Food and art
I recently had a conversation about food and the importance of it. Art came up in the conversation.
Here’s why two and a half minutes of Miami Vice are better than any food or consumable. Because no one else can do it. No one can create Starry Night again. No one can write Ficciones again. No one can compose Rites of Spring again.
Food is repeatable. That’s mostly the point. You have a recipe, you have a dish.
Wine is at least a rarity. And, of course, so are some food dishes. But if you’re eating rare food dishes, you aren’t reading this blog. Odds are, you don’t even use the Internet. If you’re worrying about how long your Kobe beef was massaged during calf-hood, you aren’t worried about what anyone has to say about … well, much of anything. You probably throw your socks and underwear out after wearing them once. You probably think they just magically appear laid out on your bed too.
Film in general gets the shaft. If you’re of a certain education level, you dismiss most film as populist entertainment. Just look at how Miramax came about in the 1990s and it’s clear there’s a market for hipster movies. And there still is (did anyone see the Brothers Bloom trailer?). Writers are terrible about it. So are academics. I think writers piss me off the most because they tend to dismiss it because it isn’t writing. Look at, for example, Jaws. Super populist. Deeper than almost every hipster movie in the last ten years. Why? Well, simply, because people were smarter then. High school graduates knew more words then than they do now (but not as many as graduates knew in the late 1940s, which is why you don’t get a lot of solid mid-range filmmakers anymore, there’s just no market for them).
With few exceptions, the best filmmakers of today were already working in some capacity in the 1970s. Certainly among American filmmakers.
I go to Table 6 and get the Roasted Lamb Collar because I know it’s good. Because I’ve had it before and they can duplicate it. Nothing duplicatable really compares to this….
And nothing compares to the end of Broadway Danny Rose either.
