Category Archives: Modernism

Sunday Night Musings

21 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by in Aesthetics, Modernism, New York

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I was going to go up early. J is still feeling badly, but believes a doctor visit at this point would be of little value. She is trying to sleep while she has a DVD of I Love Lucy episodes playing in the background. Not wishing to hear the ossified jokes and agonize through the banal situations, staying down here where I can listen to the music (the best part of ILL) is the smart choice. I can put a DVD of old cigarette commercials in the downstairs machine and pretend I’m 8 years old again.

I will always associate these Lucy episodes with my recovery from back surgery. We played them almost every night, along with The Andy Griffith Show. Reading or other stuff was reserved for the day time. We did not have FIOS then. I can’t remember exactly what I was reading then, four years ago. Stefan Zweig, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein., most likely.

I considered myself something of a sophisticate four years ago. Any modernist idea received a full and rather uncritical consideration and acceptance. So I would lap up a PBS presentation on modern art as if Picasso were the equivalent of Raphael or Giotto. It’s all art, right? And people pay good money for all of it. The modern world, I am afraid, is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and wondering what happened to the truth. But that was how I thought then.

There will be one more passenger train passing through Ashland. #97 Southbound Silver Meteor, headed to Miami. One Winter’s night we will make the full journey. We will stay in an Art Deco hotel in South Beach and pretend 85 years of history never happened. No Hitler, no Bomb, no Castro. If only.

Right now, we have the yellow orange sodium lights reflecting off wet pavement and wet slate roof shingles. It is a static moment anticipating the dynamic conjoined chrome steel cars of the passenger train. The horn sounds. It won’t be long now. Less than a minute of speed, and a rush of sound, then stillness til morning and Northbound Silver Meteor #98 will work its way toward Manhattan, Penn Station, Times Square, The Empire State Building, Radio City, the Northetn artifacts of that hopeful time, now perhaps as anachronistic as the biplane, the Zeppelin, these very trains for which we wait.

Super Rant

07 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in American History, Modernism, Politics

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,

Well shucks, I am still awake. I have a cold pack on my shoulder. I’m watching old cartoons on YouTube. I fixed tacos tonight. From a kit. To tell you the truth, they weren’t bad. I fixed J’s lunch. Tuna salad, mixed fruit compote, some snacks, like cookies,store bought, high end Pepperidge Farm.

Every time I watch the Democratic politicians, I see men and women, whose world is falling apart and they have no way to stop it. I am reminded of then Alabama Governor George Wallace, also a Democrat, standing in a doorway to block integration of the University of Alabama. I am reminded of the Soviet military trying to stop the collapse of the Communist dictatorship in a failed coup thwarted by Boris Yeltsin.

I also think of the brave forgotten Chinese student who tried to stare down a tank in Tienamen Square in 1989. Yeah, sometimes raw naked power still wins. And the Communist state survives in China, ironically supported by global capitalists, and the Holy See of Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Francis).

It is a crazy world and the narratives that CNN or The New York Times, among others, try to promote as fact are failing to gain traction. People don’t accept what they present as fact without question. Scepticism reigns. And as more of the “Russia collusion” story is shown to be a fabrication, the Democratic Leadership is resorting to bluster and gesture, like their deceased forbearer George Corley Wallace.

The Götterdämmerung of American liberal progressivism is happening now. The repudiation of abortion by Millenials, while pro-choice politicians, like Andrew Cuomo, who support third trimester abortions, is one example. Consider,for example, the success of the film Unplanned or the pro-life rally recently held in Times Square. The liberal progressive decline goes beyond abortion, but abortion reflects so much. China has all but admitted that their “One Child Policy”, that has abortion as the keystone, has set the stage for a demographic collapse. In simplest terms, the abortion ethos is a prescription for cultural extinction, if not other iterations .

What is happening in both the United States and the world at large doesn’t fit the globalist paradigms promoted since the end of World War Two. The global deliberative body, the United Nations, or extranational ruling polities like the European Union are declining. National sovereignty has renewed support among many nations in Europe, Hungary, Poland, Italy, to name three.

The rhetoric used to besmirch the critics of globalism, “right wing populists”, for example, doesn’t turn people away from nationalist parties with the power they once did.

Oblivion is a long road. And a slow trek.

A Long Ramble That May Have A Point.

02 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Modernism

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Today, I went to my medieval philosophy discussion group. (Yawns erupt among readers.)

So what’s that about? We discuss questions of aesthetics and virtue. At the heart is the debate of whether reason springs from faith or if faith derives from what reason reveals. (another collective yawn.) I guess you had to have been there. Not to worry, the medieval thinkers themselves were engaged in similar questions.

I am increasingly engaged with why and how the underpinnings of our culture today came to be. Do we understand how Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud influence our world today?

One example, seemingly tangential, but actually central to our understanding of the current modernist, consumer-driven world is the work of Edward Bernays. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he put Freud’s ideas of subconscious motives into his own field of public relations, and from public relations to advertising.

One afternoon in 1923, he had three women light up cigarettes on Park Avenue, New York City, and smoke. It was publicized, as it was intended to be. Women smoking openly, back then when women didn’t, was a statement of equality between the sexes. After that little staged event, more and more women smoked. Critical to understanding public relations, as demonstrated by what we now view as this egregious stunt by Bernays, is that public relations and propaganda were considered to be synonymous. Bernays wanted to direct how you think and your decisions. That is exactly what Josef Goebbels did.

My point is that it didn’t just happen. We live in a world where much of what we hear has been tested out on focus groups before we ever hear it. The opinion makers want to know how we will respond so they can adjust their messages, and ultimately lead us toward their way of thinking. There isn’t supposed to be pushback.

The Yellow Vest Uprising in France should not be taking place. The citizens of France were not supposed to have grumbled about a new tax on fossil fuels and taken to the streets. The tax was intended to discourage fossil fuel use and thus decrease greenhouse emissions. The problem is that French workers can’t afford to live in the cities where their jobs are, e.g. Paris. So they need gasoline to drive from home to work and back. French citizens are not acquiesing to this carbon tax as an affirmation of their global citizenship. There seem to be fewer and fewer people wanting to venture into the Brave New World dictated to them.