Deals Going Down
You can now go cast your votes for the aforeblogged ($5,000) Echo Songwriting Prize, with nominees Final Fantasy, Laura Barrett, Wolf Parade, the Stills and Propagandhi. And please do! However you vote, take advantage of the opp to give songs you don't know an audition.
Also, Eye magazine's Totally Wired column this week hits two topics I've been meaning to post about: One is Paper Thin Walls, which is kind of the new Pitchfork or the new Addicted to Noise (the first full-on web music magazine, if you're old(!) enough to remember the mid-90s). Stuart Berman, guest-columning for Dave Morris, doesn't mention it explicitly, but this seems to be a project partly born of the tumult at the Village Voice and other print-media music-crit outlets, with Chuck Eddy prominent among the contributors corralled by editor Christopher R Weingarten (former CMJ staffer), also including Frank Kogan, Richard Gehr, Sterling Clover and other names familiar from the Eddy-torial era at the Voice. Maybe Xgau will be next to join the roster.
Stuart also mentions the upcoming CopyCamp conference on intellectual property, copyright, appropriation and the arts, happening in Toronto Sept. 28-30, with guests including John Oswald and Mark Hosler of Negativland. There's quite a bit more to be said about this - for instance, the fact that the conference is being co-organized by Trampoline Hall's own Misha Glouberman, and that controversies and splinter conferences have erupted around it - and a full post will come this weekend, but meanwhile if you're interested in getting one of the subsidized artists-and-writers-etc. spots to attend, I hear you should apply very quickly indeed.
Finally, I wonder how Scarlett Johansson feels about being the preferred ingenue of two creepy old icons of the once-best of American culture, both Woody Allen and Bob Dylan? (Three if you count Bill Murray.) I hope it feels great. If told in advance I would have been sceptical. But she pulls it off more completely than could any other young H'wood actress of her era, who would almost certainly be trying too hard, unable to merge with the screen, with the light, coming off winsome, unable to be dull and just-short-of-blank the way klassik stars really were. ("I heard the deafening noise/ I felt transient joys/ I know they are not what they seem," Dylan sings, seeming as the film unspools to be writing specifically of Johansson's face).
| Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 01 at 1:30 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
COMMENTS
Carl, it's not the naivety that gets me, it's the cliche.
I'm not even sure what you mean by "naive." That it's unaware of its cliche-ness? Dylan has always been aware of the cliches in his T.P. Alley-style songs (rhyming "moon" and "spoon" in one of the first ones, "I'll be your baby tonight"), so yeah, you're probably right, the vid is probably aware of it too.
Another, more plausible reading of the vid: that it's supposed to be a representation of memory/desire, not a faux-home video. The ambiguity of memory/fantasy makes the lack of tension (and the lack of hubby) more plausible.
Bob's hipness in the vid is sincere -- he really does want to signify Woody & Hank & Buddy. The fakeness is ambiguous. Does Bob wish he'd been a good 46-years married husband? Does he regret having made promises he didn't keep? Given his scorn for women expressed in so many songs from 1962 to 2006, I plead indifference.
Posted by john on September 16, 2006 10:39 PM
I dunno, Peli - I find it hard to believe that Johansson isn't having fun doing this video (fun on the level of enjoying her ability to execute the performance, especially), while I often think porn actors don't look to be having any fun. Didn't you say on your blog that there's this problem in theory/criticism where the first person whose romanticism is revealed loses? Dylan's persona is so much *not* that of a romantic that the romanticism of the video seems especially charming to me. I wouldn't want to see a long chain of sequels, mind you.
I admit to enjoying the staring and staring and staring. I am not convinced that this admission need be a guilty one Any speculation I make that she is trying to get me to stare would be specious, but so is the speculation that she's not.
And I also don't think the video is unaware that this staring is an ambiguous act. Peli & John are reading it as a more naive piece than I am.
Posted by zoilus on September 16, 2006 2:14 AM
I agree with John. What this video make manifest for me is that romantic objecitification is that much more sinister and creepey than sexual objectificiaton.
Posted by peli grietzer on September 9, 2006 7:16 AM
Thanks for clarifying, Brian - I wasn't sure at first. Yeah, I think a senior-boomers revived spirit-of-60s (in both senses) movement would be fantastic! Who else? And so far what it's against is the callowness of the culture they themselves put in motion: "Your old road is rapidly agin'/ Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand..." and then it's like, hey, wait a minute! So perfect.
Posted by zoilus on September 4, 2006 5:13 AM
Let me clarify and say that such a rebellion would be great. Who's better positioned to change things—-from copyright law to corporate avarice-- than the largest segment of the population?
Posted by Brian on September 3, 2006 10:39 PM
I love bob - long live dewey
Posted by original spin on September 3, 2006 7:09 PM
Carl,
Between this post (which reminded me of Dylan's "[recorded music] ain't worth nothing anyway" approach to file sharing) and the notice of Christgau's termination I almost get a sense of a coming "Boomer's Rebellion."
Trust no one under 50?
Posted by Brian on September 1, 2006 8:12 PM