This is not necessarily a sign that Wenatchee The Hatchet is "back" but a couple of things came up and there's room for one blogger to congratulate another, however belatedly.
First of all, congratulations to Dr. Ethan Hein
for getting his PhD in music education! : )
At this point I can’t help but recall a word game
one of my siblings and I have in which we do absurdist mash-up titles of films
and songs. For song title mashups I came
up with “We’ve Only Just
Begun Burning Down
the House”.
Some examples the sibling came up with for are Sleepaway Camp Highlander and Ghost Dad in the Shell. If you don’t
get the jokes In that … maybe it’s for the best. I came up with I Spit on Your Grave of the Fireflies and Over the Top Gun.
Which, conveniently, gets to the next element in
links for the weekend.
By way of, ahem, some themes that have shown up
here in the past, it can’t help but be noted that some people are touting Pete “Maverick”
Mitchell as a non-woke hero.
I don’t recall getting the impression either of
these guys ever served in the military or have anything much beyond a
Hollywoodized conception of military life and service. Chaplain
M S Evers comes to mind. For those who have heard of a notion of “stolen
valor” when it comes to celebrity preachers who have the status and prestige
but have not paid the dues it might not be a surprise if some guys have a
notion of military valor in which a Tom Cruise character in a quasi-musical
film is held up as exemplary.
Sure, I thought Top Gun was pretty cool when I was 12 but I didn’t know better. Now
there are amusing online videos explaining why there wouldn’t have been a Top Gun sequel because if military codes
and laws were enforced Pete Mitchell would’ve been dishonorably discharged
decades ago. This one is an example where the host and guest are clearly Archer
fans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTx_qZL3tqM&t=10s
and they explain all the stuff “Maverick” did in
Top Gun that would’ve gotten him dishonorably discharged at best and executed
for crimes at worst.
Over at The Music Salon blog Steven Watson has a two-part series on
the music of Toru Takemitsu, who has been one of my favorites for decades.
Takemitsu’s music for guitar is atypical for his usual musical styles but
everything he wrote for the guitar is a gem!
Ted Gioia has a list of warning signs that you are
living in a culture that has no counterculture
Eh ... at the risk of quoting myself from another context:
even within his own work Gioia has noted that yesteryear's rebels tend to become today's establishmentarians or that the powers that be co-opt past revolutions.
But I do wonder whether it's meaningful to write as though there "needs" to be a "counterculture" or that there have been countercultures across human history. What do those sorts of things mean? A subculture cordoned off from the mainstream or the seats of power? Would that be like neo-Assyrian astrological notes for the priests vs. the official documents of record given to kings? In my reading on ancient near eastern divinatory customs it was interesting to read that there were distinctions between astrological customs for the prophetic guilds to preserve astronomical observation and the official oracles given to kings that would cater to political realities. So the stars might say the king would lose a battle to a powerful enemy in terms of the intra-guild indicators but the oracle would say the king would be victorious if careful but to be mindful of risks. I doubt many would consider "that" to be a "counterculture".
I also openly doubt that cultures that have no "counterculture", whatever those are, are characterized by "mediocrity". The ars perfecta of the early modern period in Western Europe was not full of mediocrity. My music teacher in college who conducted choral music pointed out that what he loved about Renaissance music was even the "floor" composers had a wider range of skills and mastery of musical craft than almost any subsequent era. Renaissance choral music was singer's art at its peak.
Endless revolutions are probably the most abnormal thing in the history of the arts not just in the West but probably the rest of the world. I think Leonard Meyer called it in the 1960s when he said there were not likely to be any truly "revolutionary" movements in the arts in Music, The Arts, and Ideas. He proposed that what was new and different was the co-existence or simultaneity of all styles and forms in the present and that it would be a challenge to live with that and not reduce it to some one-size-fits-all scholastic read (that's more subtext than text). The revolutionary era of the long 19th century and early 20th century gave way to a later 20th century where the odds were no sea-change movement was coming. Meyer proposed the real challenge was going to be coping with the sheer plethora of stylistic and formal options rather than coming up with something "new". There would be no single dominant style or school for scholars and arts historians peg everything down to.
https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2022/05/no-counterculture.html?showComment=1653850640287#c256802586714544250
Dwight MacDonald hypothesized in "Masscult and Midcult" that the avant gardists of the early 20th century didn't even really see themselves as avant garde. They were tired of Victorian sentimentality and Romanticist bombast and wanted to find ways at being creative that stripped out the conventions that they believed got in the way of mediating thought and art in their own era. He also hypothesized that the spectacular artistic cultures of the past, whether Elizabethan England or Athens, had a lot of shared qualities but, more so, a lot of intra-cultural competition. Xenakis went so far as to argue that all Western music oscillates between parameters laid out by Parmenides and Pythagoras as a continuum between their respective ideas. So, eh, I mean Ted Gioia's dualism between the eleatic monists and the Pythagoreans isn't even "that" new if we keep in mind what Greek avant gardists like Xenakis pointed out in the 1950s. The new element, such as it is, is the imposed antagonist binary--the dualism Gioia introduced in his Subversive History was a duality iN Xenakis and that Xenakis approach makes far more sense. Leonard Meyer's proposal half a century ago-ish was that the West has oscillated between classicism and romanticism but that the Romantic era that kicked off in the 19th century was still with us and we haven't left it. If Meyer were still alive he might propose that the pendulum swing away from 2 centuries of Romanticism to some form of classicism might be overdue. Taruskin has practicaly made a career out of writing books on the deleterious influence of Romanticist dogmas on academic musicology.
Of course I still, obviously, like to read Gioia. Terry Teachout once wrote that a great critic can be more useful when they are completely wrong than an average critic is by being right. Knowing now that Teachout gave Gioia encouragement early in his career I venture to guess that Gioia is in that class Teachout would've described as great-even-when-completely-wrong-because-he-inspires-fruitful-discussion. And I gotta admit the triple whammy of Joan Didion, Terry Teachout and Angelo Gilardino all dying within weeks of each other took the wind out of my sails for blogging. So that had a ton to do with the blogging sabbatical, which is not necessarily over because of this one post.
I haven’t linked to anything from Freddie deBoer
in a while but he has a riff on how reactions to wokeness are lame but
reactions to reactions to wokeness can be lame.
Bear with me as I quote him at a bit of length here.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/unlearning-the-language-of-wokeness.html
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/social-justice-advocates-dont-get?s=r
...
What
underlies all this is the phlogiston of contemporary progressive politics: the
immense condescension with which racial politics are treated. To the extent
that America’s racial politics have become more emotional and linguistically radical,
they’ve also become wrapped in a layer of pandering and head-patting on the
part of benevolent white liberals who have little need for material change (as
they’re already affluent themselves) and much to lose from appearing not to kowtow
to social justice norms (as their lives are unusually dependent on reputation).
An outcome of this situation is that you have a lot of people who ostensibly
support a social justice agenda and yet are totally indifferent to whether
anything actually gets done. Defunding the police was the ultimate example.
Nobody thought we were going to defund the police!
We
can’t get a single piece of meaningful gun control legislation passed in a
country with weekly child-slaughterings, and you’re going to defund the police
forces? But untold thousands of white lefties put “Defund the Police #ACAB” in
their Instagram bios anyway because actually meaningfully changing policing
practices had far less interest to them than did appearing to be the right kind
of person. This is why I’ve said for years that one of the social justice
agenda’s biggest problems lies in its adherents; many of them are really only
onboard with appearing to be onboard.
...
There’s a local news angle to this. Cutting the budget of the SPD may have had
some side effects. Defunding the police
as social media political theater isn’t the same as cutting the department
budget and then finding out a year or so later that, well, as the mayor has put
it lately …
There’s a piece at Mere Orthodoxy lately on how
the masculinity crisis is an economic crises.
https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-masculinity-crisis-is-an-economic-crisis/
Sure, and while I’ve talked with friends about how
the unskilled labor market withered away in the last forty years and how the
basic disposability of people in general can seem acute in terms of the
disposability of males …
those jobs that working class men could get
straight out of high school aren’t coming back and at a policy level nobody
wants those jobs to come back. Pandering
to right-wing populism on the premise that those jobs will be brought back or created
doesn’t mean those jobs will come back.
But the author at the Mere Orthodoxy piece
proposes that at this point conservative evangelicals in the Anglo-American
West should at least recognize that because the economic realities at hand make
the prescribed scripts of Driscollian masculine adulthood improbable we should
consider other options.
To which Wenatchee The Hatchet can alternately say
“duh” and “Amen”. It’s not like I haven’t written about that ever since 2006.
Finally, Alan Jacobs has been riffing on "normies" as Matthew Arnold style "philistines". I'm just going to quote from part 2:
…
We
owe this use of the word “philistine” to Matthew Arnold, who in turn borrowed
it from a town-and-gown dispute in the German city of Jena. In his great book
Culture and Anarchy Arnold sets the Philistine on the side of money over
against culture:
The
people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being
very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are
just the people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these
people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of
their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the
things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their
mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount
of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like
these people by having it?”
The
condescension drips and drips. But like Trevor-Roper, Arnold did not confuse
philistinism with stupidity: in a later essay he picks up a category he had
briefly mentioned in Culture and Anarchy:
the “Philistine of genius.” This category is dominated by three giants: “So we
have the Philistine of genius in religion — Luther; the Philistine of genius in
politics — Cromwell; the Philistine of genius in literature — Bunyan.” Though
appalled by these figures, he has to concede their greatness. The whole project
of Culture and Anarchy might be
described as a thought experiment for creating a world in which such people
could never be recognized as great; but in our real, existing world, such
recognition is unavoidable to the honest.
However,
did any of these figures desire money?
If so, they went about the pursuit of it in very odd ways. I think the love of
money is, for Arnold, just one of the ways a person can live in opposition to
true Culture. One also opposes culture by a leveling impulse: Luther against
the papacy; Cromwell against the aristocracy; and Bunyan against the state
church and its confinement of the ability to preach to the formally educated.
And over the course of his career I think Arnold much more consistently focuses
on the Philistinism of Leveling rather than the Philistinism of Lucre.
…
So, a question would be, is Alan Jacobs on target proposing that Arnold's Philistines of Genius were advocating a Philistinism of Leveling rather than the Philistinism of Lucre? I can't help but introduce eschatological considerations for these philistines because the Lutheran tradition is, as I understand it, amillennial while the Puritans were postmillennialist futurist (I've been on a Crawford Gribben marathon reading through his works on millennarian thought in the Puritan movements and the political outworkings of those ideas). Revolutionary futurist millenarianism seems like it could be an important variable in two of the three philistines.
Anyone want to unpack what Levelers were up to, since it seems Jacobs is alluding to the Levelers as a movement? It gets me thinking about a distinction I've been making in my offline thoughts on the arts about the difference between populist/populism in arts and politics and the more specific idea I have been entertaining here at the blog about cultivating a synergistic exchange between what people tend to call highbrow and lowbrow in Dwight MacDonaldish terms. Even cranky old Adorno conceded that synergistic exchanges between the elite and street musical styles and forms was common enough up through Haydn and Mozart yet one of the unexamined axioms among academics and the academically trained in the last century or so, maybe post Matthew Arnold in general, is that such a synergistic process of exchange can't happen.
Well, I obviously disagree. But the way that I disagree is more by example than precept. When Ethan Hein and I compare notes on Stevie Wonder or Prince or Bach or David Bowie or John Lee Hooker (and Bjork!) I'm not blogging as an academic but I like that it's possible for people to trade ideas across styles and forms and disciplines. So, again, congratulations to Ethan for getting his doctorate and kudos for blogging about Talking Heads. : )
I'm not sure I'd say this post means Wenatchee The Hatchet is "back" because the sabbatical from blogging may keep going but I figure I would break the blogging silence to congratulate Ethan and share a bit of what I've been reading online even if I'm not going to hit readers with book reports on Gribben's work on the connections between postmillennialist futurist eschatologies and political subversion. :) It "might" be germane to folks who have concerns about folks in Idaho but ... no, no ... I'm still trying to take a break from blogging.
1 comment:
Thanks man, nice to see some activity here.
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