Post a controversial opinion

that GIF always bothers me because the sound it would make ≠ the traditional rimshot+cymbal noise

― Karl Malone, 9. april 2018 01:37 (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But that is the best part! #ContrOp

A lot of avant-garde cinema has that solitary feeling, from Brakhage to experimental documentary. But I also think collaborative art is good in other contexts, like the Illiad, or Shakespeares works made in collaboration with his actors. #Scenius>Genius

When Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers collaborate, it isn't just two individual pieces of art, words and music. The real product is the songs, with the sum greater than the parts.

When Billy Wilder put Kirk Douglas on top of the mountain in Ace in the Hole, was he in total control of his medium? Of course not, though did it really diminish the statement made?

Likewise when Jackson Pollack dropped paint onto a canvas, was he ever fully in control of his medium?

Wilder and Pollack both knew the materials and methods they were using and introduced a degree of controlled randomness and I feel great art was the result.

no man is an island but on the other hand this is the controps thread guys, being controversial is kinda the point

Yah I get it but controps threads are best with the (probably fruitless) arguments that follow.

Also is compromise so bad in itself? Isn't there a kind of beauty when someone gets the best from the materials available?

Michael Curtiz was a studio man, and the materials he used might have been forced upon him with the direction limited, but he still had the control in bringing them together and framing them in the best possible way. I wouldn't hesitate to call his best movies "great art".

nobody who creates any kind of cultural commodity has ever existed as a sealed unit expressing the purity of their purely independent ideas thru a neutral technology that does no more than allow the expression of their pure artistic freedom would be my general point

Oh agreed for sure.

this is the controps thread guys, being controversial is kinda the point

the introduction of a controversial opinion producing subsequent controversy seems like a natural life cycle

no it doesn't

does so

Aimless otm

Great art is never made by committee.

I mean

This is a potentially dangerous line of thought. Refueling the "artist toiling in solitude" romance is one thing, but negating any other model is not only fetishistic toward the "solitary artist", but also dismissive of more social and community-oriented methods of art-creation

I do profess to have a taste for "single origin work" because it IS romantic, no one is immune (except people who wilfully or reactionarily have immunized themselves); I have heard the "Tinashe produced her first mixtape herself" narrative told to me in wondrous tones more times than I can count. But lots of great art is made by committee, made by proxy, made by industrialization of one's vision, made by curation, made by teams of people. If we're going to dig deep and cull the single-origin stuff from the rest then there's a lot of essential great art that's gonna lose its "great" status, the least of which is your Richard Serra

I mean, it would be poetic if Richard Serra spent many tedious hours welding those enormous metals into art that is as equally tedious

But still: the gallery, the lighting, the method in which you discovered his work, the donors that paid for it...

I do get waves of pleasure in inhabiting the isolated psychological spaces that Galina Ustvolskaya wrote her works in, contemplating birch trees and Jesus Christ and her own mortality, but it's still played by some people, on instruments made by other people, in a building made by other people, and recorded by others, uploaded by others, linked to me by others, and the entire history and work of that composer is coloured by anecdotes about her and Shostakovich, anecdotes about Americans hearing her work and feeling frightened, and the documentary I watched about her, and so on

Last night I was speaking with a gallery curator who was telling me about how every Monday they have to clean out the Yayoi Kusama rooms, and the installation staff were considering creating new work from the enormous amount of hair that was collected. I don't know if "Large Ball Of Human Hair Collected Every Monday By A Custodial Team For Six Months From The Kusama Infinity Mirror Chambers Exhibition" (2019) would qualify as "great art" but I'd definitely pay to see it

i think unperson has a point about art by committee, not in terms of the dismissing of film entirely, but in terms of its effect on film more than other art forms. it's not as healthy today as it once was, the films released by major studios are fewer and more narrowly focused and yet take up a higher percentage of screens than ever before. while i believe it's easier to make films today w/the wide range of technologies available it's also harder to get them seen widely or make any money doing it. i also find it a bummer how many promising actors and directors pop up and are immediately funneled into the tentpole movie pipeline, and the ones that aren't sometimes just disappear.

99% of the posts in the 'Posts you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here' thread should have been posted to their intended threads.

99%? Are you positive about that? Because that seems high.

"Posts you had a second thought about..." should be retitled "Some passive aggressive posts sometimes without context."

That's the whole point of the thread. In normal circumstances you just wouldn't post it anywhere at all.

Dmac explained the purpose of that thread well

it's a thread for posting not for reading

god

Listening to Beethoven 7 right now and here's my controv op on that: the second movement, ie the famous one that has been beaten to death in recent years, is unquestionably the worst movement. Total bummer in comparison to the joy and invention of Mvmnts 1, 3 and 4.

Yeah movement #2 is literally shit

booming controps

Nah, you're just wrong. All of it is amazing but the bummer remains the best part of the 7th.

Tu quote Samuel Beckett, 'the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence'. I assume he was referring to the second movement in particular.

Tu quote Samuel Beckett, 'the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence'. I assume he was referring to the second movement in particular.

I don't see why. That description sounds like movements 3 and 4 particularly, because they seem to literally portray dizziness and drunken swaying - contemporaries thought Beethoven composed it while drunk(1) (while I think it's just portraying that state). Movement 2 is more a wearying procession of sounds than a dizzying path - it's a funeral march after all

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Beethoven)

Friedrich Wieck, who was present during rehearsals, said that the consensus, among musicians and laymen alike, was that Beethoven must have composed the symphony in a drunken state

(Then again it's Happy Days Sam, so you're probably right. The most tragic movement was prob his fave)

Oh fuck off mvt. 2 is so nice

The major-to-minor moment at the end of that one phrase is one of the most beautiful things ever written

The rest of the symphony is underrated tho, it's def my favourite of Beethoven's symphonies..

..aside from a residual early-childhood connection to #1 as a result of an adoration for this British cartoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ThMmLVWZo8

Fair enough! That's why I put it in this here thread, it's obviously a masterful movement in and of itself, but I'm burnt out on it personally. And the other 3 movements are up there with my fave LVB tings

Oh, and one last point: the only reason it is any good is because of the harmonic counterpoint, which does elevate it, of course - in terms of form, it's a fairly dull set variations. The formal innovations of the other 3 movements is not present here to me.

i prefer early autechre

My favourite is Gantz Graf, is that more or less controversial? I dunno.

Beau Bridges is a really terrible actor.

I thought "early Autechre was best" was always kind of the majority opinion though admittedly anyone who's stuck with them to this point probably actually enjoys the sensation of a floor buffer rattling their brain

Gantz Graf is also my favorite. I feel like I used to be an outlier with this opinion, but I think these days among autechre fans the Confield/Draft/Untilted era is considered the best by many if not by most.

I guess there's probably lots of people who like 90s autechre who don't really consider themselves big autechre fans, though. I can't imagine this is the case much for 00s/10s autechre.

"Beau Bridges is a really terrible actor."

he got better as he got older.

I'm kind of amused at the idea of someone wanting to get into Autechre for the first time and just being like "okay, I'll just grab their latest album..."

lol that was me in 2016

Draft 7.30 was the first one I bought.

But picking up a quintuple album as your introduction would be pretty intense, I agree.

xpost he got worse as he got older!

i didn't buy it i streamed it... i think
then i got Incunabula on vinyl and wasn't into at all, sold it last summer. i like the Garbage EP

Gantz Graf is also my favorite. I feel like I used to be an outlier with this opinion, but I think these days among autechre fans the Confield/Draft/Untilted era is considered the best by many if not by most.

― silverfish, Friday, April 20, 2018 6:10 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In say 2002-2005 I felt like Autechre fans were all "STFU with that ridiculous novelty noise thing" but everyone who's still onboard now seems to agree with me that it's the best distillation of the Autechre concept, or the concept as it was at least.

And in related news I just showed the video to my kids (aged 3 and 7) and they said it was "awesome" so that probably settles it.

Boiled meat is delicious

you meant simmered, surely. outright boiling makes meat tougher and less flavorful.

Wrong

Boiled sausage and bratwursts are delicious

As are some boiled meats in east asian cuisine

nyc street dogs are boiled and are the best hot dogs in the world so yes

ground meat has already had its fibers thoroughly mangled, so it can stand boiling better without as much toughness.

but are you sure a nyc street vendor keeps a rolling boil going? seems like it would be a lot more energy intensive and would lessen their profits by that much, compared to keeping to a low simmer. I ask out of ignorance, never having been to nyc.

Pretty sure hot dogs are already cooked; they are kept in hot (not boiling) water just as a means of ensuring they are warm when you want to eat them.

people streaming video on phones are probably garbage.