Living in Los Angeles

When John Tempereau considers the possibility of someone breaking into this field who might live, say, in Detroit, he replies, “Don’t bother.” Is that cold or merely a matter of fact? “Well, you don’t want to encourage them to come. You must be really honest with them. I have to tell you, even New York is a dead end for composers. Especially lately, it just hasn’t been a fertile ground like it was years ago. . . . so it is a rought market. You can’t live anywhere but right here. There’s something about being in the town every day, being visible, seeing people at lunch, just being the conversations of the people in town. If you’re not, you’re losing out. If you’re not living in LA as a film composer, you’re not going to be successful. Every body thinks, enough trips out here per year — it never works.

“If you can get to the level of Howard Shore, yes. And living in London is a completely different story, because so much recording is done in London and there are so many great filmmakers that we use from there. But as far as being a television composer, for instance, it’s here or London.”

Well then.

It should be noted here that we are talking about over 40,000,000 abortions since Roe v Wade. Which, among other things, means millions less children available for adoption — which explains why it is so hard to adopt in the United States, and why couples must look to foreign countries.

Right now it seems one’s position on the matter bespeaks one’s overall attitude towards the relationship between individual and State (or “centralized government”). People who believe that Roe v Wade was correctly decided are, on average, progressive-Left minded. People who feel Roe v Wade should in fact be addressed by the Supreme Court, but disagree with the outcome, are progressive-Right minded. And people who feel that the Supreme Court had no business deciding this case, are either libertarian-Left (abortion should be legal at the state level) or libertarian-Right (abortion should not be legal at the state level). Those are the four primary political stances in America today, and abortion clearly delineates all four.

So you see at present there are actually two levels of arguments in involved in abortion — #1, should the Supreme Court decided at all?, and #2, should abortion be legal?

Right now, common society has the mechanism to grapple only with #2. On the other hand, #1 gets little to no play in common society. As a symptom, outside of Fred Thompson, no major presidential candidates (including McCain and Obama) are comfortable speaking about the incredibly unique characteristic of American government, namely the virtues and power of divided government between the levels of individuals, families, local assocations, states, and federal.

Now while it is important to have civil disagreements and discussion about #2, the ability to be civil (if still passionate) is disallowed by the reality of #1. Federal government jurisdiction over this issue means everyday citizens have next to no reason to attempt civil discourse about abortion (#2) with their neighbors and friends. There is simply no political benefit of doing so; only the Supreme Court can change this law. Rather, the only political benefit is to engage in uncivil war about abortion, whether you are yea or nay on it. Because only the rhetoric of uncivil war can play at the MSMedia level. Only uncivil war can influence national political parties, and national political candidates, and the justices they nominate and approve.

So this is why abortion is at present so fundamental to American politics. The largely unacknowledged dimension of the issue (namely, #1) acts as a kind of silent, shadowy, tyrannical driver, psychologically, in our society. Very much like how an unacknowledged feeling in the mind of a person acts like a driver of behavior — i.e., someone who doesn’t not acknowledge their jealousy of a person will act bizarrely and unreasonably towards that person. The bottom line is this: until widespread conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. Supreme Court has no business deciding whether abortion should be legal or not, abortion will continue its strangehold on national political discourse.

In other words, whether it should be legal or not (#2)  should be put into timeout. During timeout, we should have a national debate as to #1 — the appropriate level of government that ought engage the issue. (I don’t see how anyone could look at the issue calmly and decide anything but that the Supreme Court should stay out of it, but we should still have the debate.) Only after that is settled will reasonable heads prevail, and people in disagreement speak in civil terms. To understand the virtues of American government, how it was designed, is our collective task.  And only then will abortion relinquish its place at the head of our country’s table. So let’s be educated citizens, again, okay?

All the lavish photography will inspire you to check out films you might never have. Suggestions are made in the following categories: “Must See”, “Drama”, “Suspense”, “Film Noir”, “Good Guys & Bad Guys”, “Comedy”, “Romance”, “Tearjerkers”, “Damsels & Dames”, “One of a Kind”, “Musicals”, “Westerns”, “Sci-Fi & Horror”. A total of 80 films are discussed, enough to occupy anyone for quite a while. And, of course, all these films bear countless re-watchings, so really, these films alone could occupy the rest of one’s lifetime.

And studying these films, if you are in the film industry, is obviously essential. Contemporary films make constant allusion to old Hollywood — nothing less than the building blocks of the language of film (along with, of course, non Hollywood classics).

As a tease, here are the book’s ten “Must See” picks:

All About Eve
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Double Indemnity
Gone with the Wind
On the Waterfront
The Philadelphia Story
Some Like It Hot
Sunset Boulevard
The Wizard of Oz

And I’ve only seen five of these! . . .  me gots some watchin’ to do.

Shakespeare is especially fond of negative terms, which are the contradictories of the corresponding positive terms. By them he achieves vigor and freshness.

We will untread the steps of damned flight. (The Life and Death of King John, 5.4.52)

Though you would seek t’unsphere the stars with oaths (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.48)

Here’s such ado to make no stain a stain . . . (The Winter’s Tale, 2.2.19)

lest her . . . beauty unprovide my mind again (Othello, 4.1.217)

As if some planet had unwittted men (Othello, 2.3.182)

No! First shall war unpeople this my realm (The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, 1.1.126)

He is unqualified with very shame (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11.44)

Unshout the noise that banish’d Marcius (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, 5.5.4)

will he not . . . Untent his person and share the air with us? (The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.177)

have you any way to unfool me again? (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.2.119)

Unscissor’d shall this hair of mine remain (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 3.3.29)

I do beseech You, . . . to unthink your speaking (The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, 2.4.103)

in his meed he’s unfellowed (The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 5.2.150)

a little to disquantity your train (The Tragedy of King Lear, 1.4.270)

but by the displanting of Cassio (Othello, 2.1.284)

Dispropertied their freedoms (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, 2.1.264)

like a star disorb’d (The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.46)

As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.

Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.

This call, by Grayson Perry, is three years old. Fitting that it would be slow to take (I just came upon the article yesterday). But it most certainly will take hold here, at POLYSEMY, because Slow Art and what we do here are in complete simpatico. From our mission statement:

POLYSEMY is an journal for champions of the fine arts who are also fine art practitioners, ranging from beginners to masters. The journal is crafted for tradition-minded fine artists who desire intelligent investigation into issues at the heart of the various disciplines of fine art based upon the premise that commonality lies at the roots of all creative endeavor — a commonality that can be articulated. POLYSEMY also features discussions of inspiration practices, media studies and techniques, social and political commentary, exhortations to classical education, aesthetic philosophy, and more.

. . . POLYSEMY is dedicated to the proposition that the fine arts are living traditions of imagination requiring constant renewal by artists. These traditions are based upon resonance, beauty, wisdom, awe, mystery; traditions that defy categories of time, and are the result of both verbal and nonverbal conversations between the works of imaginative people across the ages. POLYSEMY’s project is to frame practical innovation, insight, and intuition to be applied towards the bringing forth of contemporary fine artistry. POLYSEMY, thus, seeks to be a useful companion to working fine artists.

Classical Education is Slow. Developing one’s idiolect is Slow. Honing disciplinary, then interdisciplinary, and finally transdisciplinary study (a.k.a. Great Artistry) is Slow. Great Ideas, Great Themes, Great Forms are Slow. Living with classic works of fine art in such a way that profundity unfolds is Slow. Wisdom is Slow. There is, in fact, nothing not Slow that is discussed at any length in any of the POLYSEMY articles or Blogs. I see no reason why Slow Art (really just another name for Fine Art; works that provide a “full meal” of perception) shouldn’t be a way to frame one of our driving forces at POLYSEMY, and POLYSEMY its main advocate in the world, or one of them. But it takes a community, not just a journal staff, to make that happen.

Consider this the Slow Art clarion call.

12. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

A period of unfavorable weather set in.
vs.
It rained every day for a week.

Or:

He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward.
vs.
He grinned as he pocketed the coin.

Or:

There is a general agreement among those who have enjoyed the experience that surf-riding is productive of great exhilaration.
vs.
All who have tried surf-riding agree that it is most exhilarating.

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this, that the surest method of arousing and holding the attention of the reader is by being specifric, definite, and concrete. Critics have pointed out how much of the effectiveness of the greatest writers, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, results from their constant definiteness and concreteness.

One moment near the end that I’d like to comment on. Asked what advice he gives to aspiring film composers (hey, that’s me!), Elfman says his advice is two-fold. On one hand, be able to imitate others’ work, because so often before he finds a composer, the director will install temporary music (or “temp music”) and often gets attached to the temp music even as the film composer is asked to come up with something original, thus it is important for the film composer to be able to imitate and/or work within the musical confines of the temp tracks. And on the other hand, Elfman stresses the importance of having your own voice as a film composer, because as he says, so many if not all of the great have developed their own voice (their own “idiolect“), because without one, directors and producers won’t think the prospective composer mature enough.

Able to copy others yet in possession of a distinct voice — Elfman acknowledges the seeming paradox of his advice. Eflman doesn’t say how he reconciles the paradox (obviously, he’s been able to, as he is one of Hollywood’s most successful film composers). So let me offer my own take.

The example, par excellence, is seminal jazz drummer Tony Williams. As a teenager, he was asked by Miles Davis to be in his quartet (along with Hancock, Shorter, Carter). This happened because the young Williams had fantastic chops, and blew everyone away with an approach to drums that was unique and powerful. Asked at one point how he was able to arrive at his own voice, he said that he learned the essential styles of the famous jazz drummers before him — imitated their sound, in other words; drummers the likes of Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones. And then for his own voice/style/sound, it was a matter of simply playing like none of his elders did. He copied other people, and in doing so, he learned their aesthetic choices; for his own voice, he simply chose differently. A finding of a niche that only deep education reveals.

Yes this is a form of “learn the rules before you break them”, but far more granular and concrete.

Thus, Elfman’s seeming paradox is not one at all. Rather, he alludes to a continuum on which the aspects of his advice are on different points, and flow from one to the other. Certainly, one starts by imitating other film composers, which means close study of their works, in order to understand their choices, and then using their works as modeled basis for imitative works by the student. After a while of doing that, with the experience of modelling several film composers’ works imitatively (i.e., making works that copy that which is studied), the student starts to see (intuit, more likely) choices that his elders have not made, and that he can, given the demands of a particular film and the psychological effect sought of music in order that the film is complete and imaginatively full.

This is the primary way for contemporary fine artists to work within inherited traditions, and still make something “new”. That is also requires significant hard work and commitment comes with the territory.

The preservation of freedom is the protective reasons for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances in civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of a parliament, though he was partly financed by an absolute monarch. Newton and Leibnitz, Einstein and Bohr, Shakespeare, Milton, Pasternak, Whitney, McCormick, Edison and Ford, Jane Addams, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Schweitzer — no one of these opened new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives. Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity.

The irony is that I think a great many fine artists are libertarian when it comes to themselves, but the opposite when it comes to their view of the proper role of government (i.e., for other people), on matters such as Food policy, Medical Care policy, and Education policy (the three disciplines that cooperate with Nature, rather than operate upon it). And this derives, I think, from the traditional relationship of artist and patron. Because the number of actual patrons has not increased, whereas the number of artists has dramatically, artists who don’t bootstrap it have had to look elsewhere. Most every road, in that case, leads to a centralized government. If you can’t get money directly for your art, getting it indirectly in the form of “universal health care”, “universal public education”, and “(artificially) cheap food” suffices as a form of patronage, allowing fine artists to devote time to their craft that would otherwise have to go towards earning the bread to pay for those services that (they fear) would be more expensive with a less centralized (i.e., more American) form of government.

The overall point, though, is that fundamentally, there is no reason “artistic liberty” is any less of a good thing than the “liberty” that is supposed to come from the American form of government, midwifed by the Founders — the primary characteristic of which is a limited centralized government on one end, a flourishingly funky civil society of individuals, families, and associations on the other, and City and State governments in between. And, thus, I see no reason, as a fine artist, to have political views other than libertarian/conservative. Centralized government off of my back means centralized government ought be off every one’s backs.

1) The Ghost and Mrs Muir
1947 classic directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director of All About Eve; scored by Bernard Herrmann. A great film that prefigures psychological themes raised more recently in Fight Club.

2) The Science of Sleep
2006. Directed by Michel Gondry. Also wrote it, but he should have hired a writer. Jean-Michel Bernard did the score. Beautifully shot and animated (usually astonishingly so) but the story is thin soup, the ending a cop-out, and thus the film incomplete.

3) Arsenic and Old Lace
1944 classic directed by Frank Capra; Cary Grant is fantastic; Max Steiner did the score; adapted for film from a play and it feels like it (heavy on dialogue, low on sets); the two old-lady aunts of Grant almost steal the show.

So he was traded to the Jets. Here’s a good compendium of media reaction.

I followed his career with the Packers from the beginning, closely through all 16 years. I attended a dozen games in person, including his last as a Packer, the NFC Championship game (a.k.a. the third coldest game in NFL history). I stopped being overly emotionally attached to professional sports some time in college, because I realized that these players, these teams, are professionals, doing a job like anyone. If the players aren’t going to be broken up after a loss (as most aren’t), then unless some one wants to pay me a football player-level salary, I’m not going to be, either.

But still, it is too bad that Favre didn’t end his career with the Packers. Of course, he’ll always be a Packer, and tied to the organization and city.

Ultimately, my feeling is more power to him. He’s got the right to pursue gainful employment in the discipline he’s mastered. And, this gives me a reason to watch a Jets game on television, where before I had none (did anyone, outside of Jets fans?). Who knows — a player of his caliber needs challenges in order to thrive, and perhaps he’ll have new ones in New York that he didn’t in Green Bay. The challenge to prove the Packers wrong; the challenge of learning a new offense; the challenge of thriving in the New York media climate; even the challenge posed by the ghost of Joe Namath (Namath being the last legend-type quarterback in the Jets organization). Certainly Favre might falter; but he might do splendidly. Favre is a wildcard-type player like no other, which is why we watch him play.

Players like Favre come along once a generation — by that I mean, a person incredibly talented who fans young and old can somehow identify with, who stirs the imagination of not just fans, but even non-fans. Packer Nation was lucky for 16 years in that we enjoyed Favre’s athletic poetry, but we shouldn’t be selfish. While of course most fans enjoyed Favre’s fine art performances, in truth only Packer fans paid the kind of attention required to grok all the beauty in play with Favre at the helm. It is really something, to be sitting inside during the Favre opera rather than merely watching through the window.

So, Jets Nation, to you I say, enjoy the ride. Hopefully Favre gives you one both gripping and memorable. And to Packer Nation, I think we all know that the time is right to move on, and has been that way since January.

There are several learning moments from an interview Linklater gave Reverse Shot in 2004. All emphasis mine, with comments following:

RS: How did you come to make your first film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books [1987]?

Linklater: That came after several years of doing short films and technical experiments. But that was the first film for which I ever put much thought into content or form, everything before that was kind of “film school.” I talk to aspiring filmmakers who have a script and are ready to jump in and make a feature, I just say, “Have you made a six-minute short yet?” They say, “No, no I’m ready for the big time.” You will learn so much, you gotta flounder around, get a lot of things out of your system. Even Orson Welles, the ultimate boy genius of cinema, made several shorts, and some weren’t that good.

In the same vein, film composers should score as many shorts as they can before they focus on trying to score a feature. “Get a lot of things out of your system” is incredibly accurate. Build your “idiolect” is another way to put it.

RS: And you distributed Slacker yourself?

Linklater: Initially. We opened it in Austin ourselves. At the Film Society we picked up people along the way who shared the mission of “Cinema: all for one.” I did most of the heavy lifting, doing all the business, booking, all the crap work. I took on all that responsibility. I guess I’m blessed or cursed with this one part of my personality, because my dad was a straight-up insurance executive kind of guy, that I could stomach going to meet with a lawyer, go file paperwork at the state, return phone calls, deal with a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that seems so “not art.” I somehow have the personality to stomach all the crap. And it’s served me well, actually, in dealing with the studios. I think people think I struggle with that, that I’m some kind of “renegade-artist-type-dude.” But I have always gotten along and been able to deal with bigger systems. I was always able to have that meeting, do what I have to do, as a means to an end. Incorporate as a nonprofit, get grants, do all the paperwork.

The capacity to not only tolerate, but thrive, in the business of film-making may in fact be what separates the wheat from the chaff, especially given the abundance of both film-makers and film composers right now.

RS: One thing we all agreed on when we selected you for this symposium, is that you’ve tried out all this different stuff, but each film is unmistakably yours. In School of Rock, there’s a certain shot where Jack Black is performing his “Band Is Mine” song for the class for the first time, and the camera moves, floats gently backwards. I feel like this “drift” is carried through all of your films.

Linklater: Again, not really conscious on my part, but maybe that’s how I see things, just this sort of floaty observation. That’s the thing about this kind of work. You’re stuck with your own personality, for better or for worse. And the sad thing about loving cinema before making films is that you think you can do anything or anyone, like Scorsese or so and so. Once you’re doing it all you really can do if you’re being honest and not knocking off something, is be yourself, the way you see it, the way you feel it.

Another good point, about the danger of “loving cinema” too soon. Probably not an insurmountable danger, of course. But nevertheless, Linklater speaks to the wisdom of learning one or a couple things deeply, rather than learning or studying a wide span but little to nothing in depth. In my case, my favorite film composer is Bernard Herrmann, but I would say that of his entire output, I’ve only closely studied five films and the scores. Mark Mothersbaugh is the one contemporary film composer whom I’ve studied the most. I think you pick one or two models, whom you study obsessively, and also allow for plenty of time for informal study and discovery, which means regularly watching films for enjoyment primarily but still for learning, if secondarily. This allows one’s love for film to grow steadily, but not too fast, keeping what you absorb useful. Sort of like not watering what you plant from seed in your garden too much.

RS: You talk about having control over something, and it ultimately being a Linklater film. How does this fit into the overall question of auteurism? To me, your films stand alone because they’re much more about collaboration.

Linklater: I never beat my chest and say this is a “Linklater film.” I’m just sort of the ringleader of a lot of creative energies. Inevitably that’s what a director does. I think that’s why I’m doing this in the first place, why I’m not sitting in a room writing alone. What I live for is mixing it up with other people and artists, having a good time and expressing ourselves. It’s sort of like I create the sandbox, but I’m inviting people to come and play in it. It’s the spirit of film, I just want to have a good time. But the director in me is striving to make the best thing possible for what I have in mind, which requires someone to come at me with more ideas than I could ever imagine. That’s what good collaboration is, whether it’s with an actor, a writer, a composer. People together on the same wavelength, building on an idea. When I work with someone, we both end up somewhere neither anticipated. You plan everything on paper, and you do all the homework and prepare, but the alchemy happens when you mix it up with others. To me, that’s cinema. A cameraman like Sven Nykvist; his best work is with Bergman. With someone else, it’s good, but it’s not the same. Those two guys go to some level together in which one needs the other. Same with directors and actors.

That pretty much speaks for itself. To prepare thoroughly in order to let go and have fun doing so, in other words.

Charlotte Rains Dixon is a freelance writer, novelist, copywriter, ghostwriter and creative writing teacher living in Portland. Charlotte has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing and is the editor of “Book Strumpet” and the author of the “Word Strumpet” blog. Dixon graciously agreed to take part in my ongoing “5 Question Interview Series”.

From Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, by Sister Meriam Joseph, pg 146:

Catachresis, a figure which we would call an implied metaphor, is the wrenching of a word, most often a verb or an adjective, from its proper application to another not proper, as when one says that the sword devours. This figure, like the use of nouns as verb, and the formation of compounds and negatives, is in Shakespeare’s hands a vital creative instrument with which he forges sudden concentrations of meaning, and secures the compression, energy, and intensity which characterize great poetry.

Lent him our terror, dress’d him with our love (Measure for Measure, 1.1.20)

Your eye in Scotland Would create soldiers (Macbeth, 4.3.186)

I have supp’d full of horrors (Macbeth, 5.5.13)

supple knees Feed arrogance (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.48)

Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine, Fall fellowly drops. (Tempest, 5.1.63)

your ears . . . so fortified against our story (Hamlet, 1.1.31)

If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech (Hamlet, 3.2.85)

And no more locutions such as “citizen of the world” and “global citizenship.” If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism isn’t, however, an asset for US presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, who needs to seem comfortable with America’s vibrant and very un-European patriotism.

Otherwise, “citizen of the world” and “global citizenship” are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.

Nonsense, indeed. As is the entire notion of “world-centrism”, “post-nationalism”, and any other similar sounding buzz word. All are poppycock dressed in rubbish.