GW: Punk Cowboys.

So I was reading the LA Times and I came across this article, laughed really loud, then decided to turn it in for credit:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/03/the-majestic-silver-strings-a-fresh-spin-on-old-country.html

The article is about this group's, "The Majestic Silver String," new album, "The Majestic Silver Strings." The group is made up of these 4 acclaimed guitarists: Buddy Miller, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, and Greg Loisz. Of these, Miller is the main one being interviewed.

Miller talks a bit about his previous work. He never really knew much about western/cowboy music, but then he got into it and he made a band. One of his old bands in NYC was called Crackers. They played "harmelodic versions of country favorites and original compositions."

Later Buddy moved on and did some work that is not mentioned.

And now he's back with his three new buddies in The Majestic Silver Strings. They take a new turn on the western genre in that their songs sound different and don't follow the general "let's go out into the fields and sing around the campfire" feeling. In fact, Miller talks about how a buddy had let him borrow music sheets called "Cowboy Songs" from the 1930. He misread the signatures in the song, and understood the music to sound "punk." He liked it, so he incorporated it into his new album with his new buddies and, in essence, their work pushed "lighthearted music into darker territory." Miller says it's appropriate because of current events like the wars in the Middle East. Meaning that the Army are the new Cowboys, and the desert is the new prairie.

I'll include this little detail I found on Facebook because I was so confused when I first read the article: The Majestic Silver Strings Album "pushes each song into the new cosmos."

If anyone is interested in checking these homies out, think fast because they'll be at the Grammy Museum (at LA Live, I think) on March 10th.

Comic Book and Musical Mash-Up an Epic fail?

Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark is a new play that has been getting a lot of buzz. Probably because its a Broadway musical about a superhero. But maybe it could be the ridiculously large budget of ...drum roll please...... 65 million dollars. Take some time to lift up your jaw, I was shocked too. With so much bread and publicity backing the project, one would assume this must a sensational show. Well Jason Zinoman of Slate seems to think its some kind of epic... an epic fail.

This article describes Turn off the Dark as a mess. More importantly, it describes how this genre mash-up ends up "a comic book musical that seems to have no affection for comic books or musicals". I originally thought this was a harsh assessment considering the play adheres to the basic form of the original Spider Man story. But there's a twist that doesn't come until the second act - Arachne, the spider woman, a seductress. She selfishly vies for Spider Man's and Peter Parker's affection. And from what I've read, he wants her too. But of course as expected, Peter ends up with his wholesome Mary Jane rather than the sexpot spider lady. Surprised?

It's clear that creator Julie Taymor has no issue with toying with the norms surrounding genre. She allows the Spider Man we know to be seen while throwing in an artistic agenda that was unexpected. The show seems quirky and fun with Spider Man flying over the audience in some Cirque Du Soleil moves. I would be down to see it, but not because it is an eloquent blend of two genres I love. The combination sounds more to me like lamb and tuna fish than peanut butter and Jelly.

Check out the article for a full review. Its not all bad.

http://www.slate.com/id/2284320/

'Buffy' writers sell Grimm's Fairy Tales pilot to NBC | Inside TV | EW.com

'Buffy' writers sell Grimm's Fairy Tales pilot to NBC | Inside TV | EW.com

Here's a good example of the Genre Watch from Entertainment Weekly, stressing the idea of the genre Hybrid, in this case the fantasy police procedural, of which I can't think of many examples (Life on Mars, I suppose)-- But suddenly there's a rush of such projects. Here's the opening paragraph of the piece but keep reading.

NBC has picked up another pilot mixing fantasy with a crime drama: The network has greenlit Grimm, described as a “dark but fantastical cop drama about a world in which characters inspired by Grimm’s Fairy Tales exist.” (Gotta love mining expired copyrights in the public domain!)....The order comes on top of Battlestar guru Ron Moore’s 17th Precinct, also at NBC, about cops working a town where people have magical powers.


Okay, EW didn't do that good a job reporting on the trend. Ain't it Cool news did better, mentioning these other projects:

" ... It also sounds a bit like the ABC project“Fables,” based on Bill Willingham’s DC/Vertigo graphic novels about fairy-tale characters who find themselves exiled to contemporary New York.

And sounds not unlike Fox’s “Georgia and the Seven Associates,” about a young lawyer banished from a top law firm run by her stepmother and forced to team up with seven quirky lawyers at a storefront legal office. One of her cases dealt with three people whose homes were taken away by something called Wolf Corp."

Kudos to AICN for at least mentioning Fables, which is a comic series that is certainly influencing all of these projects. This whole concept reminds me though of the 1990 cop musical show, "Cop Rock." which you have to see to believe how bad it was. Are all genre hybrids possible, or are some incompatible?  

The Fighter KOs the sports-movie cliches | Film | The Guardian

The Fighter KOs the sports-movie cliches | Film | The Guardian

The Guardian has a perfect Genre Watch piece on the fight-movie, sports films and The Fighter. It takes the position that the only way to make a really good sports movie may be to avoid or downplay the conventions of the sports movie. He uses other films to support his argument, but can anyone think of any counter examples?

"The biggest loser in David O Russell's The Fighter is the fight-movie in particular, and the sports-movie genre in general. Usually when a sports movie kicks off, we can anticipate a harrowingly familiar structure defined by the passage of the season, from warm-ups and practice through qualifying heats - or, in this case, bouts - through the quarters and semis and the final itself, with a side-dish of triumph over adversity, moral or familial redemption, getting the girl and saving your soul. It's an iron-clad formula that makes sports movies similar to rock'n'roll biopics like Ray and Walk The Line – they have exactly the same plot and structure, and are often the same movie.

... Russell makes the necessary concessions to the demands of genre, and if you fail to shed a tear then you're made of stone – but they don't dominate his characters or their story, and the result is his best and most soulful movie since Three Kings.The best sports movies are the ones with the smallest amount of actual sport in them: This Sporting Life, where the action is all in pubs and bedrooms, with the rugby field an existential zone of combat; ditto Raging Bull, with its mere 18 minutes of epoch-making fight footage set against a convincing, lovingly detail-packed evocation of Italian-American, working-class family life in the 1940s and 50s. ...

Sporting Life – is what helps The Fighter escape the confines of genre and expectation. Without all that humming, bustling, foul-mouthed, real-life humanity, it might just have been another sports movie – another Gridiron Gang, another Any Given Sunday – instead of a new admission to the Pantheon of Great Sports Movies – for which one needs more than mere sport •

Science fiction teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology. - By Robert J. Sawyer - Slate Magazine

Science fiction teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology. - By Robert J. Sawyer - Slate Magazine

I'm going to do some sample posts using some of your assigned genre watch periodicals. Here's one from Slate.
I just mentioned the literary origin of Science Fiction in class, and we were talking about how ideology and Industry might structure Genre,  but here's a piece on how genre , science-fiction specifically, might structure ideology and industry instead. Highlights below, but the whole piece is worth reading as are the comments section.I
A debate rages there over whether or not Literary SF is so negative that it actually impedes public acceptance of science innovation. Also of interest to me is that the Slate author seems only willing to give literary SF respect or acknowledge its influence, i.e. Heinlein matters, but not Kubrick. Thoughts? 




"Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,is generally considered the first work of science fiction. It explores, in scientific terms, the notion of synthetic life: ...Think about that: Mary Shelley put these questions on the table almost two centuries ago—41 years before Darwin published The Origin of Species and 135 years before Crick and Watson figured out the structure of DNA. Is it any wonder that Alvin Toffler, one of the first futurists, called reading science fiction the only preventive medicine for future shock?


Isaac Asimov, the great American science fiction writer, defined the genre thus: "Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the responses of human beings to changes in science and technology." The societal impact of what is being cooked up in labs is always foremost in the science fiction writer's mind. ... What's valuable about this for societies is that science-fiction writers explore these issues in ways that working scientists simply can't. Some years ago, for a documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, I interviewed neurobiologist Joe Tsien, who had created superintelligent mice in his lab at Princeton—something he freely spoke about when the cameras were off. But as soon as we started rolling, and I asked him about the creation of smarter mice, he made a "cut" gesture. "We can talk about the mice having better memories but not about them being smarter. The public will be all over me if they think we're making animals more intelligent." But science-fiction writers do get to talk about the real meaning of research. We're not beholden to skittish funding bodies and so are free to speculate about the full range of impacts that new technologies might have—not just the upsides but the downsides, too. 

So this is a good genre find in Slate and it's it wasn't in the "arts" section, rather it was under SCIENCE. Don't limit your reviews to just the entertainment section -- Genre is everywhere. 

Genre Watch

We're into the fourth week and all of you should have some better grasp of what we're doing in terms of Genre Watch. Yet I only have one post from 3 students (including Michael, who's post aren't up. If there's some confusion, let me know -- but I read all of these sources and you're all missing great genre watch opportunities.

Happy blogging!

Horror in the fine arts

There was some debate here last week around the LA Times story linking the popularity of horror to bad times. Personally, I've always been a believer. Clarence, on the other hand, posted: "And I'm still iffy on the idea of unsatisfying and troubling times in real life motivating audiences to go see horror ... "
As I was reading City Beat this week, one more piece of the puzzle fell into place, and the fact that it didn't occur to me before indicates how far removed and on a pedestal I put ART from the other arts. The title of the story was:

SUPERABUNDANCE OF HORROR

War plus Expressionism equals two rooms of shock at LACMA

"... Like most everything else German, Expressionism went to war in 1914, with only isolated malcontents and extreme leftists standing against the militarist tide. Artistic results of this lemming’s leap are on display at LACMA, as Shell Shocked: Expressionism after the Great War displays post-Armistice selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies.
...Even canvases having little to do with the war are shot through with battlefield images, such as the goofy, broken Christ in Max Beckmann’s Descent from the Cross, all knees, elbows and pale twisted death, like a corpse jutting from the mud and wire of No Man’s Land. The exhibit’s signature piece, Otto Lange’s Vision, rolls the guilt, misery and dread of lost war and bitter postwar into a single naked figure sitting quaking like a penitent child as accusing faces surround.
... [and bringing in film] Germany’s postwar Expressionis t cinema, one of the marvels of 1920s European cul ture, is represented by posters and selected clips f rom Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (193 1), the former a dystopian parable as well as arguably the first science fiction film, and the latter the frame for Peter Lorre’s monstrous performance as the ultimate displaced outsider – a child molester even the criminal underworld despises. Both speak to disillusion many times worse than the patriotism hangover endured by the American writers and artists of the Lost Generation, just then laying bare their own psychological wounds in fiction and verse. Read the whole story here
My simple point is that fine art often goes dark or horrific in scary times, so why not film.

Farewell to Bushisms, Hello to Change

In light of the recent inauguration of President Obama, video clips of the President will probably no longer appear in their previous genre: comedy. Already, the Daily Bushism calendars have vanished from shelves, and many online sites will end their daily ridicule of the former President. Jacob Weisberg, the man in charge of Slate's Bushisms, finds "the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character." When Bush made mistakes, he wrote, he showed an ability to laugh at himself that is rarely found in world leaders. "Through his willful, improvisational and incompetent use of language, he tempers (very slightly) his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of government."

Conversely, Obama has shown a tremendous sensitivity to his media image, and he is very much in control of it thus far. Through his weekly video podcast, he bypassed the media and spoke directly to the American people. During the campaign, his sense of showmanship, from buying 30 minutes of network television to the fireworks and fanfare at the DNC, has captured the American imagination and helped us all to believe that "yes we can." He continued that trend through election night and his Inauguration. Even whitehouse.gov (not to mention change.gov) looks like it came right out of the middle of his campaign. The man is a rock star, and now that he's President, I doubt he's going to let that change. He'll try to keep his image as flawless and inspiring as ever, bringing that change we all need. Now we have said farewell to President Bush and hello to a President who has sold himself as an inspiration. The American people have already bought it. Politics have gone from cynically comical to hopeful optimistic.

Some, perhaps most, will not miss President Bush at all, but, in the words of Weisberg, "you can't ... despise someone who regrets that, because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance, '[t]oo many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country.' "

Read the article here.

Genre Watch Example

The LA times' Hero Complex blog just did a nice piece on horror that included these bits:

"If horror films reflect the anxieties of a culture, then it makes perfect sense that so many nefarious characters are emerging from the darkness: The collapse of the housing market, the menacing approach of a potential economic depression, an ongoing war and international unrest -- they're the stuff of nightmares. And yet, sitting in dark theaters watching unspeakable acts on screen, we find release -- or at least distraction from the real threats we face."

and

"Horror is the genre that makes you feel something, like comedy makes you laugh," said Andrew Form, a partner in Michael Bay's company Platinum Dunes, which produced the new "Friday the 13th." "It elicits an immediate response. You sit down in the seat and you just know that your hand's probably going to be over your eyes and you're going to be waiting for those jumps. For 90 minutes, you're guaranteed to feel something."

It would be easy to apply some of Andrew Tudor's thoughts on genre (Reader Week II) to these passages. First of all, Tudor dismisses the horror genre's intention to "horrify" as "less important." (Mr. Form [perfect last name for this discussion] would disagree) But the blue quote from the LA Times piece seems to share Tudor's idea that horror is more than just "A Scary Movie." Tudor was very early on advocating that the purpose in studying genre films is partly to understand the culture in which they are made, i.e to understand the "social and psychological context of film." So if we are studying current horror, we are in essence studying current society.

For the full piece, read here: (And it really is worth reading -- from an industry perspective, as well as a critical one.)

Sundance and A New Round of Romantic Comedies

An interesting article about the popularity of bittersweet romantic comedies/"dramedies" at the Sundance Film Festival. Audrey and I were recently talking about the seeming lack of original romantic comedies being released as of late, so I was intrigued by this development in Park City. The films seem to be focused on portraying a kind of young, "indie"-type love that seeks to play off the recent appeal of "Once". It seems the romance may now run a little less quaint and the comedy a lot more subtle than "You Got Mail" or "Two Weeks Notice," at least.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ife1903a36d09a1d8145f9f6a10c6e720

Last Genre Post!

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/05/05/080505crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=2

The Hunt is not over. Helen Hunt, after a brief hiatus since the birth of her daughter, has made a new movie called “Then She Found Me.” She directs and stars in this “fine, tense, unpredictable comedy of mixed-up emotions and sudden illuminations.” Critic David Denby applauds the story, saying that she explores the many angles of the idea of neediness.

I was surprised to learn that a story about a struggling 39-year-old who accidentally gets pregnant and is enamored with a divorcee with 2 kids is a comedy. This pregnancy/ comedy thing seems to be a trend nowadays… Knocked Up, Juno, Junebug. Diablo Cody insists that no one was copying one another; there was just this weird trend in Hollywood this year, and creatives were actually mad other people had the same idea. Personally, I hope this pregnancy/ comedy sub-genre dries up pretty quickly since there is only so much child-centered plot I can stomach (pun intended). I am interested to see some of the promo for this movie, though, since the other publicity I saw for it (Hunt is on the cover of Backstage West) treats the story more like a drama. Publicity aside, I am excited to see this movie with Colin Firth and Bette Midler!

Hip Hop Just May Bring Back the Musical

Although not from my assigned publication, I read this article in the Wall Street Journal that I found very interesting--"But Can You Dance to It?" by John Jurgensen. It delineates the recent trend for writing dance steps as lyrics in hip hop songs. This new fad, made most popular by Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat" which not only inspired millions of people to learn and embrace the dance, but also was responsible for launching the careers of those who capitalized upon Crank Dat's success with the teen generation. Two teenagers who made "Crank Dat Batman" recently signed a deal with Universal MoTown after their talent was noticed and applauded by websurfers all across the country.

What is most important to note is the way teenagers are the group responsible for this change in music, facilitated by the fact that sites such as YouTube have made it all the easier to upload material and have it reach a wide audience. It is also interesting that this dance craze was not started by the head of a record studio, or at the whim of a marketing executive who thought it might sell the song better if people would be able to learn a dance while listening to the song. It has launched into a music genre all its own, with songs such as "Walk It Out," "2 Step," "Pop Lock and Drop It," "Cupid Shuffle," and most importantly "Crank Dat." This has not pleased executives--""The kids have taken hip-hop back and the adults don't like it," says Michael Crooms, better known as Mr. Collipark, an Atlanta producer and record executive who discovered the movement's poster child, a 17-year-old named DeAndre Way." DeAndre Way is also known as Soulja Boy.

This is a great example of how the new generation is able to turn the focus of an entire industry into marketing songs that have dance steps incorporated within the lyrics--it has now become very common to upload onto YouTube not only the music videos but also instructional videos for learning the dances. Has this become the modern teenager's take and appreciation of the classic musical? I think so.