Well, here I am. In the time since my last post, I've encountered much and would like to share my thoughts on some it, but at the outset let me say that I've had a fairly productive, interesting summer, one full of worries about the crisis that confronts both the state in which I live and the university at which I work yet also one that afforded time to catch up on research, writing, movie-going, and making new colleagues and friends or reconnecting with old ones. It was a summer of a massive L.A. fire, of a grass-roots challenge to the L.A. County Museum of Art's decision to suspend its inherently important film program, of screenings of compelling films, and screenings of questionable ones; it was also, for me at least, a summer in which I missed the Toronto International Film Festival yet discovered San Francisco, in which I spent considerable time in the reading room of the Huntington Library, and in which I was able to catch up with several things I had been meaning to see or hear.
One of these is the HBO television series The Wire. A friend whose opinions I greatly respect told me that The Wire works on the level of a Dostoevsky novel, replete with characters, intersecting storylines, and ideas. It creators structured the show with gradual expositions that span multiple episodes and that then lead and mount to compelling, intricate conclusions. Before The Wire, I didn't have too much faith in television. It's prone to formula; if consumed in large doses, it can limit people's lives in a particularly insidious way; like the romance novel or the mainstream pop song, the bulk of it can be forgettable, the gems sometimes difficult to find. But The Wire has awakened my belief in the potential of the medium. In addition to the show's novelistic structure, it examines with distinguishing, sensitive realism the cultures of Baltimore's inner-city drug trade, police department, and civil structure, and each season looks at a different side of Baltimore's underclass, from the projects and the docks, to the populated and abandoned neighborhoods, to the schools and street corners. Most of all, the series underscores in a particularly complex manner the influence that institutions have upon people at all levels of the social stratum, and how institutions, tragically, compromise individuals and the kinds of choices they make. While I'm hardly an expert on television history, I can say unreservedly that The Wire seems to be the best it has offered: deeply intricate, maddening in all sorts of ways, incisive, eye-opening, layered, heartbreaking, often funny, endearing, intelligent, definitely brilliant. I've got one season to go, and I can't wait to see how it all ends (Omar ... what will happen to Omar? Don't tell me if you already know.)
As far as feature films go, I saw a number this summer. Michael Mann's Public Enemies seemed devoid of the dramatic, narrative arc inherent in John Dillinger's life, and I admit to feeling a bit underwhelmed when leaving the theater, but Mann, more than ever, appears to be moving closer towards visual impressionism than he does towards realism and drama. Few films in recent memory construct mood and experience through surface texture as effectively as this one does. Duncan Jones' science-fiction film, Moon, is small-scale in the best sense of the term, meaning it avoids excess, and while it deals intellectually with issues of identity and memory, it is surprisingly affecting (definitely a favorite of the year for me). On DVD, I enjoyed David Mamet's directorial debut, House of Games, for its refreshing use of language; I wasn't quite as keen on the film's study of the art of the con, but that's only because this is a fairly common trope in Mamet's work. Chantal Akerman's acknowledged masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, impressed me more than anything, though. As a study of domesticity, repetition, ritual, and loneliness, it has both an academic and a nightmarish quality to it, and its lingering closing shot left me wide awake, when I otherwise would have been sleeping. But, even more, as a fellow fan remarked to me, the film is a primary exponent of spatial relationships, those between individuals and the familiar walls that surround them and the invisible ones they might not be conscious of. Akerman's cinematographer, Babette Mangolte, enhanced these themes with a stationary camera, often placed at the end of hallways or on the opposite sides of doorways; her limiting of the depth of field when Dielman is outside nicely maintained thematic consistency.
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On to music. Over at The Existence Machine, Richard makes an interesting point about the consumption of new music:
I wonder if there isn't something unseemly about the attempt at remaining up-to-date well into serious adulthood. I wonder if it's not part of what keeps us not young but infantile, or rather, distracted. It becomes consumerist frenzy, this need that must be filled (something like a manufactured consent, of sorts). I also wonder if it isn't convenient for me to come around to such an idea only since I've abandoned my own serious efforts at keeping up. Do I need to know what every hip band of 20 year-olds, however inventive, is up to this and every year? Should I? Am I wrong to call the whole process into question? How many records need to exist? How many can you listen to?
I think there's something to this idea of a manufactured consent, and I plead wholly guilty to engaging in it, sometimes willingly, sometimes reflexively, like, well, a child. I do think music is important, its rewards worth the work of engaging it directly, but, like so much else these days, it requires choice, not so easy to exercise when there's so much out there (my unread RSS feeds any given week reach well into the hundreds in large part because of all the new music that bloggers are mentioning). Personally, I struggle with the very issues Richard raises, and so I'm not sure where my own indulgences will take me, but I'm trying to get better at focusing on fewer artists and albums on a monthly or annual basis, compared to my far more diffuse and wide-ranging consumption in recent times (depth, not breadth, as I so often preach as a teacher).
Having said all that, this is something I will likely repeat by year's end: 2009 has been a great year for music so far, as many of my favorite artists have released new albums: Neko Case (the highly musical Middle Cyclone), M. Ward (the consistently good Hold Time), Metric (the pulse-pounding Fantasies), Viva Voce (Rose City, on which Anita Robinson, yet again, convinces me why she's my favorite rock guitarist of the moment), and the supergroup The Dead Weather (the bluesy Horehound). Yet I think I'll remember 2009 for the year in which I really clicked with Wynton Marsalis and, particularly, Keith Jarrett. Marsalis' early records, especially his Live at Blues Alley (still available in a reprinted edition), evince a fiery personality that combined the targeted playing of post-bop Miles Davis with the inherent traditionalism of, say, Freddie Hubbard or Clark Terry. Jarrett has quickly become a personal favorite; he displays the intelligence of a master interpreter, the abandon of a truly free-wheeling improviser, and the precision of a classicist. I've listened to a ridiculous amount of his output in recent months (the six-disc At the Blue Note foremost among them), but lately I've been returning to Bye Bye Blackbird (his homage to Miles), My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreaux, and Standards Live. He's always better live, in no small part due to the almost subconscious, extemporaneous interaction of his group.
And, finally, a word about Andras Schiff's new recording of Bach's partitas for the ECM label: it reminds me why I began listening to Schiff's recordings of Bach in the first place. Fluid and dignified, without a trace of artificiality, at least to these ears.
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At any rate, that's a lot. But more to come, and I hope some of it will be about The Wire.
