Blog Department of Burying the Lede, Tyler Cowen Edition

Some of you long-time "Mr. K" fans (if such a creature exists) might remember when I blogged about Tyler Cowen's writing on arts and capitalism. It won't surprise you that I continue to follow his blog Marginal Revolution, which he co-writes with Alex Tabarrok.

While I don't agree with all of his conclusions or understand some of the headier economic material, he usually has some interesting conclusions. For example, in the midst of a post about a book by Charles Murray about the upper class and middle/lower classes diverging in America, he dropped this bomb, which makes sense, but which I'd never thought of before:

 The liberation of American women also damaged the quality of public education, by removing the implicit subsidy of so many “captive” and smart female laborers. 

 Perhaps part of the reason that the quality of public education has declined in relation to previous generations, is because the wages of public school teachers were only competitive for women when they had little hope of any other trade.

I know there are arguments that, for unionized teachers, benefits are actually pretty good, but those benefits accrue after the teachers have been there for a while and penalize entry-level teachers.

I think it's a good thing that smart people of both genders can now contribute to all fields. However, I wonder if part of the knee-jerk bias against the teacher side of the education debates is due to the fact that, prior to the "liberation of American women", teaching was often identified as a woman's job and the people holding those positions for a while were often considered "old maids".

As a counterpoint to Zev's thoughtful post over at On Chicago Theatre...

I suggest this article over at Slate, by Bill James trying to explain why we as a nation produce so many great athletes but don't produce very many great writers (or sub in actor/dancer/classically-trained musician/fine artist, etc.). Really... RTWT, I'll be waiting.

I don't disagree with Zev's post at all, btw. I think he points out that the best way to fix things is to actually try ways of fixing him.

I think what James points out that is useful is that, the reason we have so many great athletes is that we encourage them along every step of the way. We're all familiar with the cliche about schools building a new stadium while shutting down the arts departments. But it goes beyond that. The fact is, athletes who show promise are encouraged from a very early age and given the resources to develop their talents so that they can become superstars.

Whereas, in comparison, writers are told to go hone their craft by themselves, get really good, and then come back in 20-25 years.

Or actors are told to go act for free, pay for training, and generally pay their dues before they might start getting something approaching a salary.

I'm not trying to say that the arts don't require hard work, some thankless honing of craft. But athletes work hard too, in high school and college and when they turn pro, at least when it comes to training. And schools and pro/semi-pro teams give them incentives and rewards and acclaim as they develop.

This doesn't mean "support all theatre equally" or "don't criticize bad work". But it suggests that artists and their institutions need to recognize that artists take time to develop, along with mentoring and resources.

Sure, no one would say that America has no good writers or actors or etc etc. But Bill James points out that Shakespearean London was the size of Topeka, Kansas, and gave us Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson (and that's just hitting the biggest names).

Even being conservative, that suggests that every small to mid-size metropolis should have a burgeoning literary community, at least two or three small theatre companies competing to out-do each other each season, a couple of chamber music groups or orchestras...

There should be the equivalent of at least a hundred Elizabethan Londons scattered across America. But there aren't. Maybe part of this is a difference in the national character or the modern temperament.

Or maybe part of it is that, from the highest to the lowest levels of the arts, we focus on short-term projects and goals, getting our thing done, raising our money, winning our company praise, just keeping the doors open, instead of thinking about who will join our company in the future, or create the new theatre company that.will replace ours.

Moving forward, that has to be both a subject for discussion and something to put into practice. Self-reliance isn't a bad thing to have, but community is certainly not a bad thing either.

My retro career just melted....

On top of reading The UFA Story, I've been on a "behind-the-scenes" of Hollywood kick lately.

About John Gregory Dunne's The Studio I have very little to say, other than that it is a fascinating view of how some great (and not-so-great) films were created over at 20th Century Fox, even as studio executives show an inability to relate to the realities of '60s America.

However, I also read Edward Jay Epstein's The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. I can't really recommend it as highly as Dunne's book, because most of Epstein's book is just reprints from his Slate and New Yorker columns, with even the new material feeling short and fluffy in the way that most magazines and internet publications expect from regular columns.

The snapshots that Epstein gives of the movie industry can be fascinating. He hints at what would have been a more interesting book in the epilogue, where he breaks down the ways that the loss of foreign financing and the bank/hedge fund collapse have severely impoverished the film world (artistically as well as financially). Epstein lays out the case that the recession strikes the independent production companies the hardest, since the difficulty in securing initial funding sinks almost anything without a big star already attached.

Furthermore, even the major studios, which are slightly better off as far as actually getting their films made, but still in an unenviable position re: making a profit, are relying more and more on overseas sales, which means a swing further towards the comic book/licensed property/shoot-out/car-chase side of the entertainment spectrum. So if you were hoping that the recession would mean smaller, smarter pictures and less empty blockbuster, Epstein's not on your side.

Which, jumping back to The UFA Story, sounds vaguely reminiscent of the German film industry's problems between 1924 and 1928 (which, I remind you, was during a period of economic improvement BEFORE the Great Depression hit). To quote Kreimeier:

This risky product with unpredictable sales potential, which even on the domestic market made life hard for producers wanting quick returns, was now pulled into the malestrom of crisis-prone international finance. (123)

 Moving on from there, Kreimeier notes that the studios that managed to weather this storm the best were those with vertical integration (control of distribution and exhibition) and investments in property (studio space, equipment, movie theatres). These giant conglomerates also usually had ties to a friendly and corporatized press that printed stories and reviews that were basically glorified press releases.

That sounds rather familiar to me. Is this where the American film industry is heading for the near future?
 

The Creature With a Thousand Films

I'm kind of conflicted by what I'm about to write. For I am a geek and I love the horror and sci-fi genres. And if you love horror and sci-fi films, then the man you owe the most thanks to is Roger Corman.

Roger Corman was/is not the best director or producer to work in those genres. He obviously wasn't the first. He was never the most ground-breaking one, even at his heyday. But he was probably the most prolific one*. And as Stalin once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."

Even if you think AiP/New World Pictures put out mostly cheap cash-in crap (which is true), Corman's desire to corner areas of the market that the "serious" studios like MGM or Warner wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole often produced interesting or daring work. Corman made a movie attacking the KKK in 1962 (!), when such a film could be personal and commercial risk (The Intruder). His Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors helped to perfect the dark comedy. And X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes, really needs no defense or explanation, beyond the fact that it is a well-made and effective horror film that mines the seamy side of our desires to great effect.

And if, for whatever reason, those films just don't speak to you, then remember that Corman helped raise an entire generation of film-makers, giving them a place to learn their craft and perfect their voice. Directors like Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, John Sayles, Jack Hill, James Cameron, Monte Hellman and Paul Bartel all learned at his feet or the feet of people working for him. Corman's films gave actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, William Shatner, and Peter Fonda some of their first major acting gigs.

But he made a lot of crap. Sometimes personal crap, sometimes exhilarating crap, but in the end, enough to keep MST3K running for years on his directorial & production work alone. And the older he got, the more of a cash-in artist he became. The Vampirella movie. The 1990s Fantastic Four movie. The endless Syfy/Sci-Fi channel re-makes and originals.

And while you could never claim he alone dumbed down the industry, he specialized in cheap, stupid movies aimed at teenagers, filled with blood and sex and rock 'n' roll (or his best approximations of them). He churned out endlessly padded films with no plot, bad science, attractive but lightweight actors,  and ridiculous costumes. He practically invented the car chase movie. Corman was no Val Lewton, taking a trashy genre and finding the beauty in it. He was a dumpster diver, who could recognize when someone threw out something perfectly good, but more likely to take a pile of junk to the scrapyard.

When you watch a summer tent-pole film that's clearly cobbled together around action sequences and catch phrases, market-tested to the 18-25 demographic, you're watching the inheritors of the Roger Corman tradition. The difference is that they are more scientific about it.

So it's easy to complain the loss of intelligent movies these days, the bad actors, ham-fisted direction & awful scripts. But that's the commercial model, dreamed up by a man who knew how to compete with TV without having to work on TV's model.

So don't complain about the culture wars. Roger Corman's Hollywood is on one side, really; the side of the consumer.

Let's give Roger Corman an Invisible Hand, everyone!

*I'm excluding people like William "one-shot" Beaudine, who were so prolific because everything they churned out was unadulterated crap. Corman certainly put out crap, but almost all his crap is at least trying to do something.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Blogger

So my project of liveblogging In Praise of Commercial Culture has gone on hiatus because I'm running out of things to say about it. As Cowen has moved to visual art and classical music, he's moved out of my comfort zone, though I keep getting suspicious that he's not grappling with the complex nature of "capitalism", which is frequently a mix of corporatism, nationalism and other weird beliefs that sort of simulate a free market. Instead, frequently, he seems content to say, "hey, everyone, as time passes, great composers/artists/writers get have earned comparatively more money and more freedom. I'd say that's pretty good."

He makes some good points about changing cultural practices and ideas that partially shape our vision of artistic golden ages as golden and how those practices and ideas blind us to the richness of our own age. But he's all too willing to wash his hands of modern composers who are increasingly exiled from both the classical and mainstream community, for example. He regrets it, and then just says, that's capitalism too. It's pretty easy to praise capitalism when capitalism is some weird omnipotent and perfect god. If you don't like capitalism (or a certain expression of capitalism), you just don't understand the Invisible Hand's ultimate design.

And then too, Cowen's approach to people and psychology seems hilarious. I seem to recall him admitting he possesses a somewhat autistic view of how people tick and that seems borne out in the book. Take this howler:

"Kurt Cobain of Nirvana committed suicide after only four albums, secure in his expectations of artistic immortality" (147).

That seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of Cobain's emotional state and his feelings about his popularity. Or a misunderstanding of depression in general.

Or this, from a section entitled, "The Musical Revolution in Africa":

"Slavery was a disaster for its victims, but it revolutionized world music." (155)

...

And I know it is easy to take quotes out of context and make them seem ridiculous, but the paragraph weirdly equates slavery with some kind of "cultural interchange" and that the "barbaric form" of slave-based "cultural contact" paved the way for "later, more beneficial voluntary contacts". Cowen's not trying to be offensive, but he's refusing to grapple with the serious moral issue at stake here. He's even ignoring the fact that pro-capitalist economists were one of the first groups to see the problems with slavery.

It's like something Monty Python or Mr. Show would put in the mouth of a well-meaning buffoon.

Bonafide hustler, making my name: Liveblogging In Praise of Commercial Culture

Chapter 2: The Market For the Written Word

Okay, so first, the prose style gets a little better once Cowen has a narrative to hold onto. I wouldn't say he holds interest as well as Malcolm Gladwell, for example, but neither of them is Joan Didion. Which is to say, neither is a prose stylist who uses that style successfully to convey a deeper understanding of the world around us. Gladwell is a prose stylist, but he's a little too flip with his philosophizing, trying to draw conclusions because he can. Cowen has some understanding of the big picture, but he can't use his writing to add an aesthetic dimension to his argument.

It helps that Cowen is talking, in this section, about a little-explored aspect of literary history, specifically the economic pressures of publishing in the British Enlightenment. We might have read works (by Swift or Pope) that deal with those economic issues or were written because of them, but that specific context sometimes doesn't even make the footnotes.

So this chapter is about Samuel Johnson, one of the first people to make their living solely through writing, versus Swift and Pope, among others, who believed that "fame" was the sole reason to write and that the government should choose who was talented.

And Cowen is willing to tackle Swift and Pope and bring to light their most troubling ideas. Though his arguments that Swift was a vehement establishment figure who believed in the healing benefits of central power does not seem to jive with Swift's basic misanthropy. I think he misreads at least some of Swift's work. As much as the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels might represent some sort of ideal, I don't think that even Swift expects us to totally accept them. I think there is some significance in the fact that our narrator (who has difficulty in detecting irony or recognizing the way other societies generally reflect his) ends the book currying the favor of his own farm animals. And "A Modest Proposal" is as much an indictment of central planning refusing to recognize the realities on the ground as it is of anti-Catholic sentiment.

And there are hints of other problems with capitalism as supporter of the arts that this chapter suggests. For one, Cowen expresses disappointment at Johnson taking a government pension at the end of his career. But given how Johnson hustled to provide himself a living for much of his life, is it really a surprise that he would desire a reliable source of income.

Because Cowen's idea of why capitalism is good for the arts relies heavily on creative destruction. Artists will become less popular, lose their edge and give way to new forms and new artists. Which I think is great for the arts.

But it sucks for the artists. Once the skill has faded and the passion has ebbed, an artist still requires sustenance. As this economic downturn (and previous recessions and depressions) proved, even very smart, skilled businessmen stink at long-term planning. Even as it regards their own personal finances.

Creative destruction doesn't care what you did for the last twenty years. It cares about what is happening today and tomorrow. It's like Alec Baldwin's character in "Glengarry Glen Ross", it doesn't care if you're a good father or a nice guy. Or a talented artist.

So Samuel Johnson takes a pension. He's a man that's dealt with awful depression and grinding poverty for years. What's Tyler Cowen's advice for one of the greater essayists of English literature? That he should have kept being talented and never felt that exhaustion in his bones?That he should never have gotten old? That he should have died before he became old?

I'm not saying we should get rid of capitalism. It's like the old saw about democracy. It's the worst system, except for all the other systems.

But a capitalist who loves artists or a capitalist who loves people needs to come to grips with the way capitalism shows no mercy to the weak and the old. And they need to suggest what we can do, instead of shrugging and muttering something about charity and the private sector.

Money: that's what I want

Also, Tyler Cowen loves to chalk normal psychology up to economics. So anxiety of influence, egotism and idealism become an economic need to innovate. When you've got the hammer of economics, everything looks like a pro-capitalist nail.

Also, I can't trust anyone who thinks Rebel without a Cause is "unintended farce, rather than a rousing story of an angry young man" (28). Um, has this guy seen the same version of Rebel without a Cause that has been released on DVD? Or any other Nicholas Ray film, ever?

Art is a kid, art is a kid, in a bull market: In Praise of Commercial Culture

You thought I'd forgotten all about you, didn't you? Maybe even my ramblings about commercial art and the like. Not quite.

For example, I finally got a chance to take a peek into In Praise of Commercial Culture by economist Tyler Cowen (one of the influential voices behind econoblog Marginal Revolutions). Only about 20 pages in, but I still have a few thoughts.

• Cowen's writing is probably best suited to blogging. I suppose that, given the normal quality of the stereotypical professorial paper, mere readability is a rarity. But he makes Malcolm Gladwell look like Joan Didion. Perfectly adequate prose sentence plods into perfectly adequate prose sentence. For a book dealing with art, there's very little art. In small doses, clarity is fine. For an entire book, it's a slog.
• So much of it is him putting down examples of his point. "You think artists don't care about money? But Beethoven said this. And Gaugin did this. And this person died in poverty." That's only slightly exaggerated. I hope later on he gets into a specific, piece-by-piece analysis of one work of art or artist.
• To Cowen's credit, it's refreshing to see someone who points out the fallacies in all the well-crafted but contrived cultural polemics that seem to be the main way any pundit/philosopher makes money these days. He's not saying everything is perfect, but he is willing to point out that, yes, life has become less nasty, brutish and short for more people and to consign those people back to the status quo ante for some weird sense of cultural homogeny is stupid.
• On the other hand, his triumphalism really vague. Some of his points, about the decrease in prices for materials as basic as paper have opened up the art field, make sense. Other arguments seem to boil down to, "hey, people have benefited from this technology/advance, and that's because of capitalism. And since artists are people, artists are benefiting from capitalism." Which is technically true, but, well, he decided to write a book about how capitalism benefits the artist specifically. It's not titled In Praise of Modernity.

More to come. Maybe next time, I'll get to his thought experiment (in blog-form) about how just recycling pop culture every 50 years would be perfectly cromulent.