This post is a response to a query posed by gokinsmen in the Ask Karina thread: “Avant-garde and short films. Your favorites, ‘the state of…’”
I’m not sure I know what “avant-garde” means anymore, and the only reason I admit that is because the very haziness of the concept seems to be the crux of the issue. What could avant garde possibly mean, in an time and place where Jonas Mekas takes to his video blog to drop wisdom from the Kabballah and defend Paris Hilton, and anyone can watch clips of Out 1 on YouTube (which is pretty much the only place to watch music videos such as the above), and an incest-heavy work of poorsploitation with riffs on Italian neorealism is poised for major mainstream success –– and all the while the general public shows little to no interest in movies starring movie stars, over and over and overagain?
Todd at South Dakota Dark introduces the Superficial Blogathon, to take place February 1-8:
…sometimes, you just want to look at attractive people doing witty things. I mean, we’re all human!
You could write an extended treatise on a work where the superficial pleasures led you to a deeper understanding of the piece as a whole. Or you could make a list of people you find attractive. Or you could just post pretty pictures. So long as it has to do with something in the arts or pop culture and it’s something you enjoy on some sort of shallow level, it’s fair game.
Karina’s note to self: this is probably the perfect place for that piece you’ve been thinking about writing about the time you went to see Janeane Garofalo at Comix, and she solicited the audience for painkillers and eventually traded a girl sitting up front some kind of hand-beaded bracelet for a handful of Vicodin, which in turn prompted to you to ponder the allure of Reality Bites. Which, you should probably admit right now, you saw four times in the theater when you were 13, and which today, though totally cognizant of its faults, you still can’t really help but like a lot.
“He made three great musicals and two of them, Cabaretand All That Jazz, effectively retrofitted the musical for a generation skeptical of artifice, incorporating techniques from the European New Wave and even neorealism. He didn’t only do it first. He did it better than just about anyone, and, despite is fame, he remains under-appreciated as a filmmaker.” On November 10, Bob at Forward to Yesterday is sponsoring Fossethon, a blogathon dedicated to the work of director/dancer/choreographer Bob Fosse. We are so there. Above, you’ll find Fosse dancing in a clip from 1953’s The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, alongside Debbie Reynolds, Van Johnson and Barbara Ruick.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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