Months have passed since the Current blogpost with a link to The Atlantic Monthly piece, Quirked Around, appeared on one of my feeds. Somehow the assertions Michael Hirschorn made in his content commentary kept nagging me for a rebuttal.
I began to fantasize a scene where I'd come upon Hirschorn discussing his ideas about Quirk, grab him by the shoulder and say, "Love to prove that wouldn't ya? Get your name into the National Geographic!" Only I like to think my indignation would be more well-founded than was that of Amity's greedy Mayor Vaughn.
Naturally, when I began to organize my thoughts for my own post detailing what bugged me about the piece, I googled the author's name . . . and the plot thickened. To be fair, on his interview with WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show Hirschorn seems less strident, at times apologetic, in his opinions (although even sketchier and more equivocating with his overall concept). But, as Adario Strange observed on one of his posts to Wired's Blog Network, Michael Hirschorn is the executive vice president of original programming and production at VH1—a Viacom organ responsible for some of the most tedious and trashy reality television programs imaginable. By what rights does he take on the likes of Wes Anderson and Ira Glass for failing to have "creative responsibility" or for not "construct(ing) a coherent universe that has something to say about contemporary life"? Where is the evidence of Mr. Hirschorn's "creative responsibility"? What does the not-all-that "coherent universe" constructed by Breaking Bonaduce tell me "about contemporary life"?
But, in the immortal words of William Seward Burroughs, who am I to be critical? Hirschon is no lout. Not only does he make more money than I'll likely ever see, he's damned smart—a Harvard man, a member of NYC's Generation X literati (he's 43)—and seems to have opinions about the media today that resonate with me ("I think people are interested in and increasingly savvy about the process of the creation of entertainment and are interested in understanding the way they are being manipulated." Thus spake Hirschorn when interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, along with former collaborator Kurt Andersen, about the now defunct online publication Inside.com). That hardly sounds like the sentiment of man who sees his Quirked
Around position as a way to subtlety pimp VH1's dreck to Atlantic Monthly intellectuals. Besides, Hirschorn is clearly too clever to attempt such a ruse or believe that dreck would needs to be pimped at all.
So I suppose I'm more mystified than indignant. He could have at least made the disclaimer that a lot of what he does for a paycheck these days might be at odds with his content criticisms.
In the event that you have not yet read the commentary (and are not inclined to), you probably wonder what exactly Quirk, as defined by Hirschorn, is. I think an earnest attempt to summarize reveals one of the weaknesses in Hirschorn's premise. He mostly defines and discusses Quirk through examples (or as he says " territorially") rather than by providing an overarching conceptual construct that would allow any of us to determine what is or isn't Quirk by ourselves. The closest he comes is this:
As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions . . . and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously.
I don't want to pretend that I don't know what Hirschorn is talking about or that there isn't something to what he says. My criticism/questions about his coinage of Quirk fall into three categories.
- His premise lacks rigor. Isn't this much like the wine of some of Susan Sontag's Notes on "Camp" put into updated jars (and damned watered down in the process)? Even Martha Bayles's concept of "perverse modernism" seems to have more specific and objective teeth than Hirschorn's Quirk. In the Brian Lehrer interview, he allows (or agrees) that there is "good quirk" and "bad quirk" but he seems unable to give us the criteria by which he would distinguish one from the other.
- He seems motivated to identify Quirk to shine a light on the aesthetic, if not moral, higher ground that float in some content Valhalla above it. Yet he doesn't explain why he is not currently occupying that higher ground. The best example of content that he thinks does? Judd Apatow's comedy from this summer, Knocked Up.
Don't get me wrong; I thought Knocked Up was—like a lot of great comedic cinema—funny yet disposable. I'm just having a little bit of trouble adjusting to a world where Judd Apatow is more of a responsible artist with something meaningful to say about contemporary life than is Ira Glass or Wes Andersen.
- Which brings my final gripe with Hirschorn's Quirk: Why pick on Ira Glass and This American Life so much? Call me naive, but when Ira Glass says in an Entertainment Weekly interview (which Hirschorn quotes) that TAL "really is a ministry of love," I think it's more reasonable to take Glass's words at face value than to assume he made the statement, as Hirschorn accuses, in "that non-ironic ironic way favored by the self-styledly quirky,". What hopes can any artist or entertainer have of transcending an ironic stance if we can say their sincerity really is just a very clever way of creating irony? And if Quirk is nothing more than irony (as Hirschorn seems to suggest in the Brian Lehrer interview), why not just call it irony and be done with it? If it's more complicated, explain the variation.
Then there's the ever popular question, "what does this have to do with public media?" What Hirschorn is talking about here—although in a disorganized manner and as a man living in a glass house yet throwing stones—is a lack of authenticity, whether the content strives for art, journalism or entertainment (or all of the above). What people expect from public media content is the kind of authenticity that never takes the easy way out by falling back on previously established poses to attain credibility. I think Ira Glass and company have managed to do this very well and aren't done trying to improve upon their model.
Perhaps to foreshadow another front of this subject that I'll deal with in a later post or perhaps just to close by pointing to something really cool, I think either some counter arguments or maybe even common ground to Hirschorn's points can be found in Jesse Thorn's manifesto of The New Sincerity (or is this just more of "that non-ironic ironic way"?). The best new slice of authentic public media I've encountered lately has to be The Sound of Young America—hosted by Thorn—which was recently picked up by PRI for distribution.
And even though it's the kind of program that hits the bull's eye of pubradio's current target demographic du jour (that Holy Grail known as—gasp!—the younger demographic) without alienating old farts like me, only a handful of stations are carrying it. It will be interesting to see if this changes any time soon.
Cheers!
