On liking bad things

When I was a kid, I collected comic books. This was back in the 80s, before the Tim Burton Batman movie turned "comics" into something else, into movies, I suppose.

I was obsessed with comics, and my best friend at the time was my best friend in large part because he was the other kid who was really into comic books (there were other common interests but for the sake of anonymity I'll leave those out).  

I stopped collecting comics in the early 90s for a very straightforward reason- I got a girlfriend. It was that simple.  I went from spending all my money on comics to never buying one for years.  I was done with them and I never really looked back.  

Well, that's not really true, or else I wouldn't be writing about them now.  More like, every few years I would go to a comic book store, sometimes one I'd frequented in the past, where the owner would remember me with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and I'd pick up an issue of what had been my favourite comic book, the Fantastic Four.  I'd read the issue I bought, mostly confused because I'd lost all the plot threads.  And was never so taken by whatever I read I sought out older issues to better understand what was going on.  This was probably a sign.

I still have my comic books, or, my parents do. They sit in a pile of white boxes in a storage room in their basement, and we talk a lot about them sending these eight boxes to me, the final repatriation of stuff that has been sitting at my parents' house in the quarter century since I left Calgary.

After the birth of my first son, I started to indulge again in some of my youthful interests more than I did in that liminal space between childhood and parenthood. As an example, over the years, I've bought some of the omnibus editions of the Fantastic Four, big thick volumes that collect 30 issues in a hardbound dust jacketed "prestige" edition.  I've usually bought them on sale at BMV, a local second hand bookstore here in Toronto, while also somewhat inebriated, alcohol being the royal road to nostalgia.

I've had them for years, but it was only a few weeks ago that I started to read the first one, which collects the first 30 issues of the Fantastic Four, "The World's Greatest Comic Book Magazine".  I'm reading them mainly because I'm sleep deprived as a result of the birth of my second son, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read, say, Wieland's Des Esels Schatten at night, or anything else that's a) in a language other than English or b) more involved or complicated than a magazine article.

As I've been making my way through the omnibus, an issue or two per night, a thought kept creeping in, one that was there the last time I read some of these treasured stories about a decade ago - they aren't very good.  The stories, the art, they aren't very good.

Maybe it was pride, or nostalgia (it was nostalgia) that kept the thought at bay, but yesterday I happened to read an essay by Sam Kriss about the death of nerds.  As someone who used to try to talk about hipsters on this very blog, to try to figure them out, I'd never really thought about the fact that nerds really did take over. 

And the idea, which I'm taking from Kriss' essay, that hipsters were just snobs except in the wrong direction, seems correct, in part because I talked about this myself 14 years ago!  So I think he's right about how the hipster and the nerd have functioned in our culture, and how we do seem to be moving past them.

For my own part, I never considered myself a nerd (I'm sure everyone else did!) but in my defense, I'd always been a pretty bad nerd - for one, although I was obsessed with comic books, and collected them with a verve bordering on what we'd probably call OCD now, I really did enjoy them.  I really liked the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and all the other superheroes - I liked their adventures, and had a lot of fun reading them and talking about the latest issues with my friends.  

But then I grew up.

To be sure, when I was in junior high, my friends and I would discuss the literary merits of comic books, their aesthetic value of course on a par with the great works of Shakespeare and Beckett, but given none of us had read any literature at that stage, it seems like in hindsight, what we were doing was learning to perform the Anglo-American-Canadian culture two step, where we affirm that whatever mass media product we're slurping down at the time is just as good as anything that has a higher aesthetic value - snobs are really just nerds with ascots!  

But back to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped reading comic books around the same time I got into classical music - the girlfriend was definitely the last straw, but the signs were there.  The last year I bought comics as a teenager, it was more out of a sense of duty- I wasn't reading them, I was collecting them, but the love wasn't really there anymore.

What did I love instead?  Bach.  And Monteverdi.  And so on.  

***

All this being said, I don't want to pretend I spend all my time listening to Xenakis on a $10,000 soundsystem while reclining in a late 60s Finnish recliner. For one, I like Star Wars, and I dutifully watch all the shows and movies, and I've even bought some of the novels and  comic books.  Most of them aren't very good, and it feels a lot like Kriss' description of nerdery, where I'm really consuming it because it's not great, but Star Wars has always held a particular place in my head, and even though I sometimes resent it, it doesn't really matter. 

It's more like a sickness, in the way that Goethe and Heine described Romanticism as a sickness. It's something I have, and deal with, but it's not going away, and you have to treat it.  But pretending like it isn't a sickness is as good an explanation as any as to why so much mass culture sucks so badly, where you have so many smart, creative people turning out bland slop to audiences who don't even know if they care about this stuff anymore.

Have I just spent a morning writing a blog post on how I'm not really a nerd?  Yes, I think so.  But I'd also like to start talking about taste again, maybe in a slightly more philosophical way, and this seemed like a good place to start.  

Soon I'll start talking about Heinrich Heine's thoughts on taste, but not today.  

But soon.

Post Beer

According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013.  

For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out.  The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!

***

Way back in 2010, I went to Germany for the first time in a long time.  It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.

It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer.  That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.

I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son.  I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.

As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!

As I recently pointed out implicitly on this very blog, Canadians can be uh, parochial.  Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well.  People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.

Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales.  Which is why this article by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time! 

I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.

Even at the time, articles like Hoppy Beer is Awful were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of Bellwoods Brewery in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital.  

Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful.  I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning.  

Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones.  But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles.  Did they really enjoy these beers?  Or were they just chasing trends?

Why did I care about this so much?  Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind!  Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore.  What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.

That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!

Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is a sour, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me!  But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day!

Reverend Billy

This morning, on the way home from walking my dog, I kicked a plastic Starbucks coffee/frappuccino/iced latte/whatever cup that someone had decided was better to leave on the ground instead of putting it into the nearby garbage container...who am I to judge?

Anyway, kicking it had a Proustian effect on me, because I immediately thought about Reverend Billy, someone I haven't thought about in nearly 20 years.  Specifically, I recalled the photo that accompanied this 2004 profile of him in the New York Times (unfortunately archived article lacks the photo!), which depicted Reverend Billy being held back by some random Starbucks patron.  

In my mind, the patron has the dead expression of a dad holding an unruly toddler, keeping Reverend Billy in place until the authorities could arrive and the patron could get his 2000 calorie Moccaccino with extra whipped topping or whatever it was he was protecting from the Reverend's anti-consumerist predations.  

I can't find the image anywhere online, so you'll just have to trust me, but it's evocative of a time when culture jamming was still a thing and the "average" person thought that it was more important to protect Starbucks than to let the performance artist play out his show. 

Times have changed, and come to think of it, I think if Reverend Billy went into a Starbucks now, he'd be greeted with applause instead of concern.  In other words, he'd probably get co-opted in that special way that capitalism manages to do to everything and everyone.

So it good to know that Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have moved on somewhat from their anti-consumerist bent (haven't we all?) and onto other pressing matters, like recently writing about global warming and protesting robobees.  In other words, he's still fighting the good fight.

Although I haven't thought of him in decades, I'm glad he's still around.  Who knew kicking a trash on a Toronto street this brisk late summer morning would lead to reacquainting myself (and you, my dear reader) with something good?

Punching down

I wouldn't really be back to blogging if I didn't complain about something that I saw on the Internet a while ago.  

Even better, I'll be complaining about someone's take on classical music!

Today's blog post responds to a tweet thread about a subscriber-only New York Times piece by John McWhorter that's a review of a book by Philip Ewell about racism in musicology.

Here is the tweet in question - at least most of them! 

I mean the real answer is “fine” art was conceived as part of a racial and colonial and gendered project to figure out how society could contain free self-governing subjects who miraculously all arrived at the same universal laws independently

— Robin James (@doctaj) May 18, 2023

The tweet is from a musicologist named Robin James - she has a blog too!  

When I read these, my initial reaction was to be angry.  Because that's what one does when they're on Twitter.  

But the more I've thought about it (and I give these kinds of things far too much thought) the more it just makes me depressed and sad.  Sad about the state of arts and humanities academia, but also sad about the ways in which most people, even smart people, talk about something that's very important and vital to me - classical music.

***

Now if you're actually reading this, or you've read me before, you'll know that these tweets are the kind of thing that's preoccupied me for a long time, because they're about the "discourse" of classical music.

I think there's a lot going on in this tweet, which is part of a longer thread - beyond the "classical music is white supremacist" stuff, she thinks that Socrates had it coming, which I'll admit I found pretty funny even if I think that's an idiosyncratic take on his death!  

At the heart of them is an age old battle, one that's been going on for maybe 100 years.  You know the one, right?  Or is it just me?  It's probably just me.

I've explained this before, so I'll try to be brief - the popular music industry has long used "classical" music as a foil to sell records.  If that's the materialist base, the cultural byproduct of this dialectical relationship between popular and "art" music is that a lot of people (and I've known a lot of people like this!) who like popular music simultaneously see classical music as some kind of threat. 

This takes all kinds of forms - you have the stuffiness of the concert hall as opposed to the authentic freedom of a rock concert.  There's the obvious conservatism of the classical musician compared to the progressive vision of the punk or new wave artist.  Or maybe it's just a generic defensiveness that I've encountered all too often when I tell people I like listening to Josquin or Wagner, as though I'm judging people for their musical tastes simply by expressing my own tastes.

This is a very common rhetorical move in popular discourse around classical music, and the move is persistent mainly because it's very effective!  

It's what the CBC did back in the aughts to gut classical music on the radio, and fire a bunch of orchestral musicians (which I discussed back in the day) - they argued that in was unfair that classical music got so much airtime as opposed to popular music on CBC.  

And of course, they were right!  Classical music did get a lot of airtime on CBC radio, but literally nowhere else on the radio!  If you wanted to listen to all kinds of independent "popular" artists or huge acts, you had a lot of places to listen to them, but if you wanted to hear Calgary Opera's production of some new Canadian opera, CBC Radio Two was it.

So fast forward to 2023, and the newest version of this phenomenon is something like this:

 

I'll admit, this video kind of broke my brain when I first encountered it. I thought about doing a post on it, but it's too demoralizing and this video is too old at this stage, and frankly too popular, to bother.

That being said, the idea that the music theory that one is taught if they go to university to study western classical music has some kind of empirical claim to universality is absurd to me.

I studied music at university, and took years of theory, counterpoint and orchestration. I still have my theory textbooks, so after watching this video I went and checked them out, and right there at the start, they all say they're going to teach you about the harmonic and contrapuntal practices of European music from around the late 17th Century to the present.

They never say that this is the only way to conceive of music theory, or that this is the best way of doing music theory, or whatever.  The textbook does what it says on the tin - it shows you the kinds of musical organization that one saw in the music of Bach and those who followed in his footsteps.

Do North American universities privilege "classical" music education over popular music?  Yes, at least this was the case back in the day.  Is this the result of long-standing legacies of colonialism and racism in North America?  Yes, it seems likely, given the settlement patterns of the continent!  Does this mean that classical music, as in, a particular genre of music whose genealogy predates colonialism, is essentially white supremacist?  Uh...

If I'm being charitable, Jame's tweet above is pretty narrow in scope.  She's suggesting that the idea of "fine" art is a kind of political project that cashes out in favour of western ideas as being universal.  But there are a lot of problems with this - when does this "project" actually start?  

For example, was Beethoven, when he was adopting Schiller's text about all men being brothers, in fact suggesting that the idea of universal brotherhood relied on western subjectivity, and not say, wishing for the possibility of human solidarity across race and culture?  One of these readings seems charitable and plausible, and the other one seems like the reading that will get you a SSHRC here in Canada (zing!).

This tweet strikes me as part of this defensiveness I've been describing taken to a whole new level - did someone say classical music is better than pop music?  Well, classical music isn't just stuffy or irrelevant or out of touch, it's actually harming people, and also, please buy my rock album and read my scholarship.

That seems like a very bold and nonsensical move to make, especially for someone like James.  She's a philosopher, but there's a pretty clear hole in this argument - the suggestion that the people who made the art somehow impacts the aesthetic value of the art is just the good old intentional fallacy.

If this all seems mean, it kind of is, and I don't doubt that her response comes from a place of justified anger about McWhorter's piece - I'm going to go ahead and admit that I haven't read it because I don't have a NY Times subscription, but his tweets on it are not great - conflating musicology and music theory doesn't really cover him in glory. 

That being said, if I'm being charitable, I can see that the point he's getting at is just that making these kinds of essentialist claims about an academic discipline leads us to dark places - I should know - I'm a Germanist!

But it's a pretty easy move, in a dying academic profession, to take something like classical music, which gets scholarly attention for historical reasons and declare it to be so bad, so evil, that it should be wiped off the face of the earth, so that popular music scholars can get tenure instead.

I don't want to psychologize Robin James too much, but she definitely reads, in her tweets and in her blog, like someone who really does think that rock music is the music of protest, while Marxists like Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze were, I don't know, white supremacists,  because of the kind of music they produced.  As in, it wasn't their political affiliations that mattered, but what she considers the problematic genealogy of their music that renders their art as reactionary or racist. I think this is deeply, deeply wrong.  

Unfortunately, it's typical of online discourse to see people punch down while acting as though they're punching up.  Does Robin James really believe that classical music has any cultural power at this stage?  Would anyone who isn't trying to raise funds for an orchestra or an opera company say that it does?

I don't know Robin James. She might be a very nice person, and an excellent scholar, and I suspect that if we had a beer together, we'd probably be a lot closer politically than apart. But as someone who is himself recently out of the academy, I have encountered a lot of people who put on this kind of performance, who talk in this way, and I just don't understand how they fail to see that all they're doing is tearing apart their own academic disciplines in an attempt to "rescue" them.

It's not a solution to the "problem" of the arts or the humanities in the academy - it's just doing the work of the neoliberal ghouls who've destroyed pretty much all of culture, including higher education.  But make no mistake - once they get rid of all those overpriced classical music programs, they're coming for everyone else.

I think it would be better if people did work of all kinds in well-funded public universities that accommodate the histories and theories of many musical genres .  I think robust public radio and television and internet that supports the huge diversity of musical styles and histories would work well for everyone.  

I think almost anything would work better than watching people tear each other down in the service of capital on a dying social media platform would be better, but often it seems like this is all we have left.