71–80 of 87 posts
One of the worst, and best reading experiences I get is anything long-form Frédéric Beigbeder. It's all over the place, always too much, showing off (both in style, dialogues, plots...), inconsistent, I find myself shaking my head or sighing most of the book, every damn time. And then, the bastard manages to turn his stories around and do something often good, sometimes great of it. Not sure whether it's on purpose o…
I used to do standup comedy at the mostly amateur level. One woman who was always at the same shows was so unfunny, she could suck the life out of any room. I always tried to study her, thinking that if I could understand the essence of why she was so deeply unfunny, I could understand the secret to being funny. Sadly I could never figure it out. Her unfunniness was inscrutable.
Can you post some examples of her unfunny jokes?
For a while she dated one of the more established comedians, who would either feed her jokes, or help her work up her own material.
So the jokes were pretty good. But it didn't matter. She might get half a laugh on the first joke, and then it was dead silence for the rest of the show.
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Scott Adams has tried to describe it. He says that a good recipe for a joke is something that almost makes sense, but not quite. In other words, it has to be slightly absurd, but also slightly sensible, at the same time. A lot of Seinfeld jokes are along those lines.
There is a decent series by Rowan Atkinson on how to build something humorous. For many standup's they basically slowly show after show 'write' their stories. By testing what is good or bad in them and discarding what does not work and keeping what does. I have been watching Josh Wolf on youtube. Not sure he meant to do it. But he tells one joke a few times in successive videos. But each time the story is more funny…
I used to do standup comedy at the mostly amateur level. One woman who was always at the same shows was so unfunny, she could suck the life out of any room. I always tried to study her, thinking that if I could understand the essence of why she was so deeply unfunny, I could understand the secret to being funny. Sadly I could never figure it out. Her unfunniness was inscrutable.
Scott Adams has tried to describe it. He says that a good recipe for a joke is something that almost makes sense, but not quite. In other words, it has to be slightly absurd, but also slightly sensible, at the same time. A lot of Seinfeld jokes are along those lines.
Spelling out the one kills me every time.
I guy I know self-published a book, and it was obvious more or less from the first page that he'd never actually read more than a handful of books in his life Right at the start there's a scene with a bunch of people in a nightclub, and when describing someone he uses the phrase "with a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle" - a colloquial phrase in Ireland meaning someone looks sour (see https://www.urbandic…
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The interesting question that often gets overlooked when lumping all these together as 'bad books' is why do some of these 'bad books' turn their authors into multi-millionaires, and not others. For that matter why is it almost only 'bad books' that turn their authors into multi-millionaires. Ready Player One is no doubt badly written and Bad Art (full disclosure, I didn't manage to finish it), but it is also one of…
What’s wrong with it?
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Great analysis, that hits a number of very good points! In particular it's interesting that you call the first category "uninspired" rather than "lacking skills". A lot of people equate this "uninspired" category with "lacking in personal expression". Typically a really skillful artist can generally make something absolutely mechanical _feel_ personal, whereas an unskilled artist cannot make anything sound personal.…
That's a very useful distinction. A lot of pop used to be - maybe still is. It works because its self-expression connects strongly with an audience. In music, the people with the technical skills often work in support roles as session musicians, producers, and arrangers. They lack individual expression and charisma but have the skills needed to polish someone else's work. The same applies to books. Dan Brown and Twil…
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
[3] https://crisismagazine.com/vault/americas-greatest-living-co...
[4] https://fugueforthought.de/2016/07/13/boulez-piano-sonata-no...
He should write some bad books. Jokes aside, though, Moore is probably a top 10 author for me. I don't think I've read anything of his that I haven't enjoyed, and what I have read, I've enjoyed heads & shoulders above – and remember much more in detail, thanks to the book nature of it all – anything else.
fav ones (?) beyond Watchmen
But I most appreciate him for Swamp Thing, because that’s where we got our first appearance of John Constantine.