Saturday, March 21, 2009

French cartoons in America

Why have Asterix and Obelix not found a huge audience in the United States?

Cartoon fans have asked this question for decades. How many conferences have we sat through listening to number crunchers dissect audience surveys?

How many times has it been suggested that deep down inside American kids don’t t trust French cartoons? How many mothers have worried about the exact contents of the magic potion that gives the protagonists the prodigious strength to defeat an endless array of Roman legions? Who has not wished for a little magic potion just to get through a long day? Don’t Americans want the small Gallic village to survive? Are they not impressed with Obelix’ capacity to eat? Who does not want to try the ancient French recipe for wild boar on a spit? All these questions have buzzed around campus seminars and studio lots for decades.

Now a new essay just published in the Annals of Alternative Media History by Buster Hinds, a young assistant professor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, Mendocino County, has put forward a sharply defined historical thesis: Americans have really always sided with the Romans against the hard-to-capture Gallic warriors.

In the Cold War environment that produced Asterix and Obelix, American audiences clearly preferred for the Roman legions to subdue that one last French village holding out against the Empire. Rather than identifying with the plucky Frenchmen who repeatedly foiled the Roman attempts at conquering the last independent village in what was then called Gaul, Americans could not help but side with Caesar in his unrelenting determination to mop-up France.

Who could not see the analogy between the Viet Cong and Asterix, the fiery little warrior who ran circles around the better trained and better armed Romans. Who did not detect the resemblance between Getafix, the village druid, and Ho Chi Min?

Was it not more than a coincidence that the first Asterix and Obelix film was released in 1967, just as the Vietnam offensive was building up to its greatest strength?

Was it no coincidence that the first comic book was released in 1959 the year Charles de Gaulle became President of France?

Yes, the American viewer, even those of the tenderest age, and certainly those discerning parents ever on the look-out for subversive political messages, recognized implicitly that Asterix and Obelix was more than a celebration of Gallic pride, it was a covert jab at Roman, i.e. American hegemony.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Mozart wants you. . .

John Rounder writes:

Help, It’s Bach week here in the thawing hinterlands. A week of snippets and bits, but not a single cantata in its entirety. The public radio station has a new fund raising campaign running, as well, and they are running ads with nasal English conductors foisting their mother country accent us, urging us to send in money because after all Mozart was a genius, whose music never ceases to astonish us. Having an Englishman Peter Cushin or Christopher Lee sell high culture is a lovely American tradition. Check out this classic ad for classical music “So many of the melodies of popular songs were actually written by the great masters.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhGjo9TuAc

Why not have someone in a Viennese accent tell us that Mozart wants you to contribute to public radio? Would that leave the wrong impression?

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Venice without James Bond

Cultural discussions outside the academy are so polarized, so simplified and reduced, that there is hardly any position to take that does not react to the NY Times. And then once you leave the scholarly world, the pull of Hollywood seems irresistible.

So the laudatory review in the Times of a new exhibit of Venetian art makes the sixteenth-century seem like a gunfight down at the Grand Canal. Admittedly the curators at the Museum of Fine Arts set the tone with their title, "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice," but the Times review lays down the narrative as a set of dueling threesomes.

Art history is once again a struggle of gigantic egos and skillful hands, first Titian masters oil painting, allowing Venice to muscle in on the game that Florence and Rome had mastered, as if painting where a contest between rival football teams. Then Tintoretto arrives, and immediately the two greats maneuver around each other, emulating and mocking each other. The wrestling match gets interesting—where is Roland Barthes when you need him—with the arrival of the new kid in town, Veronese. Rich patrons are put all aflutter by his courtly manners, the saloon girls swoon for the young dandy with the quick draw. Have we not seen this movie before?

The Times and the museum, presumably as well, cannot think outside the splashing narrative forms of big screen movies. The complexity of great painting is reduced to the nuance of a tabloid headline. It really does not have to be this way. Plenty of foreign papers give slow, thoughtful art reviews for readers who have heard of Venice before. American papers give in all too quickly to the demand to excite the undergraduate masses.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Serbian Gangster

Swiss news reports from a Serbian newspaper article that Ratko Mladic, wanted for war crimes by the UN tribunal in The Hague, has been hiding in New Belgrade, a massive post-war Modernist housing project. This sprawling complex of brutalist architecture has popped into the global media stream as an echo of American hip-hop. The buildings are reportedly arranged as labyrinths with many exits. New Belgrade has that mix of functional architecture, urban poverty, pumped-up youth and alienation that makes it an export market for American ghetto culture. The police are said to be concentrating on apartments with high electricity use and no telephone traffic. Serbian commentators characterize Mladic as likely to commit suicide rather than be taken alive. He apparently has cut himself off from all contact with the outside world and receives visits from one partisan only.

Youtube has lots of home-made video clips of New Belgrade graffiti, such as the following--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS7FRlZN_yg

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Popular Professors

The debate over whether universities are run along the calculus of the market place reappeared again in the latest Stanley Fish blog posting in the NYTimes, where he argues that professors do not have an obligation to educate a politically engaged population.

Fish focuses the argument against the long-standing assumption held by some professors that they need to teach their students to think critically, which in many cases means question the government or the way society treats the oppressed. For Fish and the politically engaged professors he criticizes, the debate centers very much on what is said in the classroom.

But the real issues concerns how universities are managed. Market forces influence what teachers say in the class only indirectly from behind the scenes. The most important economic concern for a professor is that every seat in his class is filled. He or she can say what they want, so long as the class has high enrollment.

From an administrative perspective, class need to address student interest. A department needs draw students, regardless of what it teaches. More important than whether a professor is conservative or liberal is that he or she be popular.

This obligation to fill seats guides the curriculum far more than any ideological debate. It discourages faculty from teaching difficult subjects; it spurs grade inflation.

Why teach a complex topic where students will score badly when you can teach a fun course where everyone earns a high grade? The demand to be cool, exciting, on the cutting edge of market popularity shapes classroom discussions far more subtly than any conscious decision to align the syllabus with a social agenda.

The obligation to fill seats also drives professors address the students more directly. It forces him to keep up with popular culture and new media. It even cajoles the old professor to writing a blog.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Influences

Johnny Marr explaining how The Smiths started out listening to 1960s girl bands in a sense, Patty Smith imitating Phil Spector, then Lou Reed imitating Marvin Gaye.

Now imagine how this chain of imitation will be played two hundred years from now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHKyx4Q4UZ4&feature=related

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Limbaugh's Soft Spot

Of course many could only enjoy the fuss that arose when Michael Steele, the head of the RNC, decried Rush Limbaugh as an “entertainer” who at times got “ugly” followed by Steele apologizing on Limbaugh’s show.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19555.html

But what really seems interesting is that Limbaugh felt threatened enough by the term, as if he had to force a display of his power by making Steele apologize. Limbaugh for the moment has made his point, but in the long run he has acknowledged where he is vulnerable. Reagan could be called an entertainer but it mattered little to the right once he became governor of California. Limbaugh fears that he may lose his standing among conservatives, that he might be somehow shut out of the decision-making process, if he is considered merely a media personality as opposed to an office holder.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Been around

So here is a video from 1980 on a Rolling Stones release party at Danceteria and what is the first question the reporter asks Mick : How come you have lasted so long?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUZNssMDf4g

I was watching this video out of nostalgia for my high school clubbing memories, instead I learned that my youth was already old.