whiplash

Yeah, this was way dumb. Kinda fun to watch and talk bullshit over though.

I had an internship with a guy a couple of years ago who majored in jazz drumming (not sure which school, but he dropped out) who did say that it was incredibly intense and unhealthy for him. Said he would basically practice until his hands were bleeding.

@ebaynetflix
'Whiplash' made me really happy that I never viewed music like anyone in that film.

https://twitter.com/ebaynetflix/status/579897677065900033

when the end credits for this came up i realized i'd gotten into a big fight with the writer/director on livejournal in 2005. woulda felt worse if it had been the editor.

btw

Is there a similar film about an abusive director?
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, January 21, 2015 4:33 PM (2 months ago)

I thought the visual style of Whiplash was very dated, the psychology didn't make any sense to me, the car crash seemed like awful writing, the big band concept would have made a lot more sense if it took place in the 30s, The Social Network told a similar story better and managed to say something abt contemporary society at the same time, Simmons' teaching technique and the concept of negative motivation didn't make much sense to me and had nothing to do with what I know about what motivated Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Billy Strayhorn, but I enjoyed the music.

Maybe I missed the point entirely, I sure was surprised to read Madonna's reaction in RS:

When the character said, ‘I’d rather be a 34-year-old genius who did something with his life, dead of a heroin overdose, than live to be 93 and do nothing’, I totally was like, ‘Yes’. That really resonated with me.

Reminds me of Lennon's response to "Hey Hey My My":

I hate it. Its better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison--its garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They're saying John Wayne conquered cancer--he whipped it like a man. You know, I'm sorry that he died and all that--I'm sorry for his family--but he didn't whip cancer. It whipped him. I don't want Sean worshipping John Wayne or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death.

Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean its garbage, you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy.

curious to see what Madonna considers "nothing". iirc raising a family and living to see your grandkids and great-grandkids isn't "nothing".

had my right hand inspected by a jazz drummer at a free workshop last night
other guy involved in the convo (bass player) asked if he was inspecting for callouses

um, what was he inspecting for?

honestly idk -- i know that my hands are strong (bony, but strong!) and also it was weird that he grabbed my hand and began to inspect it but i got a distinctly whiplashy feel to the interaction so i wanted to put it here. i still haven't seen the movie btw. i asked half-jokingly if he'd like to inspect my arm but he declined.

i went up to him after his set to say that i enjoyed it, told him i am also drummer (and how long i have been playing) and the inspection followed after a line of questioning intended to determine whether or not i was ready to participate in the workshop (it is an open jam workshop type thing).

sounds kinda icky

it def has never happened before
i didn't feel like gross or anything it just seemed like an excessive measure of my dedication to grab my hand and inspect it. welcome to my world!

I asked my bridge teacher if she'd seen Whiplash after ridiculing me for leading away from an ace. She laughed

I have to admit this one sort of lost me when Teller and Reiser continued talking after Rififi started. After that I was all "Simmons slapped you...fuck you, you talked during a movie...You're bleeding?...Hit by a truck?...Fuck you, you talked during a movie."

Need to work on that. Simmons was a very convincing piece of human garbage tho, and I'm very excited for the good movies Teller will do in the future between all the paycheck stuff he'll most certainly take on.

i watched "keep on, keeping on" last night and it was everything this movie wasn't and is highly recommended.
clark terry was a helluva guy

This is a pretty cool interpretation of Whiplash

definitely interesting to think of the film as a manifestation of an aspiring musician's anxieties

this is a thoroughly silly movie. lots of unintentional hilarity.

but then, i also woke up in the middle of the night after an incredibly vivid anxiety dream/nightmare about missing a gig with my band.

Basically the Karate Kid on drums.

it's so dumb how when doing press for this movie, they were all semantically evasive about saying 'almost all the drumming you see in the movie is him'. of course, people are going to take that to mean that you're also hearing him play, but that's not true 98% of the time. he just did a half-decent job at miming (although watching his stiff-armed, palm-down, pinkie-out ride cymbal technique is painful...but maybe that's in-character for a college freshman drummer? except when they switch to overhead shots all of a sudden it's someone with nice grip).

Neil Peart on Whiplash:

"There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming. My teacher Peter Erskine was saying he feels ungrateful because it's great there's a movie about drummers, but why is it so flawed humanistically and in small technical ways that didn't cost anything? It wouldn't cost anything to have a proper jazz drum set and to show the guy how to use his wrists. And the bloody ice cube jug or whatever? Absurd! There's a Band-Aid on my finger right now – yeah, I bleed. But jazz drumming, no, there is no bleeding."

flappy bird said this on the la la land thread

the depiction of a music teacher as a sadistic drill master

there are no bullies in jazz? there are no sadistic drill sergeant wannabes in music education? what fucking planet are you and Neil Peart from?

i've heard that Buddy Rich tape! bullying in the name of such boring music is unfortunate though.

The hand inspection! So much has happened since then.

One of my students asked me if I had seen this movie a couple days ago. I said yes and he asked what I thought. I replied by asking what he thought about the teacher (since I am his teacher) and I don't exactly remember what he said but we agreed that the teacher was abusive. IIRC he also said that some people with talent "need" that sort of treatment to reach their full potential. I thought about what a pervasive idea this is, that talented people should/might need to be bullied into excellence. I don't agree but is this common wisdom?

Talented people can be lazy as hell

Who's an example of an IRL talented person who required other people to bully them to accomplish anything?

If they are lazy, they need to develop willpower, which bullying isn't great at imo

I can't think of an example because it seems like "wisdom" that comes from excuse-making after someone is bullied rather than a legitimate strategy for achieving excellence. "He needed it to achieve his potential" -- that's essentially what my student said and I found it kind of surprising.

xp to NA - That's kind of a "prove a negative" problem in certain professions I can think of, music education certainly being one.

I think a lot of music educators - not one-on-one instructors much, but definitely bandleaders, conductors etc. use bullying and similar drill instructor techniques as a shortcut to get obedience out of small crowds of geniuses.

I should differentiate between the truly pathological, manipulative shit that JK Simmons does in this movie, and the shouting and belittling that are par for the course in marching bands and military training everywhere

Art Taylor published a book of interviews he conducted with (famous) jazz musicians, and none of the drummers in the book cite "tough love" as a motivator for being creative or improving their craft. The closest they come is one drummer describing how hard he studied and practiced, telling a story about being really competitive about who gets to the equipment for practice in the morning when he lived with another musician. Meanwhile, another drummer in another interview basically says jazz is about feeling and not technique, and a lot of the musicians from the period Art Taylor focuses on describe their experiences of learning to play by listening to and playing with musicians they like.

When I was reading the motivation literature as a prelude to entering a teaching credential program a few years ago, I learned that a lot of the motivation folk wisdom about, e.g., rewards and punishment is wrong, and those things are not particularly motivating and can in fact be demotivating. Even the "conservative" hardliners and dissenters in motivation literature like applied behavior analysis researchers and practitioners or Pritchard, Campbell & Campbell believe punishment is demotivating.

I think people espouse the virtues of tough love because it's easy. If someone isn't doing as well as you'd hope, or if someone seems disinterested, you can yell at them or force them to do something. It's easy to find anecdotal evidence of this having some effect on young people. You hold their feet over the coals and then they do the thing you asked, therefore your tough love made them into the intelligent and responsible adults they become, no credit due to having literature in the home, or to eating with them, or to giving access to the tools they need to think and be creative, or to the daily demonstrations we give of how to live in the world and get along with others.

Yeah, not disputing any of that. Interestingly I've come to realize the structured "tough love" I got in the service did more to bring out my work ethic and confidence than the previous nearly two decades of whatever my parents and teachers had been doing.

I am certain that almost no famous creative person would ever point to a disciplinarian as a prime motivator, though.