“Distant Voices: an email correspondence” by Jake Berry & Jeffrey Side

96 pages

Otoliths, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9807651-4-4

$13.45 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/outside-voices-an-email-correspondence/12675463

Excerpt:

“I think we are nearing an end of game situation as far as the arts are concerned. By that, I mean everything that could be done in painting, music, poetry, film, song etc. has been done. All that seems to be going on now in each of these art forms is a repetition of achievements but rebranding them as ‘innovative.’  Painting is still feeding off Pollack or Rothko, and conceptual art is still milking the found object idea. Experimental classical music is still working with dissonance and atonal stuff. Mainstream poetry is still under the shadow of Wordsworth and Whitman; or if it is experimental, it is still operating under the fragmentation/collage aesthetic of early modernist poetry. Modern experimental film seems not to exist anymore (it is now video art) and mainstream film (since Spielberg) imitates the look and feel of German Expressionist cinema in the 1920s. In pop/rock (the two have become the same to me now) the musical sounds are not as innovative as they were with the early 1980s new wave stuff, with its space-age synth sound and robotic feel. What we have now is fourth rate Beatles/Doors/Stones wannabees on the one hand, and soul-based divas (Beyonce etc.) churning out substandard Tina Turna/Diana Ross/Donna Summer with ‘attitude’ and an R&B base run. There is nothing very innovative being done anymore. Obviously, this is a caricature and not 100% accurate, but it illustrates a trend.” (Jeffrey Side)

“Yes, these days it is anathema to do anything that seems romantic. This is the horseshit of so-called postmodernism. Romanticism leads to Modernism and you must rebel against Modernism because, well, it’s old now and you have to do something new. It was Pound though that said ‘make it new.’ Poetry has painted itself into corners all over the place. The academic corner. The Beat/Hip corner. The exclusive avant-garde corner. The anecdotal narrative corner. The poetry slam, open mic corner. All of these are for a very limited audience. I heard Gore Vidal talking about the novel a couple of years ago. He lamented that the novel had gone the way of poetry, into obscurity. Many people would object saying no, there are more novels published every year than ever before. Yes, but have you read those novels? They aren’t Dickens, nowhere near it. They aren’t even Gore Vidal. It’s mostly pulp stuff.” (Jake Berry)