), but it's certainly theater. I'd also add that unlike, theater, which usually implies "performance," "drama" is a text-based term, as if it could be a category along with novels and poetry. Krogan's use of Eugene O'Neill here is a particularly good example, although for the wrong reasons. O'Neill was a dramatist first and a playwright second. Of course, as many have argued, that made his plays much more forceful when read than when performed.

Now that I'm taking W.J.T. Mitchell's Theories of Media class, these kind of discussions interest me a lot more.

Labels: ben brantley, edward bond, eugene o'neill, the guardian, the little mermaid, theater vs. drama