What are the classics of the 21st century thus far?

Say we're in the latter half of the century looking back - what novels/non-fiction/film/tv will be viewed as classics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

lock thread

http://assets.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/BLOOMBERG_PHOTO_50_shades_of_grey_fifty_gray*280.JPG?v=1

for me t.v. beats any book or movie or record. one episode of battlestar or whatever slays any movie i've seen in the 21st century. or any book i've read. i don't read a lot of 21st century books though. if there is a tolstoy out there lemme know.

Margaret

2666 came out in 2004

likewise if there is a renoir out there making movies lemme know.

see my post!

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

trying to really think hard about this and not simply list personal favorites and touchstones...and it's hard. not sure i can really tell what's gonna "stand the test of time" in way that classic is supposed to.

margaret? never heard of it. i just watched the trailer though. looks like a good cable movie. was it originally on the Lifetime network?

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

― scott seward, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:55 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tolstoy wrote about pretty teenagers and their pretty teenage problems?

hey every century gets the tolstoy it deserves.

i haven't seen it yet, but this might make the cut:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn-ykHdl6PY

Super Troopers

Have you heard about this show The Wire?

Dickens of the 21st Century iirc

is the wire better than the corrections? yes, yes it is.

die hard 5 and world war z coming out this year though so we may see too instant classics emerge in one year.

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

― scott seward, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:55 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tolstoy wrote about pretty teenagers and their pretty teenage problems?

― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, January 24, 2013 11:08 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

m/l

louis c.k. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> current novelists i've heard of and never read

UYD is the Shakespeare of 2006

Werckmeister Harmonies and Uncle Boonmee.

margaret, mulholland dr, some haneke, against the day, idk you guys take it from here

Don't understand why people can't seem to prefer tv without making the claim that other art forms are inferior. Are there a bunch of snobs telling you that Deadwood sucks compared to George Saunders or whatever?

i don't think other art forms are inferior. just saying i prefer t.v. in the 21st century to most movies i see/books i've read/records i've heard in the 21st century. maybe the people making t.v. now are people who would have made great movies/written great books/etc in the past. video game people probably think the same thing about video game makers. maybe the video game makers of today would have been great sculptors or something a hundred years ago.

i mean i totally give the win to books/movies/art in the 20th century over t.v. as much as i love 20th century t.v.

i probably give mel blanc the win overall in the 20th century though.

UYD is the Shakespeare of 2006

― President Keyes, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

2006 4 Life, otm

the obvious stuff will probably attract the term "classic" in a decade or two: kanye west, pixar up until "brave", breaking bad...
otoh a lot of my more favorite current bands, tv shows, and movies ( say, wes anderson, mad men, kendrick lamar) will, despite critical acclaim at the time of their release, eventually disappear under the sands of time. when i mention them, my grandchildren will roll their eyes and say "what the hell is a madmen grandpaw?"

& yes, "gangham style" will drop to huge roars of approval at wxyc's annual "twothousand-teens" dance yearly from 2031-2040

I still maintain that Tree of Life will be much more highly regarded once arrive at a properly post-ironic point in time.

Absolutely agree with Breaking Bad as long as it doesn't devolve into Benny Hill-esque farce in its final episodes. And also hardcore cosign 21st C. Lynch. I think a ton of the music made so far this century will be forgotten soon enough.

Tree of Life just missed out on a spot in Sight & Sound's 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made poll, so I think it's p highly regarded already, regardless of any irony defecit/surplus.

If academic study/critical scrutiny is any guide to classic status, then Haneke's Hidden is already well on its way to being regarded as a classic. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Werckmeister Harmonies, and La Quattro Volte are all in w/ a shout, too, imho.

Attempts at this sort of canon-building are usually doomed to failure but Pixar is an absolute no-brainer. The people who build canons tend to have golden eras in their heads for the novel, for cinema, for pop music, whatever, and those always seem to be in the past, but there must be an emerging consensus we've been living through a golden age of animation for several years now?

Kung fu hustle, dimitar berbatov

The Shield

Pixar didn't exactly dominate the ILX poll for what that's worth.

Scientists suggest that no-one has ever watched The Shield.

this is hard to figure out i think because what seems to distinguish all the stuff that's swept under the rug of history (like, say all those other novels released around the time Moby Dick was being ignored) is that they are produced according to conventions that no longer really have the power to compel fascination or meaning. they dont connect with anything anymore.

take Moby Dick, I'd argue that one of the reasons it's a "classic" is precisely because of the ways that it's just still really weird. and at the same time somehow it's set in terms that so many novels after it came to adopt--it's like a wealth of formal/aesthetic possibilities which still have potential or meaning for new works. ditto the weirdness/fascination of Dante, The Book of Job, Homer, Shakespeare (the list is long obv).

Assayas' Summer Hours and Carlos sure look like classics to me.

Catfish (2010)

david lynch doesn't count and neither does malick they are already canon library of congress fodder. have been for centuries.

i don't know what was supposed to be so amazing about catfish.

Breaking Bad.

Deadwood

The Shield is the Shakespeare of the 21st century.

CYE is the new jane austen.

Margaret

― ryan, Thursday, January 24, 2013 10:52 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Deadwood

― standard disclaimer applies (darraghmac), Friday, January 25, 2013 9:47 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Scientists suggest that no-one has ever watched The Shield.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 25 January 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bach was ignored for 200 years after he died etc

but there must be an emerging consensus we've been living through a golden age of animation for several years now?

between pixar and miyazaki you'd think so

@dril

since there isn't going to be a 22nd century, the question is moot

im sure theres a thread for amateur scifi somewhere

Breaking Bad won't make it. There hasn't been any surprises since season 3, and it won't hold up on a revisit, once you know how they make it out of their latest problem. Mad Men and Rubicon will be seen as the great AMC-series.

ya mad men is full of surprises

I wonder if don draper is gonna cheat on his wife

Peep Show, Spaced, League of gentlemen and The Office are some of the finest comedies ever made

Tree of Life just missed out on a spot in Sight & Sound's 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made poll

This is maybe an interesting place to start. Here are the 21st-century films in the S&S critics' top 250:

In the Mood for Love
Mulholland Drive
The Tree of Life
Tropical Malady
Hidden (Cache)
The Werckmeister Harmonies
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
There Will Be Blood
WALL-E
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
West of the Tracks
Russian Ark
Spirited Away
Melancholia

s&s 100 is a good place to start pooping on

some of those movies are p cool tho

is the wire better than the corrections? yes, yes it is.

I dunno, I couldn't get through The Wire but did get through The Corrections, though I probably spent as much time watching the Wire as I did reading The Corrections (maybe 7 hours?)

OH NO WAIT, I'm thinking of Freedom, not The Corrections. The Corrections was better than the Wire. I was going to say "But the Corrections didn't come out in the 21st century" but I looked it up, and no, it did. It seems like ages ago.

louis c.k. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> current novelists i've heard of and never read

have you read sam lipsyte? he really goes deep in a way that louis ck tends to shy back from, and, unlike ck, he's funny

i have no opinion of deadwood vs george saunders, though, both have flaws but also virtuosic high points

Oh, the thick of it, obv

lol the corrections is no classic and shouldnt be mentioned i the same breath as the wire, lipsyte and Saunders are cool but from what I've read neither of them have produced anything nearly classical, saunders worldview is p limited, lipsyte seems p trapped in the same bougie fear cycle as franzen et al tho obvs hes a much better writer

Some posts itt putting the chall in challops.

lol stfu

Forbrydelsen!

It will in Denmark, at least...

I wonder if don draper is gonna cheat on his wife

― iatee, 25. januar 2013 17:09 (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He hasn't done that for a looong time. But walther white still uses chemistry to get out of a tight spot every third episode.

I was agreeing with you in part, lagoon. Corrections will sink like a stone in the ocean of time.

hah sry

I'd second There Will Be Blood, which will look more definitive the further we get from fossil fuels.

mullholand dr is prob the most no brainier of anything itt

In the Mood for Love - need to see
Mulholland Drive - yes!
The Tree of Life - nah
Tropical Malady - need to see
Hidden (Cache) - pfft
The Werckmeister Harmonies - need to see
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - need to see
There Will Be Blood - hell yeah!
WALL-E - Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Up are better, but ok
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - need to see
West of the Tracks - what's this?
Russian Ark - need to see
Spirited Away - i guess...
Melancholia - fuck no.

But walther white still uses chemistry to get out of a tight spot every third episode.

and when he ran over those drugs dealers and then proceeded to shoot one of them cold. Yeah I guess there is chemistry in those bullets.

phantom menace 70-minute review
marvel vs. capcom 3

the trouble with judging the state of literature is that the stuff that gets hyped (Franzen) is already looking as stale as 20th century event novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities" and the better stuff probably didn't get reviewed in the NYT. With TV it's pretty easy to locate the good stuff.

franzen is just awful

plot against america came out in 2004 - roth's last that i'd consider a classic

A grand dont come for free

most of the "name" american novelists putting stuff out now are pretty bad.

i hated wall-e. i'm all about finding nemo though.

the whole fast food nation thing in wall-e ugh...

the first half tho

I wish the first half of Wall-E was the whole movie.

Not even the first half -- it's only like the first 20-30 minutes that are the best.

I haven't read any books that have come out in the past 12 years that have really made an impact on me

most of the "name" american novelists putting stuff out now are pretty bad.

I haven't read any books that have come out in the past 12 years that have really made an impact on me

I don't know if people who were the equivalent of ILXors in 1922 felt something momentous about The Great Gatsby or if they were all "fuck this overhyped Fitzgerald asshat." And/or, what was the equivalent of Franzen then that has been largely forgotten?

sub-question goes to the cultier works that only get accepted with time - stuff like Red Harvest or Raymond Chandler or The Killer Inside Me.

TV-wise, I feel like a lot of stuff we talk about and love (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.) are going to be viewed like we view The Rockford Files - really good, memorable, but not special in a way that will make our grandchildren care. The Sopranos and The Wire seem like a head above the other good cable series on this - I love Rome and Deadwood, but maybe they're both just awesome, awesome tv shows for their time?

are the top non-fiction writers (right now) more important than fiction? Jon Krakauer/David Grann/etc..

Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead are important to me, so I doubt I'll recoil in embarrassment should I think about rereading them.

BIRDEMIC SHOCK AND TERROR

and when he ran over those drugs dealers and then proceeded to shoot one of them cold. Yeah I guess there is chemistry in those bullets.

― xyzzzz__, 25. januar 2013 18:12 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That was in season three. And that it's the last surprising moment is pretty much my point.

THIS book is one recent book that i would put in a time capsule and one of the few recent books i can think of that made me really jealous and wish i cud rite that gud.

http://electricliterature.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/pulphead_John_Jeremiah_Sullivan_cover.jpg

i was even nicely blurbed on the back of a book in 2012 by greil marcus and i was jealous of pulphead's better greil marcus blurb. that's how jealous i am of this book.

Bolano and Sebald to thread.

once upon a time in anatolia.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

Keep meaning to read Pulphead.

"classics"

as much as i see all the gladwell books lauded, ppl might think those are classics in ~80 yrs

guys:

ilx

*weeps*

if ever there was a thread to fill with tumblr porn gifs

am0n i enjoy yr posting but what do you actually unironically *like*

so happy to have been part of 21st century masterwork ilx

take that, jonathan franzen!

Pulphead really is great. I've given out 3 or 4 copies as gifts now - every time it's been a hit.

http://genrelasagna.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/cover.jpg?w=200&h=300

am0n i enjoy yr posting but what do you actually unironically *like*

― mookieproof, Friday, January 25, 2013 6:02 PM

impression i got was that the thread is not about personal likes but canonization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pje34fUgLQ

i still gotts buy that! they even have a copy at a store in town. i'll get it i promise. i think its that one. does he have more than one?

x-post

sadly, it's the only one

tv is cool tho, scott otm

"Forget You" / "Fuck You"
Hostel and Hostel: Part II
James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers
"Piece of Me"
Act 2 of August: Osage County
Human Smoke
Doctor Atomic
James Perse hoodies

Act 2 of August: Osage County

huh i weirdly was just reading abt this 2day. movie adaptation coming out this yr f/ meryl streep & julia roberts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August:_Osage_County_(film)

impression i got was that the thread is not about personal likes but canonization

nah that's cool, i just honestly wondered

Also, while Avatar is not a great work of the decade, it will be im the canon as a reaction to drones.

By the way, just to dilute my challops earlier in the thread, let me add to the chorus of those saying that "Mulholland Drive" is the obvious movie choice from the current era.

I wish the first half of Wall-E was the whole movie.

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, January 25, 2013 8:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

if this had been the case I'm not sure I'd've survived last year (when I first saw it). Emotional wreck.

yeah I don't get this whole half of Wall-E thing either. I think it was Morbz who said he liked 25 mins of it.

Frederik you really like to be surprised huh?

Is your least favourite song No Surprises?

Predictable! That was the word I was looking for! It's just boring how predictable these last few seasons have been.

My least favourite song is John Wayne Gacy Jr. In the future Illinois will be seen as the insencere cloying dreck that it is, while Michigan will rise and take it's place in the indie-pantheon.

Finised season 4 of Breaking Bad last night (in fact I need to give it back to the library to avoid paying a fine...this is what saturdays are for after all) and you know it was predictable as in you couldn't see Walter dying but something can be uetterly predictable and nevertheless enjoyable and well worked out in its execution which this was, and then some.

NOT dying i mean

lol sorry right the first time

well now breaking bad is spoiled i don't need to see it :)

nobody gonna second 'against the day'? currently 917 pages in, last 300 stay this good and we're in masterpiece county

I love AtD but I've got all sorts of daft stuff going on in my head when playing the masterpiece game, in order to try and make it a little more meaningful and AtD doesn't feel like "masterpiece" material (it's still great - I like it plenty more than a lot of masterpieces). It's a bit of a wodge - and feels more like people will say "TP was a great writer of the late 20th/early 20th C" and within that won't necessarily point to AtD as TP's masterpiece.

I'd like to say something like Remainder, say, which feels like it augurs stuff, packs the attention grabbing punch of a single idea well executed, and is memorable, has enough of a mid to late 20thC European theoretical sensibility to feel it might in someway be representative of the modern.

Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect.

I feel also the likely shift in economic power is going to mean masterpieces are likely to be found from material not in the Western cultural production market. That's maybe not in the scope of this particular question, but idk, maybe Sha Dingding (thanks _Rudipherous_) will produce something, or there'll be something Korean (I rate the Infernal Affairs trilogy very high, if not quite at masterpiece level).

there aren't enough things like remainder

true.

the trouble with judging the state of literature is that the stuff that gets hyped (Franzen) is already looking as stale as 20th century event novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities"

bonfire of the vanities is seen as 'stale'?

I feel like remainder could go either way, either a) canonically remembered as the most interesting novel of otherwise dim early C21 British literary world or b) drifting into semi-obscurity, enthused over by ageing bookish sorts (ie us) & occasionally rediscovered by young turks. Maybe I'm saying it's a 'minor classic'. Sort of depends where McCarthy goes, I guess. But it's certainly the first book that came into my head when thinking about this in relation to British novels.

Fizzles otm as per. Agree about Against The Day.

And general agreement with the TV line in this thread - it seems to me the medium most obviously going through a golden age (US TV, that is).

the new yes minister

oh god what's it like? I'd forgotten about that.

it is exactly

Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect.

Even if I like what I've seen I find that kind of talk insufferable really.

Don't know why it has to be compared to film at all. Apples and Oranges.

this sort of talk was maaaybe legitimized in a single instance by the extraordinary density and blackness of the sopranos but there is nothing else close to it

apples are shinier than oranges. oranges are less red than apples. you can compare anything to anything. saying that one art form or branch of the arts or one medium speaks to you more than another isn't really that unfair at all. television has inspired me in recent years! moreso than dance or painting or the musical theatre.or books. or rock records. or whatever. what's hard to understand about that?

x-post

and nobody has really come up with a looooong list of books or movies or recordings that are "epic" "masterpieces" from the 21st that they think will outlive us all. but people have said a lot of nice things about cable television. so its not just me...

agree that the sopranos is really the only tv show that warrants masterpiece talk (a masterpiece of television, it should be said).

mad men seems significant in the big scheme if only because it seems to buck the tendency for a constantly forward-moving dramatic arc. seen week to week it's almost like entering this slightly weird "otherness of the past" kind space.

Lots of people do that the TV > film as if wanting to bury film. Whereas all they do is show up an anxiety for TV to be accepted as film now is into some form of accpetability by I don't even who anymore. That's before getting to the notion that a lot of people who say this kind of thing (at least in this coutry) hate TV, and love that this stuff is available as box sets so they can switch it off and go on a fkn 10 hour marathon w/it.

So sorry should've said I'm not getting at you Scott, understand your angle. xxp

oh, doh, Cloud Atlas, I guess that is/will become the consensus British novel of last ten years.

feel like the tv drama boxset is a fairly new-ish form (or maybe that the proliferation of the form is now pushing it to the fore as something that can now be compared with movies etc etc). also feel that as a form it now draws more star power and better scripting than movies at present, which is surely a new and significant development.

Come Dine With Me is better than Franzen

you say like you don't mean it but its true!

I mean it!

also, here's the thing with me, i'm not even talking about entire series runs when i talk about t.v. i think one great hour or half hour of t.v. is comparable to a great poem/song/short story/novel/movie. they often take more work to make than a lot of poems and paintings too. they can be great art to me. but i really love t.v. so there is that.

good chief!

like, for instance, there are single episodes of trailer park boys that to me are better than some ken loach movies i've seen. or better than the work of some poverty-porn documentary photographers i've seen in recent years. (TPB also funny and also kinda effortlessly could get to the heart of a lot of questions/ideas about social status/ills/problems without even trying to.)

i'll stop about t.v. now though. got work to do. i still love movies. and books and all that. (got stoned and watched blade runner last night though so i can be kinda lazy...)

at the very least franzen would be improved by text having marginal comments intended to be spoken by CDWM voiceover guy.

Sort of off-topic but I feel like a lot of the people who are making looooong draggy hollywood movies should really be making tv instead. Like the last batman film was 4 hours long & half the characters were still really underdeveloped but they got away with it because ppl wanted to spend more time in that world (ditto the hobbit). Whereas a TV show can have 13hrs to unfold so they can spend whole episodes focusing on peripheral characters w/o fucking up the pacing of individual segments.

Anyway this has nothing to do with "classics" really except as a possible reason why the classics of the 21st century won't come from (mainstream US) cinema

LOL xp

I think plenty of things that are critically acclaimed right now will just be forgotten in the future. And plenty of stuff that flies under the radar now will be regarded as classic or at least ahead-of-its time.

did you guys ever read my classic post on the first paragraph of The Corrections:

every once in a while i pick up the corrections and every time i look at the first paragraph it stops me dead in my tracks. and stops me from ever reading the book.

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat."

this paragraph drives me a little crazy and the whole northern religion of things comes to an end. firstly, i REALLY want to know how apples ripening in a bag add to the "madness" and "disorder" of an autumn prairie cold front. secondly, i ALWAYS imagine that the storm windows are actually IN the bedrooms. Like, they are all on the bed shuddering. Though, that at least does imply some sort of madness. Thirdly, is the "gust after gust of disorder"...wind? Do empty rooms and yards free of children somehow add to the "madness" of a cold front? if there are leaves and acorns and ripening apples it can't be THAT cold yet. Are leaf blowers and clothes dryers ominous symbols of mother nature's fury? And are the trees smoking a lot of cigarettes and pacing a lot? What exactly makes them "restless"?

― scott seward, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:28 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think we'll be alot more cool about videogames in the future, and some stuff will be regarded as classics that laid the ground for whatever futuristic entertainment we do end up with.

then Fizzles came along and knocked it out of the park:

I don't know, I feel the problem may be obscurely connected with wanting to do this:

The madness of the trees ripening in the mortgage of a minor light. You could feel it: gust after gust of disorder. The cold front restless in the sky: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low on the autumn prairie, termperatures falling, storm windows shuddering in empty bedrooms. No red oaks in the yard here. The children rained acorns on houses with no gasoline. The nasal contention of a clothes dryer, the drone of a leaf blower, paper apples in a local bag, the autumn prairie coming to an end. A cold front lengthened on yellowing zoysia. The smell of the whole northern religion of things with which Alfred Lambert had made morning love to the wicker seat after a paintbrush. HIccuping.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 8:24 PM (9 months ago)

this too. still drives me bonkers:

and even when i browse at random i find things like:

"It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games."

It's like one of those wise and pithy Tolstoy quotes...except....really? IS that the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements? Maybe I hang out in the wrong prairie towns.

― scott seward, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:31 PM (9 months ago)

it'll all be in my book: Franzen Line By Line

right, now we just need CDWM voiceover dude to read that out

Freedom is even worse with that bullshit

http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2012/08/23/news/web_photos/23.1N019.jesus3.C--300x300.jpg

_Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect._

Even if I like what I've seen I find that kind of talk insufferable really.

really? that surprises me slightly. wait, if I meant "film from the same period" (which is what I meant) is that any different?

I feel this period is a golden age for TV (bit strong maybe) comparable to the golden ages of film - popular, clever, imaginative, daring. Film during this period doesn't feel that strong to me. Mind you I did spend an awful lot of time since 2000 going to see films like Charlie's Angels II Full Throttle so maybe I get what I deserve.

Cloud Atlas- yes definitely.

Come Dine With Me is better than Franzen.

"The nasal contention of a clothes dryer" sounds like a clueless guy making fun of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

tbf Celebrity Love Island was probly better than Franzen

guys EVERYTHING EVER is better than franzen

there, we can move on now

the anal contention of strongo

i mean don't get me wrong i'm always in favor of franzen-bashing in any form

that whole opening graf from the corrections reads like what a broken computer might spit out if you fed it a cormac mccarthy novel and a nicholas sparks novel

It's a mild Saturday afternoon, I'm trying to avoid the Anita Brookner novel on my table scowling at me, and I'd like some antifranzenation on this thread.

i have like a stack of books to get through that's almost as tall as i am, and instead i am seriously thing self-abusing thoughts like going to the library and trying to read freedom again

wait, don't get confused, franzen's nasal thing was a leaf blower. fizzles made it into a clothes dryer.

fizzles reimagining of franzen so much better. i really wish he would do the whole book. the re-corrections according to fizzles.

man Scott that first graf is just dire. How did this book become famous? It was entirely due to Oprah, right?

_Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect._

Even if I like what I've seen I find that kind of talk insufferable really.

really? that surprises me slightly. wait, if I meant "film from the same period" (which is what I meant) is that any different?

Thought you meant film from the same period in the first place as you're talking about US TV "from the last decade and a bit".

I think I've had about a dozen or so really awesome experiences at the cinema, mostly foreign*. Its challenging not just in what it talks about, but the way it does in narrative terms. HBO or whatever still restricts that, it needs something seemingly comprehensible and immediate. Also because of censorship a lot is said about how cable shows can show whatever but they often revel in this to the extent of overdoing it.

For TV this is all great, but I don't know I still think the audience knowing who the killer is before Columbo gets to him...its all in that line as much as a break with the past into a more advanced future.

Know this doesn't equate to 60 hours but the quality is def there.

* Charlie's Angels (can't remember which exact one, been years) had so much energy and fun and excitement, record needs to be set straight on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM

Iirc there was a lot of pre-publication hype about the Corrections because Franzen, an "experimental" writer, had written an essay in Harpers arguing for a return of the age of the big social canvas realistic novel. Turned out that tv did that kind of thing better than he could.

and he had no idea what social realism meant either

david foster wallace is the stone temple pilots to franzen's yo la tengo.

don't worry that doesn't make sense.

i just think of grunge and alt-rock when i think of these guys.

chabon the only one out of the imaginary group of people that i always lump together that i have really enjoyed. and he came first. really dug mysteries of pittsburgh and the short story collection. at the time they came out anyway.

so okay anyway you got lynch, malick, japanese animator dude, pixar, and the cloud atlas. what about genius painters? where did they all go? remember art galleries? i vote for betsey peyton cuz i used to get stoned with her when i was a kid.

oh and music-wise, i could make a long list of metal albums and experimental/electronic/electroacoustic/noise albums that i think are works of art and masterpiece-y upon request.

Let's not forget that "classic" actually means "5% of people have read/seen/whatever it, everyone knows how to make jokes about the famous bits". All submissions to include an apposite knock-knock joke from the year 2150, please.

lots of south park episodes

Let's not forget that "classic" actually means "5% of people have read/seen/whatever it, everyone knows how to make jokes about the famous bits".

you know any Mayor of Casterbridge jokes?

amanda palmer's mini-ukulele-opera got MORE to the core point of connection and crowdfunding and money and energy and art and love than jonathan franzen

cue the slate piece about how kickstarter has not yet funded a "classic" anything

Kickstarter funded the comic book Satan Is Alive! A Tribute to Mercyful Fate. It's a stone cold instant classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9KMgg7T_sg

http://www.metrojolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2011Kaputt.jpg

I think we'll be alot more cool about videogames in the future, and some stuff will be regarded as classics that laid the ground for whatever futuristic entertainment we do end up with.

Everything Katamari has made the world a more beautiful place.

Tom McCarthy's Remainder, as mentioned above, leaps to mind as "destined for classic" status.

There Will Be Blood too.

Safe choices there.

Jaime Hernandez's current work will probably stand as a whole, the patch of Ghost Of Hoppers thru The Love Bunglers - that's another safe conservative bet, but Jaime is one of the greatest artists (in every sense) alive, a genuine monument.

WRT Chris Ware - "Lint" and that sci-fi story, both in the "Rusty Brown" cycle, are contenders. "Lint" will leave you breathless.

21th-C Classics:

Half-Life 2
Saints Row 3
GTA: San Andreas
Red Dead Redemption
Fez
Rez
Ico
Shadow of the Colossus
Journey
the Walking Dead
Civilization 4

i agree w/ exactly one of those

barcelona under guardiola

Wanted to float Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell out there as a potential candidate.

hahaha what, that thing is so forgettable

I have forgotten essentially every detail about that book

you won't forget it when I drop it on yr head

adventure time
la mala educacion
scott pilgrim (film)
film socialisme
inland empire

i didnt really like pulphead but its v possible i was literally stoned everytime i tried to read it. theres some piece abt him going 2 a churchy bonaroo or s.thing? it's really not good iirc

omg i almost suggested scott pilgrim

y'all like some terrible shit

solitary etc.

y'all like some terrible shit

― let's go do some crimes (strongo hulkington's ghost dad

srsly, i mean david lynch, still, really?

sex house

The Road

Oh god yes to Sex House. Yet another wonderful comedy artifact that I can't seem to get anyone to take seriously and watch because of its medium.

More broadly, I'd love to think that things like The Onion and The Soup, while very of their time, will stand the test of time by virtue of a critical position that exists outside of their time. Like, anything that so perfectly captures the horrific absurdity of a particular period should be revered ad infinitum.

Know this doesn't equate to 60 hours but the quality is def there.

* Charlie's Angels (can't remember which exact one, been years) had so much energy and fun and excitement, record needs to be set straight on that.

agreed a masterpiece doesn't need to be 60hrs long.

Charlie's Angels II was weird and quite interesting (and v different from the first which I remember enjoying, hence going to the second). It was purely driven by costume and striking settings to what felt like quite an extreme degree.

It felt like something that was present particularly in the third Bourne movie and Quantum of Solace, but in a less obvious, slightly duplicitous way. The mechanics were just "how can we get these characters from this scenic place to this other scenic place".

it's a style where there is only plot (where characters go) and no story (why they go there). It might be argued that a LOT of films are like this, but actually there does tend to be at least some notional sense of motive and rational, and where I felt CA-II-FT was a pack leader was the complete absence of why, not even notional, or so absurd as to cast mocking doubt upon the whole notion of "why". <-- esp the case in QoS iirc. Impressionistic/loosely associated Last Year in Marienbads of tourism brochures (Bond) or pop videos (CAIIFT).

If this becomes a dominant, dream-like mechanism in Hollywood film, then maybe Full Throttle will be seen as a masterpiece.

if people are still wearing vote for Pedro tshirts in 2201 then Napoleon dynamite will have secured its place in canon.

I absolutely think NapDyn is a 21st C. classic (my theoretical kids will love it), but I'm not gonna reopen that can of worms.

& yes, "gangham style" will drop to huge roars of approval at wxyc's annual "twothousand-teens" dance yearly from 2031-2040

― messiahwannabe, Friday, 25 January 2013 09:16 (2 days ago) Permalink

re: being groundbreaking or masterpieces or ambitious
Flight of the Navigator was the first feature to use specular reflection CGI (and really well done, too -- also great pee wee herman performance) but T2 gets all the canon props.

I kinda feel that people looking back at this era will be more interested in it for internet related stuff--the first this or that thing. Probably there'll be classes on the early days of podcasting and net series.

I think the idea that something from video games will be canonized makes sense -- it seems to me the place where people are really doing something new, so new that a person like me (who hasn't played games seriously since 1996 or so) doesn't even understand how video games can have the things that art has -- but I know it can because I see that people who have thought about them deeply talk about them in that light, in language I can't penetrate. (In other words, video games are basically the same as opera to me, or for that matter classical music generally -- I take it on faith that there is art there, and a distinction between good and bad, even if due to lack of training it's unavailable to me, because why would people lie?)

So given that 50 years from now games will be an establishment artform, scholars will retrospectively understand which contemporary game started making it that way, and that will be canon.

Also: it's funny, when I read about the current golden age of TV I always think "but people said that same thing about The Sopranos when it was on, that it was remaking the genre of TV and was a work of art that would be remembered for decades as such, and yet no one has spent a second thinking about the Sopranos since a week after it went off the air," but I stand corrected, I see that there are people in this thread who are still thinking about Sopranos!

I feel like the talk about the "golden age of tv" started around the time the Sopranos and Deadwood went off the air (or maybe when the Wire was ending), as in "this was a great age of tv and now it's over, hope you appreciated it." But then there was Mad Men, and Breaking Bad and the NBC thursday comedies and it just kept on going.

The thing about tv is, the exceptional stuff mainly comes around when a network has nothing to lose. HBO had to make a splash, so did AMC. Once they became as big as they wanted, they went from The Wire to True Blood, Mad Men to Walking Dead. Lost was a hail mary from an executive under pressure, nbc had nothing better to do than program community and 30 rock. It seems to me that the situation with the tv-networks has stabilized, so I think tv will be mainly adequate going forward.

However, the new net-services might be in the same situation as the cable-networks was fifteen years ago. I'd say the fourth season of Arrested Development has the most potential to be tv-as-art in 2013.

More broadly, great art happens when people aren't comfortable and complacent and trying to follow a formula to perpetuate wealth/success/fame that already exists. They say you gotta stay hungry.

Of the TV stuff to date, I think The Wire has the best claim to classic. I won't be surprised if it becomes the Citizen Kane of TV drama, topping Best-Ever polls for decades out.

Fiction-wise, I haven't read most of the big hypes, and this is more a hope than a prediction, but I think Train Dreams could/should be called a classic. (I have a bias for novellas, tho.)

I love The Wire, but it dropped the ball somewhat in the home stretch. Same with The Sopranos (Chase should've turned down that extra half season rather than needlessly padding out the narrative). Deadwood is masterful but feels unresolved (to me...I know others disagree). Breaking Bad is really the only recent drama series that holds its own as a stunningly accomplished work when looked at as a whole.

"So given that 50 years from now games will be an establishment artform"
video games are in a weird state right now where it's close enough to film to think of them under that lens but as the peripherals and platforms become more specialized, they'll start to revert to the same cultural place as board games or sports, so unless Settlers of Catan and Ultimate Fighting become national institutions, and there is a statue of Gary Gygax in every township, the future doesn't look very Katamari.

angry birds sold as much copies as the beatles sold records

It's funny cos the more 'artsy' they get, it also seems like they just want to be movies more and more. Cutscenes taking up hours and hours or play. It's cool that using an in-game engine you can orchestrate a sweeping cinematic but i think they have alot more going for them than simply copying movies. Movies are about a visual/aural experience. Games are about the interaction. In another 10 years mainstream videogames may be visually and sonically indistinguishable from Pixar movies, and the most successful will be about how to offer the most entertaining and interesting interaction with that presentation.

Games are already in art gallery and have been for years. Who knows maybe there will be a game that is considered the "2001" or "Sgt. Pepper" of videogames. It's really hard to imagine what will happen in the future as games have been becoming more and more integrated into our lives. First you had to have access to a Timeshare machine, then to an arcade game, then to home consoles, then to your Gameboy, and now it's on everyone's phones. People are walking around with videogames 24/7 literally in their pockets. I guess the logical endpoint is some kind of VR contact lens or brain implant or otherwise immersive experience. Who knows what kind of games will be around then? We probably won't even call them games, they will simply be The Way Things Are and VR galaxy hopping or whatever will be something you do on the bus ride to work.

i disagree; it's totally easy to see where video games will end up: flash mob lazer tag grindr

which is the codename for playstation 5

lovepillow

I'm a little shocked at the longevity of magic the gathering, but that's kind of a last century thing, but so was sopranos?

One season in the last century, six in this one

http://webtoolfeed.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/906700710_rg8ms-l-21.jpg?

undecided, but possibly

Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai, maybe. It's one I figure I'll be rereading.

Film-wise, I might go with Russian Ark.

yo who are you/do we know each other IRL?
― fiscal cliff racer (bernard snowy)

possibly! i don't want to reveal my government name here and stuff, but if you're friends with the zen frisbee/pipe/new romans crowd, i'm the guy that used to hang with all those folks, then moved to indonesia. also i could be the only person to ever be fired from wxyc (circa 89) though really that seems impossible - surely many people have been let go over the years for the same reasons as i

The Onion's "firing on all cylinders" days are in the 20th century though - if it's eligible then so is the Simpsons, and then we can all go home.

I am seriously against the Sopranos - more or less for the sake of my sanity I have to hope that the lure of "white middle-class man has mid-life crisis" will fade over time.

It's been popular for a while
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/Babbit.jpg

to say nothing of
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Cervantes_Don_Quixote_1605.gif/200px-Cervantes_Don_Quixote_1605.gif

I am aware that it has form.

Tho to be honest my views on this are a) Morbs otm re: lololol future generations and b) The whole idea of a canon of classics in the sense of "this is what you need to watch" seems to be crumbling pretty fast - if you want a picture of the future, imagine the IMDB top #100 and then c) fuck the Sopranos

If this becomes a dominant, dream-like mechanism in Hollywood film, then maybe Full Throttle will be seen as a masterpiece.

In some ways 'dream-like mechanism' is much of what US film is good at, and 'full throttle' seemed to give it a new twist to this. Will re-check next time its on.

Thread was worth posting, after all.

fwiw i think the sopranos does more to swim against the tide of "white middle class man has mide life crisis" than mad men or breaking bad do. you could argue that trope is something it holds up for criticism. (ie, the fact that the white middle class dude is basically a monster)

though of course all three seem to have a conflicted relationship to that idea--but id argue it's the most complex in sopranos.

kinda blowing my mind that enjoyably staid 3d walkaround of the male characters of 60s american novels Mad Men is being pushed as a classic. i can see how it's appreciated & how it's an interesting way for people now to be relating to recent history, all sharply drawn morals, but idg what's perceived as unusual or excellent about it,the way you can make those arguments for the sopranos or the wire. even if it's really engrossing it doesn't seem like anything more significant or reflective to me.

It's surprising to realize this, but I feel like Walter White is more of a monster than Tony Soprano at this point.

Schlump otm

I love The Wire, but it dropped the ball somewhat in the home stretch.

Do you mean because it deviates from strict realism with the craziness of some of the final events? To me there was sufficient credibility built up over the previous seasons to make all of that believable. It came across as just a singularly fucked up month in the history of Baltimore. Having cashed in on that credibility, though, it was a good time to end the series.

The only real flaw I saw in the last season is that Marlo is not an interesting character.

"white middle-class man has mid-life crisis"

ahahahahahahahahahahaha

but srsly ryan is onto something with the "is a monster" thing - i'm gonna ignore the complex class politics of Sopranos since Andrew obviously has - but let's take it further; it isn't just that Tony Soprano or Walter White are monsters, there's the very obvious sense that they're made monstrous by their fear of death, and specifically by the way that fear is formed by the monstrous worlds they inhabit

they're good t.v. characters. memorable. i actually kinda prefer hal from malcolm in the middle as a character though as far as midlife breakdowns go.

i thought the great feat of the sopranos was making an audience love every mob cliche again and again even though they were old hat for decades. but, again, those cliches just make for good drama/t.v. they are comforting to people. like zombies and brains! they always want to eat them and people will watch them eat them forever.

tony soprano is one of my favorite characters ever. something so compelling to me about someone who is essentially a sociopath who is trying, and utterly failing, to find self-knowledge and spiritual transcendence. tony is an extreme case but there's something so final about that show's view of the possibility of those things that seems to apply to everyone.

yeah, that's why i think it's a critique of the society that creates a Tony in the end - so much of what he does feels like he has moral agency to do otherwise but he ends up compelled to be who he is expected to be

nicely put

also, the sopranos is unparalleled in its depiction of american conspicuous (over)consumption.

as for the other two white mid life crisis shows, i dont really know if i have a handle on what mad men is really try to do yet. it does have this lovely and purposeful oddness of tone that i've remarked on a few times around here.

breaking bad almost seems like a superhero origin story in reverse--and maybe im just messed up but i know a part of my lizard brain still "roots" for walter, sympathizes with him (if only because of the narrative mechanics), and im really curious if the show will actually succeed in getting people to turn against him, to actually root for him to fail/die/whatever. i could never root against tony 100% because his struggle is MY struggle too. walter seems less complex so far, but that would be an achievement of some sort.

Yeah, he's a compelling audience identification figure, in the way that white middle-class men just seem so much better at for some reason.

Oh idk some of them manage to be otherwise

its all shakespeare and all that, right? the sopranos, i mean. all hubris and hamlet and sons of anarchy. age-old tales. it fits in any era.

still think people here are being kinda, uh, rockist. though i never use that word. like can't one single perfect episode of the wire be a work of art comparable to a poem or a painting without dragging in the whole long-ass series? that's how i think, anyway. moses gunn episode of homicide will always be up there with whatever fancy art i liked in the 90's. to give one example. could be the pine barrens episode of sopranos for some or a perfectly perfect episode of 30 rock even. just the craft of a perfect episode. i love that stuff.

The only real flaw I saw in the last season is that Marlo is not an interesting character.

I think that's what makes him an interesting character! Not in the sense of "Hey, it's Marlo!" but the contrast with Stringer or Avon, that all he is is a blank canvas to pour power into - he doesn't seem to want anything else (which is why he's unhappy when he lucks into getting everything that Stringer wanted but couldn't have).

it isn't just that Tony Soprano or Walter White are monsters, there's the very obvious sense that they're made monstrous by their fear of death, and specifically by the way that fear is formed by the monstrous worlds they inhabit

And then go on and contrast these two w/Hank who both face crisis and death but have completely diff ways of dealing with it.

re: Walter, despite being a monster you'd rather spend time w/him than Hank anyday of the week. Re-wires the word decent in your head.

I don't know whether I'd really say Walter White is afraid of death. In a way, he is almost set free by his death sentence. He is afraid of losing control, afraid of uncertainty, and yeah, cancer is therefore terrifying, but he also seems to have a death-wish. Like, he wants to survive, but he would rather die in a storm of bullets than in a hospital bed.

To me, Mad Men is more about change and history and society than about Don Draper. The last three seasons have been amazing at actually showing and discussing how some things change and other things don't.

Breaking bad seems to me to be about work
And how taking a difficult job brings out parts of your personality that you previously ignored or didnt know existed

nice point!

i thought the great feat of the sopranos was making an audience love every mob cliche again and again even though they were old hat for decades. but, again, those cliches just make for good drama/t.v. they are comforting to people. like zombies and brains! they always want to eat them and people will watch them eat them forever.

i agree with this, but to a larger extent i think the mafia is like high school or the aristocracies of the past--it's a fertile setting for creating heightened stakes, a kind of funhouse mirror for ordinary life.

like, the Godfather could be boiled down to "shall i take over dad's business or be my own man?"

Ugh but still a man

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SMBC_Title.png

scott: i think it's a great point and one too often passed over. it's hard to make those judgments with stuff that has these long multi-season narrative arcs perhaps. but i think there's an interesting tension to doing an episodic narrative--something that mad men, in particular, seems to push to its limits.

oh is this sopranos vs. breaking bad now?

Sopranos is faust, basically. Tony is the devil. Melfi is a standin for the audience. Everyone else is consumed or destroyed by Tony's monstrosity.

Breaking Bad is much thinner thematically imho - as I said at the end of Season 4: Feel like this show is about one thing and one thing only, really: being addicted to the tension that comes from high risk behavior. The rest is just mechanics, action movie shit.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem

absolutely agree with this

Faust! I like it. Tony sorta seems like Faust and Mephistopheles.

agree that BB is thinner. which is why, as much as I love it, im not sure it's something i'll ever return to when it's over. but of course who knows.

like that episode of breaking bad where jesse parties for days with hobos in his house. that was a better drug movie in 44 minutes than any drug movie i can think of in recent memory. not saying it was a deathless epic masterpiece but you didn't really have to watch every episode to get that episode. it stands on its own.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

― scott seward, Monday, January 28, 2013 10:42 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think you are otm here, especially about Pine Barrens, which I am rewatching right now since you mentioned it

In the case of The Wire, I'd say that the basic units are the individual seasons. That's the level on which you see the most formal unity. Focusing on episodes makes a lot of sense in Community, where episodes can vary a lot stylistically and in terms of quality. Same with Seinfeld.

Pine Barrens is an obvious one. University. College. maybe a few others.

An old, but valid, definition of a classic is a work of art that is still sought out and appreciated, one that still has a wide audience or readership, a century after it first appeared. This gives the work five or more generations to settle into the culture, and lets the tatses of the original audience to be erased by several new waves of enthusiasm and the reactions aginst them.

Easily 99.5% of art and lit gets washed away in those tides. What's left after all that time has to compete with whatever is new and vital in the current culture and hold its own. Under the circumstances, it's a pretty safe bet that most of what has been touted here is wrong, but I endorse the general sense of the thread that films will outperform books by a wide margin. I would add to that my hunch that a majority of the classic books written since 2000 will be non-fiction.

Just catching up, the ones I like are:

• animation
• big telly box sets
• grand theft auto

• r&b
• skyscrapers

more important question: after the global warming holocaust, what will extraterrestrials want to watch when they retrieve our artifacts and take them back to their space museums?

girls gone wild

that reminds me, im pretty confident about A.I. fitting the bill. (not to rehash that debate yet again...)

Aliens might start with Planet Earth.

i'm more of a bicentennial man myself.

than an A.I. man.

same movie really.

Re: treating TV episodes as discrete works of art, I think it's totally valid but I seem to have more trouble with doing so myself the less an individual episode stands on its own as an independent work. Long-form narrative just sorta becomes a single, blurred single unit in my head, and there are moments that stand out but rarely single episodes. I personally tend to revere single episodes of, like, sitcoms and more procedural-y shows (like choice ST:TNG eps, or that first season Homicide ep with the araber). But I would by no means balk if someone with a brain capable of remembering single episodes were to champion a small piece of the larger pie.

This is probably because, since the advent of the season-long DVD box set, watching six straight episodes of a show has become my preferred method of watching TV by a country mile. Similar, I guess, to how I prefer to not just dip into a novel for an hour here and there.

i hope the aliens like party down. any one episode of that show is a treat. any single episode better than the hangover or a zillion other recent comedy movies too.

I often wonder if there is some distant planet that is home to some technologically superior aliens that have been watching us for years and they love our movies but think Drive Angry 2>>>>Citizen Kane.

i'm glad that after much disgreement with scott seward itt the two of us can bro up over our love for party down

i still think about the sopranos all the time. one big difference between the sopranos and shows like breaking bad and sons of anarchy is that i think david chase hated the soprano family from the beginning.

p sure that in the future major film studios will each only release one multibillion dollar budgeted film a year and that everything else will be on-demand or w/e for the various smaller screens, making the delineation between tv and movies really fuzzy/irrelevant, esp as things like commercial breaks get phased out.

does danny mcbride hate kenny powers?

killer ryan posts itt fwiw

doubt it, especially given the way the character was softened/redeemed in the last season (xp)

did they really do that? i disapprove! stricken from the halls of classics now!

yeah i wasn't happy about it either

this is a good other thread to mention deus ex in

wolf hall trilogy is obvs a major masterpiece

Oasis 2006 compilation album 'stop the clocks'