Sunday, February 28, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)
The Folk Revival:
The Kingston Trio - Tom Dooley
Pete Seeger - Turn Turn Turn!
Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Lyrics here.
Surf & Hot Rod Combos:
The Beach Boys - Surfin USA
Dick Dale & The Del-Tones - Miserlou
Link Wray & His Ray Men - Rumble (Outtake)
The Stingers (Jack Cole) - Mustang
Uptown R&B from Motown/All songs by Holland-Dozier-Holland:
Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run
The Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is
Girl Groups/Phil Spector Wall of Sound/Songs by Weill & Mann:
The Ronettes - Be My Baby
The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron
Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann songs NOT produced by Phil Spector:
Lesley Gore - It's My Party
The Wall of Sound in full-effect:
Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep, Mountain High
The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling
Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"
nb. You will not be responsible for this reading for the midterm. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review of material that will actually be covered on the midterm.
In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.
Beneath the cobblestones, the beach: Theory, Situationism and Cultural Resistance
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)
Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy
How To Talk Like A Situationist
Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)
If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.
Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)
If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Cinematic Specificity: Language or Reality
On Montage:
Vsevolod Pudovkin, "On Editing" from Film Technique
Sergei Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage" from Film Form
On Realism:
André Bazin, What is Cinema, Vol. 1
(nb. please only read the essays at pg. 9 and pg. 41: "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" + "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage (aka Montage Interdit).
R'n'R or Transubstantiated R'n'B?
Elvis Presley - That's All Right, Mama + Blue Moon of Kentucky
Bill Haley & The Comets - Crazy Man Crazy
Fats Domino - Ain't That A Shame + Blueberry Hill
Little Richard - Tutti Frutti
Chuck Berry - Almost Grown + Little Queenie
Bo Diddley - Pretty Thing
The Chords - Sh-Boom
Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall In Love
Friday, February 12, 2016
Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy
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| Eisenstein Diagram |
Whitey's Lindy Hoppers: Something Wild
This is the Lindy Hop, the Jitterbug, the Suzie-Q. The clip is an excerpt from H.C. Potter's Helzapoppin' (1941). The Lindy Hoppers doing "The Big Apple" in 1939 are here. Enjoy.
In this clip the dancing starts at the 2:15 mark.
from Jonathan Demme's Something Wild; The Feelies play David Bowies's "Fame" and Jeff Daniels dances with his eye on the 'Other' for cues.
Post-War Hillbillies: Western Swing, Honky Tonk and Bluegrass
Hank Williams - Hey Goodlookin' + Lovesick Blues
Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys - Muleskinner Blues + Blue Moon Of Kentucky
Cinema/210 Reading Schedule
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| Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson (USA, 2012) |
Here's the updated reading schedule for Intro to Film. This is based on the 10th Edition of Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art. If you have previous editions you can compare the chapters with the Table of Contents of the 10th Edition that you can find here -click on the 'Look Inside' banner. Make sure you do not use a textbook that predates the 8th Edition.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker
The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross
Even the New Yorker catches up:
"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”
These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
TV: The Idiot Box, the Electronic Babysitter, the Toaster with Pictures...
Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society"
originally in Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form
Michele Hilmes, "Cable, Satellite and Digital Technologies"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Television"
The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II
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| Rufus Thomas, DJ Extraordinaire |
in Garofalo:
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues
Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"
Pre-War Specialties
Robert Johnson - Love in Vain
Blind Willie Johnson, "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"
"The most transcendent piece in all American music" (Ry Cooder)
Blind Willie Johnson, "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"
"The most transcendent piece in all American music" (Ry Cooder)
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