Interview #2: Max Goldberg

I've never been one to associate the idea of a cultural "critic" with the phenomenon of "laughter," but when I talked to San Francisco Bay Guardian film and music critic Max Goldberg a few months ago, I got a whole lot of the latter, a comforting balance to the overwhelming weight of his intelligence. For the past four years, Goldberg has worked his way up to writing thorough and thoroughly erudite features on some of the most enriching films and musical acts that have made their way through the City By the Bay. In addition to working at the Guardian, he wrote an extensive piece for the gallery opening of his close friends (and NewFlags comrades) Dave Wilson and Frank Lyon aka Ribbons, while also maintaining a part time position at event listing site Flavorpill.

Furthermore, Max’s band Stop Plate Tectonics blew the collective mind of all the NewFlags contributors back when we were in college together. In February, Max took a couple of hours out of his culturally fecund schedule to talk about the (dis)comforts of being a “Critic” with a capital C, the politics of being a tastemaker vs. a provoacteur, and how the hell you write about the art of friends who are so close, you call them brothers.

Thanks to Dave Wilson for taking the photo above, and many thanks again to Max for dropping some knowledge on us. Do check out Max’s excellent blog Text of Light (on the blogroll!), which compiles all his Guardian pieces along with other, equally learned musings on the world around him.

~ Ashraf
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NewFlags: So are you making a living writing?

Max Goldberg: More or less…”a living" is so relative, but it definitely feels good to have everything I'm doing somehow related to "the bigger picture." In addition to working at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I write for Flavorpill in San Francisco, which is an event listing site. I do something every day for that job, which isn't the most substantive – I troll the internet for events to list and write little blurbs about them. And then I freelance write a little bit scattershot – it always seems to go in waves. I’ll have a few assignments in a week and then I’ll be really working a lot, and then there’ll be another week where it’s more about just coming up with ideas and seeing what’s coming up on the calendar to be pitching to the people at the Guardian.

NF: I guess you can’t really let your mind wander too much because you have to be writing about something that’s playing relatively soon, right?

MG: Totally. I obviously feel fortunate to be in San Francisco just because there’s a good selection of things that are happening. And I feel like the culture is generally at a level where there’s always something interesting to be interacting with. Although, the idea of doing it in New York or in LA is a crazy notion to me because it’s such an overload. But it definitely is a very broad challenge to be coming up with projects and ideas that I might wanna think about and write about and carry out on my own that don’t necessarily have to do with “the films opening in March” or “the bands playing this week.”

NF: When did you start writing in an expository sense on films and music? I know you studied film in college, but were you writing or thinking about writing about art before then?

MG: Not with any grand design, certainly, and not consciously. I feel like it was a pretty natural transition for me, but I also feel like a bunch of little things just sort of happened and I ended up going with it. I ended up being a film major in school and ended up really digging that, but that wasn’t at all what I was expecting to do when I went there. And I guess my job at the Guardian feels the same way to me. I can easily imagine that that just wouldn’t have happened and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get around to doing this.

NF: Were you at least especially thorough in reading about music and movies?

MG: Yeah, they’ve always been an interest of mine. As far as reading about movies and music and “paying attention” to criticism – that’s something that really only started to happen for me after graduating from college. It was a sort of education after my education, because at school I did feel a kind of awakening, but at the same time, it was just reading what was handed to you. The Film department had a certain bent, and you’re very much watching and thinking and reading exactly what they give to you. And so I think that when I started to write in the fall of 2004, pretty much right after graduating in May, I just had a hunger to see what criticism was all about and read who the people are who do this really well. That first year for me was totally exciting, I was always thinking to myself “Whoa, this person is so big and I’m so persuaded by their view of things.”

NF: Are you finding that writing is deepening your enjoyment, or appreciation of the art? Or is it just another way to take it all in?

MG: Well, writing about film and music feel very different for me in the sense that the music stuff just feels like a natural growth – it’s a very local thing for me. I’m usually thinking and writing about the music that’s in front of me, or that my friends are really enthusiastic about. And I just write in a very expressive way about music and about taste.

Film criticism feels a bit more serious to me, I guess that’s more where I feel the “deepening” or the “broadening,” but I don’t know exactly how to put it into words. If I were to look back on the last few years, it’s a combination of first learning how to write by doing it, how to be writing in this format which is pretty narrow – I’m usually writing between 600 and 1500 words – and learning what you can do with that, and what the goals are with writing about films and the different ways you can write about and react to them.

The other part of it is constantly feeling like I’m just catching up – there’s all these directors and movements about which I might know a few things, but I’ve only been able to see one or two of their films. So much of this job is still about “Before I start shooting my mouth off about Jacques Rivette, I better actually try to see a few of his movies.” When you’re reading one of those great critics in Film Comment or something else, you realize these people are 55 years old and they’ve spent 30 years watching films really diligently. And you tell yourself that you have a lot of work to do to be able to develop that voice.

NF: Are there some specific writers you can think of you feel like you’re learning from?

MG: Yeah! At the Guardian, I feel so fortunate to have landed there and to have a relationship with Johnny Right Huston – he’s the Arts Editor and the Film Editor. With him, I feel like my taste has been shaped so much by where he’s steered me. It is getting increasingly rare for independent papers to have an actual staff, even if it’s really small – which it is at the Guardian – and to have these people steering the content. The other main paper in San Francisco is the SF Weekly, and it gets some of the syndicated reviews from the Village Voice, which then run everywhere else. So it’s just nice to feel this local vibe.

There are definitely a lot of different critics I respond to, critics who I’ve tried to go back to – I especially respond to Manny Farber, and to Andrew Sarris. Among working critics, especially in Film Comment, whenever Kent Jones or Amy Taubin write something, I feel like I’m always so easily wooed by what they have to say. And there are critics who I read whose erudition boggles my mind, if I’m reading Jonathan Rosenbaum or the really great Australian critic Adrian Martin, I feel like they’re doing a totally different thing than I am. I feel like I’m the hack saxophone player watching John Coltrane play. And, then there are other critics who I think are great for different reasons, like J Hoberman for the Voice or Manohla Dargis for the New York Times. Their stuff is more hopeful to me because I can more easily imagine myself writing what they're writing – I think part of it is that they’re writing for a more general audience than some of the more esoteric writers.

NF: I’ve always been curious about the experience of watching foreign films – to a certain extent, they feel like a critic’s domain and I’m curious if you see a sort of disconnect between the people doing very specific writing – like at Film Comment, where they’re maybe not catering to a specific audience, but they’re almost guiding it – as oppose to the New York Times, which can really appeal to a more general audience.

MG: There’s a couple of different parts to that. I think that both certainly have their place in terms of writing for the more general audience and writing for the coterie. And I think that part of my time doing this is sort of – and this is very much an ongoing process – is finding out what I’m good at or what it is I should be applying myself toward, and where my energies are best directed to. Not only is it ongoing, but I feel that thinking about it in that way is a very new thing to me because it’s taken a long time for me to even start thinking of myself as a critic, even though that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s such a tenuous lifestyle, it’s just taken a long time for me to be comfortable with what I do and the fact that I’ve been doing it for a while and I’ll continue doing it for a while and I can now think about how I want to be as a critic. So that’s definitely one thing.

And it’s interesting what you say about foreign films because I think there is implicitly in any film critic, and in a lot of more serious music criticism, there is this element of didacticism in a critic’s voice, or I guess in a more positive way, an instructive type of voice that is taking on this role. It’s like “Okay, here’s this thing, which is great, but because of various realities of distribution and capitalism, it’s not going to get pushed, so here it’s my role to really push this.” And I think that generally it is a service, although sometimes it can come off as being heavy-handed. The way any American critic is going to be writing about foreign films is going to be inherently problematic. The more and more you get into this stuff – especially if you’re getting into this more selective class of films or music or books – you’re necessarily crossing borders.

NF: You talk about the different ways to be a critic, but how do you see the role of the critic in our culture?

MG: Actually, one thing I did in preparation for your calling, I remembered this great quote I found some time last year. I’m paraphrasing it, it’s something that the French critic Serge Daney said: “A critic should either know something or love something. Or even better, know how to share this love with the general public.” I think that certainly appeals to me, especially because I naturally gravitate to what I guess you could call “affectionate criticism.” I’m usually drawn to writing about something because I’m interested in it and to some extent I like it, and that’s what drives me and that's what I want to express in my pieces. I never feel the urge to lay the smackdown on something that I’m writing about in feature-length. It could be fun to do in some little blurb on some schlocky movie, but not generally.

NF: That was definitely something that I appreciated when I was reading your pieces. Do you feel like you can account for why so many critics can be so negative?

MG: For one thing, I think some people are just good at it. Someone like Pauline Kael is an amazing stylist who can deliver this debilitating critique of a film. On the other side of her there’s someone like Susan Sontag who is so very, very intelligent, and her intelligence just towers over anything that she looks at. I think there are just certain critical voices that lend themselves to that kind of writing.

Accounting for my position, I think that part of it is certainly just a product of my greenness, my inexperience, and my nervousness to be too deliberate about something that I’m having a mixed reaction to. Also, I don’t have a weekly column or anything like that at the Guardian. If I did, I might see myself having more space to go after something.

So I think part of it is that I don’t get to step up to the plate every day, so when I do write, I want to spend time on something I’m drawn to. There’ve been certain things where I think I tried to register something’s being somewhat disappointing or in consideration of what came before it, its being problematic – but usually I try to integrate it into a pros and cons type picture, so it’s never a leveling critique. One day, I’d love to be able to lay the smackdown on something. I think of Susan Sontag’s essay on Diane Arbus, which I read not that long ago, and it’s so devastating and so overpowering. I just I can’t look at this woman’s photographs again, Sontag really delivers the death-knell.

NF: What’s your relationship with your editors? Do you feel you can articulate some of the things they’ve taught you?

MG: I think the things I’ve gotten the most from them haven’t been so much a product of intensive editing so much as direction in terms of “you should see this” or “you should read this” or “you should think about this.” Again, it speaks to my greenness and how much I have to catch up on. It’s a really good, broadening thing. When I’m Not There was coming out, I was talking to Johnny Ray about Todd Haynes. He has so much more of a direct plug-in with that because he was there writing about Haynes when he was first coming out and he was getting to know him. In that respect, there’s just a lot of knowledge to pass on.

But then, more generally, the encouragement that I’ve gotten from Johnny and Kimberly, the music editor, on specific pieces has been fortifying. There was one instance during last spring’s San Francisco Film Festival when Johnny asked me to write about this documentary called Forever by Heddy Honigmann about Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris. And again, it was one of these things that’s exciting when Johnny has seen something and he says “I think your sensibility would be great for this.” But I really struggled with that movie. I don’t know what it was, it’s a really beautiful film, but I just didn’t have some normal footholds, I didn’t have a good sense of reference for it, and she’s directed a ton of other documentaries, and I hadn’t seen any of them, so I felt really at a loss in a certain way. I was e-mailing with Johnny about that, and we had a nice correspondence about certain scenes in the film that we both really liked. And then I ended up writing a much more personal reaction to the film than some of my other aesthetic, or historical, pieces. This ended up being more of an emotional reaction. Johnny was so encouraging about that. It was a great feeling to know that I could respond to something with just me and read it in this way and the writing will still have value.

NF: You were just talking about I’m Not There, and there’s something you wrote about it in your piece on biopics, you said “It is epigrammatic, rather than evocative, and made to be written about.” How do you feel about films that need to be sussed out verbally, as oppose to more visceral ones?

MG: I think that’s a really important distinction and certainly a hard thing to make categorical judgments about. We don’t have to decide whether we want the slow and lyrical movie where it almost feels like a betrayal to put into words because it’s so much about the experience of the film, versus the movie that feels like a dissertation, that’s just built out of reference and is there to be written about. I mean, those films challenge me as they’re meant to be challenging, and they put me a little off-guard, which again, they’re designed to. Just think about Godard’s movies and how you’re playing this game with it, you know, responding to it with all this interpretation but then the film is doubling back on you. With the I’m Not There piece, I gave Todd Haynes the benefit of the doubt just because I think his motivation for making that was totally sound and it was a really interesting project, although at a more personal level, I was somewhat disappointed by that movie because I didn’t feel like there was quite enough “soul” in it.

NF: Along those lines, has having to write about music and movies gotten at all difficult when, for example, you’re trying to engage with something that has, as you said, “soul?”

MG: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are situations in which I feel myself pushing up against and experiencing my limits as a writer. And again, I am relatively new to this kind of expository writing, you know. When there’s something that has this “soul,” sometimes all I can do is take a deep breath. It’s always tricky to be putting something into words in this way, especially with music, which is one of these things that can be so silly. Sometimes you’re reading something about My Bloody Valentine and you think “how many different ways can I say ‘ethereal’?” If I’m ever feeling a little adrift in my writing, I try to remind myself that I’m really trying to give a person a sense of this work. I don’t need to wrap it up or totally explicate it, or even solve it.

NF: Do you feel like the stuff that we’re saying needs to be written about is any more or less valid? Do you see anything wrong with making a movie like that?

MG: No, not inherently. The best kinds of movies, I suppose, are really plugging in to their moment in culture and in politics and in history, and they let loose with this charge of what all the different, often fractured, strands of thought are at that particular moment in time. Some of the movies of Godard’s that I like best do actually have this cathartic quality for me, so that it feels like something has been thought over and worked out in some way, so I think it can be a necessary thing.

NF: Incidentally, I was recently reading something Harold Bloom wrote where he basically said he felt like looking at art through any lens other than a purely aesthetic one cheapens that work.

MG: Well, I naturally tend towards the aesthetic myself, that’s kind of just my taste, but…I’m not ready to argue the point with Harold Bloom. I do think it’s kind of silly in a way to be contending that the aesthetic doesn’t have shadings of other, political components. I guess he writes mostly about literature and poetry, which, since there is such a definite author, it’s easier to essentialize the aesthetic and the voice. Whereas, working with something like film or often with popular music, it’s a much messier picture.

NF: What was your reaction to that whole Sascha Frere-Jones article about indie rock needing to be “blacker?”

MG: (Laughs) It was…interesting…. I mean, I don’t quite get him in general. It feels like he has this amazing post at the New Yorker, but it’s confusing why it’s him. To me, the New Yorker is such a strange thing. I get it, and I love it, but for film and music criticism, it’s a bit of a strange beast. It often feels patronizing to me. I thought that he was certainly addressing something that we’re all aware of and that is very much present and I think is good to be talked about in this way because this is such a white-dominated subculture he’s talking about. Being in California these few years, it’s been a treat for me to dig in to what’s often called “freak-folk,” which is something I really enjoy for the most part, but at the same time, quickly gets ridiculous. I think that when I look back on this time it’ll be something I see as a trend that I really engaged with. So I sort of sympathize with where he was coming from – although I don’t know if I agree with what he said in this particular sense.

Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but generally it seems like “indie rock” is becoming a less and less useful designator. I think there’s a more interesting argument to be made with someone like the Talking Heads where you’re dealing with artists who contradict Jones’s premise. I think there’s a richer argument to be thinking about – to what extent are David Byrne and Brian Eno appropriating this music? You can acknowledge why something is important and at the same time try to get your hands dirty with what’s going on with it. Something else that I’m thinking now that struck me about that article is that it doesn’t ring true with my experience – and that’s part of my problem with the laziness of the “indie rock” tag – it sort of presupposes that there’s this small group of bands that’s the be-all, end-all for a lot of listeners. In my maybe skewed reality, all of my friends had momentous experiences with Pavement and all the other “canons” of indie rock, while still having hugely eclectic tastes. I could look at their iPods, and it’ll have the bands that Sascha Frere-Jones is talking about – the Pavements and Modest Mouses – but it’ll also have the Anthology of American Folk Music and the Goodbye Babylon set, and a Sly Stone album. It doesn’t ring true to me that there’s this group of people that’s cutting itself off from other kinds of music.

NF: Well let’s talk about what you mentioned in your e-mail earlier, the experience of writing about friends and their art.

MG: That’s so…big! That’s a different thing for me.

Frank and Dave, who work together as Ribbons, had a gallery opening last week showcasing some of their work. My essay looked at their collaboration, specifically their collaboration as Ribbons for the last couple of years, and then it looked at the specifics of this show which involved a lot of their individual contributions, whereas before the whole Ribbons entity was their joint thing to put on their different concerts to gather designs and put on shows. But this was something different – they were having this show that wasn’t so much a retrospective of what they’ve done so much as a celebration of the spirit of it, something to which they were both contributing their individual art pieces.

This funny thing occurred to me while I was writing that piece – the other big writing project that I had going on at that moment was something about Jandek, who’s a famously obscure, recluse musician. So here’s this piece for the Guardian and the nature of it is that you really can’t know anything about the author. You can speculate and look for different ways to get into the work. Ribbons was the total opposite, something I’m so intimate with. I mean, I live with Dave! So for me the challenge of that was how to strike some balance between having some level of critical distance to try to express something more objective about what it is I think they’re doing, and it was also important for me to be taking them seriously as artists. I think that’s something that’s often the case when working with friends or people you’re close to is that you’re always keeping tabs on a person and you know what it is that they’re up to and you know their style and stuff like that, but it’s kind of bracing to them to take a whole day to really really talk about where you’re coming from right now and what is this you’re creating. It was definitely a necessary thing to get going on the essay. I was absolutely drawing on my special experience and knowledge with them and using that to give a more intimate portrait, but it was a challenge, for sure.

NF: I guess last question is do you have a shortlist of movies and/or albums that have been criminally underrated over the years?

MG: Do you know Entrance? I feel like my experience with music is so local. I’ve had the opportunity to see him over the past few months – I think his last album is so good. Everything I read about him – it seems like people aren’t taking him seriously, a lot of people write him off as being this retro thing. Right now I feel like he’s operating on a totally different level. He’s someone I’ve totally been pulling for. I’ve also been really smitten with this songwriter Michael Hurley for the last year or two – that’s been another thing where I’ve had the chance to see him a couple of times and he’s totally a West Coast dude. He’s one of these people who has a really small base of people who admire him, but it’s one of those things where to know is to love him. He just has so many great albums and so many great songs, you wonder why this dude is not recognized in a broader way. It’s always good to have your stock of undervalued treasures.

NF: Are you making music these days?

MG: I’m not (laughs). My relationship to making music is kind of strange, or I guess estranged, right now. I was still doing it the first year I came out here. I don’t’ know if it’s right that writing has supplanted my music…that’s sort of the corollary, but I’m not sure I buy it. There’s part of me that still feels like I’m on vacation from doing music. It’s a strange little ghost around me. Talking so much to Ribbons about their processes, it was really helpful for me to reflect and recognize that “oh, these are some of the same things that I am doing, just in a different form, even if it’s a kind of secondary creation, since I’m jumping off of someone else’s work.” But in terms of the process and the commitment to it, it does feel artistic to me.

NF: Does that mean that Stop Plate Tectonics was kind of the last project you worked on?

MG: Yeah. Actually, the first year I lived out in California was such a different year for me because it was before a lot of my friends lived out here. So that whole year, in terms of music, I was just messing around on my own, never getting too deep into something. When Dave moved out here, it was such a treat – we were excited to be around each other and we played music together for a lot of that second year. We played together as Brothers because we were getting a lot of people thinking we were brothers. It was just this really casual, informal thing. We just each had a few songs and were just playing guitar together. I think because it was so casual, we both started to naturally gravitate to other things – Dave to his artwork and me to my writing. It was a natural-feeling thing to me because it was at a moment when I felt like music was something I enjoyed doing, but it wasn’t something that was firing me up. But there’s still a part of me that has my fingers crossed for some reawakening.





Stop Plate Tectonics - Spring Forward Fall Back.mp3