26W01. Everything is a remix
New Year’s concerts are everything a classical music concert isn’t. They’re casual and relaxed, but most of all, they’re disorderly and noisy. I hate it, but i love it. How can you not be amused by those poor parents that felt obliged to wear nice clothes because the grandparents wanted to introduce the kids to classical music, only to discover that nobody else bothered?
I’ll always have a soft spot for first-time concert goers who didn’t wait for the ushers and are now lost finding their seat, for the octogenarian couples that still have a spring in their step and a twinkle in their eyes, and for the regulars like ourselves that are nominally reading a book but really watching the room. We all were there, we’ll all be there. We’re all here and that’s nice.
I can’t bring myself to clap in between pieces, but i thoroughly enjoy the sincere bursts of applause from people who genuinely enjoy the music. It doesn’t hurt that, for once, the orchestra didn’t play The Nutcracker Suite1 like a sloppy Viennese waltz, but actually imbued it with some sense of timing and attack. I’ve seen worse ways to start a new year.
Books
Blank Space by W. David Marx. Ametora was a brilliant study of the way Japan adopted and ultimately revived traditional American fashion; Status and Culture was a thought-provoking examination of the role fashion plays in the creation of new norms and eventually culture; Blank Space is a rambling collection of haphazard anecdotes that are supposed to prove our “cultural stagnation”.
Marx expands on the weakest point of Status and Culture: the idea that “bold artistic experimentation” has struggled “to gain recognition” in a world where “reboots, rehashes, and fads” have flourished. His carefully curated list of examples would be convincing if they didn’t stem from a disappointingly myopic viewpoint. He seems to have forgotten that uppercase-C culture is nothing but the dream of the most imperialist members of the American elite.
Ours is a world of multiple lower-c cultures feeding on each other. Different countries, different ethnicities, different age groups and even different genders have different cultures, but Marx only explores the mainstream culture of 30- to 50-something mostly white heterosexual middle-class Americans. This particular “culture” has definitely stagnated, and i’m convinced that this relative stagnation explains part of the rise of techno-fascism in the United States.
But that’s the point: it’s a relative stagnation. Look at Western Africa or South-Eastern Asia, look at Latin Americans or Nipo-brasileiros, look at young women or transgender people, and you’ll see everything but stagnation. Those cultures evolve faster and faster with our ever faster means of communication, which is undoubtedly a huge problem if you believe that you need an overarching civic political culture to hold nation-states, but they render Marx’s point moot.
Most of all, Marx seems to ignore the immense role that free and open-source software has played in the first quarter of our century. “Everything is a remix” is the closest thing we have to an uppercase-C global culture. For the first time in history, the means of creation and communication are (almost) evenly distributed, and the most important story of the last five years has been the fight to recapture them – or annihilate them by flooding human knowledge with machine-generated slop.
That’s scary, and i can’t help but think that Blank Space is partly motivated by fear. If anything, our cultures are metastazing, and we need to find ways to continue expressing our individuality without losing the ability to understand each other as a society. Inventing a new framework to maintain our global cultural canon in the digital space will be one of the most important things we’ll do in this coming quarter of a century. If we don’t, it’s not stasis we’ll have to decry, but the triumph of “order”- and “truth”-wielding authoritarian regimes.
Music
Les demoiselles de Rochefort at the Lido. Spending Christmas at the Lido is becoming a (ferociously middle-class) tradition. Les demoiselles de Rochefort is the first French musical comedy film that attracted global audiences thanks to its English dub… and irresistible music. The first stage musical adaptation from 2003 was bloodcurdingly bad. This new adaptation is much more faithful to the movie and the stage production cleverly pays homage to Rochefort’s transporter bridge. As always at the Lido, the performance was stellar. I can’t tell you how much i enjoy seeing people make such a hard thing as belting your heart out while tap-dancing look so effortlessly easy.
Movies
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning by Christopher McQuarrie. The ultimate Tom Cruise ego trip. He’s graduated from “i can play a good spy and here are a few set pieces to prove it” to “i can play a literal Messiah and here are two hours of exposition because you’re too dumb to understand how great i am” in the span of thirty years. Let’s hope this final reckoning really is final.
Things
LEGO Game Boy. Don’t tell my friends: i hadn’t built an entire LEGO set by myself in twenty-five years. It struck me as a kind of modern (and easy) jigsaw puzzle2, a way to pass time away from a screen more than to build a beautiful showpiece. Don’t get me wrong, the resulting 1:1 scale model is really clever with its lenticular screen and its functional buttons, but most of the pieces are hidden inside and will never be seen again. Even the brilliant Easter Egg, which i won’t reveal, isn’t easily accessible. Nonetheless, i had a good time building it and it looks great on my shelves. Who can ask for more?
TV shows
Pluribus by Vince Gilligan. Robb Knight said it best: this is “the most boring show i can’t stop watching”. I’m a staunch proponent of “show, don’t tell”, but the overall pace of the season felt a bit too slow, because Gilligan spent a lot of time showing things that didn’t tell much. Nothing seems to happen in two episodes, and then, huge character development happens in ten minutes. The cinematography is masterful, but sometimes, the heart-achingly beautiful shots felt a bit gratuitous. That being said, the last episode leaves us wanting more without ending on a dumb cliffhanger. The behind-the-scenes featurette makes me believe we’re in for a good ride.