Posted on 12-9-2002
Yesterdays
Re-packaged As Tomorrows
By Alan Marston
After 25 years of `modern' music and movies - where the word
modern is a
euphamism for commerce comes first - the heart and soul, the
life that is
the raison d'etre for art is missing in action. Needless to
say those who
control modern everything via commerce are not handing over
art to life,
they are going back to pre-freemarket art which they now own.
It will work
for a while, but only for a while will the inevitable be staved
off, the
inevitable return of creativity, the uncontrollable, the expression
of
life-forces.
Meantime expect many more yesterdays in your future, all my
troubles seemed
so far away. Roger Ebert, the film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times,
has
been writing about pictures of yesteryear. Editors say they're
focusing on
the past to enlighten a new generation ignorant of pop culture
before the
era of Bruce, Prince and Madonna. Well, that's the commercial
PR line. I
think its re-cycling rather than facing up to future-uncontrollable.
Art
that's 10, 30, even 70 years old is drawing lots of attention
from the
usual suspects, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio and the
music magazine
Blender. They are the front-line media troops for `modern' art.
God help
us. In recent weeks, Ebert has tackled "The Hustler" (1961),
"In Cold
Blood" (1967) and "Unforgiven" (1992) in his biweekly Sun-Times
Great
Movies series. Reviews of the old pictures receive twice the
space he gives
current films. "So much of the new stuff is just not very challenging
for
an intelligent viewer," he said.
Susan Stamberg, a 30-year NPR veteran, agrees. Over the past
few months,
she has broadcast extended essays on cultural touchstones like
the Mamas
and the Papas' hit "California Dreamin' " and a famous 1941
Rita Hayworth
pinup as part of NPR's Present at the Creation series. There
is, Ms.
Stamberg said, a "paucity of anything fresh or original in contemporary
pop
culture. "It's not an accident that Broadway is so full of revivals,"
she
added.
Ebert's Great Movies series and NPR's Present at the Creation
are part of a
wider trend of taking new looks at dusty classics, he may have
started the
wave when he began his old-flicks column in 1996. Rolling Stone
picked up
on it in 1999 with the RS Hall of Fame, a series of new reviews
of
time-honored albums. And the momentum is building. When Blender
had its
debut last year, it included a regular two-page feature called
The Greatest
Songs Ever. NPR kicked off Present at the Creation in January.
On
television, VH1 recently began broadcasting "Ultimate Albums,"
a show about
genre-defining CD's.
Fifty or 100 years ago, there were widely accepted works you
could be
familiar with and be considered culturally educated, said Nathan
Brackett,
a senior editor of Rolling Stone. Today, roughly 30,000 new
CD's are
released each year, and those albums compete for teenagers'
attention with
films, television, video games and the Internet. A tsunami of
pure pop
commercial art. Many are drowning, profits are drowning with
them, the art
business is looking for a way forward that maintains their control,
they
can't see it so are looking backwards instead. Retro critiques
are in sync
with current creators who see the gaze back as an excuse to
trade the
present for well-worn favorites and for work released before
their careers
started. Critics have a responsibility to produce something
meatier than
nostalgia. The backward-looking trend continues a spiral that
music and
movie owners and critics have been in for years. Rather than
take a chance
on new scripts, movie studios return to "Star Wars," "Austin
Powers" and
"Men In Black," to name a handful of the franchises that have
dominated
multiplexes this summer. They rewrite television shows like
"The Fugitive."
And television even remakes itself with NBC's "Rerun," the show
based on
new players' acting out vintage sitcom scripts.
Its working, at the moment. Consumers (they used to be humans)
are pointed
to the familiar. When last year's new television season opened
later that
month, former favorites on the wane, like "Friends," shot back
to the top
of the ratings. The preferred response to 9/11, preferred by
those that
felt they are the target, has been to go back to the good old
days ....
when commerce was king.
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