Top Albums and Songs of 2009

I am the least hip of all hipsters. As much as I love publications like Paste Magazine, I'm pretty damn out of the loop when it comes to the NPR indie scene. I was a year behind the hype on almost all of 2008's big releases, including Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. But nonetheless, I soldier on, compiling lists of albums and tracks that have seemed particularly excellent to me over the past 12 months. I'd love to hear feedback and comments and additions you would have made, so never be afraid of the comment button! Also, note that these albums in are no ranked order, seeing as how that's almost impossible. So this isn't really a "top" list in the strictest sense, but just nine really excellent records.

Favorite Albums:

1. Dark Was The Night, Various Artists: This tremendous, all-star collection of songs was released nearly a year ago by RedHot, an organization that, since the 1980s, has been putting out compilation albums in support of HIV/AIDS research and awareness programs. So right off the bat, there's really no way to go wrong, just based on the project of the album as a whole. It certainly doesn't hurt that it's packed to the rafters with amazing one-offs and B-sides from some of today's top indie acts, including Yeasayer, Bon Iver, The National, Andrew Bird, Grizzly Bear, Connor Oberst, and The Decembrists. It's a pretty tough chore picking out the strongest tracks from this collection, but I'd certainly fix Yeasayer's shimmering "Tightrope," Bon Iver's understated "Brackett, WI," My Brightest Diamond's cover of the Nina Simone classic, "Feelin' Good" and Connor Oberst and Gillian Welch's re-imagination of Oberst's "Lua" around the top of the heap. DWTN is an arresting compilation that never simply relies upon the clout of its contributors to carry its weight. This is a powerful, well-arranged set of songs for an excellent cause.

**

2. Horehound, The Dead Weather: Jack White's newest supergroup truly lives up to its expectations. Made up of vocalist Alison Mosshart (of The Kills), Jack White on drums, vocals, and occasionally guitar, Dean Fertita (of Queens of the Stone Age) on keys and guitar, and Jack Lawrence (of The Raconteurs) on bass and guitar, The Dead Weather convened somewhat by accident for a period of not much more than two weeks in 2009 to record their debut album Horehoud, with pretty excellent results. Part southern-fried rock, part Led Zeppelin, part soundtrack to your sexiest encounters, Horehound is a gritty, seductive, ballsy set of songs that makes you want to smash vintage guitars, grow your hair out, toss liquor bottles at your needy groupies, and gyrate your hips with all the energy you can muster. Standouts include the lead single "Treat Me Like Your Mother," and the unbelievably sexy, slow-burning album opener, "60 Feet Tall." One listen and I was totally hooked. Excellent album.

**

3. Noble Beast, Andrew Bird. Andrew Bird has a long, somewhat tortured and inconsistent relationship with the recording process, having been variably lumped in, over the course of his career, with a number of now-reviled trends, such as the ill-fated swing revival of the early 1990s. With Noble Beast, though, Bird seems to have finally hit his stride. By combining achingly beautiful violin arrangements and his incredibly erudite and verbose lyrics with just enough electronic instrumentation to keep it on the leading edge of the alt-folk scene, Noble Beast achieves that always challenging balance between pastoral beauty and avant garde poking and prodding. Perhaps the strongest songs on the album are the rollicking tongue-twister "Tenuousness," the lovely folk ballad "Effigy," the seven-minute instrumental piece "Carrion Suite," and my personal favorite, "Anonanimal." Sometimes stunningly crisp and precise, other times satisfyingly hearty and throaty, Noble Beast is an excellent album, especially for those quiet nights with a book and a mug of something warm.

**

4. New Moon Original Soundtrack, Various Artists. Let's just address the obvious elephant in the room right away. This is the soundtrack to New Moon. That movie about sparkling vampires who can't get laid, Native American werewolves, and awkward teen girl angst. I was in a meeting with a professor this term and he made direct reference to this album as an example of why he would hate to be a 20-something music snob in 2009. This disc is filled, top to bottom, with tracks from some of today's most important and influential independent acts, but is nonetheless stapled onto the back of the Twilight morass- what's a hipster to do? I've chosen the option of simply not caring. I'll never see the movie. I'll never have to hear Lykke Li (on the stunning track "Possibility") provide the background track to some vampire heartbreak montage. Problem solved. Let's just look at the music. Fielding tracks by artists such as Grizzly Bear, Anya Maria, Death Cab for Cutie, The Killers, and Thom Yorke, the New Moon OST is full, like DWTN, of tasty indie tidbits and elegant, lush tracks, such as the Bon Iver+St. Vincent collaboration "Roslyn," which, despite being next to incomprehensible, is stunningly beautiful. We even get some unexpected contributions from Lupe Fiasco (with the actually pretty wicked "Solar Midnight") and Australia's answer to Meatloaf, Eskimo Joe ("Thunderclap"). Despite their diversity and occasional weirdness, every song on this album is arresting in its own right, and they all deserve lots of attention, regardless of their unfortunate coupling to the Twilight vehicle. The vampires that this album promotes may suck, but the tracks it offer certainly don't (PUN).

**

5. Torches/ Torches (The Ward, Colorado Demos), Brian Borcherdt. Borcherdt is something of a quiet deity in the Canadian music industry. He's spent most of his career starting independent artist development organizations and labels, such as Hand Drawn Dracula Records, and has helped launch the careers of such Canadian success stories as Jill Barber. While he's not working on the institutional side, he's busy touring with his critically-acclaimed noise/electro troupe, Holy Fuck. Borcherdt's moody, atmospheric, and decidedly dark solo work, however, belies this frantic persona. Torches is the follow up to Borcherdt's 2008 release, Coyotes, which rendered, in haunting, ethereal shades, the darkest, most idiosyncratic parts of the isolated imagination. After having almost lost every last bit of Torches to the trunk of a cab, Borcherdt released the whole album, along with the original demos, free of charge in late November, and building off of the aesthetic established by Coyotes, tracks like "Preserver" and "Crime Scenes," while a bit fuller and more fleshed out, provide stunningly honest, powerfully moody glimpses into the snowiest corners of memory.

**

6. Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Dan Mangan. I don’t think that there was ever any doubt that this album would end up on my year-end list. Any regular reader (or casual acquaintance) will know that, to borrow a friend’s term, I have a pretty serious “Mang-on,” though I prefer the term “Fangan.” Biases aside, however, this is a truly excellent album that deserves all the glowing press it had received since its release in August. Nice, Nice, Very Nice makes no bones about it- it aims for the heart strings. From the saccharine pizzicato strings in “You Silly Git,” to the roaring passion of “Basket,” to the stunning swell of “Fair Verona,” every song strikes at the emotions at a startlingly honest level. The album has received scattered criticism for being a bit schizophrenic in its programming. Granted, “Some People,” while a pretty great track, seems to be a bit out of place here. But nevertheless, the album doesn’t really need to adhere to a single aesthetic to be unified, as such. What holds the whole operation together is Mangan’s amazing ability to speak directly and without pretension to our most impassioned moments, be they silent and reflective, or soaring and heroic. Of course, a good sing along about robot love doesn’t hurt, either.

**

7. Timber Timbre, Timber Timbre. The band’s name gives probably the best summary of what to expect from their eponymous album- a kind of organic, echoey, spare, but still lush hike through the dark, seductive bits of our experiences; what one might hear if Grizzly Bear played a concert in the middle of a forest. The instrumentation throughout the album, heavy on organs, filtered guitars, muffled percussion, and sometimes barely-audible screeching violins, provides the perfect complement to Taylor Kirk's sultry, defiantly unique vocals. Nowhere on this album, does this combination work better than on the eerie blues track “Trouble Comes Knocking,” which wades through sticky guitar riffs and juke-bar piano lines to make everything around you seem a bit hazy and blue. Similarly, on the pared back “No Bold Villain,” we feel somehow caught between the crisp, shivering woods of Canada, and the claustrophobic humidity of the bayou- an oddly intoxicating balancing act. An album to wrap yourself in, and happily so.

**

8. Fantasies, Metric: The smashing Canadian success of the year, Metric’s follow up to Live It Out proved to be the album of the summer for many of my closest friends and compatriots. When Live It Out was released, Metric took some flak for moving into a more decidedly rock vein, with tracks like “Empty” defying the hooky pop sensibility of classics like “Combat Baby.” With Fantasies, Metric seems to have found some pretty excellent middle ground. Big, shimmery, full of distortion, loud, catchy, sometimes contemplative, and full of the melodic loveliness that made them the darlings of Canadian indie music nearly 10 years ago, Fantasies has proven both eminently listenable, effectively popular (without being populist), and irresistibly fun. My favorites include the album’s lead single “Help, I’m Alive,” the ridiculously catchy “Sick Muse,” and the big finale, “Stadium Love,” which all but demands open windows, a sunny day, and your foot to the floor.

**

9. Echoes, Jenn Grant: Jenn Grant makes me smile like a damn fool. I had the pleasure of seeing Jenn perform live with Dan Mangan this summer, before I’d ever had a chance to delve into her music. She was endearingly crazy, intimate, and always charming, and bounced between her lovely dream-pop ballads with ease. After the show, I took it upon myself to take a harder look at her 2009 release, Echoes, and was not disappointed. Grant’s vocals flutter elegantly atop every track, providing an arresting focal point amid quaint bass clarinet lines, simple, bright guitar parts, the pleasant white noise of brushes on a snare, and the delicate ringing of bells. Tracks such as “You’ll go Far,” the tender “Where Are You Now,” and the hypnotic “Sailing By Silverships,” epitomize this elegant mixing, and showcase Grant’s truly unique voice, which effortlessly swings between idiosyncratic and assured, elegant and tenuous. I just love this album. It’s so pretty, from top to bottom, and reflects the personality of its creator with photographic accuracy.

Songs!

I promise, to keep this short, I'll only write commentary for those songs that I haven't already mentioned above. Same rules apply: no particular order, and all that jazz.

1. "My Girls," Animal Collective: Big, sweeping, shimmery, hooky; one of a few songs that become the soundtrack to the best nights of the summer.

2. "Anonanimal," Andrew Bird.

3. "Ambling Alp," Yeasayer. This track was actually just released near the end of November as a free download, and has quickly become a favorite. Characteristically Yeasayer (filled with organs and elaborate falsetto choral passages), but still all its own, "Ampling Alp" rollicks through driving percussion and electronic elements to make for a wicked good time.

4. "So Far Around the Bend," The National. One of many great tracks from Dark Was The Night, this song is just lovely. The unaffected vocal delivery grounds the almost whimsical instrumentation, complete with dueling clarinets and rich piano. Always a pleasure, even if a pretty devastatingly sad one.

5. "You'll Go Far," Jenn Grant. I'm gonna break my own rule briefly just to express again how much I love this song. So pretty.

6. "Fair Verona," Dan Mangan.

7. "60 Feet Tall," The Dead Weather.

8. "Tightrope," Yeasayer.

9. "Deep Blue Sea," Grizzly Bear. Another track from Dark Was the Night that still impresses me almost a year later. "Deep Blue Sea" has Grizzly Bear written all over it, steeped in lush instrumentation, but what really sets this track apart is its swirling, hypnotic rhythm that mirrors the ebb and flow of its titular character.

10. "You're Too Cool," The Zolas. It's been a huge year for Vancouver artists, and this duo are a big part of the reason why. Their latest album Tic Toc Tic is a soulful, psychadelic, piano-driven romp that walks a fine line between quirky and certifiably crazy. But it's also excellent, and this spunky track captures its essence perfectly.

11. "Roslyn," Bon Iver and St. Vincent. (From the New Moon Original Soundtrack)

12. "Treat Me Like Your Mother," The Dead Weather

13. "Crime Scenes," Brian Borcherdt

14. "Big Bird in a Small Cage," Patrick Watson. Watson's latest album, Wooden Arms was shortlisted for Polaris this year, and deservedly so. His unique and always unexpected instrumentation constantly leaves me dizzy and wanting more. "Big Bird in a Small Cage" is just lovely- distinctly Watson, but uplifting and whimsical on an album that often takes a darker, more atmospheric approach.

15. "The Beat Stuff," Hannah Georgas. Hannah Georgas, another Vancouver artist, has had a tremendous year, having just recently snagged the CBC Radio 3 Bucky Award for Best New Artist, and this track is ample proof of why it was so deserved. So cute, so fun, spunky, and unique, "The Beat Stuff" is just great. Plain and simple.

16. "Goodnight Moon," Said the Whale. Consider this a bonus track? Said The Whale's newest release, Islands Disappear is a great time throughout, but this explosive, sweeping finale is really the tops from the disc, in my books. Starting innocently enough, with a tenderly finger-picked ukulele, "Goodnight Moon," gradually winds up into a big ole' dance/clap/shout-along, and couldn't be more fun if it tried.

And that's all she wrote! Sorry it's so distressingly long, I tend to ramble. As mentioned, feel free to provide feedback in a comment; I'd love to hear your thoughts. Hope the early days of the holidays are treating you and yours well.

Merry Early Christmas

St. Vincent and Andrew Bird. Too much beautiful music in one spot. The violin looping that Bird does in "Natural Disaster" is insanely beautiful.

Home Stretch Motivation

You know what? There's a whole lot of shitty things about Fall/Early Winter in Vancouver and the end of the semester. You're worn out from 13 long weeks of classes and assignments, yet have to somehow buckle down harder than ever to get prepped for exams and finish term papers. As was the case this year, you get locked under 2 weeks of record breaking downpours and forget that the sun even exists. You always seem a bit wetter and colder than you logically should. The prospect of Christmas with the family is tempting, but seems impossibly far away.

But you know what else? It doesn't take much more than a walk downtown when the sun is bouncing off the snow-capped mountains across the Strait and resting warm on your face, taking the edge off the cool air, to make all those things disappear. The city is magic at times like these. Everything glows silver and cracks with a sharp certitude. What a way to recharge the batteries.

Also, Jenn Grant helps a lot, too:

Shameless

Hello, friends

I've been busy fluttering around the social networking circles, getting myself involved in all sorts of things. Probably most exciting or all my new projects is that I now write for an excellent Canadian music blog, North by East West (possibly my favorite blog name ever, explained as "A geographically impossible blog for a geographically impossible country." Cleverness for days). Between now and the end of the semester, my posting might be pretty scattered, as my actual life is getting unreasonably chaotic, but once Christmas holidays hits (15 days!), I hope to have lots of time to sit down, come up with my Favorite Things and year-end music lists on Man Descending and get some posts up to NxEW.

Also, you should watch these videos:

Ashleigh of Hey Ocean playing "If I Were a Ship" on kalimba


The Zolas playing "The Great Collapse"

THE ZOLAS - The Great Collapse from Mitch Fillion on Vimeo.

If you're interested (you should be), you can check out NxEW here:www.nxew.ca

Activating the Tweet: A Manifesto in 128 Characters

Building, sharing, and celebrating collaborative, participatory dialogues and social action. In real time. One voice at a time.

Rehashing

Last February, I wrote a fairly long, but perhaps not-so-coherent post on La Blogotheque, a French website that posts "take-away shows," which are essentially re-imagined music videos fascinated with embedding performance within a shared public space. Since that ill-fated late night attempt at profundity, I've had a number of opportunities to explore the idea of public space in a bit more depth, and based on some rather stunning information I've come across, I want to take another crack at this. Unfortunately, I'm again taking this project on late at night when many, many things should be taking priority, but this somehow seems more pressing.

The notion of a "public space" seems natural in the West, but every discussion of this issue demands that we see the idea of public space as something relatively new and socially constructed, growing largely out of the late 1800s and the force of the Industrial Revolution. . In pre-industrial European society, work and leisure occured in the same spaces. The family, in the era before waged labour and factory-style production, was a productive unit, turning the home into at once a space of work and a space of rest, a space where the family would eat, learn, pray, assemble, craft, carve, and celebrate. Work was carried out not in the interest of exchange, but largely in pursuit of a subsistence lifestyle, and thus there was rarely an impulse to produce beyond what was necessary for survival. The crop that a family worked to maintain was not meant to be gathered and exported for profit, but consumed within the home, and perhaps shared with neighbours during annual celebrations. In this society, ritual, work, play, and survival were inextricably combined, and so were the spaces in which each took place.

With the Enclosure Acts of the early Industrial Revolution, however, this arrangement was dramatically undercut. The Enclosure Acts allowed feudal lords to conglomerate and fence their land, and crucially gave them clearance to remove from these lands the subsistence-level tenant farmers who for centuries had lived a life based on communal use of shared resources. As a result, many farmers found themselves cleaved from their rural existence, and had little choice but to immigrate to cities and accept waged work in the factory system. Suddenly, instead of tending crops on the family plot that would eventually be utilized and consumed within the home, workers travelled from spaces reserved exclusively for sleep and rest, to spaces reserved exclusively for work and production, and created objects that they themselves would rarely consume, as wages for early industrial factory workers were stunningly, inhumanely low. It is in this divide that we find the roots of the idea of public and private spaces. Spaces such as the home and the factory were decidedly private, reserved for particular activities that were radically dissociated from one another. The city, despite being overwhelmingly dense, disaggregated the elements of daily life for the new working class. Outside the factory and the home was a network of spaces reserved exclusively for leisure: pubs, taverns, parks, and eventually music halls and theatres. However, as the dominion of the market over daily life increased throughout the period, even these spaces came to be roped off to all but those who could pay to enter, ultimately serving to privatize leisure.

Out of this history comes a sense that privately owned property is fenced off from the general public, and everything outside these areas falls into the public domain, an amorphous and ill-defined sphere where space, resources, and experience are shared. In urban studies rhetoric, this public space is one that encourages mingling and discussion between people of all ages, religions, races, income levels, and backgrounds, allegedly promoting the growth of values such as pluralism, openness, and social learning. Unfortunately, as anyone living in a city is well aware, this optimistic vision of the street is far cry from urban realities. The public space is rigorously policed not just by official institutions such as municipal governments, but also by the forces of capital. We live in a profoundly branded physical world. Everything is sponsored by, made possible by, facilitated by, founded in partnership with (ad nauseam) some corporate body. Every street is lined with billboards and storefronts emblazoned with colourful logos. Even spaces such as universities are deeply commercialized, with campuses accepting into their walls international chain retailers and food outlets. As a result, just as common as the vision of public space as pluralist and socially vibrant, is a vision of public space constantly under attack by corporate colonization and, in many areas, gentrification.

This process of colonization has reached almost comical levels. Well, I suppose it would be more funny if it weren't actually happening, but nonetheless. For example, it was recently brought to my attention by a filmmaking friend that it is now possible (and apparently quite common) to copyright a building. Iconic designs the world over such as New York's Empire State Building, Paris' Eiffel Tower, and Vancouver's Canada Place have all been copyrighted, and, as a result, it is technically illegal to photograph, film, or represent these buildings in any way, without either obtaining express permission from the copyright holder, or simply biting the bullet and forking over exorbitant amounts of money to cover rights clearance. I should point out that the Eiffel Tower copyright issue is a bit more contentious than I make it out to be. Technically, the Tower itself is not copyrighted, but the constantly rotating and changing installations that adorn it are subject to the protection of copyright. For example, the tower is currently covered with thousands of lights that periodically twinkle throughout the evening. It has been argued that this installation is a non-trivial artistic expression, and thus can be protected by copyright, making it illegal to photograph or film the tower after dark. Based on that detail alone, it's not hard to pick up the overwhelming scent of lunacy that lingers around such practices.

Vancouver's Canada Place

The Eiffel Tower after dark (subject to copyright, apparently)

I can detect two main faults (of many more possible ones) with this practice. Firstly, there is perhaps no better illustration of the spectacular failure of nations around the world to protect the founding principles of copyright law from exploitation by commercial interests. Copyrighting is a practice that was developed as a way of protecting the creators of non-trivial expressions of an original thought. The practice of copyrighting a building, vista or public view, however, all but ignores this definition of the term. Rather than protecting the interests of creators, it pads the pockets of copyright holders: in a situation where someone creates something while employed by another person, the copyright on that something they created is immediately owned by their employer. In the case of an architect on commission, the copyright on their design goes to the person funding their work, not to the architect him or herself. To claim copyright on a building, then, only makes sense if you're copyrighting the nuts and bolts of the design. If someone were to steal the blueprints that the architect created and build their own Empire State Building or Eiffel Tower, then there should be legal grounds to take action. This protects creators. This allows an architect to defend their work from theft and compromise. When the owner of the copyright on a building, however, bars students from filming their first- and second-year projects in certain spaces that are ostensibly and functionally of the public domain by citing copyright infringement, they are simply exploiting their legal ownership of that space as a way to shake every last dime from the pockets of citizens.

Secondly (or rather, an extension of firstly), such a practice moronically and unjustly attempts to reorient the very notion of public space by blanking out certain portions of the urban map. It is my belief that once a building is created, it exists within a larger urban fabric that people move through, around, wrap themselves in, and occasionally tear to shreds. In other words, it becomes something larger than itself, it contributes to a shared cityscape where it can be interpreted variably and unpredictably by any citizen walking by. It exists as part of a skyline, as part of the pulsing urban organism, as part of a shared material world. Narratives are negotiated around it. Life happens outside of it. Life happens inside of it. And the life that happens on the inside bleeds into, informs, and is itself structured by the life outside of it. In essence, it is public space. How is it then possible to simply, with the stroke of a pen, make it invisible? How do we photograph downtown Vancouver without capturing the billowing sails of Canada Place? It's outright impossible. Copyright holders have attempted, through legal rhetoric, to assert that their properties vanish when confronted with the unlicensed camera, but the eye doesn't lie. We see that Canada Place exists. We see that it belongs to our city. We see it as an instrumental part of our shared urban experience. No exploitation of copyright law can undo that integral combination of the material and the social that gives rise to the organismic city. To copyright spaces or buildings is like copyrighting air or conversation or bus noise or the garbage on the streets. Every single one of these things is part of public space, and deserves to be treated as such, and cannot be artificially blanked out by commercial interests.

Cities only exist because people live in them. Because we allow them to. Because we will them to. Without people, cities are just buildings. This is a fact that colonizers of public space seem to forget. Their buildings only have such profound meanings and strong reputations because of the people that they now attempt to push away with legal wheelings and dealings.

The city that you live in belongs to you, and vice-versa.

Finding Ways Out

A little while back, I had a break between classes, and so took to the Internet to fritter away my time, as opposed to tackling yet another paper. I came upon a link to this tremendous and powerful article by Mark Slouka for Harper's Magazine, detailing the ways in which the humanities have been systematically marginalized in the contemporary university; reduced to a romantic novelty in a space now geared less toward the cultivation of effective citizens and more toward the production of hirable employees. The article is long, detailed, and demands your full attention, but if you have the time, I'd highly suggest reading it not only because it articulates a position close to my own heart, but because I feel that it touches on a characteristic of the postmodern humanities ghetto that frequently goes unnoticed (willfully or otherwise) in much of the critical literature on the subject.

Slouka disparages the ways in which the university has become a kind of corporate incubators that places quantitative and "practical" fields of study at the top of their funding lists. After all, how does a university bolster their reputation in the popular press? By citing the success of their alumni. How does the university gauge the success of its alumni? Salary and job title. These arguments are important, and are hard to understate, but perhaps predictable. We've come to expect those in the humanities to scorn their counterparts in business administration, mathematics and the applied sciences. In many ways, people have grown weary of the dusty philosopher, tangled up in complex discursive webs, thrashing through the overgrown jungle of academic erudition. The student or expert of humanities is often thought of as deliberately obscure, offended by the corporate, pragmatic world, forcibly pressed into a subordinate position within the academy and in the workforce at large; losing him or herself in the thrill of academic inquiry by night, silently loathing the business people he or she serves during the lunch rush. And out of this resentment arises an attitude more-or-less unique to the humanities: an embrace of obscurity. If the big kids won't let us play on the jungle gym, we'll take recess in the library, speak in code, baffle them with our obscurity, accept and celebrate our subordinate position out of spite.

This attitude is what Slouka finds reprehensible. How can the humanities resent their position in the university if they actively create it? What right does the expert on shrubbery in Shakespeare have to lament her position within the confines of the humanities department if she deliberately makes her work next to impossible to understand? How can we expect the world to take the humanities seriously if its most devoted practitioners continually reduce it to a derelict heap of jargon and good intentions?

To answer these questions, we have to first ask a bigger, perhaps more metaphysical one: When did art stop believing in itself?

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the Modernist avant-garde was flourishing, the art world was brimful of hope for a better future. Architects like Le Corbusier and Erickson truly thought that, by changing the ways that we built, we could change the way we exist within the world. Picasso tried to re-invent vision one canvas at a time. Vertov tried to create a new, universal, egalitarian language with the movie camera. This is art that would change the world. This is art that had faith in its ability to rethink the inequalities, injustices, and limitations of the modern world. Not just rethink, but reconfigure. This is art that acted. With the Second World War, however, came a sense, that modernism had collapsed on itself. The machine that Le Corbusier and Vertov had envisioned as the road to a more equitable and effective future had been transformed into a force of destruction. Death had become efficient and mechanical. Politics had become a game of aesthetic posturing. History obliterated in the pursuit of the new. Later strains of Modernism attempted to reinvigorate the project of Modernity, but are widely considered to have failed. By the end of the 1960s, Modernism was dead. Postmodernism, that invisible catch-all of 21st century Cultural Studies, seemingly filled the void. Where modern art collapsed upon itself as the result of political manipulation to nefarious ends, postmodern art collapses on itself simply because it can. It cannibalizes itself because it has nothing better to do. Modernism failed to create change, and it had piles of manifestoes, blueprints and road maps specifically designed to meet its own goals. Postmodernism is predicated on hopelessness and nihilism. If there's no hope for change, why develop plans? If you don't have plans, how and what do you create, and for what purpose? Aesthetics cease to be political tools, and become ends in themselves. Art is simply there. On place mats in cheap restaurants. In magazines. On CD covers. In museums. Airports. Bathroom stalls. Art is. And that's all it is.

Don't confuse this for formalism, which assumes that art exists in a vacuum, because even formalism presupposes that there is something beyond art. For art to exist in isolation, it has to exist in isolation from something. Even in a school of thought that seems to thrive on art as neutral and distinct from culture, there is a political dimension- art is seen as different and distinct from the world around it. Difference and exclusion are always, without exception, political issues. Postmodernism does not assume continuity with, or isolation from the world. It just is.

I feel that this is an attitude that needs to be, if not reversed, re-imagined. Art simply can't be taken seriously if it sees itself as silliness, as something that exists because it can. Art must see itself as necessary to be seen as necessary. To tear down the walls of the postmodern ghetto and upset taken-for-granted models of ideological production, the humanities have to regain their humanity. They have to strive for change, not erudition; accessibility, not mystification.

Perhaps this is why many people now consider the vast majority of music, film, television, and literature to be so intolerably boring. If music has no goal but to exist, how can it rouse its listener? Even in art forms generally acknowledged to have a social concern or political agenda, like documentary film, hopelessness reigns. Michael Moore makes controversial films about gun control, capitalist hegemony, and the violence of corporate health care, and yet somehow, his films seem stunningly uninteresting. This is because there is no hope in his films. At the end of Sicko, Moore doesn't propose possible solutions, nor does he provide a set of terms on which health care should operate. Sicko concludes with Moore's own voiceover telling us of how he personally paid for a surgery needed by the wife of a former online enemy. Any hope for broad institutional change is obliderated. The only solution we see manifests at the level of private exchange, a kind of capitulation to the impossibility of reformatting entrenched models of health care funding in the United States. Moore deeply betrays his own goal. He resigns himself to the all-too common position of grudgingly accepting the terms of the world around him, but always seething and sneering at it, feeling always intellectually superior, but institutionally subordinate to those around him. Moore's films are boring because they are all the same, and they are all the same because they are hopeless.

Hopelessness is always the same. Hopelessness is unchanging, stoic. Hope, however, is necessarily dynamic. Hope is always evolving, always adapting to new circumstances, always creating new ways of doing things in the interest of keeping itself alive on uneven ground. Hope is motion and progress.

Hope is what the arts and humanities need. The humanities need to understand that their subordination in a corporate world is not a given, but an imposition that they themselves were complicit in constructing. If we got ourselves into this mess, as the saying goes, we can get ourselves out. All we need is to believe that it's worth it. All we need is to believe that art can change the world. All we need is hope, and the motion, change, and future-focused optimism that it carries with it.