View out the plane, out of Denver

Possible ideas for some backgrounds for future work.

Denver Art Museum

So, a surprisingly amazing trip to the Denver Art Musuem this weekend. The building kind of has the Gehry-Koolhaus-iconic building thing on the outside, which is nice but whatever- the inside is the stunner, some of the reviews I read ripped it for wasting space and how hard it is to show work- clearly not a problem here, the work looked great, and will get better as they experiment with how to show work there, like at the Wexner Center. The main stairway is a great, spiraling, vertigo inducing space that makes you aware of how you move through it, in the best way possible. It was also great to contrast it with Liebskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, the lightness of the DAM with the brooding darkness of the JM.






The second surprise was the quality of the work- strong work by Murakami, Ackerman, Ritchee, Saville, Rauch, and a number of others. So it ended up being one of those inspiring visits to the museum that raises the bar and makes you want to get back into the studio.


Franz Ackerman


Neo Rauch


Matthew Ritchee


Matthew Ritchee








This was not counting the original Gio Ponti building, with Asian, Mexican, Indian, and South American art, some really nice stuff in there, too but that ended up being more of a run through, the bulk of the time was in the contemporary wing...

How to be Funny

from the Telegraph UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/29/svcarr29.xml

How to be funny

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 29/10/2006
Why are comedians such good liars? How hard do they work on their jokes? And how important is... timing? Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves explain the rules

They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.Bob Monkhouse

This Monkhouse gag is funny but, of course, it's much better heard than read. On paper, a joke is a pale and inadequate one-dimensional version of itself. In fact, a joke scarcely exists until someone has told it and someone else has laughed.
The who, where, when, what and why of a joke's telling can be more significant that its topic, and no single theory - from Freud's notion of the joke as a release of suppressed sexual neurosis to Schopenhauer's definition of humour as a reaction to incongruity - can explain how jokes work.
Even comedy's greats seem stuck for a proper analysis. When John Cleese tired of questions about where he got his jokes from, he resorted to, 'I buy them from a little man in Swindon.' The truth is much more prosaic. Jokes are about 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent whittling and crafting - much of it in front of an audience.
Jerry Seinfeld talks of the comedian's 'third eye', through which he views life with ironic detachment. However, irony and detachment are not enough. Joke writing and performing is a craft, and while an all-encompassing theory of humour may elude us, it is possible to identify some of the basics in the building of a successful joke.
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Set-up, punchline, laugh?

A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a whisky. As the barman's pouring it the cowboy looks about him. 'Where is everybody?' he says. 'Gone to the hanging,' says the barman. 'Hanging?' says the cowboy.'Who they hanging?' 'Brownpaper Pete,' replies the barman. 'Brownpaper Pete? Why do they call him that?''Well,' says the barman. 'His hat's made of brown paper, his shirt's made of brown paper, his jacket's made of brown paper and his trousers are made of brown paper.' 'Really?' says the cowboy. 'What they hanging him for?''Rustling.'
Many jokes, like this one, are written backwards, with the punchline sorted out first. However, the punchline - the destination without which a joke loses its way - is so potent a force that even on its own, with little or no narrative set-up, it can make us laugh. Witness the hugely popular sketch comedy of The Fast Show and Little Britain, in which characters get laughs from catchphrases that function just like punchlines to the situational jokes.

This is also how an 'in-joke' works among a group of friends. Life itself provides the set-up, and a word or two, sometimes just a knowing look between two people who are in on the joke, provides the punchline.

A professional comic's routine may be based on true personal experience, but real experience doesn't tend to come conveniently complete with a punchline. That's why most comics are outrageous liars. It's also why pathological observational comics may even begin to provoke 'hilarious' denouements by deliberately forgetting their wedding anniversaries or leaving their children in the supermarket.

Surprise!

I took the wife's family out for tea and biscuits. They weren't too happy about having to give blood, though.

Surprise is the fundamental joke mechanism. Most punchlines rely on an element of surprise - that's why they're not funny the third time you hear them.

Jerry Seinfeld compares telling a joke to attempting to leap a metaphorical canyon, taking the audience with him. The set-up is the nearside cliff, and the punchline is the far side. If they're too far apart, the listeners don't make it to the other side. And if they are too close together, the audience just steps across the gap without experiencing any exhilarating leap. The joke-hearer gets far more pleasure from the joke if he or she has to do a little work.

F***ing surprise!

A very cheap and easy way of making people laugh is to throw in some swear words. It's become something of a tradition among the more iconoclastic comics to write a routine that is ostensibly aimed at depriving taboo words of their power to shock, but which conveniently harnesses the power of shocking words to make us laugh.

Jerry Seinfeld dismisses swearing as 'a trick' because it provokes laughter even when the joke isn't funny. However, George Carlin says, 'Shock is just another form of surprise, and comedy is based on surprise. This is a noisy culture… If you want to be heard, then you have to raise your voice a little bit … If it [swearing] is the only thing going for you, it won't last long. But as long as it's just a device to draw them in…' Too ****ing right.

Oh, and timing!

The surprise mechanism doesn't work without effective timing. It's almost impossible to explain in print because our eyes always skip ahead to the punchline before the set-up is properly digested. But next time you listen to a comedian, listen to the pauses. They're not that funny on their own - obviously, they're just tiny silences - but the point is, neither are the jokes.
Surprise is often worked into a joke through the 'pull-back/reveal' technique. The joke focuses your attention on a particular angle or detail of the scene, then suddenly pans out to show you the whole, surprising picture. Very often the success of these jokes hinges on the joke-teller's subtle control of rhythm: a beat here, a breath there.

The American comedian Emo Philips is a master. Take this routine with a pull-back/reveal in every line.

My sister had a baby. We could have company over and she'll be there with her breast out, feeding him... cereal, or whatever. The other day she took me aside and said, Emo, can you babysit little Derek while I go to the carnival... and look for the father? I said, OK. So I'm pushing him through the park, and he's crying... because I forgot the stroller. I take him home and I'm trying to rinse out his diaper in the toilet - you ever rinse out a baby's diaper in the toilet? Yuck. Anyway... I accidentally let go of his foot. And he's spinning around, crying, and I'm trying to get him out with the plunger... because you can't use Drano, that HURTS a kid!

Familiarity

We have a little pamphlet, lent us by a comedian friend, called Jokes Jokes Jokes: Why spend 2/6 at a Music Hall? Here's 2,000 laughs for a 1/3. Selected by Ike'nsmile Lettslaff, the book, apparently published in the late 1940s, offers such gems as: 'Lor' lumme, Bill,' said a gentleman of the course to his pal, as a fashionably dressed lady passed, 'look at 'er wiv all 'em buttons on 'er skirt and me 'olding up me trarziz wiv string.'
and...

He was rather shy and it was the first time that he had dared to bring her flowers. She, delighted, threw her arms about his neck and kissed him. He suddenly grabbed his hat and started out of the door. 'Oh!' she said. 'I'm sorry if I have offended you.' 'Oh, that's not it,' he called back; 'I'm going after more flowers.'

No disrespect to Mr Lettslaff but the volume failed to yield the promised 2,000 laughs because the jokes rely on the audience's instant recognition of incidental detail. In a world now sadly bereft of proper ladies and courting swains in hats, these jokes don't have any grip on our sense of humour. However, there are certain basic themes - hen-pecked husbands and village idiots - that appear to endure. Likewise, some jokes have short shelf lives, while others are surprisingly durable, flexing to accommodate themselves to audiences in different continents, even different centuries.

To understand this, consider a joke as a sum of parts. The basic structural component is its theme or premise - a stupid man who thinks he's clever, for example - and that bit crosses continents and survives millennia. The second layer of the joke is in the way the story is told, and that's incredibly culturally specific. Individual jokes have finite significance because they rely on joke and audience inhabiting the same world.

One of the current masters of the humour of intimate recognition is the Bolton stand-up artist Peter Kay. His live gigs, particularly in the North-West, are legendary. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, cry with laughter. This isn't the comedy of incongruity or suppressed sexual neurosis. This is the comedy of the banal made up of carefully observed vignettes that both deflate and celebrate the minutiae of British life.

The philosopher Simon Critchley writes, 'Humour views the world awry, bringing us back to the everyday by estranging us from it. The comedian is the anthropologist of our everyday lives.' Anthropological comedy is dependent on place and time. Peter Kay could perform the same act in a comedy club in North Dakota and be met with mild bafflement. But in the north of England - in fact, all over the UK - his audiences howl with recognition as the comic gives them licence to find themselves ridiculous. His act is so inclusive and warm that at times it feels like some kind of community therapy.

Conventional two-liner jokes aren't important to Kay. The few classically defined 'jokes' in his set are put to use to build a conversational rapport with the audience. They are old and terribly familiar - so much so that everyone can join in.

KAY: What's black and white and looks like a horse? (holds mic towards audience)
ENTIRE AUDIENCE: A zebra!
KAY: How does Bob Marley like his doughnuts?
ENTIRE AUDIENCE: Wi' jam in!
KAY: You see? That's a joke, that. That's the first thing you'll tell when you get 'ome.

Economy and exaggeration

The difference between a funny story and a joke is often verbal economy.
It's not that long, wordy jokes can't be funny, but if too much is explained, there's no logical leap for the audience to make, and the paradigm shift which elicits laughter is lost.
Compare: I'm not a homosexual. Mind you, I might be mistaken for one if I went to the north of England. In places like Newcastle, there's such a culture of macho posturing that they go out in their shirtsleeves in all kinds of weather, so if you wear a coat they think you're gay.
And: I'm not gay. Unless you're from Newcastle and by 'gay' you mean, 'owns a coat'.

Sounds peculiar

Native English-speakers seem to find certain sounds and syllables inherently funny. In Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys, the old Vaudeville entertainer, Willy, tries to explain.
Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know which words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. You say Alka-Seltzer, you get a laugh. Words with K in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny.
British radio comedy of the 1960s was the high-water mark for funny-name creation when Round the Horne writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman thronged the airwaves with creatures such as Mr Throbwalloper, Reg Pubes, Obadiah Loombucket, J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock and, of course, the fading starlet Dame Celia Molestrangler and the 'ageing juvenile Binkie Huckaback'.

It's not certain why all these 'k' and 'oo' sounds are funny, but some speech experts think that the combinations of tiny facial muscles we use to make these particular sounds might subconsciously remind us of smiling or laughing.

Top tips

So much for the joke's basic building blocks. The question is, is understanding them enough to make any one a comedian? Most professionals think that great comedians are born, not made. However standing up and telling jokes is essentially a craft, not an art, and therefore can be improved. So in the spirit of self-improvement, we leave you with five basic rules for telling a joke.

Pick your moments. It's easiest to tell a joke when everyone's relaxed and enjoying themselves. Telling a joke to relieve tension is a high-risk strategy, but potentially hilarious. Besides, there'll be other funerals.

Know where you're going - the punchline - before you start.

Don't be tempted to over-elaborate. Eddie Izzard makes it look easy, but remember that one man's surreal flight of fancy is another man's rambling, incoherent humiliation.

Project a demeanour of relaxed confidence - it gives your listener permission to laugh. You can try deadpan, but social joke-telling usually requires the teller to laugh too.

Enjoy it. If your entire self-esteem is resting on whether people laugh at your joke, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, you are showing signs of the borderline personality disorder that characterises all the best comedians, so perhaps you should consider telling jokes for a living.

Edited extracts from 'The Naked Jape', by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (Penguin)

On Klosterman

This all started with the idea of making a short monthly digest called "Fort Grunt Recommends" and then I dared to make negative comments about Chuck Klosterman. Maybe something in here worth keeping so I posted it. This got a little messy, so I've cleaned it up by making me red and ben blue, and having the text get darker as it goes through the thread. The dotted lines signal when the thread was finished, which, oddly enough was when I would win. Weird.

(lou)

I think there is something disingenuous about his populism; in one article he says things being under or over-rated by saying that only has to do with critics and what they say shouldn't mean anything, but he is certainly aware that by talking about billy joel at all, he's saying he's thinks joel is underrated in some way.

(ben)

I'm having trouble understanding what you've written here. but either way, it seems to me like you can write about someone without thinking they should be valued higher. I think a more accurate way to look at it is, Klosterman thinks Billy Joel is under-analyzed, or under-examined or whatever. I think he makes it pretty clear in some earlier pieces that he doesn't like billy joel, but that he is using Joel to illustrate ideas about perceived coolness.

(lou)

Maybe there's another way of approaching this, but it's kind of annoying how he switches sides to appear more contrarian than he is, sometimes a little too much effort trying to appear to be an anti-hipster. To go with your point below, it is as easy as Patton going on about hippies; nobody takes
hipsters seriously either so why belabor the point?

(ben)

I don't know what Klosterman did to hurt your hipster feelings, but on his behalf, I'm sorry.

(lou)

(in Petre voice) Nooooooo. Maybe this has more to do with considering the audience- do the Spin articles articles do more hipster bashing than the Esquire? I don't remember the ESPN ones ever doing that, though he doesn't seem to need to bash the sports obsessives that would also be easy targets. I guess I'm just wondering if he's building that in to make sure he's not confused with hipsters. This probably isn't important overall to his work but comes off a little pre-emptively defensive.

(ben)

I pretty much only read him in the books, so I'm not sure about how he reads in the various sources. But I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with writing towards your audience, or away from them, depending.

(lou)

That's what I'm saying. So maybe there's also something there- what makes Klosterman so readable in book form, given that we pretty much both blew right through it, versus say Lawrence Weschler? I'm beginning to think I overrated LW, it was a real struggle to get through the last essay collection (Vermeer in Bosnia), like he's gotten lazy working for McSweeney's and the fawning that I imagine that happens to him over there. Maybe Klosterman is more cued into the audience, but also has somehow been helped out by different editorial staffs, etc.

Could be CK is just a better writter, but is there a vein running through the work that's missing from someone like Weschler? Seems like Weschler's recent obsession with coincidences (or "convergences") was destroyed for me in Mobius Dick...
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(lou)

Also, and I don't think he mentions it in this book, but his discounting of punk and post punk music ("punk rock is patently ridiculous" "no good music was made in 1979") also seems to be posturing or baiting to the people who would read him consistantly.

(ben)

Two things here, one, if he is baiting people, it doesn't seem very different than Patton Oswalt going on about hating hippies. Two, the vast majority of people who like punk rock (like the vast majority of people period) are annoying, and the more devoted they are to it, the more annoying they can be. To me his stance is similar to his stance on politics. anyone who self identifies as a democrat or republican (or punk rock fan) doesn't have anything to tell Klosterman about music. - You can see a related response from Peter Bagge, who did Hate out of Seattle during the grunge era and now only only listens to 14 year old Britney Spears clones.

(lou)

I think your response has more to do with you than klosterman or anything else, in particular your problems with anyone who is into anything. I mean, in your repulsion from comics people, or tai chi people, or artists. Is that the appeal of a Klosterman, who seems to be a generalist even when he tells of all his KISS knowledge... maybe acknowledging your fear? Is this another thing Klosterman does to appear to be an anti-hipster?

(ben)

I think he's coming at it from the same angle that I am. As someone's dedication to a thing increases, they tend to put blinders on regarding that things faults, and tend to unfairly amplify that thing's good qualities. Note I say tend, because where this gets dicey is with someone like you, or... (not very many other people I know) where you can be both enthusiastic about something while still being honest about that thing's negatives.

It's something I struggle with, I tend to be overly hard on the things I'm interested in, because I don't want to fool myself into thinking about something inaccurately. So in some ways I'm probably the worst person to talk to about, say, the health benefits of taiji. because I tend to downplay the positives and equate the benefits with those derived from other, similar exercises.

I'm trying to come up with a counterexample for the discussion. Can you think of anyone who writes about music (for instance) from the perspective that you would prefer? The only example I can think of (maybe) is Pauline Kael in film, but it's not the same thing really.

(lou)

Well, in regards to you- I can understand playing it down to other people... do you think that comes from working somewhere for six years where being good at your job isn't really that prized? Seems to me you have no problem with being good about art, work, tai chi withI think one of the benefits of grad school was getting that out of my system, at least in terms of just being into my work and other people's work, and not losing too much criticality in the process. It seems like this mostly happens for people when they are into a particular technique, or whatever their obsession is- I think I've been learning to smoke that out faster from people, it's particularly hard to take when it doesn't even seem like they're into that particular thing, just using it to bullshit people (like the health benefits of tai chi.)

Thinking it over though, I have gotten by on enthusiasm or work ethic/production in spite of glaring errors in conceptual or formal elements in my work. I don't think people didn't see them, just that they didn't say anything, given the number of people in the program with no enthusiasm or work ethic. This flares up occasionally at the Fort, in part b/c of the publicness of the space, when some says something about the space always changing, etc. That said, it's easy to lose sight of bigger goals and get enraptured of technique, careerism, how you're perceived, etc.

(ben)

I think it comes from not liking people who preach to the choir more than working here. I don't think being good at your job is prized most places. I have no problem trying to do good work (art, library, tai chi), nor do I have a problem being critical of people who don't, or the work they produce. With your second point, I think people get taken in by enthusiasm and confidence, and frequently lack the ability to take a step back and evaluate what they're actually seeing (or hearing, or whatever). The same way the hot girl in your high school really wasn't one of the more attractive girls, she had just built up this gestalt of being the hot girl and nothing would change that. I'd rather be "right" about liking something, rather than wrong about disliking something. right here referring to not getting fooled by enthusiasm, confidence, everyone else liking it...whatever.

(lou)

As far as work- maybe the appeal of teaching is, no matter what your colleagues think, if you're good at it at least some of your students appreciate it. I imagine at least some of your tai chi students appreciate your efforts, dedication, etc even if they don't say it. That of course is a whole other thread... the curse of the co-worker.

Nice analogy for coasting. I know exactly who you're talking about.

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(lou)

That said, the fact that he's published in Esquire, ESPN, Spin, and the NYTimes Magazine is great, though he would also argue against that (re: the notion that something you like getting popular isn't something you should be happy about). So is Klosterman the Christopher Hitchens of our generation?

no.

You might be wrong about that. Reread earlier Hitchens, with the name-dropping and strawman arguments. Klosterman is in danger of drifting that way.

nuh uh

yuh huh.

derp

Touche
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(lou)

Also- I think he discounts the effect listening to shit like Billy Joel does to someone who's working creatively. No one who loves Billy Joel will ever make anything good. Ever.

(ben)

You're switching your argument midstream here. Klosterman (apparently) listens to, or listened to, Billy Joel. He writes good essays. So what's the effect been so far on him?

(lou)

That's why i put that separate from the rest, i don't know if there's a bigger argument. though, i did say "loves", as in honest enjoys billy joel. i don't believe klosterman (i'm talking about a previous essay, not the one in IV). he does write good essays, but they're not airtight... maybe for the fgr's you can try and talk about the separation of the subject (which, particularly with the espn articles) from his main themes. i mean, he writes about "stuff" pretty well but I think what i was getting at was trying to figure out what his overarching themes are and how that holds up with essay writers like mencken, etc.

(ben)

your second sentence I agree with, mostly. Although in the same way that any book can technically be a primary source (depending on the context), so too can I see a situation where person could love billy joel and make something good.

(lou)

maybe, but i think that just opens anything up, that "good" becomes watered down. why bother thinking about what you read, just pick up whatever, watch whatever and make some shit. maybe that statement can be changed to "no one who loves billy joel will ever make anything great."

(ben)

Can outsider art be great? How similar to your taste does someone else's have to be for them to make great art? 80%? 50%? Are there specific qualities that they must be drawn to in art to make great things? Specific qualities that they must be repulsed by? If someone hated all art other than the works of Joseph Cornell and the music of Stephen Foster could they make great art? What about Jim Dine and Motorhead?

Not facetious questions. and I'm not being contrary to be contrary, so if you can answer any of these questions seriously I'll totally take it seriously. These are issues that I think about because I am drawn to a lot of work who's brilliance is not overt so much as hidden in the nooks and crannies of their bombasticity. for instance, I still think the best Jonathan Lethem is Gun with Occasional Music, which is easily his most genre specific. not because (I think) I'm simple, but because his voice seeks out the holes in genre's straitjacket. As he's gotten bolder and more creative/ambitious he's also gotten less interesting, less unique.

If I were trying to answer the questions, here's how I would. No, someone doesn't have to have the same taste I do, but their art has to have built in evidence that they've thought about what they consume. as a canny viewer I think I can tease that out of what they've done, although not in every case. Further if they've thought about what they consume, and they continue to consume what I think of as substandard work (dicey, we can talk about this tomorrow if you want. lunch?) then I might wonder how they see value in that work, to continue consuming it.

I don't know what they would have to be drawn to, but they would need to be repulsed by easy use of cliche, artifice, lack of truthfulness (in the john gardner definition of truthfulness) and overt pandering to the audience. If someone hated all art other than the works of JC and SF, they could make great art, because the constraint put on them by their taste would force them to explore more fully, plus JC and SF have enough meat to maintain a consumer's interest for extended viewing/thinking. If someone hated all but the work of JD and MH, probably not, because Dine is basically a one trick pony and Motorhead is an extended joke.

(But I'm not automatically ruling out someone's ability to like JD and MH and make great art, because stranger things have happened)

(lou)

First, you're wildly off base about Motorhead- joke or not, they fucking rock. Don't be afraid of that.

I think using the word "taste" seems to be code for belittling someone's attempts at honestly assessing what they consume and that work (art, lit, music, etc) can have a depth to it and the cumulative effect of this, combined with the same rigor in production, can create something bigger than yourself (for lack of a better term.) Well, in most cases taste may be the accurate word for it, if you're talking about something you like. Maybe there's a way to differentiate between things you would defend and things that didn't really bother you.

(ben)

I re-read one of the articles from the book, the one where he states most baldly the idea that anyone who thinks their taste is sacrosant automatically thinks good art has an inherent goodness, and is an idiot. How do you feel about that sentiment?

Maybe a profitable way to evaluate your contention about the impact people's honest attempts at understanding what they like has on their production would be to start picking artists who evince that quality, and then artists who don't, and see if there are trends taking shape. For instance, I know that Jeff Levine and Kevin Huizenga definitely fall under this category, just read their respective blogs. If they weren't creators, they'd make excellent book/film/comics critics. On the other side look at Clowes or Ware. They understand what they're looking at (in the same way I think Klosterman understands Joel) but they acknowledge that their daily arts intake is more on the crappy, or genre laden, or whatever side.

(Incidentally, in thinking about artists who fit into the one category or the other, Dan Zettwoch came up. He's a good example of someone who has good taste (whatever that means), analyzes what he consumes, seems very critical of his and his group of friend's work, and still makes crappy art. Another person I might put in this camp would be John Gardner. At his best he was only very good, a far cry from John Fowles (who is the most similar writer, but less systematic writer I can think of).

(lou)

So maybe that's Klosterman's project: that everything is interdependent and things that may seem inherently bad, taken in the larger picture, can be re-examined. I think that is another instance of dishonesty, that people who believe in inherent goodness in art are idiots or the stuff about culture winning or losing being stupid ("culture just is") is the extreme point he's staking out to make that bigger point. In a way it's related to Jon Stewart's relationship to politics and journalism, styling themselves as a kind of ombudsman, with a way out of having to be responsible for any bigger statement, or trying to make people think they have nothing at stake (or declaring that even when you know that's not true.)

I could list people I know who fit in the catregories you're talking about but it's pretty tough for artists, as their writings (contemporary artists in particular) aren't easy to find, you have to pick it up from the work. Or not. Something to think of in relation to our work- maybe laying these things a little more bare is something we can push for, I think most people (myself included) have had plenty of the enigma artist.

I guess I tend to try and see parallels to the velvet underground-stooges-ny dolls-ramones-80's indie rock-nirvana vein, where there are specific lineages, but things like daniel johnston can exist outside of it, but still be good. It still depends on how you interpret these things too- i'm thinking of banks violette, an artist who used goth imagery and sweedish death metal as a basis for his work, but it actually works, specifically the salt-cast timber church I had seen images of in the whitney last year. maybe in way, working within those tropes but then poking out of them. agreed on lethem, ...as she crawled across the table was good in that way too.

(ben)

I don't think it's accurate to conflate those bands. I think there is a massive qualitative difference between the Velvet Underground and the Ramones as compared to the Stooges and *definitely* compared to the NY dolls. I like all of them, but if I really take my blinders off for a second, I think V.U. and the Ramones stand on their own as excellent bands, the dolls and the stooges need the presence of what they inspired to make them good, because the music isn't as solid.

(lou)

But that's the lineage, you can alter it slightly (say, toss in Bowie and the Talking Heads and lead it to glam/new wave), but in no way are they necessarily equal. You can have some elements of a lineage weaker and some stronger but they "fit" in that way and in a way, it helps to understand that music to know where it came from, what came from it. At least for me- the same thing happened with learning the evolution of impressionism-post impressionism-cubism-abex-pop-conceptualism lineage. There are weaker and stronger elements in there to, and people that exist way outside of that like Klee, and in no way is the only way to look at it. But a useful start, no?

So maybe back to Klosterman- his constraint is specifically talking about pop culture and his relation to it, and how it relates to bigger themes in our Culture- so working out of Spin, Esquire, ESPN, he subverts the expected givens (like that Billy Joel sucks) and turns them on their head to rethink these givens. So what makes him g good, possibly great, at this, other than humor?

(ben)

Well, for me, I think that what makes him good is his ability to make connections between pop culture that actually resonate with thoughtful consumers of pop culture. Lots of people have his breadth and depth of knowledge, and try to make these sorts of connections (Michael Azzerad has done a bad job of it in the past, so has Greil Marcus. so does Nick Hornsby) but few can make them in a way that connects in an honest yet artful way. I suspect because most people let their personal preferences get too much in the way of the point they're trying to make.

(lou)

Does this go back to the idea of the librarian from The Man Without Qualities? That was an extreme example, but also a foil for the main character, that you can only truly know something by being totally objective, and not letting personal preferences or emotions into it. I don't get to read it too much, but the blog that John Darnielle was doing (Last Plane to Jakarta) is great because of his enthusiasm without losing sight of his criticallity- and maybe it's Klosterman's attempts at objectivity might, in the end, not make his work lasting. That the chances he's taking are relatively small.

I guess the other point is that, say with John, the enthusiasm isn't a buffer, but it somehow makes it seem more honest (and perhaps a reason to keep the fg recommendations positive and not be ripping stuff)- it seems like when Klosterman is saying something like "art has no intrinsic value" he's just doing that to be provocative, in the bad sense of the word. That's what's started this whole thing, my feeling that Klosterman is being slightly less than honest, and wondering if that is being used in the service of something bigger than what the individual articles are about, or just ot be clever.

But to go with an anti-Klosterman sentiment, he may just be better. Or have good timing- I always assumed there would be people who loved splattering paint, but in 17th century Venice that wouldn't get you anything, and now it would just be copying, but in 1950 it made total sense.

And to address the 50-80% thing- I don't even know if I need to have anything in common (about what I like) with someone, but it seems likely that we would if they're producing something that adds to what I like, whatever that is (something I respond to b/c of it's physicality or makes me rethink how i think about the world/culture/whatever, or even just what clicks with me formally (proportions, colors, melodies, phrasing of a sentence.) ) So the value of a klosterman is in re-seeing the totallity of what I take in and figuring out what has value and what doesn't, in the importance of that process. If I'm teaching or producing something, it should add to this in some way.


do you think we can boil all that shit on klosterman down to a thing for the fort grunt recommends? something along the lines of "a truly funny collection of essays from various magazines- these essays seem topical because of the variety of audiences he writes for (spin, espn, esquire, etc), but klosterman's main thesis seems to be the interdependence of cultural/creative items on each other, making you rethink the relationships thoughtful consumers of culture make when figuring out what is good. Much more relevant than Weschler, Hornby, Marcus or Azerad, it goes beyond chronicling mere coincidences in what seems to be an honest investigation of what is important in our current culture, while knowing how to write humorously and concisely, two things that cannot be overlooked when making an arguement."

On Not Funny

http://www.slate.com/id/2151046/


the middlebrow: Dissecting the mainstream.

Dane Cook Insert punchline.

By Bryan Curtis
Posted Friday, Oct. 6, 2006, at 6:46 PM ET

As anybody who watched Gallagher smash watermelons can tell you, comedy is a niche business. But lately a few niche comics, who in another life would have been confined to working auto shows, have become rich comics. This year's comedy concert box-office champ, with nearly $400,000 per city, is Larry the Cable Guy, the noted Southern philosopher. Whatever his charms, Larry will not be mistaken for Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Cosby. Exhibit B is Dane Cook, an aggressively unshaven, 34-year-old comic with hair styled like a yucca plant. Last year, Cook's second album, Retaliation, opened at No. 4 on the Billboard album charts—the biggest showing for a comedy album since Steve Martin's Wild and Crazy Guy (1978). Last week, Cook hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, where he had the opportunity to play Saddam Hussein; today he opens a new film, Employee of the Month, in which, as he has pointed out on his Web site, his name appears above the title.

A native of Boston, Cook is nonthreateningly handsome, with soft, feminine features and unexpressive brown eyes. Onstage, he keeps his lower body rigid, squatting on his haunches and striding stiffly across the stage, while his torso remains loose and willowy. If you listen to his albums—Retaliation and his debut CD, Harmful If Swallowed (2003)—you'll hear a man who sounds very much like a small boy regaling stories to his friends. Cook's repertoire includes self-generated sound effects like primate shrieks; tales of pre-adolescent terror, like glimpsing your father's genitals; and pure nerd fantasies, like being abducted by a UFO. The audience, a mixture of men and women, shrieks with self-congratulatory delight.

Cook is what is often called an "observational comic"—someone who points out the absurdities of modern life and heightens them to comic effect. In his case, all the observations concern the plight of twentysomethings. In describing fights he has with women, for example, Cook will call them "mental terrorists" and "brain ninjas" who are unwilling to lose. Then he'll strike the pose of the aggrieved female—legs locked, head turned to the left—and in a singsongy voice begin to recreate the woman's rant. In another bit, Cook describes the difference between crying in front of your mother and your father. For Cook (again posing and doing cartoonish voices), Mom is all warmth and assurance, while Dad is reminding you of his experiences in Korea.

Perhaps because of his album covers, which feature Cook looking smug and cocksure, he has been incorrectly labeled a "frat boy" comedian. But frat boys, at least the ones I have had the pleasure of knowing, do not practice observational comedy. They tend more toward the savage put-down and the menacing attitude regarding friendship and sexuality. (Think David Spade or maybe Vince Vaughn.) If we're to stick with collegiate metaphors, Cook is more like the harmlessly affected guy who lives in the dorm room next door, the one obsessed with UFO abduction, killer-bee attacks, sexual humiliation, clubbing, hot chicks, and the other predilections of youth. (He's like the guy who's always trying to show you something he found on the Internet.) Cook's jokes often begin with "this is what everybody does when …"; he's a generalizer rather than an advocate of a particular (or particularly crude) worldview.
What explains Cook's rise? Partly it's his relentless salesmanship. In 2002, he spent more than $25,000 to erect an eponymous Web site full of interactive features, including regular "Danecasts." His shaggy legions grew, and now his MySpace page has tallied more than 1.5 million "friends." ( "yo Dane, it's Red... i know you've been pissed bout people callin ur phone and stuff, but if you get a call from a 420 number you should pick up. i'm cool man, no BS or anything.") Instead of affecting an air of detachment like some comedians (or even outright disdain for the audience), Cook is legendary for being a mensch: signing endless autographs at shows and returning his fans' e-mail. Other comedians "went out and partied when the show was over; I went home and updated my Web site and e-mailed people," Cook boasted to the New York Times last year. "A lot of people thought I was wasting a lot of time and energy, but I saw results immediately."

There's an inherent problem with Cook's act, however: There's doesn't seem to be anything at stake. Not every comedian needs to be explicating a high-minded moral code (like, say, Bill Hicks) or a blessedly mundane one (like Jerry Seinfeld). But every great comic must use his act to create friction—some value must be rubbing up against another value. When Cook begins to crack wise, he seems merely to be describing the benign hang-ups of the college/post-college set rather than actually weighing in on them. In Retaliation, for example, Cook confesses that he desperately wants to own a pet monkey. He would give the monkey a sword and dress him in a suit of armor, he says. "How pumped would you be driving home from work knowing that some place in your house that there's a monkey you would battle?"

Give Cook points for giving voice to the secret dream of 22-year-olds across the land. (It's like Dane knows me and my friends!) But once you've passed the age where you're charmed by the comedy of recognition, you realize that Cook doesn't add very much value. There's no philosophy underlying the joke, even a goofy dorm-room philosophy. So, why do we want monkeys, exactly? Why not some equally exotic creature? Is this why we constantly fail with girls? Dude, hello?

As someone who styles himself as a voice of a generation (he likes to speak in the first-person plural), there's little sense that Cook sees himself operating in opposition to anything or anyone. (He hates topical humor and doesn't mention current events.) And even if we accept Cook as a chronicler of post-adolescent males, Cook often misses the mark. It's true, as Cook jokes, that at the end of every movie trailer we must weigh in on whether we think the movie will be any good or not. Cook also says that whenever another car cuts us off on the road, we always say, "Um, hello…" We do?

Cook is an undangerous comedian posing as a dangerous one. In fact, the only time he betrays angst, generational or otherwise, is a semigrammatical mission statement he printed on his Web site. "I will make it with pride and without being a f****** asshole or a side stepping cheating douche bag," Cook wrote. "I won't take cheap shots at others that have earned more than me and I won't judge those with less. Who gives a fruit flies balls about what anyone else is saying about my path and me. I'm on it and you know this is leading me somewhere that's why you nip at my heels."

Spoken like a true comedian! Sadly, Cook's act bulges only with self-satisfaction. The secret of Dane Cook's outsized success is that he's not really a niche comedian at all. He's a comedian your mother could love.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
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Remarks from the Fray:I would argue that you can find a message in his comedy. It's just not the message Curtis is accustomed to hearing from comedians. Dane Cook actually seems to like his parents, he talks about growing up Catholic, he seems cool with doing what needs to be done to be successful-- basically, he isn't a rebel. He also doesn't appear to be suicidal or an alcoholic. He's just a really nice guy who really likes his fans and makes an effort to reach out to them. I guess that's a problem for some people.--TheDobster

I did watch the train wreck/poor man's Entourage that was "Tourgasm", and I came to the conclusion that, though he is not a great comedian per se, he has the charm, charisma, and thoughtfulness to be a really good talk show host, or some such thing. Perhaps he can even be a decent comedic actor, when not writing his own material. But as a mediocre, albeit popular, standup comic, I think he's missing out on his true calling.--Jilly449

Judging by his dismissal of Dane Cook Curtis is about as old as the elderly man who is always yelling at those kids to "get off my lawn"! "But every great comic must use his act to create friction—some value must be rubbing up against another value."Why? Says who? Isn't it enough to make people laugh? Curtis criticizes Cook for being a "voice of his generation" but not giving them any answers. Who the hell turns to a comedian to give them answers about life?--TJA

When did Dane Cook ever advertise himself as a niche comedian? No, he isn't going to push the boundaries of the medium anytime soon, but I've listened to a great deal of the comedy out there, and he's at least above average. I think Bryan Curtis' problem is that "above-average" shouldn't warrant this kind of meteoric rise. It shouldn't warrant having his name above the title of a well-funded and aggressively advertised rom-com starring Jessica Simpson. It has always appeared that Dane Cook's talents lie in a relentless and almost unnerving brand of self-promotion (his underwhelming HBO Tourgasm shows him explaning, on more than one occassion, how instant messaging with fans has helped spread the good word). Whether he's a flavor of the moment comic or he has real staying power (don't hold your breath waiting for Employee of the Month to prove that) remains to be seen, but give the guy SOME credit - he sure knows how to promote. And he'll tell you about it too.--DeliciousSandwich

Wow

this is one of the meanest things i've read in some time. i would guess klosterman fucked his wife or something. kind of nice how creepy this guy comes off trying to paint klosterman as creepy, by his intimate knowledge of creepiness.

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NEWS & COLUMNS


By Mark Ames


I HAVE FOUND the metaphor for everything vile in my generation, and its name is Chuck Klosterman. I cannot ever recall reading a book as toxic, disingenuous and stupid as Klosterman’s new collection of essays, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Every single page of this book stings. Getting through it was hell. I felt like young Paul Atreides in Dune, when he has to put his hand in the pain box while the evil telepathic witch stands beside him with a poison-tipped needle pressed against his neck. Only in this case, Klosterman is the witch, whispering in my ear, "Now you will feel a burning sensation from the hokey irony oozing from my prose… Now, an itching that you cannot scratch as I bombard you with insincere trash-culture references… Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Puffs... Mwah-hah-hah!"

Klosterman is, quite simply and almost literally, an ass. His soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man’s failing, hairless back end. His tiny, red mouth is a sphincter twisting to a pained close 40 seconds after taking a brutal pounding from Peter North. To round it out, he has a mop of ironically uncombed, dyed-yellow hair and thick-rimmed glasses that look like they were placed on the ass as a frat prank, like a wig and sunglasses thrown on an old jack-o-lantern.

All of which might lend Klosterman some pathos if he didn’t brag so much about his heterosexual conquests and quasi-cynical manipulation of scores of alleged girlfriends. More disturbing are his obsessions with teen and pre-teen pop culture, as exemplified by a creepy essay on Saved by the Bell.

Turning again to his dust-jacket photo, one sees the Chuck Klosterman saggy ass-head attached to a torso wearing a loose, white t-shirt–a t-shirt that looks suspiciously as if it had been stretched in a struggle. I would bet that when that picture was taken, Klosterman was wearing nothing other than that stretched, white t-shirt…and perhaps a pair of black socks.

In other words, he looks like a sex offender. And sentences like "I can’t watch a minute of professional soccer without feeling like I’m looking at a playground of desperate, depressed fourth-graders…"–or "When I say ‘my guys,’ I am referring to a collection of scrappy, rag-tag, mostly unremarkable fourth- and fifth-graders…"–don’t help.

Coming off as a sex offender is one thing. But Klosterman is worse than that: He’s a one-man prose polluter, a living WMD employing the dummy ass-head as a delivery system. And I will forever hate this ass-creature for the pain and suffering he has caused me.

Klosterman’s newest book is all the proof you’ll ever need of the existence of Klosterman’s WMD prose. The cute title alone should tell you to arm yourself and U-Haul it to Idaho: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, with the added asterisked footnote: "A Low Culture Manifesto." He’s not throwing a curve ball here. The content is really just as disgustingly cute–or "snarky," to use one of Klosterman’s favorite mainstream-alternative 90s neologisms–as the title suggests.

But "low culture"? I didn’t know intellectuals, even Beigeist morons like Klosterman, could get away with using phrases like "high" and "low" culture anymore. Even ironically.

Klosterman and his type are one of the reasons why I went into exile (I’m writing this from Moscow). I wanted out of a paradigm in which his type dominated the narrative when in fact his type should be rotting in a death camp, begging for a clump of grass to suck on. I understood 10 years ago that fighting against the Klostermans in America is utterly pointless: Klosterman is the metaphor, the designated heir of everything horribly American, precisely because he’s stupid, shameless and hokey.




KLOSTERMAN IS DESTINED to succeed, and he knows it. That’s why his "Manifesto" is overflowing with a sunny confidence that is in perfect inverse relationship to the famine of originality and intelligence in its content. Even his fake self-deprecating asides are reflections of this confidence. His self-deprecation is clearly insincere, but he knows it’s required in order to sound "hip" or "postmodern," as he mistakenly calls himself.

The Cocoa Puffs manifesto doesn’t start off subtly. In his one-and-a-half-page forward, there’s a concentrated sample of what’s to come: bad wholesome humor as wince-inducing as a Wonder Years voiceover, lame flip-flops on contemporary cliches and flat-out lies, such as this one about how his book came together:

"It was written in those fleeting evening moments just before I fall asleep…The subjects in this book are not the only ones that prove my point; they’re just the ones I happened to pick before I fell asleep."

In other words, Klosterman didn’t really study for his test.

This account of the book’s anti-inspiration is as fake (and silly) as its flip-flop, the Romantic-era poets’ lie that their poetry was conceived in the heat of passion. Even if Klosterman is merely being ironic, it’s an incredibly dated irony appropriated from late-80s grunge cliches about anti-inspiration and sleepiness. The horrible truth is that he’s doing both–lying and being ironic–and somehow, somewhere, there’s a publisher (Scribner), an editor (Brant Rumble) and a readership (most likely you or someone you know, as this book is already a rapid seller on amazon.com) that’s lapping it all up.

Klosterman’s anti-inspiration lie is quickly followed by the first of many flip-flops on conventional cliches that he thinks give his essays depth: "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever ‘in and of itself.’" [Italics Klosterman’s]

Are you scratchin’ your chins over that one, Gen-X- and Gen-Yers? I dunno–my forefinger and thumb are getting pretty raw; I need a special chin-scratching machine to help me through all the thoughts that one inspires. There’ll be nothing but bone and tendon hanging from my lower jaw by the time I figure it out.

Klosterman thinks he’s really onto something with his flip-flops, and nearly every essay has one:

[D]espite their best efforts at being grumpy, a self-described cynic is secretly optimistic about normal human nature.

[The Real World] was theoretically created as a seamless extension of reality. But somewhere that relationship became reversed; theory was replaced by practice.

What’s compelling about the idea of the Monroe-DiMaggio relationship…is not the idea of them being together. It’s the idea of them not being together.

We don’t need Pam[ela Anderson] to know where she is; she helps us understand where we are.

And so on. As you can see, if Sean Penn’s retarded character from I Am Sam had read Baudrillard, you’d get Chuck Klosterman. Or rather, one of many vile facets of his literary persona.

Every page delivers a one-two knock-out of flip-flopped cliches and stupid lies, lies such as calling Steely Dan "more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined." It’s time to note that Klosterman is a rock critic for Spin. He doesn’t mean the Steely Dan comment on any level at all. It’s an entrepreneurial move to position himself as ironic, original and harmless–and thus increase book sales to other ironic, original and harmless people. It’s not so much a lie as a posture, the way all assholes of my generation posture without ever committing to anything but their career advancement.

Among his many postures is the one that he’s "crazy" or "insane," as he repeatedly describes himself without a shred of evidence. If anything, he only proves how utterly common and bourgeois he is, such as in this infuriating comparison:

The best relationship I ever had was with a journalist who was as crazy as me, and some of our coworkers liked to compare us to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. At the time, I used to think, ‘Yeah, that’s completely valid: We fight all the time, our love is self-destructive, and–if she was mysteriously killed–I’m sure I’d be wrongly arrested for second-degree murder before dying from an overdose.’ We even watched Sid & Nancy in her parents’ basement and giggled the whole time. ‘That’s us,’ we said gleefully.

In other words, Klosterman and his girlfriend would be as crazy as Sid and Nancy if they were shooting smack on a stained mattress in the Chelsea and not sitting in their parents’ basement watching tv, giggling and drinking chocolate milk.




WHILE KLOSTERMAN'S ain’t-I-crazy posture is laughable, it’s not nearly as Goering-esque as his hick posture, a stance that requires him to remind us over and over that he’s from North Dakota, that he really likes hair-metal bands from the 80s and that he’s very, very heterosexual, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He says of his North Dakota college days:

We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live.

I suppose this must go over well with his Manhattan handlers, who just love "authentic" hicks who can write roughly the same Beigeist-intellectual drivel as they while still keeping to their "roots." Here Klosterman is the hick equivalent of an Oreo, the pre-Civil Rights blacks who won over white Northern liberals by imitating their locution and tame politics. Only in this case, rather than imitating modern Manhattanite culture critics, Klosterman is imitating the very type of reified hick he knows Manhattan publishers want to see: red-necked on the outside, solid Beige on the inside. A cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. In more ways than he’s aware of.




EVERY CHAPTER OF Klosterman’s book is an essay that makes a point–usually a flip-flop chin-scratcher followed by a hokey moral–and in just about every subject he tackles, he’s just plain wrong.

How anyone can completely misread pop culture, particularly its most obvious elements, is beyond me, but Klosterman accomplishes this feat. For the most part it’s because he hyper-postures over simple things that are too obvious to hold up to even mild posturing.

Examples:

"The desire to be cool is the desire to be rescued."

Wrong. The desire to be cool is the desire to get laid and dominate.

"Amateur pornography grounds us in our reality."

Wrong. Amateur porn makes nerds think they have a chance of fucking the object.

"Billy Joel is great."

Wrong. And someone should pick up a chair and crack it over Klosterman’s head for writing this.

"Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable."

Again with the chair, this time cracking it repeatedly.

And then there’s this classic example of Klosterman’s total idiocy, which crosses over into unexpected reactionary Christianity in its complete misreading of reality:

What’s most disturbing is the amount of internet porn that has absolutely nothing to do with sexual desire and everything to do with cartoonish misogyny, most notably the endless sites showing men ejaculating on women’s faces while the recipients pretend to enjoy it; this has about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan.

Doesn’t get more stupid than this, folks. Not just stupid, but Klosterman here sounds more like the Church Lady than the beer-pounding, headbanging heterosexual from North Dakota he’s made himself out to be. But that’s Klosterman’s squeamish little soul unexpectedly laid bare, stripped of all posture, for a fleeting moment. It is, I believe, the one sentence in the entire book in which he is true to himself, only without even being aware of it.

When it comes to Klosterman and women, Klosterman is at his most disturbing, and his most un-self-aware, if such a thing can be imagined by now. This is evident in the first chapter, the snarky subject of which is the women Klosterman dates. In substance and style, it’s as hokey-vile as an episode of Friends, only with signature Klosterman riffs just to make sure that what you read is as painful as bamboo straw under the fingernails: "No woman will ever satisfy me," he starts. "Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow become marginally famous."

Even Bob Hope would have considered that opening statement too tame; for Klosterman, it’s right out there on the edge. Almost Steely Dan-esque.

And we’re only on page one. I found myself screeching, throwing the book down, and, if this was indeed an interrogation, willing to name all the names he wanted. Just to stop the pain. But Klosterman was just getting started.

His reason for voicing such an "edgy" opinion about women comes down to this: "I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack."

Rather than blame his own loathsome personality or ass-esque face for his failure with women, Klosterman tries to generalize his problem: "It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack."

And finally, desperately fleeing from self-examination like a retreating peasant army, he switches the whole frame to fashionable Beigeist media criticism, anything to get as far away from Chuck Klosterman as possible: "When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in Say Anything..."

Underlying this lame point of media criticism is the false notion that other people, not Chuck of course, are incapable of distinguishing media fictions from reality–a stupid premise that was marginally interesting long ago in the hands of Barthes, Baudrillard and Gitlin, but deserving of a milkshake on the head in the case of Klosterman. Only hack media critics believe that "regular" people are somehow more susceptible to the pop culture bacillus than they are, probably because they don’t spend time among these "regular" people.

Sick thing is, Klosterman, as a proud North Dakotan hick, spent all too much time with "regular" folks. He knows their presumed susceptibility is a lie, but also knows that this lie is what the coastal Beigeocracy wants to hear. He’s only too willing to sell them all out in order to please his Manhattan masters, who have their own set of cliches that they expect to read. Hence, this gem of a media-crit cliche: "The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want."

He then goes from blaming Cusack to blaming Coldplay: "That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay…"

Dontcha get it, Chuck!?! These girls would do literally ANYTHING to get away from you!!! Even fly to Portland to see a shitty band!

Rather than inspiring any sort of sympathetic self-examination, the Coldplay episode allows Klosterman to indulge in a repetition of the word "fuck," a word that has been completely stripped of all its danger. Using "fuck" today is as shocking as belly-button piercings, which is why Klosterman lifts his t-shirt up and flashes the reader: "Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life… I hope Coldplay gets fucking dropped by fucking EMI and ends up like the Stone fucking Roses, who were actually a better fucking band, all things considered."

Gee, ya think? Yes, definite-fucking-ly.




KLOSTERMAN IS MORE than just an idiot. He takes everything down two whole notches, a place where too many people in my generation are willing to follow. To cite but one example, the Onion recently ran a fawning review.

Though he claims the entire spectrum of contemporary culture–from mainstream trash to the cult margins–his aim is really to gut the avant-garde and make it safe for himself and his readers. He’s leading the gentrification of alternative culture to its most destructive stage yet, which is why he namedrops Lou Reed, Kim Deal, Guided By Voices, David Lynch, Sid and Nancy and other hallowed figures of the avant-garde–and dumps them for excessive homages to Billy Joel, GNR and Saved by the Bell. He’s aware of the avant-garde, he knows their names, but in the end, as a Populist Middle-American, as the Jimmy Stewart of college radio, he rejects it in favor of mainstream crap on the guise that his posture is both kewl and ironic, in a supposedly uncool, authentic, hick sort of way.

I’m not sure if Klosterman was ever interesting enough to make the turn from being on the genuine margin to a posing Top Ten culturist. I suspect he was always just a mediocre boor who happened upon the sellout type after being exposed to coastal American twentysomething culture, and so he merely panders to them. He’s positioned himself as the sellout’s spokesman, as well as the spokesman for all the other Gen-Xers who never even had the brains or guts to wade into the margins in the first place. He comforts them with his familiar posturing, his heart-warming sentimentality and his empty boasting.

It’s not just Klosterman. There’s the entire culture where this man is taken seriously and blown in journals that really should know better.

He and his kind have won. God knows, I’d love to fight the bastard, because I do believe that the sword is mightier than the pen. And I’m not posturing, I really mean it. But Klosterman would probably win–he describes himself as "six-foot-two" and he’s a good five years younger than I. But I’d do it. I really will do it.

Until then, I’ll stay safely out here in Moscow–one of the northern hemisphere’s last safe havens from his toxicity and all that it represents.

On funny

Comedy to the rescue
Want to know what's going on in politics? Forget the news. Armando Iannucci on how comedians are filling the gap where serious debate used to be

Wednesday October 18, 2006
The Guardian

I was watching Mastermind recently and found a contestant had chosen Alan Partridge as his subject. My reaction was a combination of being thrilled to be responsible for something that was being asked about on Mastermind, while thinking: "God, Mastermind's gone downhill a bit, hasn't it?" I sometimes find myself lowering my opinion of a body when it asks me to appear in front of it.
And yet comedy matters to a lot of people. Surveys show that a high proportion of people aged 18 to 36 get most of their information about British politics from Have I Got News For You. In America, similar figures show that Jon Stewart's topical comedy The Daily Show supplies a high percentage of 18 to 36-year-old Americans with their main news fix.

Why is comedy taking up so much space in our culture? Why is it so present, so dominant? There are things that should matter more - but at the moment they just aren't there.

I had a salutary experience of this around our breakfast table. The family were talking about jobs, what the children wanted to do when they grew up; all sorts of useful professions came up, teacher, nurse, doctor, anything really. I told my seven-year-old son: "You can always write jokes." "Daddy," he said, furiously. "That's not work."

It's what I suspect most of us who work in the creative arts occasionally feel: that what we're doing is interesting, it's fun, it's probably the only thing we can imagine ourselves doing. But is it a proper job? Is there a point to what anyone in the arts is doing? It's only recently that I've come to find out that it does - that spending one's life just imagining things, making things up, performs a crucial role today. It matters because it's an act of imagination, and imagination is one of the things that defines us as human beings rather than monkeys. It's an act of imagination that is just as valid, just as crucial, I think, as any serious competitor, like a drama or the novel. But I think we sometimes see comedy as an inferior art form.

This irks me. Comedy allows the imagination to be at its most revolutionary. Because, when you treat something comically, you can do anything. You can distort or exaggerate, you can break out of the form, you can be as real or as unrealistic as you like. You can invent, you can deny, hide or reveal, be as free or as controlling as you like. The most groundbreaking novels are usually comic. In return, though, you make a devastating pact with your audience. Because, though you can pour all your energy into doing any of these things, if they're not funny (worse still, if they're not instantly funny) then you're a failure. No court of appeal.

That's why, over questions of taste and taboo in comedy, my instinct is always first to ask: is it funny? That's why I probably would have had more sympathy with the Christian protest groups if Jerry Springer: The Opera had been less amusing, and would have had more sympathy with the Danish cartoonists if their efforts in depicting Muhammad had been more witty. And I'm sure the Labour MP Sion Simon - who parodied David Cameron's web diaries with a send-up of himself dressed as a yoof called Dave, inviting people to sleep with his wife, because that was cool - would have earned less derision if his material had been not so dire. Simon defended his efforts on the basis that it was "just satire". No, Sion, it was just bad.

I thank my lucky stars I'm not elected, like a politician, and don't have to arm myself daily with opinions, arguments and reactions that hang together and stand up to examination. I don't have to have a recognisable point of view or ideology; and, if all else fails, I can always change my mind. So long as it's funny. It's the privilege of being irresponsible.

But here is the confusing bit. Despite this, I still want comedy to matter a great deal. I want it to tackle big subjects. The idea that we are making someone laugh about something does not mean we don't take it seriously. Sometimes, we can take something so seriously that the only practical way to release the tension is to make a joke. Sometimes, we can be so appalled by someone's behaviour that the only effective way to run it again in our heads is as farce. Luckily, we do not live under tyranny, but those who do so know the creative freedom the joke gives them. You can ban writing, but you can't stop people finding things funny.

Similarly, being serious is not a sufficient reason for tastelessness or taboo-busting. A piece of television I found offensive recently was a documentary about Gorecki's Third Symphony. One movement contains a setting of words scrawled by an 18-year-old girl in a Gestapo cell. This music played over scenes from Auschwitz. I found myself getting angry at this, because what was happening was that images of real death and real trauma were being used as a background visual to illustrate and promote an already commercially successful piece of classical music. Regardless of the serious intent of the composition, I did find myself wondering what it is about "high art" that gives it the right to plunder our experiences in this way. If I had set those same scenes to, say, a Frank Sinatra classic, I would have an awful lot of explaining to do. So why not here?

I should be honoured that comedy plays such an influential part in cultural life. Look at politics. So much of it today is conducted in the form of a joke - not necessarily an amusing joke - that it's practically impossible for a professional jokesmith to go one better. After Sion Simon's "satirical" send-up of Cameron on YouTube, is there really any room for a comedian's more professional parody? When Gordon Brown has to get comic writers to supply him with some gags about the Arctic Monkeys and the Arctic circle, is there anything left for a comedian to say? When the only way a Prime Minister can get round his wife publicly calling his Chancellor a liar is with a joke, then what's left for a joke-writer to do? Comedy is so prevalent now, it's cool by association. So politicians speak and act according to the rhythms of comedy. Labour trying to portray Cameron as a chameleon - it's an attempted sketch.

This has come about for three reasons: politicians have stopped speaking to us properly, the media has stopped examining their actions in anything like a forensic way, and broadcast culture has become so watered down, so scared of fact, that people are less inclined to turn to anything other than entertainment for information.

Broadcast journalism today promotes itself not so much on what it talks about but on the method it uses: "Broadcasting 24 hours a day, correspondents in over 50 capital cities, giving you all the headlines every 15 minutes, up to six generations of journalists gathered in one newsroom, making you feel all the news you want to feel, even on Christmas Day." Hi-tech software and speedy transmission makes everything instant news, but we lose sight of the skilled individuals who can process this random unstoppable flow of information and somehow construct a meaningful examination of it. We need narrative.

I found myself hungry for narrative in the build-up to the war in Iraq. Here, surely, were facts - or, indeed, a glaring absence of facts - that required piecing together. Here, surely, it was clear that political debate was operating on a curiously surreal level. We were being asked to attack a country on the basis that the weapons we knew (but couldn't prove) it had would definitely be used against us, especially if we attacked it. This Alice Through the Looking Glass logic has continued after the invasion. Now, it seems, it was necessary to have invaded Iraq to rid the world of the terrorist cells who have flooded into the country since it was invaded. The terrorist attacks in London and mainland Europe since are, officially, unconnected with the invasion of a country that was invaded because it had links with terrorist attacks in mainland Europe.

My favourite quotation from the eminently quotable George Bush is a remark he made last year about the constant attacks on US troops in Iraq: "The insurgents are being defeated; that's why they're continuing to fight." It's a stunning reversal of all logic. Measuring success in terms of how far you are from success. An even stranger utterance came from Tony Blair at Labour's 2004 Conference when he defended his actions by saying: "Judgments aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe."

I only know what I believe. I find that one of the most chilling statements uttered by a seemingly rational politician. Apart from the fact that it overturns about 16 centuries of western philosophy and questions the entire principle of scientific inquiry, it's also, surely, how the Taliban get through their day.

Of course, I'm being selective in the way I have treated this logic. I have written my sentences with a deliberate aim of getting a laugh. I have treated it comically. But what else can I do? That's what I do. It was up to others to provide a more sober analysis. Except I just didn't see that happening. The media didn't stop to analyse the facts. Didn't comb Bush and Blair's speeches at the time to point out deficiencies in logic. And instead it was left for some of them to apologise much later for having trusted the PM too much, for having assumed that what he told the Commons about WMD was true. It's a shameful failure. The media didn't work. And it left a gap.

That's why I find myself stepping into that gap. Not just me, but many other humorists, satirists, comics, artists, people who make a virtue of the fact they distort logic for comic effect, but who still feel compelled to analyse that logic because no one else will. Everyone has analysed the result of the Hutton inquiry. But no one has analysed all the evidence given during it. Because the result, not the evidence, was deemed to have been the story.

But how can we expect the media to want to do anything more when the political debate they are meant to be reporting has become restricted to the point of non-existence? When politicians themselves want to debate image, postpone policy to the last moment, defer content until style has been sorted and sold, then there's a decreasing pool of ideas and arguments to analyse.
What amazes me is how much this has accelerated in the past five years or so; how much it seems to have gone past a tipping point where there's no longer anything factual left to talk about. Cameron sets up a webcam and a blog not because he has something new to say, but because he has a new medium in which to say something.

There is an emptiness in public argument waiting to be filled. That's where my lot come in again. If politicians fail to supply politics with content, is it any wonder people turn to other, more entertaining sources?

Given there is no absolute meaning, no hard, unquestionable kernel of truth at the centre of what we see, how can we take anything seriously ever again? Of course, we do, though, by turning to those who do offer narratives, even if they are fictional ones. Because they are better than no narrative at all. That's why I think comedy, and indeed any act of imagination, matters - and matters fundamentally. But this is not the sort of thing it should have been left to a comedian to say.

· This is an edited extract from the Tate Britain Lecture given by Armando Iannucci last night.