VINYL IS PODCAST #10: An unfocused invitation to holler on criteria. [In two parts]
by Dan Callahan, Ryland Walker Knight, Kevin B Lee, and Keith Uhlich
[PART ONE]
[Podomatic stream]
[Direct audio download]
[iTunes subscription available]
[Simple syndication subscription]
[PART TWO]
[Podomatic stream]
[Direct audio download]
[iTunes subscription available]
[Simple syndication subscription]
RWK here. For our first East Coast podcast, I was joined by some of my best friends in this (surprisingly little, and ever tight-knit) critical community that I'm jumping into to talk about, as I thought only natural, our criteria for judgment and evaluation. My initial plan was to ask these gentlemen to provide a brief historical account of how their individual criteria developed to our current conversation and how they navigate the distinction between taste and value in their work. This aim was lead astray. This is a good thing. We four wound up talking around this question, or prompt, and, I hope, answered it in another (that is, less explicit) fashion. The curious listener will find how each of our spoken words signals an evaluation as much as these written words forever perform value judgments. It's all about language, always, it appears—and how we develop different vocabularies for different registers of conversation. These are the things I like to think about. So this was fun for me, even though I talk the least among our party (which is a first, I think, for this podcast). I'm continually more interested in how we think about things rather than why, because the former subtends the latter in a subtle way. The problem, then, as ever, is how to account for that, for everything, and how to argue for your favorites as much as revere them (or the opposite). And I think we do a pretty good job here. Please, tell us things. —Thanks for listening!
Posts
Thanks for the shout-outs, Kevin! -Evan
ReplyDeleteLaw & Order, SVU is redeemable not because it's "Rip from the Headlines" social engagement (which is amusing, but hardly rigorous), but for its outrageous, purely deliberate drive towards the present. Unlike most procedurals that desires to solve the murder at hand, stemming all the way back to Doyle's mystery novels, SVU manages to discard of the crime altogether, rushing past the Past, and deliver one after another plot twist after plot twist until we're left exclusively at the end with individual pathologies and as Uhlich pointed out, female hysteria. It's a fascinating experiment for the writers to outdo each other in the next episode, and for the fan, who because of the context of television's seriality, expects the next case to sensationalize the individual cases, and overarching "characters." Benson and Stabler's personal lives are flayed open and scrutinized with precision and sass. Hope there will be podcast on this show.
ReplyDeleteAs for object-oriented criticism (something you guys constantly mentioned in the podcast), I feel that type of analysis reduces the film experience to purely the film itself (which runs contrary to its rich history as a mass medium), when reception plays a large part in how the film earns its particular merits in the eyes and ears of the critic, including those of retroactive appreciation after reading an illuminating rant or rave of the film...or to put in academic terms, that big D word resurfaces. DISCOURSE rears it ugly head to put all the top ten lists to shame. Our taste is not stuck in a consensual vacuum, it's trapped in perpetual change, and whatever value discovered is an artifact of its moment, culturally and personally.