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.