Not Fade Away

Youth for me is often characterized by spontaneity and conviction, tackling the unforeseen head-on, learning to personally adapt to shifting interrelated paradigms and opportunities, struggling to synthesize components of both the contemporary and historical real.

Not that careful planning doesn't also often play a strategic role, it's just that this aspect of youth is much less romantic, not to say that it isn't more durable, and more likely to win consistently when playing cards.

Tough to say which trajectory is more reckless.

And it's obviously relative too, the 27 year old seeming more youthful than someone in their 50s, etcetera, etcetera, wow.

David Chase's Not Fade Away concerns a number of youths and the rock and roll band they form during the '60s, as well as the familial and amorous relations of one of its members. Success is referred to within as the result of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, from a variety of socio-economic stances.

The question here is, according to this criteria, is Not Fade Away's exploration of youth a success, and if so, does it interrogate the reckless, planting a forest through the trees?

The dialogue also heavily favours the commercial side of art and it's this domain within which the film operates.

It's very calculated.

Throughout I kept thinking that this is the corporate packaged conception of what should be appealing to suburban youth without going so far as to plausibly alienate their parents, based on composite statistical data.

The only possible artistic moment (I should clarify what I mean by art in a book someday) occurs during a point where the film seems pointless, and you're thinking, good lord, corporate pointlessness, how 21st century!

But then the main couple critiques a film they're watching for its pointlessness, after which things become more bourgeois, and a more traditional plot takes shape.

Perhaps I'm too old to comprehend Not Fade Away's spontaneous conviction, but I am old enough to appreciate the skilful ways in which it condenses multidimensional intergenerational issues into a mildly entertaining fictional synopsis.

Still wasn't enough for me though, and if that 10% inspiration doesn't transmit at least the possibility of spontaneous artistic conviction to the rest of the text's perspiration, I can only state, that if packaged corporate youth is a success, with all its missionary incarnations mathematically corporealized, planned twenty years in advance (note that the Rolling Stones, whom I love, are still being used to classify youth 50 years later), and completely lacking spur of the moment improvisation, it's reckless, and therefore youthful, yet hopelessly banal (the wrong side of The Schwartz).

Gus Van Sant's Promised Land offers an escape from this predicament.

Not that this form is ever going to fade away.

Drank a busch tallboy while writing this.