Day: May 17, 2011

Conservatism & The Arts

Writer David Mamet.
Writer David Mamet.

By David Ross. The Obamas have invited some apparently outrageous rapper to the White House to participate in a ‘poetry reading,’ with predictable repercussions. The left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes fumes:

Look, the conservatives, if Shakespeare were alive, and he went to the White House to get, you know, some sort of a reading, they would be outraged about him – talking about killing his brother, and the father had to go, and a mother he slept with – They’d be out of their fricking minds with this. They don’t understand culture! Or literature!

Conservatives – at least the many who ridiculed this comment online – do know the difference between Shakespeare and Sophocles, and know that Oedipus killed his father and not his brother. Or is Rhodes hazily thinking of Hamlet? Who can tell?

From "Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince."

The NPR-ish notion that conservatives are sub-literate is so annoyingly counter-factual, as the central vein of Anglo-American literature for the last two hundred and more years has been essentially conservative: Swift, Burke, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Carlyle, Trollope, Thoreau, Ruskin (a self-described “violent Tory of the old school”), Yeats, Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor and the Southern agrarian writers in toto, Saul Bellow. Only Dickens and possibly George Eliot, among the greatest writers, can be neatly grafted onto a liberal moral or political scheme. Even self-professed radicals, like William Morris, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, are only superficially or problematically so, while the elusive James Joyce is imaginable as a conservative but inconceivable – utterly self-contradictory – as a liberal of any sort. I myself consider Morris the most conservative man who ever lived and attribute his communism to a complete and rather silly misunderstanding: his communist utopia was not progressive but maniacally reactionary, a fantasy of the Middle Ages idealized and restored. Not for nothing did Yeats call Morris his “chief of men.” Some day, I believe, a scholarly fellow with a certain entrepreneurial instinct will write a fascinating book on the conservatism of Harry Potter, which borrows more than plot conventions from Tolkien and Lewis, and harks back, in its fundamentals, to the monasticism of the Middle Ages and to the legend of St. George.

In the coup de grace to the Rhodes stereotype, David Mamet, our most renowned playwright, has announced his conservative conversion with a splashy new book (see here). Continue reading Conservatism & The Arts

Ring-a-Ding-Ding: Pan Am, Playboy Club Trailers Begin the ‘Mad Men’ Cash-in

By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what people think of the new trailer above for NBC’s forthcoming show The Playboy Club, as well as the clip below from ABC’s forthcoming series Pan Am. Both series are set in the early, swingin’ 60s – and both are looking an awful lot like Mad Men … in fact, almost embarrassingly so. Christina Hendricks and January Jones would seem to be owed some residuals, here.

It seems fairly clear that the major network Mad Men cash-in has begun, except that whatever ironic detachment and/or sophistication with which Mad Men approached the 50s/early 60s seems to be jettisoned here in favor of abject lifestyle propaganda and product placement (even of an obsolete brand, in the case of Pan-Am).

Due to their overall flavor of pandering, my sense is that the networks are going to have a difficult time selling these shows – although I certainly could be wrong. In any case, it’s fascinating to me that this is the turn popular entertainment is taking during the Obama era. Obama has always struck me as a 50s-style, Adlai Stevenson-type person in terms of his tight, disciplined personal demeanor, academic-style liberalism and Illinois background. Perhaps we are, in sense, going back to the late 50s/early 60s these days. Reader feedback is encouraged. Continue reading Ring-a-Ding-Ding: Pan Am, Playboy Club Trailers Begin the ‘Mad Men’ Cash-in

LFM Review: White Button (Bijelo Dugme) @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. They were much like Yugoslavia’s version of Czechoslovakia’s Plastic People of the Universe, except they had a much easier time of it with the Tito regime. They only faced a few drug busts, which they do not claim to be altogether unwarranted. Indeed, the hard rock band was a unifying force for the youth culture, but attempts by various nationalities to claim them as their own contributed to the band’s eventual break-up. The rise, fall, and multiple reinventions of the Yugoslav hard-rock band Bijelo Dugme is chronicled in Igor Stoimenov’s documentary, White Button, the closing film of the 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.

Yugoslav rock heroes.

Musically, White Button (who adopted the “Bijelo Dugme” moniker essentially to prove names don’t matter in rock) is probably best compared to Led Zeppelin. Both bands represented the early cusp of Heavy Metal, but were still very much in touch with the blues and R&B roots of the music. In terms of popularity, they were the Beatles, the Stones, the Bieber kid, and the Grateful Dead, all in one. Their ethnic heritage was mixed, but they all originally came together in Sarajevo.

Evidently, it was good to be a rock-star, even under Tito. Though Stoimenov largely glosses over their relationship with the state, it seems they must have been tolerated as an instrument to keep the Balkan country from Balkanizing. (Also, it would have been the height of hypocrisy for the government to act against Bijelo Dugme at a time when Tito was criticizing the Husek puppet government for cracking down in Czechoslovakia.)

What Bijelo does best is old time rock & roll. The band turned the Yugoslav music scene on its ear in more ways than one. For instance, their graphic designer recalls how they pushed the envelope using sexual imagery to sell records (see exhibit A below).

It is not always a triumphant story, though. Like any legitimate rock band, they lost a drummer to drugs and personal demons along the way. They also took an ill-conceived detour into the New Wave that the film never shies away from examining in humiliating detail. They would have better luck when Goran Bregocić, the Brian Wilson of the group, looked toward traditional Roma and Macedonian music for inspiration.

Bijelo Dugme album cover.

Oddly, the film ends exactly when Bijelo Dugme disbands, declining to cover the band members’ experiences during the war. However, the accompanying short, Damir Pirić’s Rock ‘n’ War, fills that gap, but from the perspective of the working rock bands of Tuzla rather than the White Buttoners.

Rock concerts “for peace” are a tiresome cliché here, but when the Tuzla rockers organized them in hopes that cooler heads would prevail in the weeks leading up to war, one has to give them credit for trying. Indeed, there is a lot of dramatic footage in the short (sixteen minute) doc. Hearing one band shred through and utterly re-contextualize Neil Young’s “Keep Rockin’ in the Free World,” is frankly kind of awe-inspiring.

Bijelo is a droll, cleverly assembled Behind the Music film, while R ‘n’ W is raw and poignant.  They both rock hard, though, closing this year’s festival on a high note. A sold-out screening, the BHFF appears to be growing nicely, bringing films by and of interest to Bosnians to a wider audience beyond the local expat community. Here’s hoping for a third day next year.

Posted on May 17th, 2011 at 2:37pm.