Letters to the Editor
-
Didn't read the article
But these letters have given me lots of new directors to add to my Netflix queue; thanks, folks! Hey, maybe someday Salon will bring in a high-profile columnist who will actually introduce people to new and interesting artists themselves, so we don't have to read the letter columns to get the information.
-
Art Criticism (from lazy, shallow and unoriginal critics) RIP
People, when are you going to get it that Salon will not get rid of CP until you stop clicking thru to her ramblings, and stop posting letters about what a washed up has-been idiot she is...
She generates traffic with her flaccid outrageousness. And that is why she is here.
Stop reading her, and she will go away.
Still one has to laugh at the irony of such person decrying the death of "art films" when any moron can tell you that ART anything, from theater, painting, dance, haute couture and film had a remarkable run from the fifties to the seventies....which ended because.....
the shock of the new falled to shock anymore. (for really exciting art criticism see Robert Hughes)http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1978226,00.html
Art runs in cycles...and hugely creative periods happen in explosions and end when their innovations creep into mass culture.
By the time they perculate down to fourth rate "critics" like Paglia, they are over.
Still it is amusing that it only took Paglia thirty years to realize that the Art Film was dead.
Even so, I might remind her that both Chabrol and Alain Resnais, though in their dotage are still directing...
it is just that their films are no longer shown in the American market, and it is the art film circuit which is no longer economically viable.
-
No offense, but I'm shocked you get paid to write this stuff.
Wow. I'm not even a film expert and I can think of a zillion films since Paglia's examples that are classic: The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "Pan's Labyrinth," "Shaun of the Dead," "The Matrix," "Triplets of Belleville," "Children of Men," "Corpse Bride," "Young Frankenstein"....
However, I'm pretty tapped into music, and I can't believe this crap about Naomi and Clarkson got past a remedial copy edit. Naomi isn't bad, but honestly you can find several singers/guitarists like her on just about every college campus in the Western world. And, as others have said, Clarkson as the Great Musical Hope? Give us a friggin' break. Salon's own music editors' desks are likely stacked full of discs from envelope-pushing acts that will never get household-name status because record labels care more about looks and marketabilty than anything else. And if a band doesn't have a built in cult following, "sexy" 20-something members, and/or produce a hit in a nanosecond, they're history faster than you can yawn at news of the Spice Girls reunion. By highlighting such mediocre, vapid examples of "good" music, Paglia unwittingly promulgates the very forces strangling creativity in the 21st century.
Age doesn't have to relegate a writer to wanton sentimentality and wistful rummaging through the dustbins of history, but in this case it seems Paglia may be better off busting open a fresh case of Milk of Magnesia and shutting down Microsoft Word. That or stick to writing about things on which she's truly conversant.
-
Compare and contrast
While Salon's featuring Camille Paglia today, Slate has Dahlia Lathwick:
"Imagine that the Democrats had been hollering for the past six months that Gonzales was an out-of-control drunk. With their eavesdropping vote, they've handed him the keys to a school bus."
Nothing Paglia's capable of saying can compare to that.
-
Art Film is Dead?
No shit, Sherlock! How alive was it ever anyway? Just saw a pretty good one, 'The Lives of Others'. Although maybe it wasn't really an "art flick", since it wasn't obscure enough.
I thought Godfather was a gangster movie?
Star Wars a classic? A classic what? A classic piece of crap w/ (for the time) great special effects?
Rock is dead? No shit! It had a 50 year run. Jazz had a pretty good 50-year run and was pretty much dead by 1970. But, as with films, there is till some pretty good music out there. You just have to seek it out in the fractured marketplace. I'm sure Philly has some rock clubs she could go to? But would any of the kids give a shit about Camille Paglia? Probably not, so why would she go?
Howlin' Wolf? Blues has been a fringe market for decades. If it weren't for all those white boys (and now girls) re-discovering blues and R&B each generation, no-one would even know who Howlin' Wolf was. So if each generation of rockers keeps re-discovering "roots" music (and you can't throw a rock ten feet in this town without it hitting a "roots" musician) how is rock dead? It's just another niche music market.
It is, unfortunately, the "vocal authority and operatic dynamics" of black church music, shifted into overdrive, that has killed contemporary black R&B, from Whitney Houston to the present day. But Mariah could really sing when she first came out, couldn't she!
More crapulous twaddle from the Pagliatron. (Credit to whoever it was that first came up with the moniker.)
-
Kelly Clarkson?!
Anyone citing Clarkson as evidence of vitality in rock music obviously has no idea what she's talking about.
I'm not even going to comment on the vapid and superficial generalizations regarding "black music".
Somebody please send some playlists to poor Camille.
-
umm...
"When Antonioni's plotless "L'Avventura" was shown at Harpur, the entire theater emptied within a half-hour -- except for the front row of me and my friends."
Allow me to update what you wrote for the year 2007.
When Lynch's plotless "Inland Empire" was shown at my local art theater, the entire theater emptied within a half-hour -- except for the front row of me and my friends.
So explain to me exactly what was so different/better about the 60s? Don't try to place your generation's revered work above the present generation's when most of your generation walked out on art-house fare just as much as this one.
-
Limousine Intellectual
I always love reading the letters in response to Paglia, because they are far more erudite and thoughtful than samples of the decaying 'intellectual' corpus we get from her. Perhaps Camille Paglia is dead?
If rock is dead, Paglia should talk to everyone at Bonnaroo, Coachella, Austin and Lollapalloza and tell them to go home. After all, they are kicking all the sad pop idols this aging professor has seen down the block.
She's probably never heard of literate rock like the Decmeberists and Arcade Fire, or roots rock like White Stripes and Drive By Truckers.
Art film dead too? What are all these fucking obscure movies I've been watching then?
Let's face it, if Paglia is so desparate for authenticity, she should come down from the 5,000 foot view, get out of her limousine and get dirty. When has this woman stopped watching TV for her view of the world?
An 'atheist' who professes love for 'new age' religion (whatever that is...), and condemns 'secular humanism' won't be trying to make consistency a value of her 'large' mind. Dealing with Iraq without noting the negative effect religion has had is simply shallow. I'm an atheist, and Camille, you're no atheist.