The Musicals of Stephen Sondheim: If I had to go to bat that there is one American creator that can inspire the immortal love that generation after generation get from Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt, Montaigne, Pushkin (read him if you don't believe me...). Leaving aside that he's one of three creators I can think of who unquestionably transcends the classical/popular divide (Gershwin and Joplin, more on them anon), his musicals are owners' manuals for life itself - packed with the wisdom of the world. In Sondheim comedy stands proudly next to tragedy, realism next to the most astonishing fantastical flights - often in the same show, along with a gallery of characters possibly as unforgettable as Hamlet and Juliet. Look particularly to Gypsy, Company, A Little Night Music, and especially West Side Story and Into The Woods.
New Hollywood: when we talk about 'New Hollywood', we really mean the years 1967-1983. These were the years that movies, beset by television, had no idea what to do to keep audiences interested, so they did the only thing they could: trust the moviemakers to make the movies they wanted to make. There were a lot of creators who had one-off conferences with the mysterium, but they had it because Hollywood was, for that brief period, more interested in art than money, and many of the usual impediments to making something great just weren't there. Look particularly to The Godfather Epic and Star Wars obviously, but just a little more obscurely: Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Harold and Maude, Cabaret, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Carrie, Being There, The Right Stuff.
Scorsese and Spielberg: but there are two creators from that period whose entire output courts the kind of lastingness we attribute to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No prizes for guessing who they are. Now that they're on either side of 80, they're still doing much of their best work as though it's still 1975. If Sondheim plants a bullseye between classical and popular, Scorsese and even Spielberg exist just barely on either side of the high/low divide - again, no prizes for guessing which is which. Scorsese, for all his encyclopedic art, would be nowhere near so compelling without the streetwise dialogue and the pop music soundtracks, and that's nearly as true for his historical epics as his gangster ones - epics like Last Temptation of Christ and Killers of the Flower Moon seem to exist as much in the times they were made as they do in the times they're set. Spielberg, on the other hand, would not be Spielberg without shots that use light and darkness with all the virtuosic beauty of Rembrandt or Caravaggio, and whether popular blockbusters or historical epics, seem to have the spiritual charge of painting's old masters. I won't say which to look to by either, they're too well-known to need any recs from me, except to make a special plea for late Spielberg nobody went to the theater for like West Side Story and The Fabelmans, and certain less known early Scorsese like Mean Streets and After Hours.
The Simpsons, seasons 1-8: Screw you, it's my list, and any list of great art from me is going to have it. You either get why it's there or you don't. Whether its comedy will need footnotes in 50 years, all of American life is in it. If you want to understand what it means to be American, that's what you watch.
Louis Armstrong Symphony Hall Concert, Boston, 1947: It was with Satchmo that it all began. Play a single trumpet on a microphone loud enough, it can blow a 100 piece orchestra away. Whether the best pop music is great music as traditional poetics understand it, it is perfect like the great folk art, perhaps the greatest folk art we will ever know. And Louis Armstrong is greater than nearly anything that comes later. Like Mozart and Sondheim, all the comedy and tragedy of the world is in it, often compressed into two minute perfection, along with a type of rhythmic vitality that was almost entirely new to music. But as great as those 1920s recordings are, they only give a dim idea of what Satchmo sounded like live. The Symphony Hall Concert is doubtless a little grander than how dance hall and bar audiences were accustomed to hearing him, but this is him at his best in sound vivid enough for three dimensions.
Golden Age Disney: Leave aside the universality of stories, simultaneously leave aside any 'problematic' elements in their archetypal narratives, look at any drawing from Pinocchio, Bambi, Snow White, even Dumbo, and ask yourself if there is any less art that goes into it than the greatest art. Then ask yourself how the lightest elements in the human experience can exist next to forces that are so oppressively dark. There may be terrible holes in their storytelling, but narratives as absorbing as any there have ever been are told with art from the ages.
The Muppet Show - original run 1976-1981: Like The Simpsons, you could not explain the Muppets without watching them. I don't know what else to say.
The Gershwin Songbook: We tend to remember George Gershwin for his few orchestral pieces, and if people are lucky they get to hear Porgy and Bess, but the best Gershwin, the most perfect, the most vital, is isolated from any show, it's simply the songs themselves with lyrics by brother Ira. Like Sondheim, they perfectly straddle that line between high and low, comedy and tragedy. But if Sondheim exceeds Gershwin, it's because while Sondheim is interested in the hard work of relationships, Gershwin is interested in beginnings, the allure of possibility, particularly sexual possibility, which is the allure of so much sophistication personified by early 20th century Hollywood and Broadway. And yet, like Sondheim, the songs have meanings so much deeper than their surface. Just think of that famous line, 'who could ask for anything more?', when you think about it, he's got rhythm, he's got music, he's got sunshine, he could ask for a shitload more... Start with Ella Fitzgerald, but find as many of the great jazz singers doing Gershwin as you can: Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and crown it all with Nina Simone doing her towering, tragic cover of I Loves You Porgy.
Citizen Kane: It's almost impossible to talk about Kane without talking about technique, and literally impossible to talk about it without talking about its making. I'm going to try the former, won't even touch the latter. There were movies before Kane, but there were not Movies, and Kane is more than a movie, it's proof that if the work is great enough, it's dangerous. It's a work so good that it proved dangerous to its makers. So damning seemed this antihero who resembled a newspaper tycoon to an actual newspaper tycoon that the movie was almost destroyed unseen, while its director barely ever worked in Hollywood again, its screenwriter never did, and the studio which bankrolled it went bankrupt. Kane is proof that movies are often as much an artform as anything in Beethoven or Dante, and just as visceral as those two. Two hours go by in a flash of lightning, and so alchemically did Kane tap into the American spirit that it can be interpreted as a prophecy of Donald Trump.
Plenty more if I finish this...
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