Dear Vanessa --

Honest now: did you have any idea that there's a substantial Russian-bard scene in America? What's a "Russian-bard scene," you may ask? Why, Russian poet-troubador-singers who have a substantial, mostly-emigre fan base, what else?

I know a tiny bit about this because 2Blowhards visitor Tatyana told me about it. Tatyana's an amazingly interesting person -- a Russian emigree with an engineering degree who works in Manhattan as an interior designer. I've been lucky enough to swap a lot of emails with her, and to spend a couple of lunches gabbing with her too. I've gotten a lot out of comparing notes; I've even managed to get her to do some personalized art-coaching. Up next on the Netflix queue, for example: "Masters of Russian Animation." Tatyana tells me that one of the animators whose work is included is really brilliant.

I've badgered Tatyana a few times about putting some of what she knows into print. So I'm pleased she's taken the time to pull some info and thoughts toether, and that she's given me permission to run her words on the blog.

Here's Tatyana on the Russian-bard scene in America.

It is all true, you see. There is a Russian conspiracy in this country. Thousands of people on both coasts (and between, in ever-increasing numbers) belong to the network. Old, veteran members form the compact organizing nucleus, and although they are not being paid themselves, they collect fees from the regulars for various organizational needs. What's more, Russians from other countries are involved. Networks in different parts of Europe, the Middle East, Canada and, I suspect, Australia know of each other and coordinate their activities.

All right, I see you're sitting on needles. I want to introduce to you the Club of Self-Written Song of the U.S., aka the Bards Club Of America. Or: the Club of the Self-Created Song; or the Author's Song Club; or the Singing Poets Club, etc.

See, there is a long-standing disagreement about of what the proper name should be. I’ll call it KSP, by Russian abbreviation. I am afraid that my pen is unable to present in compact prose the detailed history of the movement. There is plethora of available material on the subject I'm having a hard time organizing in a concise manner. I'm sure there are many erudite people out there who’ll be shocked by my grossly inadequate outline. Let's just say that I'm writing this as a first introduction to the subject.

So, the history of the bard scene, or how I see it.

In the country formerly known as the Soviet Union, everybody led a double existence. And in this multilayered world, songs by bards were part of the hidden, sincere, human, core side of our lives. Like contraband books by old and new writers that official critics labeled anti-Soviet and that we read only in Samizdat, songs written and sung by Bulat Okudjava, Yury Vizbor, Veronica Dolina, Vladimir Vysotsky and hundreds of others were a sort of underground soul food, a reflection of reality that was unavailable through the usual channels.

It started in the late 50's, after survivors from Northern and Siberian camps started to trickle back to populated parts of the country. Very few of them could write like Solzhenitsyn or Varlaam Shalamov, but many more could sing prison songs. The so-called blatnye pesni were written by career criminals, and songs based on the experience of the camps were written by political prisoners, but in form resembled the former (sometimes even using the same melody).

Society's attitudes towards prisoners changed during the "Thaw" years of the 1960’s. Political "ZK" (inmates), who were previously considered "the enemies of the People," became human again. Suddenly Pushkin's line about "mercy to the fallen" was quoted in Pravda; public debates about "physicists vs. lyricists" filled the arenas with audiences. And the first shy voices of social and political dissent started to appear semi-publicly.

Vysotsky started with songs imitating blatnye pesni, and soon became the best-known Russian bard. (Here's a page about him. See also the excellent Sasha Voloch article here.)

Another source was the tradition of so-called "urban romance," a 19th-century melodramatic musical form mostly of love triangle-themes. There were some folk influences, too, but negligebly few. The first here was Bulat Okoudjava. Songs in his tradition by different authors are the best in whole KSP movement.

At the same time it became desirable to choose "manly man" professions not associated with the Party, Communist ideology and such. Spending a field season in the tundra as geologist was considered a more romantic and masculine thing to do than to be a literary critic in a state publishing house. Being a journalist was interesting only if he was writing about people of "self- dependent professions": pioneers of Siberian exploration, mountain climbers, sailors, commercial pilots, submarine officers, etc.

One such journalist, Yury Vizbor, was writing reports for newspapers and also poems about the people he'd written about in his articles. Vizbor also sang his poems, accompanying himself on the guitar. He became one of the patriarchs of the so-called "Tourist Song" ("tourist" meaning mostly camper and/or hiker -- in Soviet conditions). His songs are considered classics of the genre. Links to some of them can be found here. There are 342 recordings listed, some of the more famous titles being "Snowstorm," "North Fleet," "I lost my heart in Fan Mountains," "3 minutes of Silence," "Ocean," "Don’t feel sorry for me" -- you get the idea.

When I feel sentimental, I tend to mumble his "Forest Sun" under my breath:

… Quiet and sad the creek by the amber pine
Ash on the morning embers
Everything’s ended, words are useless now
My sweet, my forest sun
Where and in what land will I see you again?

(You can see more here. Scroll down to "Forest Sun.")

Those were people at the cradle. This year is a commemorative one for three authors: Okudjava, Vizbor and Klyachkin. (I know, I know, how the hell to pronounce "Klyachkin"? That’s why I didn’t say anything about him -- but believe me, he’s very good, too).

There are thousands of bards now, in Russia and abroad: people who write their own lyrics and music and sing it, too. These are bards in purest sense, like Vadim Pevzner (here), who lives simultaneously in New York and Moscow. And then all possible variations too: people who perform somebody’s songs but are not singers by profession; people who use somebody’s verses as lyrics for their own songs and sometimes sing them, too, etc. The ruling principle from the beginning was that all these people were amateurs, and had unrelated professions and/or earned their living by some other means. There were three or four exceptions, which obviously only confirms the rule.

Things have changed now, what with the fall of the Soviet Union, with the impossibility of finding work in certain fields (mostly science and research), with emigration, etc. Looking at some of the biggest names (living and not): Sergei Nikitin, PhD in Physics, Moscow State University, scientist. Yuri Vizbor -- as I said above, journalist, but also a screenwriter, alpinist, and radio personality. Viktor Berkovsky -- he graduated from the "aristocratic" Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, and is a metallurgist and pedagogue. Alexei Brunov -- an engineer-geologist, he has degrees from two universities. Veronika Dolina -- professor of French. Yuli Kim -- professor of Russian, Social Sciences and History, screenwriter and playwright. Aleksandr Mirzayan -- scientist, Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics.

All of them are widely-known authors/performers. There are duets, trios and solos on international tours now too. Some are larger musical groups, with a varied selection of instruments; purists call any instrumentation more complex than a solo guitar an abomination. There are vivid discussion on hundreds of KSP forums on all related issues. (For example, here -- in Russian, alas.)

And there are slets, or festivals. Some are small. But some are huge: true Woodstocks of the Bard Song.

A month ago I was standing at the Center Jersey train station, on my way to a slet. I was very unpleased with myself. So much preparation, endless phone conferences, lists of who takes what, schedule synchronizing, counting of vacation days -- and here I am, circling around an unfamiliar station where I was told I'll be picked up by a stranger. The rucksack was heavy on my back and my supposed ride was nowhere to be seen -- and I even forgot to print the e-mail with the guy’s cell number!

I'd missed the previous event last winter. I was torn between two unrelated gatherings, and of course the one I finally chose, in the city, turned out to be a total waste of time; the person I'd most wanted to see didn't even show up. So this year, I decided to go the woods no matter what. Normally, sleeping in the woods is not my idea of great time: insects, shaky tents with their illusion of privacy, bumpy ground under the sleeping bag (I'm no princess, but I still prefer a reasonably comfortable mattress for my sleeping accomodations). Besides, when it’s dark, my not-ideal vision gets even worse, and I expect herds of threatening night animals to jump at me from behind any tree.

So why am I … -- ah, here, my ride just arrived, an SUV packed with camping gear, one dog, one wife, two guitars and one junior. And quickly we're on the road to the Pokonos, Indian Head campground, home of the Summer slet of the Bard Club of the East Coast. (You can see their logo here -- and feel free to browse the section for more photos). Incidentally, those three famous heads are not Marx, Engels and Lenin, as you might think, but founding fathers of the genre: Vizbor, Okudjava and Klyachkin. The reason they're portrayed together is because this year happen to be their memorial year. Thus the name of the slet: "Memorial."

Slets on the East Coast have been taking place for seven years. The first one consisted of 150 people; there were no visiting stars, just amateurs and admirers of tradition. Some of them had known each other since their college days in the Old Country, where they were members of the local clubs or simply listened to the tapes of their favorite authors. Or they met during one of the big festivals back in Russia, for example "Grushinsky" (or simply "Grushinka") in Samara on Volga, with its floating on water stage in the shape of a guitar. Grushinsky has been held for 31 yrs, and last year there were about 200 thousand attendees. (See here.)

I never went to any of the big slets even in my 20's, in my first college years. I knew about the movement, of course, and admired the songs, as well as the ideas behind them. I gladly attended any concerts available in my Ural University city (official and unofficial alike) by visiting celebrities. In fact, it was me who introduced my younger sister to the whole idea.

But there were some personal exterior circumstances (as well as differences in our personalities) that left me a mere occasional listener and made her one of the organizers in her college club. Oh, the stories she used to tell me. A Moscow slet during one of the summer breaks: it snowed in June and temperature fell to minus C deg. Forest meadow became a snowfield, and the occupants of her tent had to warm up the beer bottles all night on their own bodies to keep them from freezing and exploding (and to have something to cure them in the morning, of course). Or another one: when given the wrong directions, their group wandered into some military territory and had to explain themselves to the major (and eventually share their fuel supplies to get released) ... Well, these stories could fill up couple of volumes. Perhaps another posting.

So it was with some mild reservations that I agreed to finally make acquaintance with the local KSP scene. I imagined a handful of middle-aged guys, channeling their middle-age crisis the safe way -- into a nostalgic pool of their cool youth memories, their middle-aged wives happily accompanying them on a "no-kids-present" trip. Not that anything would be wrong with that, mind you.

I found something I didn't expect, though. We arrived on Friday afternoon, handed our tickets at the parking gate to scary-looking guards with walkie-talkies in full camouflage with bulging pockets on their uniform (called GOP, no relation -- simply means Security Group). We found our site, I saw my sister, and I carried my stuff to her tent.

It was the usual camping atmosphere: about 10 tents surrounding a fire pit, folding table and chairs, people in shabby clothes unloading coolers. Introductions: I immediately mixed up names, cities, professions, who is currently whose wife (and boy, was it fun afterwards figuring out supposed connections!). There were hundreds of similar sites around, adding up to around 2,500 people present. (I was told there were about 500-600 people who didn't manage to get tickets … )

There was one huge central stage at the soccer field (not very good pic, but you can see S. Nikitin here), with a schedule of big concerts pinned to the pole: 3-4 every day/night of the weekend, not counting impromptu "guitar-around-the-circle" events at every site.

From first concert on Friday night and for two more days (and nights) I didn't have a spare moment to reflect. Instead, I soaked up poetry, music, and new people like a desert soil under the rain. I didn't even know I had this need in me until I started listening. Maybe because I wasn't expecting much I was totally captivated and became so enthusiastic I didn't recognize myself. There wasn't even that much vodka in me, honest; besides, summer nights are quite cold in the Poconos, so warming up is essential.

Some pictures from my memories. Here's the so-called Pentagon (I was told the name comes from its geometrical shape) -- gigantic pieces of tree trunks surround a huge camp-fire with improvised sound apparatus on one side and a long procession of singers. And what a performance! The stars of the evening -- guests from abroad, live. S. Nikitin (solo and with his son, who lives in the US with his American wife, doing scientific research). Psoy Korolenko (a real scream, see his site here ). Local celebrities Vladimir Muzykantov (a serious scientist, MD, professor of medicine, here -- an outstanding, exquisite poet and songwriter (see here; track 9, "Nostalgia"). From his other song:

What force throws us to the cushions
We are dying in our last kiss
And above us our souls are flying by
To the paradiz, to the paradiz, to the paradiz …

Arkady Dubinchik (a programmer and software writer, Washington -- sorry, no tracks of his beautiful songs at his site, only his great poetry: youll have to take my word for it ). Alik Alabin (here --click on tracks for sound samples ). Oh, there is no way I can list everybody -- I don't know the names of three-quarters of them!

Three hours of sleep a night on average; breakfast, smoothly flowing into an early lunch ... Food and drink offered by strangers. An orange campfire in pitch-blackness. Lena S., with her 10 yrs-younger girlfriend in the shadow behind, handling Lena's glass, sweater, cigarettes while she sings her angelic songs -- nobody knows the girl's name despite her being Lena's companion of six years and present on all the slets. Nikitin with sore throat at our site at 2:30 a.m., with all of us humming along. The famous song "Key" by Alabin and Shvets (they hadn't sung together for a long time, but made an exception for this slet). A guy who gave me a ride telling us a story about how he went to Reagan's funeral -- and thus triggering political discussion over kebabs. Somebody unknown wandering to our site with all ingredients for gin and tonic (even ice cubes in thermos), asking only for our glasses to fill (by than started to dawn). After lunch: photojournalist Yury L. reading aloud his daughter's short stories next to our tent (she's a paralegal deployed to Iraq) …

What surprised me the most was how many young people were there -- at least 50%. And they not only knew the old songs and authors of the past generation. Instead, they were singing their own -- in Russian! -- around their own campfires.

Sunday morning my sister found me a direct ride to Brooklyn -- Olya, an economics student at Carnegie-Mellon, 21. I arrived home with my head full of new voices and faces, with random poetic lines in my ears, and completely out of voice myself. I was fighting a severe allergy attack (something's always blooming in the forest) and an aching back. And I haven't been that happy for a very long time.

I got out of the car. On the corner a girl was waiting for cars to pass: black skirt to her heels, studded with metal and applied cords, military boots, a torn violet Goth top, magenta lipstick and … a Muslim headdress. Welcome back to reality.

For further browsing, try here, here, here, and here.

Many thanks to Tatyana.

Best,

Michael

at July 24, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Until today, I'd thought that the most vulgar/outrageous/naughty (depends on the mood, doesn't it?) nonporn magazine titles I'd ever run across were those of two hipster style/fashion rags: Wad, and Self-Service. "Self-Service" -- the perfect magazine title for a solipsistic, it's-all-about-pleasing-yourself age, eh?

But there's a new contender. Browsing around the magazine racks this afternoon, I spotted a glossy called ... FaceFull. And, no, it's not oral-sex porn; it's not even a hipster style/fashion magazine. Instead, it's an edgy, snazzily-produced magazine devoted to the, er, sport of paintball. Splat!

Here's FaceFull's website. Trekkies may enjoy the magazine's visit with William Shatner, paintball enthusiast.

Best,

Michael

at July 24, 2004 | perma-link | (0) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Once again, I've missed my chance. Putting together my posting (here) about how bizarre it is that teenage values have taken over the general culture, out-of-the-loop me didn't pounce on the fact that July 2004 has been settled on by experts as the 50th anniversary of the birth of rock 'n' roll. 2Blowhards: always your first source for breaking news.

In celebration of rock's big birthday, The Spectator's Michael Henderson has written an entertainingly cranky rant. (I'm tickled to notice that he mentions a few of the same sociological facts I wrote about in my posting.) Since the piece isn't online, I'll type out some passages from it. Henderson mentions Elvis' 1954 recording of "That's All Right, Now," and goes on in this way:

The postwar world, increasingly obsessed by youth, needed a standard-bearer to sing its own songs, and anointed a gauche kid from Tupelo, Mississippi, whose gift was to transform the raw music of poor blacks into comforting, bite-sized chunks for white record-buyers. At a stroke, the teenager was born, an unsettling development for men and women who were still coming to terms with the fracturing consequences of a horrible war.

Half a century later it seems that teenagers, and the people who cater for their easy, pliable tastes, have taken over the world. And don't imagine that being a teenager simply means awaiting the key to the door. Some people carry their teenage years into middle-age ...

Let's spit it out. Pop culture may be 50, it may even have provided some innocent (and not so innocent) entertainment along the way, but it has never grown up and it never will ...

With few exceptions, [pop music] is melodically obvious, harmonically non-existent and lyrically execrable ... With its manufactured sense of outrage, juvenile emotionalism, bogus egalitarianism and grotesque sentimentality, pop lacks the capacity to express any feelings other than the most basic: that by trying to be rebellious in some inchoate, let's-goad-the-parents sort of way, it has turned out a succession of illiterate chumps who are more conformist than the 'establishment' figures they find it daring to mock ...

No form of entertainment, not even the film industry, has produced so many unpleasant people, addicted to drink, drugs, sex or self-regard, and no art form (if we can call it that) has been so indulged by the media. Far from it. Drug-taking and sexual excess are held to be an indispensable part of a rock 'n' nroll 'lifestyle'... How many thousands of young people seduced by the promise of 'liberation' have discovered instead that the road of excess leads not to the palace of wisdom but to a life of enslavement? ...

Pop music can supply excitement, but not true joy. It cannot ennoble, but it can demean. It has no capacity for personal growth, and is hostile to the very notion of beauty. It lacks tenderness, compassion and forgiveneess, and without those qualities there can be no art ...

Henderson confesses that as a kid he too had his favorites: King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, and especially Roxy Music. But I get the feeling -- don't you? -- that he's decided the time has come to move on.

So what if Henderson overdoes it a bit -- he makes some good points. And, besides, isn't "going provocatively far out on a limb" what we pay opinion columnists (and especially British opinion columnists) to do? The Spectator's website is here.

Best,

Michael

at July 24, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments

Dear Vanessa --

The weather in NYC was hot and humid the day after the Wife and I returned from our Caribbean vacation. "Good lord," she said when we got together that evening. "Did you see what the young girls were walking around in today? They looked like sluts!" Coming from a Wife who's no more of a prude than I am -- puh-leeze, we both enjoyed ourselves in the '70s -- that was saying a lot.

I wonder: are this year's slutty fashions much different than last year's slutty fashions? What I'm noticing seems mainly like souped-up retreads:

• The Amazing Ruffled Mini. These are skirts that hug smoothly from below-navel to halfway down the hips, then flare dramatically for six inches before cutting off entirely. The stretchiness up top makes the hips go switch-switch-switch, while the ever-in-motion ruffles offer promises of paradise. Men all over the city are praying for breezes, because not much more than a breeze is required to flip up one of these barely-there hems. And the skirts have certainly made following a girl up the subway stairs a particularly suspenseful exercise.
  
• Clingier fabrics. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but it seems as though this summer's bellybaring tops are even more revealing than last year's. Not in terms of flesh displayed -- how could they reveal more flesh? -- but in terms of what they reveal about what's beneath. Last year was all about nipple-pokies. This year seems to be about giving away nipple-details. When bras are worn, the location of the label can be discerned, and the number of clasps can be counted.
  
• Stretch terry to the max. Who was the genius fabric-engineer who turned terrycloth into such an alluring thing? This year's stretch terry seems very, very thin, and especially stroke-able. I'm mostly seeing it in hotpants and lowslung sarong-like skirts.
  
• Slash-cut wraparound skirts. Some of them cut 'way up to the hipbone, if only on one side. Have you noticed how many of these fashions require a great deal of management? There's the tight grip that prevents buttcheek embarassments; there's the clutching and tugging meant to battle hem-creep. Perhaps these fashions really serve a purpose. Perhaps girls, who no longer smoke as much as they once did, simply need new ways to busy their hands.

Has all sense of "appropriateness" gone out the window, do you think? Even last year, there was still a clear distinction between "clothes you'd wear at the beach, or to a party, or skanking around the East Village" and "clothes you'd wear in a respectable part of town." This year, that distinction seems to have vanished. It's very striking, for instance, the way that semi-see-thru white pants -- which last year was beachwear, a daring coverup to put on over your bikini -- are now a standard thing in midtown.

The public/private distinction also seems to be continuing its long, inevitable decline. What with the current semi-transparent, gauzy fabrics -- and with the underwear-as-outwear thing now viewed as an established and classic style -- much of the diff between publicwear and privatewear has evaporated. Hey: if it feels good in the boudoir, why change for dinner?

I've noticed a shift in attitude too. As you remember, NYC women are deservedly famous for how aggressively they push their sexiness. To be more accurate, what they're famous for is sending off very loud mixed signals, along the lines of: "Look at me, dammit! Now!"/"What the fuck do you think you're looking at?" -- Gina Gershon on a bad-PMS day, in other words. This summer, I'm finding that many of the sparkly mediakid gals are projecting another attitude entirely. The showing-off and teasing are done confidently and serenely. Walking around town in wispy nothings, doing their best to look like sexpots from "The O.C.," the young gals seem to be expecting ... Well, what?

Certainly not wolf whistles -- how 20th century would that be, eh? The idea that guys might feel turned-on, moved, annoyed, angered, or outraged doesn't seem to have occurred to them. No, the women seem more robotic than that. You have to wonder what they are expecting. Applause? A promotion? Good Nielsen ratings?

My theory is that today's young women have grown up being encouraged to think of feeling hot and doing a lot of self-expression as not just good and fun, but as the keys to success in life generally. Going around looking like a videoslut strikes them as ... cool. Neat. A sign that you're one of life's winners.

Lord knows I've got nothing against self-expression per se, though I do think that the idea of "not expressing yourself" is being undersold these days. Whatever happened to these joys: relaxing; being silent; keeping your own company; playing fly-on-the-wall; and not worrying about the limelight. They aren't exactly in heavy rotation, are they?

But the real downside of the cult of self-expression seems to me to be how badly the other side of the equation -- namely, how your behavior is going to be taken by others who are present -- is being neglected. (Perhaps it's even being demonized.) Practically speaking, this neglect isn't just puzzling and inconvenient; it's a communications disaster, because it's only by observing, interpreting, and responding that communication can take place at all.

But maybe 20somethings aren't interested in communicating. The young 'uns I observe don't seem to be, anyway, at least not in any traditional way. For all the enthusiastic self-expression they indulge in, the 20somethings I see largely seem devoted to acting out. Lordy, I haven't witnessed so much venting and squabbling since I was in nursery school. The 20somethings don't seem to me like people interested in the experience of communication; they seem instead like solipsistic monads exhibiting a lot of Brownian motion.

I find I can't make sense out of much of what they say, for instance. This isn't a mere matter of me being unhip to current slang. It's that I can find no word-based content, let alone logic, in what they say. What they seem to be peddling instead is acting-out behavior -- gesticulating, squabbling, grabbing, etc. (They express themselves at each other, guffaw at how brilliant they've been, then set to squabbling again.) The words they speak convey no meaning, they're just dressing on the self-expression package. Each mediakid is his/her own genius performance artist. Or maybe it'd be more accurate to think of today's 20something as an MTV show, and his/her persona as that show's video-jock host. They always seem to be imagining themselves performing for a videocamera.

To my mind, it adds up to nothing but energy, agitation and noise. So I find myself switching gears when I deal with them. Since there's nothing to be found in what they say, I do my best to interpret their behavior. I switch into "acting" mode; I forget about the lines and look for and respond to subtext instead.

Life is passing this old coot by, I guess. 'Way back in my day, squabbling, and having tantrums were considered bad behavior; kids who were too prone to venting were quarantined until they quit it. Acting-out generally was considered to be -- if occasionally therapeutic and fun -- not a standard-operating-procedure way of making your way through life. Not for the first time do I wonder: what's it going to be like to have a boss from this generation?

As I was walking back from the doctor today -- dodging sidewalk cellphonists, of course -- I was wondering what it is that this summer's style of gal-dress really means. Is it just "I'm hot!" "Look at me!" And "I'm a star"? Perhaps what the styles convey is, "Nobody ever said 'no' to me."

I was pleased with myself and began reviewing the idea. Could I perhaps be onto something? I was giving the idea some thought when the answer walked by: a mother and her teenaged daughter dressed in matching clingy bellytops and ruffled minis -- a hot, 35-ish blonde accompanied by her hot, Anna K.-style child, both equipped with legs, tans, bellybutton hardware, and cellphones. Not only was this a mom who'd never said No; she obviously looks to her daughter for style tips.

I wonder what'll become of office-dress expectations as the bellybutton crowd begins to advance. Isn't it inevitable that they'll want the corporation to make room for their preferences? How far will they be able to go before the Boomer bosses blow the whistle?

Curious about this, I've been giving officewear more attention than usual recently. Spotted so far this summer: only a few spaghetti-strap tops but lots of sleevelessness; no minis; and, surprisingly, much more breast cleavage than I remember from years past. After a decade of the rawest butt fetishism, could breasts be making a comeback?

Bare bellies have yet to turn up at the office. Well, frankly bare bellies, anyway. We do seem to be sidling edgewise up to the look, though. Some of the more daring young gals, I've noticed, have taken to wearing tight tops that barely reach the waistbands of their pants, and that don't overlap them at all. If these young women should happen -- just happen, you understand -- to lean over? Or should these curvy and taut creatures maybe -- just maybe -- reach up for something on a high shelf? And if some yummy young bellyflesh should go on display? Well, gosh, nothing was intended, was it? So where's the harm?

How are the young gals out your way dressing on hot 'n' humid days? And what are you observing about dress-expectations (and dress-habits) at the office?

Steve Sailer reviews Stephen Rhoads' new book about sex differences here; I put some of the book's facts into a blog posting here.

Best,

Michael

at July 22, 2004 | perma-link | (24) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Those people who continue talking on the cellphone even while paying the cashier? How can anyone be so rude? And how's the cashier supposed to take their behavior? Nate Davis has been the cashier; he tells how fond he is of rude cellphone behavior here.

Being one of Manhattan's few cellphone-free inhabitants myself, I see no upside whatsoever in the devices. As far as I'm concerned, all they've introduced into my life are a lot of unwanted externalities: madly-gabbing one-armed drivers; pedestrians who weave about erratically while waving their arms (a genuine nuisance in NYC, where sidewalks are narrow and crowded); cab drivers overexcited to be in touch with relatives in Nigeria. Worst of all: colleagues who leave work early because you can "reach them on the cell" after all -- but who, when you do call them, can't concentrate, struggling as they are with bad connections and screaming kids.

At the doctor's today, I discovered yet another bummer: waiting rooms have been changed for the worse by cellphones. Perverse though it may sound, I used to enjoy the half-hour wait for the doctor. The air conditioning ... the magazines I'd never read otherwise ... the dozing and deep-breathing ...

What with cellphones, though, the half-hour wait for the doc has become one long annoyance. There's the beeping and chirping to contend with, as well as the one-sided, overloud conversations. Today, I got to hear a business deal being hashed out; a Daddy being implored repeatedly to give his daughter more money; and train reservations get arranged. There was also the inevitable conversation about where exactly the cellphonist is located. ("Well, I'm in the doctor's waiting room right now. I got here about ten minutes ago, and blah blah ...") Not a single one of these cellphone gabbers made any effort to go out into the hall and leave the rest of us in peace.

Are you any good at triumphing in these situations? I'm not. "Glaring," my usual weapon of choice, serves no purpose in NYC, where people make faces back at you and double their volume levels. I'm too polite a mid-American -- or maybe just too terrified -- to try scolding people for their bad manners. New Yorkers like nothing better than someone who's telling them to act decently; it gives them a target to heap abuse on. Shush someone, or (worse) tell them to be considerate, and the word "fascist" is guaranteed to be launched at you within seconds. Inside of a minute, you'll find yourself saddled with blame for slavery, various wars, and gas-price hikes. So I keep to myself, writhe impotently, and wind up feeling bad about my impotence.

But, given that none of my companions in the doctor's waiting-room looked even the slightest bit peeved by all the cellphone rudeness going on around them, I guess the battle for quiet and civility has already been lost. And the BBC reports here that Europeans love love love their cellphones, and feel they can't live without 'em.

Best,

Michael

at July 22, 2004 | perma-link | (14) comments

Many thanks to everyone who offered tips and coaching about controlling commentspam. Being the weeniest of technoweenies, I'm dependent on the kindness of strangers, and so am doubly appreciative.

Major thanks as well to Daniel and Leilah at Westgate Necromantic who, overnight, installed MTBlacklist and the MTCloseComments plugin -- I wouldn't have been able to accomplish such a task in a zillion years. (Any computer challenge more demanding than typing in a password is beyond me.) But Daniel and Leilah have left me feeling optimistic once again about this blog's chances of surviving the evil plague of commentspam.

I enthusiastically recommend Daniel and Leilah, by the way, to anyone interested in setting up (or updating, or tweaking) a blog or a website. They're fast and good, their prices are fair, and they're a complete pleasure to deal with. Their own smokin' Goth website is here.

at July 22, 2004 | perma-link | (0) comments

Dear Vanessa --

I've been enjoying the heck out of James McMurtry's tasty and rockin' alt-country CD Too Long in the Wasteland. His music works for me in a way many people say Springsteen's works for them. McMurtry's tone --cussed, sardonic, and bitter, if also careworn and companionable -- brings his stuff alive in a way that really delights me, while Springsteen's earnestness and myth-making almost always make me roll my eyes like a bored, disbelieving teenager. McMurtry's got the kind of sly deadpan you might associate with a bearded trucker; a hyperarticulate, steely mind; and a surprising capacity for the tender and the mournful. I find the combo a treat.

I can't resist the pleasure of typing out some of the lyrics to his song "I'm Not From Here." Imagine them sung by a rough-edged, still-waters-run-deep kind of guy; imagine a loose-limbed and fleet-footed band playing flyin'-down-the-highway music.

I'm not from here
I just live here
Grew up somewhere far away
Came here thinking I'd never stay long
I'd be going back soon someday

It's been a few years
Since I got here
Seen 'em come and I've seen 'em go
Crowds assemble, they hang out awhile
Then they melt away like an early snow

Onto some bright future somewhere
Down the road to points unknown
Sending postcards when they get there
Wherever it is they think they're goin'

I'm not from here
I just live here
Can't see that it matters much
I read the papers and I watch the nightly news
Who's to say I'm out of touch?

Nobody's from here
Most of us just live here
Locals long since moved away
Sold their played-out farms for parking lots
Went off looking for a better way

Onto some bright future somewhere
Better times on down the road
Wonder if they ever got there
Wherever it was they thought they'd go

Hit my home town
A couple years back
Hard to say just how it felt
But it looked like so many towns I mighta been through
On my way to somewhere else

I'm not from here
But people tell me
It's not like it used to be
They say I shoulda been here
Back about ten years
Before it got ruined by folks like me

What a fab, jaunty-depressive evocation of the just-passing-through, ashtray-ish Nowheresville we've transformed so much of America into, and of the lost-but-in-a-hurry deadend that American adulthood so often turns out to be. Good lord, the bleary and clueless things we choose to do with our freedom and our prosperity. Come to think of it, I wonder if McMurtry has read James Kunstler's wonderful New Urban-ish jeremiads The Geography of Nowhere (buyable here) and Home From Nowhere (buyable here).

McMurtry's terrific disk can be bought here. Here's McMurtry's website. Here's a good profile of McMurtry by Roy Kasten.

Best,

Michael

at July 21, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments

Dear Vanessa --

I woke up this morning to find hundreds and hundreds of new spam-comments deposited on this blog. It took more than half an hour to cleanse them away. When it gets to this stage, spam-comments become more than a mere annoyance; they start threatening to make blogging not worth a blogger's time. In recent months, I've had to spend hours and hours of my life on spam-comment maintenance to keep this blog in running order. I've got nearly 500 IP addresses on our "banned" list so far. 500! -- that's 'way too much banning, and 'way too much time spent on banning.

But the worst was yet to come, because this morning I also discovered a scary and unwelcome new spam-comment twist, a new generation (I think) of spam-comments: spam-comments that appear on the public version of the blog -- a websurfer looking at a posting would see them -- but that don't show up from inside the guts of the blog. In other words, the spam-comments have been deposited on the blog in such a way that visitors can see them, yet I can't delete them. When I go behind the scenes to do my usual spam-comment maintenance, these new spam-comments are invisible, so I can't get at them to zap them.

I'm not sure I'm being clear, so forgive me for trying again. The affected posting when viewed by a visitor is dotted with spam comments. But the same posting when viewed from within Movable Type -- which usually shows the posting's contents as well as all the attached comments -- doesn't show that any spam-comments are on the posting at all.

Some examples of postings that from the public's p-o-v have tons of spam-comments on them but which from inside Movable Type don't: this posting here, this one here, this one here, this one here, this one here, and this one here. From within Movable Type, I can see none of the spam-comments visitors can see. So I can't remove them, and I'm having nightmares about watching the blog drown in tidal waves of spam-comments that I'm helpless to do anything about.

Has anyone run across these newfangled spam-comments? Is there a sensible way to contend with them?

Also: is now a good time to upgrade to Movable Type 3.0? I confess to feeling baffled when I look at Movable Type's webpage (here). I can't tell whether we're being told that geeks and only geeks should now make an early move, or whether the time has come for everyone to upgrade.

Many thanks for advice and tips.

Best,

Michael

at July 21, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments

Dear Vanessa --

* The other day, The Wife -- who's usually even more uninterested in politics than I am -- made what struck me as an amazingly useful point about American politics. "The reason why politics in America is so infuriating," she said, "is because the only thing it's ever really about is business. It isn't about 'liberalism' or 'conservatism' -- there's never anything philosophical or political in the larger sense at stake. It's really just about where you stand on business. The Republicans are pro-business and the Democrats are anti-business. That's it. And what's deeply infuriating about that is that in America the only thing that's ever really at stake is business." I'm not sure her formula explains absolutely everything about the American political scene, but it seems to do an awfully good job of explaining about 80% of it. It also strikes me as a far more solid and defensible thesis than what many recent deep-think political bestsellers have peddled. ("The End of History," anyone?) Interested publishers are invited to make offers through my email address.

* John O'Sullivan's excellent cover story in The American Conservative is readable here. It's an essay about Samuel Huntington's recent book, "Who Are We?", and it's thoughtful, informative, and hysteria-free. Those curious about American identity -- and especially the America's-always-been-a-multicultural-society crowd -- should enjoy giving O'Sullivan's essay a wrestle. They'd get a lot out of Huntington's book, as well as David Hackett Fischer's study of America's British roots, Albion's Seed, too. The Huntington can be bought here; Fischer's book is buyable here. A good passage from O'Sullivan's essay:

America’s elites—both the corporate elites of the Right and the academic elites of the Left—do not share the opinions and tastes of the American people. Both elites have been, in effect, “de-nationalized” by the processes of economic and cultural globalization. They are more likely to share the tastes and opinions of their counterparts in other countries than those of their own countrymen in provincial and small-town America. They regard patriotism and national feeling as atavistic emotions that retard both economic rationality (in the case of the Right) and cosmopolitan ideologies of “democratic humanism” (in the case of the Left). And they see America not as a nation like other nations, if more powerful, but as the embryo either of the global market or of a new “universal nation” without boundaries or restrictive citizenship. As a result, on a whole range of policy issues—racial preferences, bilingual education, military intervention abroad, open borders —the American people are firmly on one side and the American elites are on the other.

I'd argue that the same situation prevails in our cultural sphere -- but that's for another posting.

* In a previous piece for City Journal (here), Heather Mac Donald called attention to high rates of immigrant crime. Sample facts: in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens; and 30% of inmates in Federal pens are foreign-born. In a new piece here, she writes about Hispanic gangs, covering a lot of ground clearly and fearlessly. Key passage:

Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture ... Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.

The new issue of City Journal is packed with other goodies too, including pieces by Myron Magnet, Kay Hymowitz, Richard Brookhiser, and Theodore Dalrymple. City Journal strikes me as the most substantial American magazine published today. Its contents can be found here.

* Many well-meaning people assume that "multiculturalism" is a sweet, vague way of saying, "Hey, I wish everybody well," and maybe in some informal sense that's true. Unfortunately, in a more formal sense it's also become a hardened and dogmatic political program that sketchy people are trying to put over on the rest of us. Lawrence Auster explains why we need to be wary, here. In another gutsy piece here, Auster takes on a question that's often puzzled me: Why do so many left-wing Jews favor policies that don't seem good for Jews? I've tended to attribute blame for this to the reflexive love many Jews have for underdogs (even when the underdog means you ill). Auster sees a lot more going on there; his piece is a fascinating and impressive psychological study.

Best,

Michael

at July 19, 2004 | perma-link | (39) comments

Dear Vanessa --

A few of the big, general arts-life truths I've stumbled across over the years have been real godsends. They help me stay semi-oriented in an often-bewildering cultural world. A couple of examples:

• The importance of the GI Bill. By funding college educations (and stays overseas) for many WWII vets, the GI Bill not only helped create postwar American art (of the higher-brow sort), it also helped create what one cynical arts prof I know calls "the academic art-appreciation racket."
  
• The impact of movies on literary fiction. Not just as in what your English prof told you -- simultaneity, cinematic cutting, all that. But also in more down-to-earth terms, as in, "Good lord, now that movies are here, what are we gonna sell???" Movies after all offer an attractive, compact, intense, and accessible fiction-package that includes story, performers, visuals, and music. How can on-the-page fiction, mere ink and paper, compete? The response of certain writers to the advent of movies was to try selling something else entirely -- to abandon narrative and character in the conventional sense, and to try selling structure, pyrotechnics, experimentation, vision, poetry, whatever. The birth of movies, in other words, helped kick off Modernist literary writing.

Here's another one of these helpful truths:

• The creation and triumph of the teenager. "The teenager" as a distinct category of person is of very recent vintage, yet teen values and teen experience have become central to our culture.

What would you say are some of the values that are considered desirable in today's America? Here are a few that I'd suggest: bustin' out; pleasing yourself; impact; excitement; grabbiness; hot-hot-hot; gimme gimme gimme; go, man, go; self-expression; rebellion; sexy sulkiness; instant gratification; loudness; brightness; poppiness.

Teen values, all of them. (These aren't values and attributes that a 60 year old is likely to value highly.) In fact, it's a historically bizarre thing that we make such a big deal of teenagehood. We treat adolescence as one of the biggest events in life. We speak endlessly about our teen traumas. We yearn for those sexy, free summers. We view life after adolescence as a slow downhill slide, unto the grave. Once we're done living our adolescence, we start re-living it. And our national ideal often seems to be ... being a happy teenager. Being someone who has all the bounce, resilience, and sunniness of childhood -- plus sex and a driver's license. What could be better?

Though we consider it normal to never quite get over having been a teen, in reality putting teen values at the center of a culture isn't a normal state of affairs. Making a big deal out of teenagerhood on a personal level isn't normal either.

Simple fact: as far as most people and most cultures have been concerned, there's no such thing as "teenagehood." Instead, there are "children," "adults," and -- OK, sure -- a brief and unfortunate period when children grow into adulthood. This stretch wasn't celebrated; no, it was thought to be something best endured and ignored.

The reason teenagerhood didn't exist was simple: because people used to go to work young, marry (or pair off) young, become parents young, and die young. Let's see how things were in the late 1800s. At that time, the typical 14-year-old boy lived on his father's farm. By 16, he was a working man, and was married to a local girl, who'd be between 13 and 16 herself. (Today, the average age when people marry in the U.S. is 23 for women and 25 for men.) Babies quickly followed.

This timetable, common to nearly all societies, began to change in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. People were leaving the farm and moving to cities. Laws were being passed against child labor. High-school-level public education was beginning to become compulsory; although the first public high school didn't open until 1875, by 1900 31 states required 8-14 year olds to attend school. For the first time, teens started being seen as different than adults in a legal sense.

Some consequences of all this: young people started marrying later. They started work at a later age. They were stuck killing a lot of time in school. Surly, moody, and full of energy, they had time and space to act out, and to think about themselves. Not surprisingly, it was at this time that juvenile delinquency became a recognized problem -- and that the first juvenile courts were established.

A stretch of life that had previously been quickly done-with and not-much-taken-note-of became broken-off, extended, and distinct. It became something to recognize, think about, and contend with. G. Stanley Hall published a two-volume book entitled "Adolescence" in 1904. The publication of this book is generally taken to be the moment "adolescence" was born as a conceptual category.

Even so, the country was anything but overrun by adolescents, let alone adolescent values. Adolescence may have become a category and a problem, but it wasn't yet a societal standard. It can be hard for us to grasp, but those giddy flappers and their roguish boyfriends in the '20s? They were young adults, not adolescents. Through the '30s, the phenomenon of roving, unemployed teens with time on their hands and full of too much pep and too many hormones continued to grow, only to be interrupted by WWII.

Then, after the war, came the next big turning point in the story, one as big as the change circa 1900. There was the notorious population spurt that resulted in the Boomer generation, and there was the (government-subsidized, by the way) exodus from the cities to the new-style suburbs.

Suddenly -- and remember, nothing like this had ever occurred on anything like this scale anywhere on earth, ever before -- the country was full of loads of kids with lots of time on their hands, who were in charge of lots of money. Within a few years, the oldest of them reached their teen years. Rock music and the '60s weren't far away.

Even so, people looking back often forget that the advent of rock music and pop movies in the '50s took place in a country that was still adult-oriented. Though we often think of the '50s as the era of the rock-and-roll teenager, the teen market was just a-borning. For some perspective, I pulled together the top-selling music of 1951, 1961, and 1971.

• 1951: The soundtrack for "Guys and Dolls." Mario Lanza. Yma Sumac. The Weavers. Les Paul. Tony Bennett.
  
• 1961: Bert Kaempfert. The soundtrack for "Exodus." Lawrence Welk. Judy Garland. But also: Elvis, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, and Paul Anka.
  
• 1971: George Harrison. "Jesus Christ Superstar." Janis Joplin. Sly and the Family Stone. Michael Jackson. Carole King.

Teen tastes, in other words, weren't present on the 1951 charts at all; took up only half the list's space in 1961; and didn't triumph entirely until 1971.

Today, we take the importance of adolescence and teenagehood for granted. What's new these days, it seems to me, is the all-pervasiveness of teen taste and teen culture. The Boomers are probably responsible for this. The people who were once the very first generation of adolescents in all history to be a target-market -- who were made to feel special and catered-to culturally, whose narcissism ran rampant, and who learned to identify themselves as adolescent and proud of it -- are now running the country's cultural life. The culture is now being guided (to the extent it can be said to be guided at all) by people who know what it's like to be a ravished-by-commerce teen. They know what a teen wants, and how to sell to him or her.

After all, the adults who rode the teen-market wave in the '50s hadn't themselves had the experience of being a teenaged target-market. These culture entrepreneurs were pioneers, blundering their way in the dark. The people now in charge of popular culture, on the other hand, aren't pioneers. They're settlers, cultivators of an already-plowed field. Scary to think that today's teens will be even more expert at exploiting, er, serving the next generation of teens, isn't it?

These days -- what with our sentimentality about children, the PC educations we subject kids to, and the inescapability of media culture -- kids are stretching their adolescence out ever longer. Many move home to the parents' place after school; others enter into slumber-party-type living arrangments with other people their age. Few of them seem to know that there might be another phase of life (ie., "adulthood") to grow into. I find it a matter of cultural interest that many of these eternal-adolescents also have no interest in anything cultural that isn't based in the electronic media. Coincidence? Je ne pense pas. (Still recovering from my French-Carib vacation, evidently ...)

Another consequence of these developments, it seems to me, is what's become of adulthood. Adulthood now looks sad. Having been crowded off the stage, adulthood mills about disconsolate and lost. Given that we now live in a country whose central values are adolescent, we've lost track of even the best adult values -- wit, grace, perspective, depth, suaveness, conviction, knowledge. In any sane civilization, these would all be regarded as virtues. In our country these days, such virtues often seem the marks of losers and failures. They seem kinda ... sad. Boring. Square. Adulthood? Get outta the way. Go sit quietly in the corner with your copy of Modern Maturity.

When we visit foreign countries, Americans are often shocked to discover that there exist cultures that don't cater to adolescents in the same unquestioning way we do, and where adults (some of them, anyway) comport themselves with dignity, sex, and style.

A personal note: when I spent a year in France in the early '70s, one of the many things that surprised me was that the French didn't take teenagehood nearly as seriously as we did. In their eyes, teenagehood wasn't a lifestyle, let alone a destiny; it was just a brief fling, and one that was only grudgingly granted. The kids I lived among knew they were being accorded a year or two's grace to act out; not for a second did they imagine it would go on forever.

This may help explain why America's so great at pop culture and why a country like France is so bad at it, by the way. The French simply don't have our commitment to the pop dream, while we're rabid about it. For us, it's become a kind of religion, and when we sing its praises we really hallelujah. But the French? Where pop culture's concerned, the French are dabblers.

What to do about any of this? Who am I to say? Still, one thing I do strictly for myself and for the sake of my mental hygiene is to maintain a distinction in my mind between "pop" and "popular." Here's how it goes. I take "popular art" to mean commercial art of any kind. Popular art contrasts with, on the one hand, "folk art" (noncommercial art that people make for themselves), and on the other hand with "high art," whatever we take that to signify. Popular art covers a wide range of culture products. Popular art is Cary Grant, Billie Holiday, Cole Porter, Edith Piaf, Krazy Kat, and Fats Waller.

"Pop," on the other hand ... Though we think of pop these days as well-nigh all-engulfing, I take pop to be a specific subcategory of popular art. Pop art -- in my mind, if in no one else's -- is that popular art which is made specifically for teens: Elvis, rap, "Top Gun," "Spiderman," "Dodgeball," "Dawson's Creek," etc.

An aside: one of the bigger surprises of my culture-observin' life has been the continued existence of pop music. Is this true for anyone else? Back in the '60s and '70s, I fully expected that, being a Boomer thing, pop music would die off when the Boomers grew up. As it turns out, the tastes of many Boomers never did grow up. And it has also turned out that every succeeding wave of teens has demanded their very own version of pop music. So don't bet on the cultural horserace according to my advice.

Here's a musing I'm less sure about. OK: teenagehood can be characterized as a time when life seems limitless, when fantasies derange us, and when our moods are all over the place. It's a time of instability. Who are we going to turn out to be? One minute we feel like superheroes, the next we collapse under self-consciousness and anxiety. This state of deranged instability seems to me to bear some relationship to the opening-up of markets, to the splintering of the traditional family, to the spread of electronic culture. They all result in (or involve) disruption, they're all a matter of constant change.

I know I'm not being clear, but still ... I knit these phenomena together in this way: one thing liberal (ie., individualist) ideology and market forces share is that they want us to never settle down. They're forever grinding what they encounter into ever-finer powders. So -- although we often think of "liberalism" and "market forces" as being in conflict -- in fact both of them conspire to make it hard to attain adulthood.

In other words, we've been turned into -- we've turned ourselves into -- perpetual adolescents because perpetual adolescents have no defences against the market, and in America market values triumph.

Quick media-world fact: ad people pursue kids and youngsters because young people can be hoodwinked and pickpocketed, er, influenced. They're buying their first cars and sofas, they're vain and insecure, and they're trying to attract mates. So they spend money on silly products, on clothes, on fashion, and on style. (Older people aren't so open to being affected by ads.) Well, how great it would be for business if the entire population could be kept in a state of perpetual anxiety, yearning, and dissatisfaction -- in a state of teenagehood?

So, in a way, technological developments, the ever-expanding media, the opening-up of markets, liberal/PC educations and ideology, and pop culture aren't in conflict. They're all part of the same picture, and they all combine to promote adolescent values. The eternal-kids these forces help create are, essentially, effective and convenient cannon fodder for today's multicultural, media-centric, digitally-based commercial world.

Incidentally, I've found when I unfurl this line of thought that some people wave it away. They're skeptical -- how can something so major as the creation of the teenager have happened so recently? And besides, who is M.Blowhard to make such a grand point?

Good question! And glad to see a little healthy skepticism! So here's a little quick proof:

• Juvenile courts had their origins only a hundred years ago.
  
• There's no word for "adolescent" in many languages.
  
• The word "teenager" didn't appear in a dictionary until 1942.
  
• Teen magazines started in the 1950s.
  
• Such teencentric movies of the '50s as "Rebel Without a Cause," "The Wild One," and "Blackboard Jungle" were inconceivable in previous decades.

If anyone wants to explore this topic more thoroughly, let me suggest starting with Grace Palladino's Teenagers, An American History (buyable here), Thomas Hines' The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (here), and John Demos' Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (here). I haven't been able to find any good web resources about this topic, darn it.

What are you feelings and thoughts about living in a culture as adolescent-centric as ours is?

Best,

Michael

CORRECTION: Thanks to Rich Rostrum and James Kabala, who pointed out an error in the above. In fact, the age at which people make their first marriages in the US today isn't much different today than it was in 1890. What's changed quite dramatically is at the other end of adolescence: the average age at which puberty hits, which (as far as I can tell from a quick Websweep) is 4-5 years earlier these days than it was in the mid-1800s. Some readers might enjoy a brief Economist article that's a history of the nuclear family here.

at July 16, 2004 | perma-link | (42) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Here's a short video documentary about the history of porn in Denmark. I was fascinated to learn a few things:

• Porn was legalized in two stages. The first, in 1967, lifted restrictions on print porn ("print" as in "text" -- novels, etc). The second stage ended restrictions on virtually all other kinds of porn.

• While the business of erotic novels and such had flourished under censorship in a modest and illicit way, once this work was made legal everyone lost interest in it. The market for it collapsed.

• Legislators took the second step -- making all other kinds of porn legal -- believing that the demise of text-porn was a trustworthy predictor of the move's consequences. Instead, demand for all these other kinds of porn (pictures, movies, etc) exploded.

Unsure what to make of this but ever-curious,

Michael

at July 16, 2004 | perma-link | (2) comments

Dear Vanessa --

A widely remarked-upon mystery of recent-ish politics: when did lefties stop being champions of race-blindness and take up racial bean-counting instead? A much-less-noticed similar mystery: when did lefties stop championing wariness about population growth and start advocating more-or-less open borders instead? As a former radical eco-freak still sympathetic to environmental concerns, I'm very curious about this question.

Recently, I've been learning a lot from reading Otis L. Graham Jr.'s new book Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis. If it hasn't quite answered my question about changes in eco-attitudes, it's still an exhaustive and alarming work.

Some not-so-fun quotes:

Americans through their fertility behavior after the 1960s were choosing a demographic future of a stabilized population at around 250 million by 2050. That path to population stabilization was radically altered by politicians in Washington, who enacted expansionist immigration policies that proved to be population policies in disguise.

Immigration's contribution to population growth (immigrants plus births to foreign-born women), which had been 13 percent in 1970, rose to 38 percent by 1980, and to 60 to 70 percent, and rising, by the end of the 1990s. With immigration pushing the throttle forward, the American population grew by 81 million from 1970 to 2000, 33 million in the 1990s alone -- the largest single-decade population increase in U.S. history ...

[In 2000, the Census Bureau] projected U.S. population totals to 2100, and the medium assumption pointed to 571 million ... Slight increases in expected fertility along with longer life spans could push that number to 1.2 billion.

Graham may not be a sparkling prose stylist, but he's awfully good at making statistics vivid. He points out, for example, that the U.S.'s population growth in the 1990s was "the equivalent of adding the entire population of Canada," and that 96% of California's recent population growth has been due to immigration. (96%!!!!)

And how do everyday Americans think and feel about these developments? Here's a quote Graham includes from the Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks: "Apart from some business executives, I have never met anyone who favored doubling the population." (Note to self: when stuck in a discussion with someone claiming that those concerned about immigration policies are racist/inhumane/etc, be sure to ask this person, "Are you telling me that you're in favor of doubling or tripling the country's population?")

As Steve Sailer (here), Randall Parker (here), the Center for Immigration Studies (here), and the gang at Vdare (here) often point out: Dems who want votes, Repubs who want cheap labor, and a bunch of (mostly) naive and gullible propagandists are putting a big one over on the rest of us -- the most dramatic demographic change in this country's history. It's something very few Americans want to see happen.

Topic for discussion: Why is so little discussion of these developments and of these policies taking place? Oh, and how do you feel about the States having a population of 571 million? Let alone 1.2 billion?

Graham's good and informative book is buyable here. Here's a short 1995 essay where Graham explores the impact of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which he calls "the single most nation-changing measure of the era."

Best,

Michael

at July 15, 2004 | perma-link | (62) comments

I'm a great fan of The British Blogger Formerly Known as Alice Bachini -- the gal who recently relocated to Texas and who now blogs as Alice in Texas, here. Alice is a wonderfully volatile phenomenon: flighty yet full of commonsense, larky yet incisive ...

Alice mostly blogs about politics, from what I think of as a realistically-libertarian point of view: no loony visions of how we'd be settling Jupiter today if only it weren't for government meddling. But she's also a terrific cultural observer, with an impossible-to-predict set of free-range interests, a quicksilver set of instincts, and (for my money) the merriest writing style in blogdom.

I'm delighted to have persuaded her to take advantage of 2Blowhards as an outlet for some of her cultureblogging. Please do check in with her own blog, Alice in Texas (here), for Alice on politics. And now, Alice on "Kill Bill 2."

Five good reasons to see the Kill Bills:

1) Uma Thurman is the new Clint Eastwood,
2) The fight scenes are extraordinary, morally powerful, and often beautiful (in an extremely bloody kind of a way, obviously),
3) The music is as full of character as the characters (especially in KBI, although the cowboy signatures in II are as powerfully stylised as anything from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly); in fact some of them even use the same notes,
4) Kill Bill is the latest incarnation of the bounty-hunting warrior myth, which places it squarely inside an important movie and story-telling tradition,
5) Uma is cool. I want to be Uma. Where can I get that yellow jumpsuit?

In martial arts, the big trick is to use your opponent's weight and strength against them. So, for instance, if they are rushing towards you with a sword at a hundred miles an hour, you just flick them gently into the air on contact, and they whack the ceiling then land crash on the glass coffee-table creating a beautiful shower of glass shards somewhat like cherry-blossom falling in the breeze. After that, being indestructible, they get up again, which is a bit of a pain; but anyway, the point is that this principle of intelligent re-direction of force, as opposed to head-to-head conflict of brute force, is what provides us with the idea that women Samurai can potentially be as good as, if not better than, men.

In warrior console games, it's the same story. Women and men fight on equal footing. Little adolescent girls win at least as often as heavy hulking Hell's Angels, in fact their litheness is an advantage. It's all about the foot-work. There is an anime cartoon in which console games have risen to new heights, being fought-out by robots operated by telepathy, in which women are naturally superior. Me, I'd rather make a sponge-cake. But who knows.

The superiority of the female sex in Kill Bill I and II seems to be part of a cultural trend of growing significance that harkens from Japan, and you could read the entire move-pair as a parable about how the paternal culture (Bill) bred a group of strong women (the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) only to have the next generation in the shape of Uma outgrow him, and when he refuses to give up his hold on her, bring the whole structure down and supplant it with the maternal culture (avoiding spoilers here just in case). But the movie doesn't really say that girls are better, it just says they have babies and men should be sensitive about how that affects their prioirities. It's hard to stay interested in your high-flying job when something more important came along. Bill's mistake is to fight that instead of taking a step back.

Still going with the reading-a-lot-into-it thing here, because that's just what I like to do, what Bill does wrong is act like a jealous child and a father, rolled into one. He over-rules Uma's feminine autonomy, because he "loves" her in an egotistical way. He behaves contradictorily because he doesn't want to be a "father" yet reserves the right to act like one. And it's a big mistake because a bunch of people end up dead from it. Starting with the wedding-party he guns down in El Paso. (Which reinforces my theory that Texas is the centre of the world, it's just that nobody noticed that before).

Anyway, having dispensed with the gender stuff, really the main thing I like about Tarantino is that he's a Big Picture guy. He gets his vision in place then fits the little details like plot and character inside it. Being a Big Picture person myself, I like that a lot. I think people who hate Tarantino see a mish-mash of disparate bits and pieces because they don't get the BP, because the BP is always radically new and thus not easily recognisable. It's like when people first heard The Rite of Spring or first saw Picasso's rearranged body-part portraits. These days, they won't admit to being outraged, even if they haven't become innured to any such sensitive reaction. They complain instead that the thing is a collection of disparate parts without internal coherence. Which is exactly what they would have said about Stravinsky and Picasso just as soon as they got over the shock; in Picasso's case, literally.

So what is the KB BP?

The trouble is, I really need to see KBII again. I hadn't even started thinking about it until the thing was over; I was still in shock about how different it is from KBI and trying to figure out why he did that, and could only come up with technical explanations so far. I already had a pretty good Big Picture about KBI, and KBII blew it to pieces. KBII it fills in the plot background, adds depth (literally, in the burying-alive scene) and puts the action into a philosophical context. But unexplained violence standing alone was the whole point of Volume I! So I fear more viewing is needed before I can properly decide whether KBII is perfect or detracts from KBI. Never dismiss people's ideas until you have given them the hearing they deserve. After KBI, Tarantino definitely deserves more of a hearing from me than he's had so far: particularly from a movie where fair hearings, or the lack of them, are a major part of what dictates the plot.

In fact, that dictates the entire plot. Bill's first impression of Uma's attempt to leave him is false, and leads to the first act of violence from which the story is played out. By the end of KBII, he has started asking questions and gains a better picture of things, and that provides the conclusion to the movies.

I think Tarantino is asking a lot of his audience. It's easy to sympathise with Uma through the trials she endures, and the successes she achieves against the odds. Sympathising with Bill, whose suffering is far less great and brought on himself through his own mistakes, is a lot more difficult; sympathising with him when he is the cause of Uma's suffering near-impossible. In the end, if we regard Bill as a character who represents something about ourselves, the movie is turned inside-out. Personally, I would find it damned tricky sympathising with a man who picks up women half his age then murders them in cold blood, even if he didn't bore the pants off me with his Eastern philosophical hippy-talk (which, by the way, is not a negative criticism of the movie: it's in character and, I think, an admirable risk to take).

But then, Uma makes a big mistake too. She rejects the father of her child for having the nature of a killer- and then what does she expect? This mistake nearly destroys both her and her baby. If in the end she is victorious (I don't think that's a spoiler- nobody could seriously expect a movie called Kill Bill to end with the death of the avenger) it is a victory staggeringly hard-won, with nothing to show for it except survival.

When Bill grants Uma a fair hearing ("grants" is not the word- in fact he has to give her a truth-drug to make it happen) and thus gets his hearing as well, we don't find out much we didn't know already. Uma's mistake was a well-intentioned mechanical one, whereas Bill's was an evil act. Their relationship is perfectly representative of a certain kind of deranged male/female relationship where the egotistical man is proprietorial and progressively more violent, and the women is innocent and seeking knowledge.

But egotism is only Bill's single fundmantal flaw: in all higher-level respects, he is knowledgeable and clever and even capable of kindness, especially to his daughter.

What's difficult about Kill Bill is, we see Bill's evil from the start and his other qualities are layered on top in the second movie. In real life, like Uma, we get it the other way around. This is morally spot-on, but more difficult to recognise. I don't think Tarantino expects us to sympathise with Bill, but I do think he expects us to consider it. The question of what makes a person good or bad ultimately hinges on egotism, and that is something we tend not to be very good at recognising in others, whether because we share the same fault or from the vulnerability of genuine truth-seeking innocence.

The moral, "Don't shack up with dodgy guys unless you know exactly what you're doing," might sound trite, but I wonder if actually that isn't today's genuine explanation for life, the universe and everything. It is better to stand alone than to hook up in moral compromises; otherwise you find yourself not just standing but fighting like hell for your very survival. And if you are smaller or fewer in numbers than the opponent who was once your unholy ally, then you'd better learn the...

STOP! Spoiler alert!

...five-point palm exploding heart technique. Hmmm.

Many thanks to Alice in Texas.

at July 15, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments

Dear Vanessa --

* In ongoing Latin-America-merges-with-the-U.S. news, John Kerry has now said that if elected he'll put in place a broad amnesty for illegals (here). Meanwhile, Latino populations in some Southern states have doubled or tripled in the last decade (here).

* The BBC reports that North African neighborhoods in France have become downright ethnic ghettos, here.

* Graham Lester delivers an eye-opening posting about Korean sex cults here.

* Steve Sailer's on an especially-energized high right now -- but when isn't he? IMHO, Steve's one of the half-dozen most interesting journalists writing today. (I say that and then have trouble coming up with five others who are in his class ... ) Check out Steve's Olympics preview (here) and his blog (the righthand column here).

* The great crime novelist Ed McBain is interviewed here and here.

* I've raved several times about the crime novelist Donald Westlake, who for my money is America's greatest living fiction virtuoso. A while back, Tatyana gave one of Westlake's "Parker" novels a try on my recommendation and wasn't much impressed. So I was tickled recently when she sent me an email letting me know that she'd just finished Westlake's publishing-world comedy "A Likely Story," and had loved it. "That's really the brilliant one!," Tatyana wrote. "It's about the publishing business in NY (c.1983-4) and mix-and-match relationships in those circles; and it's hilarious and sad. I couldn't put it down till the end. My son found me giggling on the balcony with the book in my hands and he thought I had started on the cuckoo path." Westlake makes me pretty cuckoo too. The novel is out of print, but copies can be bought (for next to nothing) here.

* Has "how to contend with the release of one of the sex tapes you made before you were a star" now become a regular topic of conversation between celebs and their press agents? Paris Hilton has agreed to let her X-rated tape be released provided she gets royalties (here). And Jenna Lewis, who's evidently a reality-TV personality of some sort, has issued a press release (here) stating firmly that she's hopping mad about the way her sex tape has gone public. A big "Attagirl" to both of them. Links thanks to Daze Reader, here.

* What's Britney like in the sack? Find out here. See what Britney looks like on a bad-hair, bad-skin day here. God bless hairdressers, makeup artists, and costumers, eh?

* R-rated alert: I ran across this very raunchy humor site here and found myself laughing a lot, especially at this piece here and this one here. So much for my highbrow cred, eh? But, to be honest, that vanished long ago, when I confessed in public that I find some of Andrew Dice Clay's routines pretty funny. So that damage has already been done.

* Good to see that Danish eco-hippies are still keepin' it natural here. (Keep clicking on "Neste" for the whole series of photographs.)

* Best goofy photo of the week, here. Apologies to the blogger who turned this photo up and to whom I should be giving credit right now. Je suis un bad blogcitizen.

* I found Jim Kalb's taxonomy of where our notion of "the good" is thought to come from enlightening, here.

* Thomas Sowell summarizes some important things about lefties and blacks that it took me years to discover and understand, here. Key lines:

Blacks have, in effect, been adopted as mascots by many white liberals. Mascots serve to symbolize something for others but the actual well-being of the mascot himself is seldom a major concern. Blacks have long been used by the left to indict American society.

Here's a long q&a; with Sowell.

* Those curious about the kinds of stupid spats, er, highbrow discussions lit types often have should enjoy this Book Babes chat with the novelist and critic Dale Peck, here.

* Congrats to Terry Teachout, who has been appointed to the National Council on the Arts, here. All arts fans should feel lucky to have someone as broadminded, enthusiastic and knowledgeable as Terry serving us. Terry's been in an especially generous blogging mood recently, which is saying a lot. Here he writes about some of his favorite films noirs; here he writes about the problem of bad local arts criticism.

* I'm sure you saw some of the recent press about how reading, or at least serious book-reading, is on the decline. (Reading for pleasure is off 15% in the last 20 years.) I enjoyed Mallarme and Kevin Holtsberry's blogcommentaries on the news, here and here. The Book Babes are informative and helpful too, here.

* Odd to think that many young film fans have no idea who Federico Fellini was. For decades, Fellini was a huge and iconic presence in the filmmaking and filmgoing worlds, the very incarnation of the film director as star. He made some good movies too. Gavin Millar's short discussion of Fellini here should help a few fans fill in some of their film-history blanks. Millar, a critic and director himself, made the wonderful "Dreamchild," which is buyable here. As a videocassette only, darn it -- the movie hasn't yet been released on DVD.

* Another movie giant and icon of the '60s and '70s was the USSR's Andrei Tarkovsky. Michael Brooke has posted a good introduction to Tarkovsky's amazing "Andrei Rublev" here.

* The other day, I had lunch with a film critic friend who recently quit the filmcrit game. Surprise: he hasn't looked so happy in years -- finally, free from having to sit through (let alone produce peppy copy about) all those dreary new movies. The Telegraph's Andrew O'Hagan writes here about what a disappointment being a movie reviewer turned out to be for him too.

* The other night, The Wife and I watched Ichi the Killer, yet another movie by the Japanese phenom, Takashi Miike, of whom we've become fans. Short review: it's one of the freakiest, most intense things we've ever watched. It's like a cross between "Fight Club" and "American Psycho," only infinitely more so; blood spurts in fountains and limbs literally fly. "Ichi" makes "Reservoir Dogs" look like a Disney film, so be warned. If, on the other hand, you've got a taste for hyper-amoral filmmaking daredeviltry, you can buy the film here, or Netflix it here.

* Hey, I just noticed that it's a few days past 2Blowhards' second birthday. Here's a Wired piece about how many people who try blogging suffer burnout. Me, I feel like I've got a little bloggin' oomph left yet.

Best,

Michael

at July 14, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Some of the reasons this blog enjoys throwing rotten tomatoes at Modernism:

• Modernism claims to be radical and progressive when it in fact couldn't be more elitist. I've got nothing against radical art or elitist art per se, and nothing against progressive art either. But I do get annoyed when elitist art stomps around justifying itself as radical and progressive -- "good for the people," or "good for the unconscious," or "setting people free," or whatever.
  
• Modernism is a secular religion-wannabe akin to Marxism and Freudianism. Secular religion-wannabes are always annoying and often destructive.
  
• Modernism's batting average is terrible. I know the idea that 95% of art is always crap is widely accepted; sorry to say I don't agree. It seems to me that traditional art-making has a pretty darned good batting average.

A brief break to spell out a couple of assumptions I'm making: that Modernism descends directly from Romanticism; and that the styles that have followed on Modernism (po-mo, decon, etc) aren't the alternatives-to-Modernism they're usually made out to be but are instead extensions of it, attempts to keep the corpse alive.

Now, back to the jeering.

• Modernism doesn't work by accepting tradition and context and then contributing what it can. Instead, it makes a point of violating context and tearing the fabric, all for the greater glory of showing off its own (supposedly redemptive) virtues.
  
• Like Romanticism, Modernism seems to have addictive properties. Discovering it, you at first feel exhilaration and pleasure; so this is what Reality, experienced fully, is really like!!! For many, the search for this sensation becomes a soul-sucking addiction. Quickly, though, the high becomes scarcer, and soon the search becomes everything. Many people manage to kick the habit, thank heavens. Too bad that some of those who don't wind up as profs, teachers, journalists and critics, and then do their best to pass along the addiction.
  
• Modernism has exacerbated the high-low clash that's such a tedious part of cultural life in America.
  
• While promising deliverance and transcendence, Modernism in fact creates a lot of misery. Forget lousy Modernist architecture for a sec and think instead about the thousands of people stuck in creative-writing workshops. Let's admit that there's something sweet about their desire to take part in the art life. Yet in most cases, what they're being sold are approaches that make art-creation difficult if not impossible. And in many cases they're being steered into creating work that they'll never be happy with. Why aren't they being given basic and traditional, "here's how you get an idea on its feet" skills instead? In a short-fiction writing class, for instance: why aren't people being shown how to project and develop their ideas into actual narratives? Forgive me for suspecting that that'd suit many students far better than being taught how to create the usual nonnarrative autobiographical/lyrical/non-epiphany-epiphany thing.
  
• Modernism has contributed a lot to the irrelevance of the fine arts to everyday people.
  
• Modernism promotes the idea that art should be difficult, and that difficulty and complexity are in and of themselves good things, as well as prerequisites to deep and meaningful art experiences.
  
• There's something about Modernism that refuses to stay put. It ain't a mere style -- no, it's the essential truth about things, the One True Church. I like pointing out that the original Modernist acting style was never referred to as "a method"; no it was The Method.

Anyway, fun to see that The New Yorker's Joan Acocella has come up with a fresh reason to razz Modernism: it contributes to writer's block. (The story is readable here.) By the way, those who are skeptical of this blog's claim that Modernism is an up-to-date version of Romanticism might want to notice that Acocella clearly agrees. Thank god for authority figures, at least when they happen to be on your side.

Fun question #1: When did writer's block first appear? Fun answer: circa Romanticism. Fun question #2: When did writer's block get markedly worse? Fun answer: with Modernism.

Some excerpts from Acocella's good piece:

Writer’s block is a modern notion. Writers have probably suffered over their work ever since they first started signing it, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that creative inhibition became an actual issue in literature, something people took into account when they talked about the art. That was partly because, around this time, the conception of the art changed. Before, writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity, which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred. ... In terms of getting up in the morning and sitting down to work, a crueller theory can hardly be imagined, and a number of the major Romantic poets showed its effects.

In the United States, the golden age of artistic inhibition was probably the period immediately following the Second World War, which saw the convergence of two forces. One was a sudden rise in the prestige of psychoanalysis. The second was a tremendous surge in ambition on the part of American artists—a lot of talk about the Great American Novel and hitting the ball out of the park....as the bar rose, so did everyone’s anxiety, and the doctor was called. Many, many writers went into psychoanalysis in those years, and they began writing about the relationship of art and neurosis.

Anxiety over self-revelation was probably not as common in the old days, when the exposure was channelled through conventional forms (ode, sonnet) that masked the writer’s identity to some extent. In former times, too, art forthrightly answered the audience’s emotional needs: tell me a story, sing me a song. Modernism, in refusing to do that duty, may have a lot to answer for in the development of artistic neurosis. If art wasn’t going to address the audience’s basic needs, then presumably it was doing something finer, more mysterious—something, in other words, that could put the artist into a sweat. As long as art remained, in some measure, artisanal—with, for example, the young Leonardo da Vinci arriving in the morning at Verrocchio’s studio and being told to paint in the angel’s wing—it must have fostered steadier minds.

Modernism: not just bad for culture, but bad for your mental health.

Best,

Michael

at July 14, 2004 | perma-link | (26) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Friedrich and I chose the "Dear Michael"/"Dear Friedrich," epistolary form we use on this blog for a simple reason: we're lazy. Since we were writing each other long, art-gaga emails anyway -- we've been doing this for years -- and since neither one of us can ever see the point of doing more work than is absolutely necessary, we looked at our emails and thought, What could be easier than copying and pasting? Well, OK, we always made an effort to pretty-up our thoughts and words. But we also genuinely did want to promote a conversational and informal tone. We felt it was important. Let the pros and the profs take care of the formal essays and from-on-high lectures. Our small contribution to the artchat world would be to be proprietors of a place where the kind of email and cafe gab we both love might flourish.

Friedrich is on hiatus from blogging, but he and I continue to swap emails as of old. Every now and then I persuade him to let me do the heavy labor of cutting and pasting. Here's a recent lunch-hour back-and-forth. I hope it's amusing.

Michael Blowhard: I got back from vacation thinking I’ve got to get more serious about my, ahem, creative work. Those dozens of stories and novels I’ve got laying around … maybe there’s a way to finish them up after all. Turns out there is, actually -- I hand them over to the Wife. I was always confident and happy dreaming up projects, laying them out, polishing them … but never at bringing the characters and situations to life. At that one stage, I’d always feel my projects go dead on me, and I could never figure out why. It turns out my wife is great at that stage. So she’s helping -- as in taking over 99% of the work. It’s going great. What fun to be able to offload what I can’t do onto someone who’s great at it. (Shhh: don’t let anyone know! Because if you let this cat out of the bag, I'll have no literary reputation left whatsoever!) And look out, world: now I get to raise from the dead every lousy little fiction project I ever dreamed up and then abandoned. Luckily, I seem to be of a little use to The Wife with her writing projects too. I make a few suggestions about structure and plots, both of which, to my surprise, I seem to have a knack for. What’s up with your creative side?

Friedrich von Blowhard: I’m thinking about doing some still life paintings. I’m also getting pretty serious about trying to write a book on art history that focuses on what paintings are really about. What were they intended to mean, at least in their original context? I’m thinking of a cultural history of art, with a fairly heavy emphasis on religion as the area of culture that’s most in tune with the visual arts. Obviously that means I have to actually figure out what was going on in a lot of historical eras, relate the general context to the specific paintings, and then boil the whole thing down into a fairly snappy presentation. I think there might be a pretty good general audience for that sort of thing, although I’m probably deluding myself. Anyway, all this is at least a good excuse for me to read a lot of cultural history. Paul Johnson, in his recent book summarizing the history of art, devotes his last chapter to the study of art history. He remarks that although contemporary art isn’t in a very inspiring state (from his point of view, anyway), it’s indisputable that art history as a discipline is at an all-time high point today. I suspect that cultural history generally is similarly enjoying a renaissance. And do be sure to send me any fiction you finish.

MB: Now that should be a fun challenge, and a great book to read, too. How’s the Paul Johnson? Crusty, vigorously-expressed, sensible, all that? The line on it has been that he’s great until he gets to Modernism, which he doesn’t understand at all. Of course, maybe he does get it, and maybe he just doesn’t think much of it. What’s wrong with a reactionary look at Modernism, anyhow? Couldn’t we get something out of that? There’s a kind of review I never understand. A book comes out, and the book makes an argument, and it either gets praised (because the reviewer agrees with the argument) or panned (because the reviewer disagrees with it). Where’s the reviewer who can say, "Well, I don’t agree with him, but he made his case well and entertainingly, and I enjoyed wrestling with it? Damn fine book!" Where’s the reviewer with the guts and sense to give a positive review to a book he disagrees with? Lordy, all these people who have to choose one team or the other, as though anything really depends on it.

FvB: I scanned Johnson’s book in the book store, didn’t actually buy it because I’ve been buying too many books lately. So I can’t pose as an expert, but I suspect the reason people didn’t like his discussion of Modern art is because his chapter on 20th Century painting is called something like “Art as Fashion” or “Fashion Art.” He takes the line that artists, beginning with Picasso, have adopted the mentality of fashion designers, forever bringing out a new Spring line, usually pasted together from bits and pieces of their or someone else’s previous lines. I’ve run across the comparison between art and fashion in social science before, but I can’t remember anyone discussing it in a serious “art” forum. I think members of the art world don’t want to engage such a heretical idea, because even refuting it (if they could) would make them think unpleasant and disturbing thoughts. Of course, if we do take the position that art works like fashion, I could trot out my old evo-bio theory about the role of fashion and apply it to the art world. As you may recall, I hypothesized that fashion works like a peacock’s tail, as a handicap to show how reproductively fit you are (because you can bear up under the added strain). High fashion actually functions by making it more, not less, difficult to project feminine allure—and thus proves that you’ve really got your sex mojo working. Applying this to art, my theory would suggest that in a world where undergraduates have posters of Cezanne’s paintings in their dorm rooms, if you want to show how stud-ly you are, you’d need to buy yourself something that’s really tough to love—like Xeroxed documentation of conceptual art pieces. Hey, it’s a thought, anyway. See any movies lately?

MB: Nothing on a movie screen in months excepting “Spidey 2,” which I saw at a screening early on, when much of the computer work hadn’t been finished yet. I liked the movie OK. It’s the middle of a trilogy, so it suffers from the fact that the first act has to be spent recapping the last movie and a big part of the last act has to be spent setting up the next movie. It’s also reversed the formula of the first movie, which I took to be “action plus a surprising amount of character.” This one is “tons and tons of character, along with some action.” But the character stuff is well-written and has some oomph. (Alvin Sargent wrote the movie. Remember him? Very big in the ‘60s and ‘70s.) Hey, does Toby Maguire do anything for you? His appeal eludes me entirely. That dewy-eyed, blank-faced, trying-to-keep-his-hopes-up-in-an-insane-world thing he does I guess speaks to the oversensitive, eternal 9-year-old in us, but it seems to be all he does. Otherwise, we watched a few DVDs in St. Barth. We caught up with “Jackie Brown,” which I liked okay too. I mainly enjoyed the way Tarantino gave the film over to his actors. I’d much rather see Tarantino do that than try to be a dazzling badass superfly director, though I wish the acting had been up to the attention he lavished on it. (Robert Forster was great, though.) But it’s a sweet, easygoing movie, and a nice tribute to the genius of Elmore Leonard. Mostly, though, I enjoyed being away from the news and the media. I was so far away from the media that it took me a few days back before I stumbled across word that Brando had died. Lordy, that whole generation is going fast. Kubrick’s gone, Woody Allen’s creaky, Altman turns 80 soon, Clint’s in his 70’s, Nicholson and Beatty have gotta be around there somewhere. Ossie Davis, Paul Newman, Sidney Lumet, Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Updike. (I wonder why the older women’s names aren’t occurring to me as quickly. Hmm.) … The cultural landscape won’t be the same place once they’ve gone. I keep wondering what’s going to happen politically once the generation raised on Civil Rights and Vietnam leaves us. Me, by that time, I hope to be in St. Barth doing yoga.

FvB: Oh, by the way, I’m sorry I never thanked you and your lovely wife for sending me that biography of Philip K. Dick. It’s an enjoyable book, but somehow it made me think less of Phil. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become less impressed by people who abandon their families, even if they are wildly talented writers.

MB: It’s always tough reading about artists whose work you love, isn't it? So few of them lived admirable lives. Brando, for instance, loved complaining about the miseries of his upbringing (which, of course, was much more middleclass than he wanted anyone to know). Yet who could have been a worse father than he was? I read somewhere that he had kids he never met or recognized as his own.

FvB: Remind me to quit complaining about my old man. Oh, there was one other thing I was impressed by in Paul Johnson’s book. At least I think it must be in there, based on some comments in a later chapter. Which is that I strongly suspect he puts at least some of the responsibility for the dreariness of the contemporary art scene on the capitalist art business, which is fairly bold coming from a guy who clearly sits on the Right side of the aisle. It reminded me of one of our common themes — the conflict between admiring the energy and freedom of capitalism, markets and private property, while having to note rather sadly the impact on at least certain forms of culture.

MB: Yeah, it seems to me that the key is balance. You’ve got to have some kind of economically-liberal arrangement in the commercial sphere of life, otherwise there’s no opportunity and there's no increasing wealth. But you’ve also got to have an actual culture too, and some real cultural confidence to go with it. It seems to me that’s what we lack as a nation. We’re entirely commercial, we’re a little clueless, we dream about getting richer and little else … and so, almost while we aren't looking, commercial values overrun all others. Since there’s no turning America into a commercial-free zone (not that I’d want to), my hope is that we can make the commercial world serve people’s personal-aesthetic-spiritual needs and desires rather than vice versa.That’s the New Urbanist and Slow Food thing: accept that the world’s a hugely commercialized place, but make the commercial stuff live up to your demands. We need to create a market of high-class and tasteful consumers who will demand that business behave if it wants their custom. Which is why it’s sad that many Americans are so uncertain of their tastes and are so easily swayed. They seem to lurch around, looking for bargains, buying the most square footage they can afford, and seeing the most heavily-advertised movie because they just don't want to miss out. I think one of the great things about the cultureblogging world is that it’s given grownups who have maintained artistic and intellectual interests a chance to find each other, swap tips, and generally feel a little less stranded and alone. This is one area, I think, where the French have an advantage over us Americans, happy though I am to razz the French on many other grounds. The French think the market exists to serve life and pleasure, and their emphasis on personal style and on the importance of aesthetics is a way of asserting that their tastes and their pleasures are more important than some corporation’s convenience.

FvB: Speaking as a thoroughly mongrelized American, don’t you think the whole immigrant-nation thing has put America in a rather different box than France? We have too many traditions jostling each other for the average Joe to have a simple, clear idea of what he’s hoping to emulate. The commercial world, and commercially-pushed art forms, like rap music, are our only unifying factors. I don’t think we’re going to see our mix-master heritage blended smooth in our lifetimes. Also, we’re much bigger on the whole notion of individualism. The French people I’ve known seem to fit into a set of social roles that function like Platonic Ideals — you know, the hot young babe, the middle-aged professional man, the burly farmer, the intellectual author, etc. French celebrities seem to be famous not for being wacky one-offs, but for being exemplars of their type, so to speak. I suspect at least some of that is the result of a lack of competing cultural traditions, a fairly homogenous population, and the lingering effects of feudalism, where 0.5% of the population established all the styles and set all the rules and everyone else followed along.

MB: I’m sure you’re right. The French do have a very set number of archetypes, and a set number of ways of doing things. But I think they think of themselves, if only in their own minds, as distinctive and unique, each and every one of them. It may not be objectively true, but that’s how they view themselves. Added to their relatively stable culture and cultural values — there’s fairly little churn regarding these in France—this attitude has done a pretty good job of keeping market values from overrunning absolutely every aspect of life. Which is something Americans, I think, could benefit from. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble creating or even enjoying anything at all in the midst of the careerist-commercial whirlwind. It’s all I can do to grit my teeth and hold on. And I don’t think it’s just me. I can’t tell you the number of talented people I’ve known who have left the art-and-culture worlds just because they found it too highstrung, too high-pressure, and too nuts.

FvB: Well, on that note, I have to confess that I’ve got to get back to work. Say hi to Vanessa for me.

This what FvB calls "taking a break from blogging," snicker snicker. By the way, did anyone catch the reference to Frank O'Hara in this posting's title? Er, headline. Er, what are those things called when they're on a blog posting anyway?

Best,

Michael

at July 13, 2004 | perma-link | (11) comments

Dear Vanessa --

Cyber-age bliss: surfing the web and listening to Itunes while the Wife gives me a combo backrub/headscratch.

High on endorphins,

Michael

at July 12, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments