Jazz, Hip Hop Etc.

[Ralph Dumain]

At 09:09 AM 8/8/97 -0400, james schmidt wrote:
>I guess the point I'd like to make (and this comes from watching the film
>with a number of very sharp people doing critical theory and cultural
>studies stuff -- I'm typically rather dense on this sort of stuff) is that
>it is wrong to assume that all the products of the Culture Industry have
>to be (even on Adorno and Horkheimer's accounting) plain dumb stupid.
>They HAVE to be clever, have new little twists, etc., to keep us coming.
>But none of this alters the fact that they are produced under a rather
>fixed schema that is going to foreclose their wandering too far.  They
>will never have that capacity to reveal an entirely different world that
>Adorno thought he found in great works of art (e.g., the "breakthrough" in
>the first movement of the Mahler 1st Sym.).  I think this suggests too
>things:  1) just because the products of the culture industry show a
>certain amount of cleverness, doesn't mean that they are really
>emancipatory (rule of thumb:  the momement you begin to think a culture
>industry product is clever, start to worry whether this is a sign that you
>yourself have become dumber!) and 2)  just becaue the products of the
>culture industry don't open up visions of utopia, doesn't mean that they
>don't -- at best -- entertain us (to quote a friend, "The commodity fetish
>is the heart of a heartless world.").

I believe this is so.  And why do I feel as if I'm experiencing deja vu all
over again?  I have an uncanny feeling reading this post, and all of a
sudden I am reminded of GROUNDHOG DAY.  This movie was brilliant, absolutely
brilliant in what it had to say and the number of levels it could be taken
on, and then it is ruined by a conventionally bourgeois typically American
ending, actually reversing the meaning of the lessons that Bill Murray had
learned undergoing the endless recurrence of the same.  The movie, instead
of intensifying the divergence between appearance and reality, as would be
logical, in the end serves to reconcile the two, transforming reality into
appearance instead of vice versa.  What a shame that such a brilliant
concept should be ruined.  And of course this is done to reinforce
conventional expectations and conventional reality and stick to the usual
formulas.

I find myself also amazed at the perfection of cynical reason in the mass
media. Most of all I love animated cartoons like THE SIMPSONS, but even
there the subversive content is reigned in by conventional morality.

I can feel to the marrow that the contradictions of this society are
reaching the breaking point.  

Some recent film made me think this.  (Not that everyday life is not bad
enough, but....)  I don't see many.  I was amazed by the contradictions of
MEN IN BLACK (brilliant but reactionary in every way), which was far
superior to BATMAN & ROBIN, which I saw on my birthday and was deeply
troubled by the crushing display of the power of capital.  Normally I refuse
to see blockbuster adventure films, which is about all the USA produces, and
am especially appalled by the previews of coming attractions.  But once in a
great while I succumb for various reasons, and when I do, I find myself
amazed to see the logic of capital thrusting its groin into my face.

That kind of porno I can do without.  

It is hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for
lack of what is found there.