Notes for 5/3/07
- Adam Gopnick on Kingsley Amis:It is a very good thing to have a built-in bullshit detector, but a bad thing when the bullshit detector crowds out the rest of your brain; that’s why they call it being narrow-minded. You quickly reach the stage where anything ambitious, complicated, or merely foreign gets spat on along with the things that are genuinely phony. Pretense and ambition are different words for the same thing, and a writing without pretense pretty soon becomes a literature without ambitions, content to congratulate itself on its own insularity.Sound familiar? Doesn't just apply to literature...
- Oh hello Pitchforkers. Now, I love Marc, but listen: that original Cohen version is fucking fantastic, once you adjust your ears to the 80s. I refer you to Dan Bejar: "a balancing act between the Adult, the Contemporary, and the Disastrous."
posted by Mike B. @ 9:58 AM
5 Comments:
Ha, well said, Mike. I'm not sure if we've ever officially "met", even in the nebulous Internet way, so now's as good a time as any to say: I'm very pleased to meet you! And: I love your blog.
Now, I'm definitely not advocating a return to everybody employing the Buckley romantic troubadour trope and playing all their songs on solo acoustic guitar with hushed vocals. (Frankly, I haven't heard much Buckley-influenced music I'd recommend.) Nor do I think Cohen's original recording is "phony," whatever that would mean in this context. I do personally find it less affecting than subsequent versions, and I think it's due to the production. Is it because I don't like '80s music? Hell, I don't know, but that seems rather unlikely... I think I just like different '80s music. (I do, however, love Bejar's artful appropriation of the '80s tropes you outline in that older thread, even if they're not usually my favorite aspects of the era.)
Hope all's well otherwise!
The detector can't be both good and bad--or it has to be both good and bad.
This says it's all bad.
Waterman: not quite sure what you mean.
Marc: thanks! I'm a big fan of yours too. I went through a definite conversion experience with Cohen's 80s output. I couldn't even listen to it because of the production, but then something happened (maybe "Dance Me to the End of Love"?) and it suddenly just sounded better than anything else. I dunno. I admire the stubbornness of it, I think.
I mean it said this:
"It is a very GOOD thing to have a built-in bullshit detector, but a BAD thing when the bullshit detector crowds out the rest of your brain..."
Does he mean ONLY when?
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