Russel, this is excellent. Your observations apply to every profession in our culture. Several years ago I retired from a career as a psychotherapist. Before that I was a print journalist and teacher. When I began working as a journalist in the late 70s that was the end of the era when college grads were the rare exception in newsrooms. Most of my colleagues were working class, with many having worked their way up to the newsroom from the loading dock or the press room. They had a range of political views and all had a discerning ability to call out bullshit. I was lucky to work with them ... and have them call out my bullshit.
In my college years I was lucky to have so little money I worked a series of factory jobs and was a member of a union. The presumptions of my comfortable suburban upbringing were challenged by shop floor realities. In many ways, I learned more from those jobs than my college courses.
I am still surprised at the things I am learning and the presumptions that turn hollow. But one thing I know for certain, the current struggle is -- as always -- one of class, not diversionary distractions the left keeps spinning its wheels about. Until the left -- whatever that is these days -- grasps that fundamental truth we are doomed to a grim future.
Again, thanks for the column.
BTW, if you have need of it, I make original political art free for use at mark192.substack.com
Well said. Best thing I ever did was drop out of art school and drift for a while working odd jobs with ex-cons, immigrants, and other outcasts. Gave me a perspective and appreciation for the truly marginalized in our society that still influences all I try to do as an artist.
Greetings from Germany, where the Victorian lady in high dudgeon made one of her more absurd recent appearances at last year's super-fancy documenta art exhibition (yes, in case you are wondering, it is "stylized" with a lower-case d). A Skandal erupted after the Indonesian artists collective hired to curate the show and give voice to the "global south" turned out to be not such big fans of Zionism. Their art was labeled antisemitic and ended up being covered with a giant, four-story black curtain. That shit actually happened in 2022. I know because I just googled it as I second-guessed myself and thought, wait a minute, jesus christ, no, did that really happen? Well, I'm pretty resigned at this point to sitting back and watching all of western culture implode under the weight of its own stupidity. Cheers, Russell. Another great piece of writing.
Well said! It's not just the arts scene. We're all being played and have been for decades. Talk about boiling frogs! But once you see the truth it can't be unseen. I see a trend of folks waking up(not "woke").
There's another aspect that's maybe different because I'm in Canada, but the "radical-minded" artists from a few decades ago have been literally run out of town and have very few venues to work from.
There's zero public funding of desperately needed rehearsal spaces, and in many communities there are so many noise bylaws and whiners that it's nearly illegal for musicians to rehearse without a major investment in a soundproofed studio - which none of us working class musicians can afford. The infrastructure that once allowed working class artists a base from which to work off of have been eliminated or made so expensive that Canada produces next-to-nothing of meaningful music or theatre anymore. And that's not by mistake - the ruling class doesn't want your "art" if it pisses them off in any way - and they also don't want to subsidize anything as basic as rehearsal space because "if you can't afford to rent your own space, then you're too poor to be a musician."
If you can't appeal to a bourgeois donor class with your art, then you're never going to get access to a stage. You can't even busk or perform for free in the park (that requires a permit - which is often denied - especially if your art has offended the donor class - and our political class are typically just puppets carrying out the donor class' dirty work).
The guys I know who could get regular gigs openly say they stay away from anything "political" because they just love performing - and if they cross that line they'll never get to play at any of the "cool" gigs again.
Reporters will even refuse to interview you (one self-described "lefty" journalist refused to interview me saying it was "too close to the election and my music was too political" - no shit - that was the point - and I was actually a CANDIDATE in that election - so she said she'd do the interview about the music after the election, and then she ghosted me and ran for office herself.) Our ruling class has successfully eliminated all working class messages from the arts community. Or like JD points out, if you get a gig and you say the wrong things, you're never gonna get that gig again, and in Canada there's really no alternatives to the mainstream venues because only the wealthy can afford to sponsor such places.
You can pick my mind for the Canadian Dystopia article, if you so desire. I wouldn't even know where to begin. But here's a start. Canadians are some of the most complacent people you'll ever meet. And the most smug. A huge part of the Canadian "identity" is comparing ourselves to the US and telling ourselves "At least we're not like them."
Full disclosure: been there, done that. And there might have been a time when there was some validity to that position. (Not really. But it was almost justifiable at one time.) That time is LONG OVER. But most Canadians are still smug as fuck about Canada. And therefore totally complacent about how the small bits of social safety netting we built have been dismantled, for example. Or else they look at American racism and say, "We're not like that" and completely ignore our indigenous population. Or, how proud everyone was not be participating in the coalition against Iraq. More empty smugness. Meanwhile, all the bullets and shells for the war were made in Canada and our navy actively patrolled the waters of the region in indirect but meaningful support of the war.
And I haven't even talked about the current economy. The housing crisis. The Temporary Foreign Worker and immigrant crisis. The total lack of re-investment and modernisation in business and industry. We're so fucking backwards in this country and most Canadians in their smug complacency don't even know. Or just don't care.
OH! And I haven't even talked about Trudeau and how we're the testing ground for the draconian neoliberal world order. Like what they did to the truckers. Fuck the truckers. But how they handled them was the vanguard action of how they're clamping down on all dissent in the west.
Finally, go find the leaders' debate from 1968. Just watch the opening statements. Watch the CONSERVATIVE leader's speech. He's to the left of today's social democrat NDP, ffs. This country is beyond embarrassing.
I live in Canada and consider it the single greatest coordinated act of civil non-violent disobedience in history. Within weeks of the convoy, all the provincial covid mandates collapsed from coast to coast like dominoes. The impact of this protest cannot be overstated and inspired mirror actions all through the western world. Because of the truckers, I was freed from my house imprisonment and able to wander into society again without having to flash a state-issued QR code at public checkpoints like something out of an Ira Levin dystopian science fiction novel.
I can't really. There was one really good working class analysis I read about a decade ago exploring how public (govt spending) money in Canada is being redirected away from promoting arts at the local level and into developing more venues to big ticket travelling artists. The thesis being that voices reflected in such venues would only be those that had enough money behind them - which is totally in line with the suppression of the working class while propagating the ruling class' "acceptable" art/propaganda.
But I'm mostly speaking from my personal experience as a musician living most of my life in British Columbia. And then when I ran for public office in 2014, 2017 and 2019 I got a lot more feedback from other artists, especially since one of the big contentious issues in my old hometown of Kamloops was the construction of a "performing arts centre" to draw in more touring "big acts" from elsewhere. So the arts became a hot topic since local artists complained they'd never be able to utilize such an expensive place except as an audience member, and the upper class basically said, "that's fine - we don't want to hear from you anyway...the new facility is designed to generate interest and revenue downtown and to attract more professionals to our city (because there was/is a severe doctor shortage)."
And because they'd charge "market" rental prices on this highly subsidized public facility it would prove to be out of reach for 99% of local talent (as both a performing or rehearsal space). So the local working class would grossly subsidize this facility to provide a venue for travelling shows to entertain the more affluent folks who could afford to attend. It's also no coincidence that the biggest promoters of this venue were the biggest landowners with property all around the proposed centre, so they'd get the perk of a newly developed big ticket venue right next to their mediocre properties thereby driving up the value while the rest of the City picked up the construction and maintenance costs. In addition to taking a public stand against it I helped run a FB page dedicated to fighting back against this facility but the main backers behind the page wanted to remain anonymous because they were afraid of losing their business/employment due to backlash. Local artists who were opposed to the centre remained silent too because they didn't want to end up in anybody's "bad books" since it was clear that 100% of the city's establishment were behind the project - and once you get on their bad side you're gonna spend a decade or two in the penalty box. (One of my old guitarists had a band called The Blacklisted in part because he was fed up with the suppression. He played on and helped record some of my music with Better Red Than Dead available on Spotify n elsewhere.)
Very good. I saw this happen in theatre over forty years. There are no more radicals in the arts in general and certainly not in theatre. If they are, they dont work. Identity politics, a cliche, but true, and the basic drift to the right in american politics has managed to fully kill the arts. Culture in general is in collapse-. Where are artists protesting the genocide? Before that the pandemic protocols, the growing restrictions on everything. I see artists supporting NATO aggressions, something unthinkable forty years ago.
Can't really say anything about theatre, but speaking of the arts at large... South Park still exists. As well as Roger Waters and a few other exceptions. And those things have always been fairly rare, no? Of course, culture is in decline. Culture is part of everything else. But everything else should indeed be described as the Matrix. By the end of the 20th century, this glorious society had finished its "transformation". And this structure is total in nature. No oases are there by definition. So it's not about the arts, identity politics, politics in general, or even the 1 %. All this stuff are just tools, symptoms, and manifestations. The problem is a bit deeper. The mentioned South Park has always understood that...
and addendum -- I think by the 70s, mid 70s anyway, the tide had turned. The CBGB scene was reactionary at its core. Patti Smith now is what I always knew her to be ( full disclosure I knew patti and tom verlaine et al, and couldnt stand any of them). A decade before mednick and sam shepard and LaMama and richard foreman were doing radical anti establishment, anti bourgeois work. Godard was making films about socialism and Maoism and commodity culture. By mid 70s, as i say, that had changed. And by the 80s it was far back in the rearview mirror.
Interesting comment. Patti always seemed like a fraud to me. I even saw her perform in her early glory days (some friends convinced me to go), at the Palladium in NYC in '78. My scepticism was confirmed, and the warm-up band, Richard Hell and the Void Oids, completely stole the show from the Patti Smith Group. They seemed and sounded like the real deal. No need to pose. Patti is a poseur (poseuse?).
Hey Who. Glad to see you over here. Unlike you and John, Patti Smith had my adolescent sensibilities mesmerized back then. I saw her in Redondo Beach in the late 70s then again years later.. Looking back, there are only a few songs of hers that survive for posterity - and like much of that scene, for me it was only fueled by a sense of the potential of “something happening”.. if that makes any sense..
It was momentarily "disappeared," but is now back, but Elizabeth Hayes is no longer sending out notices, so you have to go directly to the site to read the articles and comment. Cheers.
well, to be clear. During the Vietnam war Robert Bly and gallway Kinnell and ginsburg and robert lowell and a dozen other poets toured the country on their own dime to give anti war readings. So it was not the exception. In theatre at that time I can remember at least 7 or 8 anti war plays scrabbled together and put up. Country Joe and the Fish at woodstock comes to mind, too. And yes, its deeper...and Ive written about that for forty years here...https://john-steppling.com/ and elsewhere. So in a sense the cultural drift toward absolute collapse is a symptom of societal collapse. Today, in place of anti war plays or poetry readings we get The Stones ADDING an Israel stop on its new tour, we get countless pro NATO positions from artists vis a vis ukraine. So i think it *is* about the arts. If not, what purpose does art and culture serve??
"So in a sense the cultural drift toward absolute collapse is a symptom of societal collapse."
My point exactly. The 60s - arguably the early 70s included - was the last "real" decade. So it was naturally reflected in the arts in a fairly noticeable way. And, yes, by the mid 70s it was pretty much over. Interestingly, Baudrillard’s "Simulacra and Simulation", which was published in the early 80s and stated that society effectively turned into total imitation without any vestiges of anything real, was actually a collection of shorter works that were written throughout the 70s. So to those with "amazing powers of observation", it was evident even then. Of course, some echoes persisted in the 80s and up to the mid 90s, and even in popular culture. For example, almost all Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s/early 90s were kinda anti-System (compare his character's comment on some shady US military operation in Libya in Predator with the matter-of-fact propaganda of the third act of G.I. Jane a decade later, which came in handy still a decade and a half later). But the final destination was already predestined. Heck, even Don Henley got it right (however on the asshole side he has eventually turned out to be); "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969" was timely, accurate, and poignant in 1975. So it's not "now". And it has little to do with identity politics. In systemic terms, the "mission" was totally completed by the late 90s. And the arts just as naturally reflected that. Today, there're still proper artists. Caitlin Johnstone is, among other things, an artist, isn't she? And she is protesting the genocide. Dwayne Booth is protesting the genocide. I'm sure there are thousands of artists across the country and all around the world who are doing that in this case and trying to do that in all other ones as individuals through various mediums. So what you are actually asking is, "Where is the community of artists doing it as a whole and producing results on a societal level?" But we both have already answered this question, haven't we? And pretty much in the same way...
dont get me wrong...there are for sure artists out there, protesting the entire landscape. My friend hiroyuki hamada for one. Roger waters you mentioned. So yes. as to the rest, I agree. One footnote is that in Hollywood...the fateful year is 77. Star Wars came out the same week as Freidkin's Sorcerer. One flopped, one changed hollywood. For the worse.
I thought it's more common to cite the debacle of Cimino's Heaven's Gate and the tremendous commercial and critical success of Spielberg's Raiders as the stuff that killed the New Hollywood. Whereas Lucas with Graffiti was kinda part of the movement. But maybe you're right and he doesn't get enough "credit" for his little inside job :)
I've been listening to some millennial podcasts that are questioning some of the 60s/70s counterculture figures and their potential CIA connections. Don't know if their surmising is correct but these days I am reevaluating everything. https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-proper-conspiracy-theorist
Is that enough names for you? Leave the Tucker Carlson/Dobular bubble for a change.
You are right about Ukraine, you won't see many people supporting Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine. Tucker supports it, but he is a trust fund baby, not an artist.
Another theater director who grew up on welfare here... and yeah, I have pretty much walked away as well, and for some of the reasons you cite. Excellence and talent matter far less than class and connections - and this is especially true in leadership positions. More annoying though is the newer generations of actors; brought up wrapped in cotton wool and already neurotic and insecure the smallest critique of craft or believability can set them into a panic attack or crisis. So attached are they to their “safe spaces” they often have grave difficulties in exploring the dark, often painful areas good art takes you. There is an unwillingness to be uncomfortable or sit with discomfort. Because of their nearly uniform class backgrounds, they often lack the life experience required to really plunge into the lives and psyches required to do classic literature.
And then, of course, there are the audiences - also increasingly unwilling to view things that are challenging or uncomfortable.
I COULD dedicate myself to only directing or producing fluffy comedies or musicals. (I happen to love fluffy comedies and musicals.) I could do as Sorkin has done, and take classics like “Mockingbird” and sanitize it for modern audiences. I could rewrite all of Shakespeare’s cannon to get rid of all the icky, uncomfortable bits and make all the language more ‘accessible’ - but that’s really not what the arts are for.
The tragic thing is that we need the arts more than ever. We NEED thinkers, dreamers, dissidents. We need works that challenge, persuade, and explore. The power of the arts lie in their unique ability to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,’ Instead, the current state of the arts is simply to comfort the comfortable and ignore the afflicted (lest we make the comfortable uncomfortable.) It’s hardly a wonder that theater is dying.
Actors like Walther Matthau, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson or even Clnt Eastwood come to my mind: in their faces you could see the tons of life experiences (like fighting in the WWII or Korea) they had before they even become actors - experiences that pushed them into acting as a healing process! The comparison with "wrapped in cotton wool" people is abysmal!
My first film was about a returning combat veteran. Had a great lead actor but was struggling to get his performance where it needed to be. Ended up having him spend time at a home for homeless veterans. The transformation I witnessed in him after that was remarkable. The best thing was when he told me, "I was excited about this film because it's a great role but after meeting those guys all I an think about is how I need to do their story justice." His whole approach changed and it wasn't about him as an actor anymore, it was about those guys and their reality.
At the premiere there was a Marine vet who told us, "Every moment of that film felt so real I was thinking, 'This guy must have been a real Marine'. Then I saw you do push-ups and I was like, 'Nah, this guy's an actor!'"
A great actor doesn't need to live it to act it, they just need to step outside themselves and understand who they're portraying. Also helped that I had a Marine vet on set most days to make sure we were being authentic. Most often it's the director that is responsible for the bad performances, whether from bad casting (often due to financing obligations), bad direction, or just not taking the subject matter seriously enough to truly understand it.
!!! "So attached are they to their 'safe spaces' they often have grave difficulties in exploring the dark, often painful areas good art takes you. There is an unwillingness to be uncomfortable or sit with discomfort." !!!
I recently was brought on to directed a short film written by 20-somethings and starring 20-somethings. One scene they wrote has a sexual assault in it. They brought in an intimacy coordinator for it and while going through the scene every aspect was "coordinated" to be as comfortable to the actors as possible. In the end, the scene looks like a dude casually bumps against a girl and not the assault the story calls for. The whole film loses a core narrative motivator because the real actors were too afraid to be uncomfortable enacting a traumatic scenario. They want to be "actors" in the same way a toddler wants to be a fireman.
In the end I blame myself though. I need to be pickier about both casting and project choices. I've done similar (and much more intense) scenes before and there are still artists out there willing to be real artists. I just need to seek out and work with them and avoid anyone more interested in personal comfort over real art.
If you refuse to acknowledge the dark, how can you find and explore those dark places? Really, why would you? It is like all those reporters, politicians, and the commentariat that keep insisting that the economy is the best every, anywhere, at all time. Yes, siree Bob! So, there is no need to see the increasing piles of homeless people on the streets.
Not without reshooting the film. Not much to edit as the "discomfort" restricted how many takes I could get of the scene. I did film parts of it in tight close-ups and am just editing it like a Jason Bourne action scene to make it feel intense even in what is actually happening on camera barely registers.
It's all good though. This was more of an experimental project and not concerned too much with the final product. If it had been one of my own projects I'd have dealt with all that early on in pre-pro to make sure there'd be no issues on set. But, this one I was just a hired gun so it is what it is. :)
Bravo, Russell! Your reflection called to mind a favorite quote from fellow artist/political wag, Tom Lehrer. "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”
The New Deal had publicly funded art as part of the overall jobs program. We need that again but this time we gotta go fully over into socialism. I am a Buddhist and a communist. The two things I see missing in American art/culture are socialism and genuine yogic spirituality. All we get is capitalism and existential humanism. What passes as Buddhism is really just mindfulness based existentialism. The Seinfeld show really was about nothing. And now Jerry is in Israel supporting the atrocities.
New Deal indeed. Alas, the opposite has happened. The power of arts and media was recognized throughout the 20th century for its power to influence, and the late-20th-century campaign in the West to stamp out anything actually leftist, hardly forgot about the more esteemed wing of the "creative class".
Russell, having spent a good portion of my early life calling myself some kind of actor, in my case out west, all I can say about your efforts here, is “bravo!” I have had something very much like what you’ve written here bouncing around inside me for some time and I did a cartwheel seeing it actually put to the page. Well done!
Russel, this is excellent. Your observations apply to every profession in our culture. Several years ago I retired from a career as a psychotherapist. Before that I was a print journalist and teacher. When I began working as a journalist in the late 70s that was the end of the era when college grads were the rare exception in newsrooms. Most of my colleagues were working class, with many having worked their way up to the newsroom from the loading dock or the press room. They had a range of political views and all had a discerning ability to call out bullshit. I was lucky to work with them ... and have them call out my bullshit.
In my college years I was lucky to have so little money I worked a series of factory jobs and was a member of a union. The presumptions of my comfortable suburban upbringing were challenged by shop floor realities. In many ways, I learned more from those jobs than my college courses.
I am still surprised at the things I am learning and the presumptions that turn hollow. But one thing I know for certain, the current struggle is -- as always -- one of class, not diversionary distractions the left keeps spinning its wheels about. Until the left -- whatever that is these days -- grasps that fundamental truth we are doomed to a grim future.
Again, thanks for the column.
BTW, if you have need of it, I make original political art free for use at mark192.substack.com
Well said. Best thing I ever did was drop out of art school and drift for a while working odd jobs with ex-cons, immigrants, and other outcasts. Gave me a perspective and appreciation for the truly marginalized in our society that still influences all I try to do as an artist.
Greetings from Germany, where the Victorian lady in high dudgeon made one of her more absurd recent appearances at last year's super-fancy documenta art exhibition (yes, in case you are wondering, it is "stylized" with a lower-case d). A Skandal erupted after the Indonesian artists collective hired to curate the show and give voice to the "global south" turned out to be not such big fans of Zionism. Their art was labeled antisemitic and ended up being covered with a giant, four-story black curtain. That shit actually happened in 2022. I know because I just googled it as I second-guessed myself and thought, wait a minute, jesus christ, no, did that really happen? Well, I'm pretty resigned at this point to sitting back and watching all of western culture implode under the weight of its own stupidity. Cheers, Russell. Another great piece of writing.
Wow that’s shocking thanks for sharing
Well said! It's not just the arts scene. We're all being played and have been for decades. Talk about boiling frogs! But once you see the truth it can't be unseen. I see a trend of folks waking up(not "woke").
There's another aspect that's maybe different because I'm in Canada, but the "radical-minded" artists from a few decades ago have been literally run out of town and have very few venues to work from.
There's zero public funding of desperately needed rehearsal spaces, and in many communities there are so many noise bylaws and whiners that it's nearly illegal for musicians to rehearse without a major investment in a soundproofed studio - which none of us working class musicians can afford. The infrastructure that once allowed working class artists a base from which to work off of have been eliminated or made so expensive that Canada produces next-to-nothing of meaningful music or theatre anymore. And that's not by mistake - the ruling class doesn't want your "art" if it pisses them off in any way - and they also don't want to subsidize anything as basic as rehearsal space because "if you can't afford to rent your own space, then you're too poor to be a musician."
If you can't appeal to a bourgeois donor class with your art, then you're never going to get access to a stage. You can't even busk or perform for free in the park (that requires a permit - which is often denied - especially if your art has offended the donor class - and our political class are typically just puppets carrying out the donor class' dirty work).
The guys I know who could get regular gigs openly say they stay away from anything "political" because they just love performing - and if they cross that line they'll never get to play at any of the "cool" gigs again.
Reporters will even refuse to interview you (one self-described "lefty" journalist refused to interview me saying it was "too close to the election and my music was too political" - no shit - that was the point - and I was actually a CANDIDATE in that election - so she said she'd do the interview about the music after the election, and then she ghosted me and ran for office herself.) Our ruling class has successfully eliminated all working class messages from the arts community. Or like JD points out, if you get a gig and you say the wrong things, you're never gonna get that gig again, and in Canada there's really no alternatives to the mainstream venues because only the wealthy can afford to sponsor such places.
Wow. Can you refer me to any articles on this? I've been working on Canadian Dystopia essay for awhile.
You can pick my mind for the Canadian Dystopia article, if you so desire. I wouldn't even know where to begin. But here's a start. Canadians are some of the most complacent people you'll ever meet. And the most smug. A huge part of the Canadian "identity" is comparing ourselves to the US and telling ourselves "At least we're not like them."
Full disclosure: been there, done that. And there might have been a time when there was some validity to that position. (Not really. But it was almost justifiable at one time.) That time is LONG OVER. But most Canadians are still smug as fuck about Canada. And therefore totally complacent about how the small bits of social safety netting we built have been dismantled, for example. Or else they look at American racism and say, "We're not like that" and completely ignore our indigenous population. Or, how proud everyone was not be participating in the coalition against Iraq. More empty smugness. Meanwhile, all the bullets and shells for the war were made in Canada and our navy actively patrolled the waters of the region in indirect but meaningful support of the war.
And I haven't even talked about the current economy. The housing crisis. The Temporary Foreign Worker and immigrant crisis. The total lack of re-investment and modernisation in business and industry. We're so fucking backwards in this country and most Canadians in their smug complacency don't even know. Or just don't care.
OH! And I haven't even talked about Trudeau and how we're the testing ground for the draconian neoliberal world order. Like what they did to the truckers. Fuck the truckers. But how they handled them was the vanguard action of how they're clamping down on all dissent in the west.
Finally, go find the leaders' debate from 1968. Just watch the opening statements. Watch the CONSERVATIVE leader's speech. He's to the left of today's social democrat NDP, ffs. This country is beyond embarrassing.
Jesus. I went on and on didn't I? :P
Bless the truckers of Canada! Standing up to the evil man is great.
You Americans have gloriously romanticised ideas about the trucker protest.
I live in Canada and consider it the single greatest coordinated act of civil non-violent disobedience in history. Within weeks of the convoy, all the provincial covid mandates collapsed from coast to coast like dominoes. The impact of this protest cannot be overstated and inspired mirror actions all through the western world. Because of the truckers, I was freed from my house imprisonment and able to wander into society again without having to flash a state-issued QR code at public checkpoints like something out of an Ira Levin dystopian science fiction novel.
Maybe you slept through all of this?
Some Americans value freedom. The left have become what they used to fight against. Romanticised = desire for basic human rights.
Liberal =/= left.
Political literacy is important.
I can't really. There was one really good working class analysis I read about a decade ago exploring how public (govt spending) money in Canada is being redirected away from promoting arts at the local level and into developing more venues to big ticket travelling artists. The thesis being that voices reflected in such venues would only be those that had enough money behind them - which is totally in line with the suppression of the working class while propagating the ruling class' "acceptable" art/propaganda.
But I'm mostly speaking from my personal experience as a musician living most of my life in British Columbia. And then when I ran for public office in 2014, 2017 and 2019 I got a lot more feedback from other artists, especially since one of the big contentious issues in my old hometown of Kamloops was the construction of a "performing arts centre" to draw in more touring "big acts" from elsewhere. So the arts became a hot topic since local artists complained they'd never be able to utilize such an expensive place except as an audience member, and the upper class basically said, "that's fine - we don't want to hear from you anyway...the new facility is designed to generate interest and revenue downtown and to attract more professionals to our city (because there was/is a severe doctor shortage)."
And because they'd charge "market" rental prices on this highly subsidized public facility it would prove to be out of reach for 99% of local talent (as both a performing or rehearsal space). So the local working class would grossly subsidize this facility to provide a venue for travelling shows to entertain the more affluent folks who could afford to attend. It's also no coincidence that the biggest promoters of this venue were the biggest landowners with property all around the proposed centre, so they'd get the perk of a newly developed big ticket venue right next to their mediocre properties thereby driving up the value while the rest of the City picked up the construction and maintenance costs. In addition to taking a public stand against it I helped run a FB page dedicated to fighting back against this facility but the main backers behind the page wanted to remain anonymous because they were afraid of losing their business/employment due to backlash. Local artists who were opposed to the centre remained silent too because they didn't want to end up in anybody's "bad books" since it was clear that 100% of the city's establishment were behind the project - and once you get on their bad side you're gonna spend a decade or two in the penalty box. (One of my old guitarists had a band called The Blacklisted in part because he was fed up with the suppression. He played on and helped record some of my music with Better Red Than Dead available on Spotify n elsewhere.)
GREAT comment!!
Gosh, how dystopic!
Very good. I saw this happen in theatre over forty years. There are no more radicals in the arts in general and certainly not in theatre. If they are, they dont work. Identity politics, a cliche, but true, and the basic drift to the right in american politics has managed to fully kill the arts. Culture in general is in collapse-. Where are artists protesting the genocide? Before that the pandemic protocols, the growing restrictions on everything. I see artists supporting NATO aggressions, something unthinkable forty years ago.
Can't really say anything about theatre, but speaking of the arts at large... South Park still exists. As well as Roger Waters and a few other exceptions. And those things have always been fairly rare, no? Of course, culture is in decline. Culture is part of everything else. But everything else should indeed be described as the Matrix. By the end of the 20th century, this glorious society had finished its "transformation". And this structure is total in nature. No oases are there by definition. So it's not about the arts, identity politics, politics in general, or even the 1 %. All this stuff are just tools, symptoms, and manifestations. The problem is a bit deeper. The mentioned South Park has always understood that...
and addendum -- I think by the 70s, mid 70s anyway, the tide had turned. The CBGB scene was reactionary at its core. Patti Smith now is what I always knew her to be ( full disclosure I knew patti and tom verlaine et al, and couldnt stand any of them). A decade before mednick and sam shepard and LaMama and richard foreman were doing radical anti establishment, anti bourgeois work. Godard was making films about socialism and Maoism and commodity culture. By mid 70s, as i say, that had changed. And by the 80s it was far back in the rearview mirror.
Interesting comment. Patti always seemed like a fraud to me. I even saw her perform in her early glory days (some friends convinced me to go), at the Palladium in NYC in '78. My scepticism was confirmed, and the warm-up band, Richard Hell and the Void Oids, completely stole the show from the Patti Smith Group. They seemed and sounded like the real deal. No need to pose. Patti is a poseur (poseuse?).
Hey Who. Glad to see you over here. Unlike you and John, Patti Smith had my adolescent sensibilities mesmerized back then. I saw her in Redondo Beach in the late 70s then again years later.. Looking back, there are only a few songs of hers that survive for posterity - and like much of that scene, for me it was only fueled by a sense of the potential of “something happening”.. if that makes any sense..
Also, it looks like Exit the Cuckoo’s Nest has been “erased.” WTF???
It was momentarily "disappeared," but is now back, but Elizabeth Hayes is no longer sending out notices, so you have to go directly to the site to read the articles and comment. Cheers.
well, to be clear. During the Vietnam war Robert Bly and gallway Kinnell and ginsburg and robert lowell and a dozen other poets toured the country on their own dime to give anti war readings. So it was not the exception. In theatre at that time I can remember at least 7 or 8 anti war plays scrabbled together and put up. Country Joe and the Fish at woodstock comes to mind, too. And yes, its deeper...and Ive written about that for forty years here...https://john-steppling.com/ and elsewhere. So in a sense the cultural drift toward absolute collapse is a symptom of societal collapse. Today, in place of anti war plays or poetry readings we get The Stones ADDING an Israel stop on its new tour, we get countless pro NATO positions from artists vis a vis ukraine. So i think it *is* about the arts. If not, what purpose does art and culture serve??
"So in a sense the cultural drift toward absolute collapse is a symptom of societal collapse."
My point exactly. The 60s - arguably the early 70s included - was the last "real" decade. So it was naturally reflected in the arts in a fairly noticeable way. And, yes, by the mid 70s it was pretty much over. Interestingly, Baudrillard’s "Simulacra and Simulation", which was published in the early 80s and stated that society effectively turned into total imitation without any vestiges of anything real, was actually a collection of shorter works that were written throughout the 70s. So to those with "amazing powers of observation", it was evident even then. Of course, some echoes persisted in the 80s and up to the mid 90s, and even in popular culture. For example, almost all Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s/early 90s were kinda anti-System (compare his character's comment on some shady US military operation in Libya in Predator with the matter-of-fact propaganda of the third act of G.I. Jane a decade later, which came in handy still a decade and a half later). But the final destination was already predestined. Heck, even Don Henley got it right (however on the asshole side he has eventually turned out to be); "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969" was timely, accurate, and poignant in 1975. So it's not "now". And it has little to do with identity politics. In systemic terms, the "mission" was totally completed by the late 90s. And the arts just as naturally reflected that. Today, there're still proper artists. Caitlin Johnstone is, among other things, an artist, isn't she? And she is protesting the genocide. Dwayne Booth is protesting the genocide. I'm sure there are thousands of artists across the country and all around the world who are doing that in this case and trying to do that in all other ones as individuals through various mediums. So what you are actually asking is, "Where is the community of artists doing it as a whole and producing results on a societal level?" But we both have already answered this question, haven't we? And pretty much in the same way...
dont get me wrong...there are for sure artists out there, protesting the entire landscape. My friend hiroyuki hamada for one. Roger waters you mentioned. So yes. as to the rest, I agree. One footnote is that in Hollywood...the fateful year is 77. Star Wars came out the same week as Freidkin's Sorcerer. One flopped, one changed hollywood. For the worse.
I thought it's more common to cite the debacle of Cimino's Heaven's Gate and the tremendous commercial and critical success of Spielberg's Raiders as the stuff that killed the New Hollywood. Whereas Lucas with Graffiti was kinda part of the movement. But maybe you're right and he doesn't get enough "credit" for his little inside job :)
I've been listening to some millennial podcasts that are questioning some of the 60s/70s counterculture figures and their potential CIA connections. Don't know if their surmising is correct but these days I am reevaluating everything. https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-proper-conspiracy-theorist
There are countless artists protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Have you been asleep?
https://www.artists4ceasefire.org/
Is that enough names for you? Leave the Tucker Carlson/Dobular bubble for a change.
You are right about Ukraine, you won't see many people supporting Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine. Tucker supports it, but he is a trust fund baby, not an artist.
As an art professor and artist for the past 30 years, I agree this story is an accurate picture of the current situation...sadly.
FYI, a good book on this topic is Ben Davis' 9.5 Theses on Art and Class: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057126-9-5-theses-on-art-and-class
Is your avatar don herzfeldt of bittersweet films, is your spoon too big?
X
https://youtu.be/7jksRQcI9NA?si=nNnIbNGn7kMn6-NG
Yes, and yes. But thankfully my anus isn't bleeding!
Another theater director who grew up on welfare here... and yeah, I have pretty much walked away as well, and for some of the reasons you cite. Excellence and talent matter far less than class and connections - and this is especially true in leadership positions. More annoying though is the newer generations of actors; brought up wrapped in cotton wool and already neurotic and insecure the smallest critique of craft or believability can set them into a panic attack or crisis. So attached are they to their “safe spaces” they often have grave difficulties in exploring the dark, often painful areas good art takes you. There is an unwillingness to be uncomfortable or sit with discomfort. Because of their nearly uniform class backgrounds, they often lack the life experience required to really plunge into the lives and psyches required to do classic literature.
And then, of course, there are the audiences - also increasingly unwilling to view things that are challenging or uncomfortable.
I COULD dedicate myself to only directing or producing fluffy comedies or musicals. (I happen to love fluffy comedies and musicals.) I could do as Sorkin has done, and take classics like “Mockingbird” and sanitize it for modern audiences. I could rewrite all of Shakespeare’s cannon to get rid of all the icky, uncomfortable bits and make all the language more ‘accessible’ - but that’s really not what the arts are for.
The tragic thing is that we need the arts more than ever. We NEED thinkers, dreamers, dissidents. We need works that challenge, persuade, and explore. The power of the arts lie in their unique ability to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,’ Instead, the current state of the arts is simply to comfort the comfortable and ignore the afflicted (lest we make the comfortable uncomfortable.) It’s hardly a wonder that theater is dying.
Actors like Walther Matthau, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson or even Clnt Eastwood come to my mind: in their faces you could see the tons of life experiences (like fighting in the WWII or Korea) they had before they even become actors - experiences that pushed them into acting as a healing process! The comparison with "wrapped in cotton wool" people is abysmal!
My first film was about a returning combat veteran. Had a great lead actor but was struggling to get his performance where it needed to be. Ended up having him spend time at a home for homeless veterans. The transformation I witnessed in him after that was remarkable. The best thing was when he told me, "I was excited about this film because it's a great role but after meeting those guys all I an think about is how I need to do their story justice." His whole approach changed and it wasn't about him as an actor anymore, it was about those guys and their reality.
At the premiere there was a Marine vet who told us, "Every moment of that film felt so real I was thinking, 'This guy must have been a real Marine'. Then I saw you do push-ups and I was like, 'Nah, this guy's an actor!'"
A great actor doesn't need to live it to act it, they just need to step outside themselves and understand who they're portraying. Also helped that I had a Marine vet on set most days to make sure we were being authentic. Most often it's the director that is responsible for the bad performances, whether from bad casting (often due to financing obligations), bad direction, or just not taking the subject matter seriously enough to truly understand it.
!!! "So attached are they to their 'safe spaces' they often have grave difficulties in exploring the dark, often painful areas good art takes you. There is an unwillingness to be uncomfortable or sit with discomfort." !!!
I recently was brought on to directed a short film written by 20-somethings and starring 20-somethings. One scene they wrote has a sexual assault in it. They brought in an intimacy coordinator for it and while going through the scene every aspect was "coordinated" to be as comfortable to the actors as possible. In the end, the scene looks like a dude casually bumps against a girl and not the assault the story calls for. The whole film loses a core narrative motivator because the real actors were too afraid to be uncomfortable enacting a traumatic scenario. They want to be "actors" in the same way a toddler wants to be a fireman.
In the end I blame myself though. I need to be pickier about both casting and project choices. I've done similar (and much more intense) scenes before and there are still artists out there willing to be real artists. I just need to seek out and work with them and avoid anyone more interested in personal comfort over real art.
If you refuse to acknowledge the dark, how can you find and explore those dark places? Really, why would you? It is like all those reporters, politicians, and the commentariat that keep insisting that the economy is the best every, anywhere, at all time. Yes, siree Bob! So, there is no need to see the increasing piles of homeless people on the streets.
Can you fix it post production?
Not without reshooting the film. Not much to edit as the "discomfort" restricted how many takes I could get of the scene. I did film parts of it in tight close-ups and am just editing it like a Jason Bourne action scene to make it feel intense even in what is actually happening on camera barely registers.
It's all good though. This was more of an experimental project and not concerned too much with the final product. If it had been one of my own projects I'd have dealt with all that early on in pre-pro to make sure there'd be no issues on set. But, this one I was just a hired gun so it is what it is. :)
Another excellent piece, Russell, even if terribly sad and discouraging.
Thank you for not being afraid to be awake Russell
Bravo, Russell! Your reflection called to mind a favorite quote from fellow artist/political wag, Tom Lehrer. "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”
Hallelujah, and kudos to you.
Brilliant piece, Russell -- I hope you will start posting more of your writing in the New Year.
The New Deal had publicly funded art as part of the overall jobs program. We need that again but this time we gotta go fully over into socialism. I am a Buddhist and a communist. The two things I see missing in American art/culture are socialism and genuine yogic spirituality. All we get is capitalism and existential humanism. What passes as Buddhism is really just mindfulness based existentialism. The Seinfeld show really was about nothing. And now Jerry is in Israel supporting the atrocities.
New Deal indeed. Alas, the opposite has happened. The power of arts and media was recognized throughout the 20th century for its power to influence, and the late-20th-century campaign in the West to stamp out anything actually leftist, hardly forgot about the more esteemed wing of the "creative class".
It’s a great delight and treat that you’ve both taken to publishing written articles again. Brilliant work!
As a kid from Westchester, now in middle age, who pursued a somewhat ill-advised career as a classical violinist, I feel so seen! 🥲
Russell, having spent a good portion of my early life calling myself some kind of actor, in my case out west, all I can say about your efforts here, is “bravo!” I have had something very much like what you’ve written here bouncing around inside me for some time and I did a cartwheel seeing it actually put to the page. Well done!
I know actors, and this here article is accurate and poignant. Nice one.