Curatorialist

Sometimes you can hit a bullseye and still miss.

The We Are The World remake for Haiti, 25 years after Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie rocked the world for USA for Africa, is sort of its own disaster in and of itself. My emotional preference would be to just go down the list of artists then and now and discuss the vast difference in artistic quality. Not that there aren’t some real deals in this video: Jennifer Hudson, Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Tony Bennet, Beyonce, Wyclef Jean, Usher, even Pink. There were some heavy hitters in there, to be sure. But the lows were so much lower as to bring down the overall quality quotient too dramatically. Popularity was never the casting spec in the ‘85 version. Jonas Brothers? Justin Bieber? Will i Am? Enrique Iglesias? Josh Groban? Miley Cyrus? I don’t need to discuss the differences between those artists and Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers or any single person who was invited into that studio in 1985. This isn’t an old guy’s “times were better when” speech, either. It’s a pure, one-to-one look at artistic integrity. Not about album sales, but about having undeniable expressive art in your soul. The kind that lasts. If you play the ‘85 video right this second (I just did), every one of those artists is undeniable. One look at the Haiti video and you just know that 25 years from now, nobody is going to want to open that time capsule. That’s a miss. Should have been part of the consideration process for something important, like disaster relief. It detracts from the integrity of the message and this message deserves it. The Jonas Brothers should have bowed out. T-Pain should have said, you know what, I’m honored to have been asked but the message is too important to make this about the trend I represent. Same with Miley Cyrus. But that’s not what goes through their minds. Not that they don’t care about the cause, I’m certain they do, but it’s the lack of soul-searching about the true meaning of something, obscured by the false rationale that popularity, in and of itself, is also a contribution to the cause, that disappoints. And nothing could sum that up better than the difference between Lionel Ritchie introducing the video in ‘85 and Jamie Foxx introducing the video in’10.

But there’s deeper issues at play here. On the surface, 2010 WATW seems to have the same premise as 1985 WATW – bring artists together for a cause. Did artists come together in 2010? In the 1985 WATW, disparate musicians stood shoulder to shoulder and finished each others’ sentences. You could barely tell where Lionel became Lionel and Stevie. Where Paul became Kenny. Where Warwick became Willie. And wasn’t that sort of the point? Quincy’s magic was in the pairings and the way the individual gave way to the duet, the duet gave way to the song and the song gave way to the message. Can we say the same about 2010 WATW? I hear the overlaps in the mix, but from the video, it appears that all of them were recorded separately. We open on Justin Bieber, HEAR Jennifer Hudson and Nicole Scherzinger come in and then hard cut to them by themselves. Where’s the sharing of the mic? Where’s two artists working it out? Where’s the “Check your ego at the door” sign? Seems to me, this is one big ego enabler: separate recordings, close-ups and a who’s who of most-Tweeted-about flavors of the month. What, Jennifer and Nicole don’t want to bend down to Justin’s height? Too good for that, are we? What a missed opportunity. And if you think that none of that matters as long as it gets people to watch and donate to Haiti, I’d beg to differ. I’d like to ask how much more money might be raised, how many more relief workers might be enlisted, how many more concerned and helpful people might come out of the woodwork with a better product? If you set out to make something of value, make it great – or you underachieved. This version drafts off the success of a predecessor, lazily substitutes artistic effort with buzz metrics and propels an already suffering industry of music into further chaos by continuing to confuse popularity for genius. Haiti and Music deserved better.

And I can applaud the intention of the people who put this together while still disliking how they went about it.

Group rapping is terrible. It should have just been Snoop, Wyclef, Kanye or maybe Lil Wayne. Diverging into a group rap segment belittles rap and misses the point of the whole get together. Let’s mix it up. It’s okay to blend Mary J. Blige in with Tony Bennet (sort of) but rappers need their own interlude? So much for creativity. Speaking of which, auto tune? Why why why would you employ a technique like this to a song with such a heartfelt message? Auto tune corrects tone at the expense of humanity, that’s why the more it’s used, the more robotic it sounds. Conceptually, where does that help in a situation where you’re asking people to have empathy for a cause?

The irony of all of this is that the ‘85 WATW starts with a slate of the USA for AFRICA logo with all the artist’s signatures on it, but all you remember is their voices. The ‘10 WATW video is a lot of voices, but all you remember are their signatures.

There’s something more than a little thought-provoking about this video. Be warned, it’s graphic:

RAD OMEN – “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.

This video forces you to look at the advertising business, both from a creation standpoint and a consumer standpoint. Jack, from the Jack in the Box ads, has become over the years a complex character. He, and The King in fact, have become pretty edgy. Willing to get in fist fights, blow up boardrooms, show up in people’s houses unannounced, etc. But they are still, in their fictitious bones, kid-like cartoon characters. The disintegration of innocence didn’t start with this video, it started with how advertising has evolved the characters to reflect ourselves. But how far do we take it? Advertising’s job is to connect to people, up to a point. There’s also a responsibility that comes with being a public message. So, advertising takes things right up to that line of appropriateness. It’s fascinating to see the other side of that line. Especially when that place somehow doesn’t feel so far away.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do on here for a long time, but hadn’t gotten around to. I was reminded, looking at that video of Marcel Duchamp that I posted last week – the music, the clothing, the film, the editing, even the way he talks; the turns of phrase, word choices and discussion points all hint at a world completely different than ours now. It’s a fantastic voyage in time and one we don’t take enough advantage of. This kind of video exists in droves, it’s just a part of a massive archive that can be pulled, but is rarely pushed. Maybe that’s where I can come in.

I am going to start curating videos that capture/curates a great time in history. We’ll call it, “Time Machine.” This one is Chicago, circa 1948 (you’re welcome, Chuck). Besides the cars, the suits, the trains and countless other gorgeous remnants of a bygone era, it marks a momentous time in America’s history of success. These are the glory days of Chicago, post 20’s Gangster Era, but they are America’s glory days, too. Just prior to this video, Chicago housed the “great migration” of Southerners, looking for work and the city flourished as a center for Jazz, architecture, fine living and much more. My grandparents (always the picture of success) met and married in Chicago, in 1928. My grandfather looked like a gangster, actually, and my grandmother was a beautiful, successful dancer and although they left for Los Angeles by 1930. But this great city, depicted in this video, is the one they made.

I’m also taken by the writing of this tour. It’s selling the city, sure, but in a voice you don’t hear anymore. It’s verging on poetic. In fact, at one point, the narrator just gently recalls a Henry Austin Dobson poem:

“TIME goes, you say? Ah no!

Alas, Time stays, we go.”

How true. Enjoy.

Like everyone, I have a special place in my heart for Duchamp. I simply love his story, love his character, love his role in art history. He was a joker, a chess player, a true lover of art, imagery and critical thinking. He also loved Cezanne and was influenced heavily by him in his seminal days and that, to me, is the sign of someone who has art inside. To truly love Cezanne is to truly love fine art. And Duchamp did both, in spades – even if he remained very non-reverential of art to his last day. And wasn’t that really his gift?

Strangely, despite all that, I never really adored Duchamp’s work. He tried Impressionism, he tried Cubism and none of it really was as good as the major artists of those movements. And for the movement that he did start, my personal taste was for what happened later on with it, even though I know he paved that road. That is neither here nor there, though. What is here and there is that Duchamp changed the course of art history and few people in the world can lay claim to that. He understood what was so great about Impressionism and Cubism and he honored it by moving it forward into the next place it could go. I love how artists work like this over time, like relay racers, each with their particular leg of the race to run, handing off batons to each other to propel the entire world forward.

I really enjoyed finding this video of him describing himself. It has a bit of an off-kilter feel to it in the pacing and music, but also in the cut and paste style of the dialogue. Despite that, the video is filled with life and does a not-bad job of capturing a bit of his spirit, and it was inspiring to me to watch this and consider all that he contibuted.

There is a 3-DVD program on the “Genius of Darwin” that came out last year and, thankfully, someone has posted up the uncut interview with Steven Pinker, my pick for smartest man alive. I’ve read two of his books: “How the Mind Works” and “The Language Instinct” which are such amazingly straight forward and sensical looks at the human brain that it becomes immediately difficult to think about ourselves any differently than how he lays it out. Much of the thinking of both books are laid out in this video.

This is over an hour of footage and has a hard time competing with more entertaining uses of time, like a Michael Mann video essay for example, but if you have any kind of interest in human evolution, psychology, biology, linguistics or the human brain then this will be immensely interesting to you.

Nice accomplishment for $12:

Homigod.

When you’re done drooling, go get as close as you want at the animators’ website. They don’t seem to mind if you stare.

I was on the treadmill this morning, watching the Tour de France (which, in and of itself, could be a full blown blog entry filed under “Oddly Motivated”. The stage had just ended and I was about to step off the apparatus, when I happened upon this advert from the Versus Network (formerly Outdoor Life Network). Everything comes together in this ad: the copy is beautiful, the music soaring, the visuals and editing are spot on and the voice over is read to perfection. I ran an extra mile in its honor. Tour de France, meh. 2 minute ad… inspired!

I don’t make halftime speeches very often. Okay, never. But if I did have the opportunity I’d just give this speech. And, yeah, I’d take full credit. Why does my team need to be confused over authorship with a 20-point deficit to overcome?

I’m sure as you get older you learn to romanticize the imagery of your youth. Certainly, that is the subject of many a song, novel, script, poem, probably even architecture, dance and other things, like how you parent. Down home this past week, I travelled through my own ghostly playgrounds and flashes of images past seeped through in flickery, Proustian, Christopher Walken in “Dead Zone” kind of way. No coincidence, then, that I’d wander upon this video today, looking like memories I didn’t know I had and, who knows, maybe they are mine, it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. The band is new (Bibio), the look is old, but the effect is nothing less than stunning and has me lost in a daze of childhood school days of overhead projectors, endless educational videos and banal things seen for the first time. It defies description, I am only glad that certain artists are able capture small pieces of it so I don’t feel crazy when the flood comes.