Only The Yogurt Has Culture

What remains of Western Civilization hardly seems worth defending.  I studied and ultimately made a living off of the Arts because I saw the inherent nobility and elevation of the human condition in creating art.  However, there is precious little left to call art in the West, and the virus of depravity is spreading worldwide.

Once upon a time, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte was considered to crass for the Vienna National Theater because it was in German and dealt with common gods and faeries.  Now, most people can't even tell me what an "aria" is, much less have ever seen an opera.  At least in my generation, The Who and Frank Zappa wrote "rock" operas and more or less achieved something memorable.

What passes for culture in the West now is little more than "schlock and ooh".  "Performers" prance around in tiny "costumes", "singing" repetitive "lyrics" to entrancing bass beats that only just meet the criteria for having rhythm.  Furthermore, I can hardly distinguish one "song" from the next.  They are all virtually identical, and in the case of DJs, they aren't even original - just digital samples of utter crap.

When Georges Seurat created the art movement of pointilism, he was exploring the qualities of light and vision using the newly discovered properties and physiology of his era.  Roy Lichtenstein, though, simply magnified the printing process, which used the pixels pioneered by Seurat, to explode comic book illustrations to enormous proportions.  Don't get me wrong, I like Lichtenstein and would happily display his work in my den next to the black velvet dogs playing poker and Elvis portraits, but as art, it hardly qualities as anything other than a quaint addition to kitsch collections.

Don't get me started on Andy Warhol.

I did my art history thesis on Claes Oldenburg's Giant Soft Fan and Henri Matisse's Four Backs.  While Oldenburg's piece is an interesting attempt to explode a common item to massive proportions to enhance its design aspects, it is more of a playful exercise than art.  Matisse, on the other hand, deconstructs a feminine back across four panels from its organic presentation to its geometric components.  This is an interesting study in the mathematics of Life and forces one to examine Nature in a new light.

Today, someone can accidentally drop a pair of glasses on the floor of a "museum" and attract a crowd of awed spectators trying to figure out what state of mind the "artist" was in when "creating" such a piece.  Don't believe me?  Read the article.

Compare also the grand cathedrals of Europe, or even the highly functional castles, to the glass blocks of today's modern city.  The cathedrals defied the massive stone blocks from which they were constructed, soaring far above the viewer's head, and the walls were constructed almost entirely of colored glass windows - art in themselves - that created a floating, other-worldly effect.  Combined with an east-west orientation - using the natural surroundings - they even created special effects at certain times of the year, when light streamed through the rose window and struck the nave, causing it to glow eerily in the murky darkness on the interior.  Magic and masterpiece!

Few even stop now to consider the magnificent technological achievement of placing a dome on a box using an ingenious device called a pendentive.  Nor do they stop to admire the incredible artistry and engineering involved in a cathedral's flying buttresses that keep the walls from flying outward under the strain of their loads.

Can anyone name a work as elevating as the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven's 9th Symphony created in the last 50 years?  How about a script as linguistically entrancing as William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette?  In fact, has any form of art moved you to tears, or left you breathless, or induced a feeling of elation that was created in the past 30 years?

Nowadays, architecture refers to game engines, the visual arts have been reduced to graphics, music has been debased to little more than a repetitive bass cleft with foul words spewed over it, and performance has devolved to computer generated movement and explosions.

Honestly, when the conversation occasionally turns to discussing the defense of Western culture, I can hardly think of anything in the past two generations worth preserving.  Fortunately, the West's greatest achievements are largely available online for everyone to access, but in terms of modern society, I find nothing of value - just a bunch of whiny, unevolved children with no sense of history, art or appreciation for anything outside the lint in their navels.

Oh sure, Donald Trump wants to revitalize America, saving American jobs and American business, but to what end?  So we can be abused into consuming more senseless crud from the country's "artists"?

It used to be that business created wealthy people, who in turn used their wealth to endow artists and talented technicians, who then created monumental works for all posterity to enjoy.  Instead, we get Bill Gates forcing the world to slime their bodies with vaccines, Elon Musk building fun toys and Puckerberg walling himself into his Hawaiian retreat.

So much for culture.

It's long past time for the West to ask itself what it is fighting for?  Without a decent answer, then what's the point?

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”

Oh My God!

A White Russian is a drink intended to be served layered.  The Patron is the one who is responsible for mixing those layers, not the bartender.  This is one of those little-known facts of life that should, but often fails, to guide our conscious lives.
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There is a common image of the artist as a bedraggled loner ensconced in his studio (artists are always male in the common mind).  Whether the artist is a writer, painter, sculptor, or whatever, he is moody, disheveled and teeters uncertainly on the cat-walk of sanity.

The writer sits alone in his rat-infested flat above a whore-house with red neon light screaming unheeded warnings across the walls of his mind.  There is a single lamp spilling unnecessary light on the termite-eaten desk.  He hunches over an Underhill Upright - upright referring to the writer, not the machine - a bottle of squalor stands guard at his right hand as he bangs out veiled autobiographies to an uninterested world.

The painter lives alone in a dingy, cavernous room with wooden planks for flooring.  Alone, that is, unless he has just sold a painting and can pay a local night butterfly to pose nude - nude is on purpose, naked is not - while he dispassionately outlines the curves and ignores the scars.

Painters have beards, writers do not.

Amidst these land mines of solitary creativity and psychological case studies, there is one art form that stands out as unique in all of art history.  It is the single art form that thrives on socializing and public adulation.  It is the one art form in which mental instability is paraded and glorified, rather than castigated and clucked at.  It is the one art form in which there are job descriptions and career paths, and whose jargon has invaded the natural landscape of communication.

The theater.

I hear you...what about the military and pro sports?  Those are destructive, not creative, and the mental illnesses on display are not favored in polite society.  A soldier or a linebacker cannot quote Shakespeare and Ionesco, nor can he distinguish between the five conventional plots.  Most certainly, these Cretaceous outcasts could never understand the deus ex machina, though they pray fervently for just such a thing.

No, in the theater, there are educated and erudite folks who just happen to like taking off their clothes for money in acts that require no consummation.  These beasts of the boards know the subtleties of body language, they rehearse for hours to place just the right inflection on a syllable, they thrive on the praise and applause of their peers, and most of all, they live for the blood-screaming immediacy of the theater.

There is no other art form in existence in which a happenstance assemblage of artists, technicians and machines must work in perfect synchronization for two and a half hours every night to create magic.  And there is no other art form in existence in which the consumming public expects that magic on demand.

Image a gaggle of art lovers hovering around a painter screaming nightly for a new masterpiece.  Or how about stuffy readers seated in the flat of the writer awaiting their due on time and on cue.  You would more likely receive cacophonous hissies about the vagaries of the creative muse, than steamy dressing rooms choked with anxiety and pheromones, and full of painted liars ready to offer their souls for your applause.

Yes, in the space of time that most of us slough off on the couch in front of the TeeVee, this group of highly suspect human beings emote to the point of leaving a physical residue on the stage - not just actors but crew as well.  In a quiet moment, if you listen very hard, you can hear the Stage Manager having a cow in her corner backstage.  She has screamed every curse and epithet known to humankind trying to push the talent onstage.

Pulses are pounding, the hairs on the nape of the neck are standing erect, pupils are dilated - just another night in the theater.

Before and after, the entire company gets sauced.  Before to calm the nerves and focus the fear - nay terror - of stepping in front of an audience.  After because the thrill of the moment and living in the eternal now is something humans are ill-equipped to survive.  Ram Daas would be envious of the showman's life: there is no future or past, just now.

That is why persons of the theater are so prized among the lesser artisans of film and TeeVee.  In those bastard arts, only the stage-trained and tempered can hold up under intense pressure and deliver identical performances time after time.  "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star," roared Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year.  He spoke from the heart in that singular line.

The theater is a mystical place.  Great brotherhoods are forged in 10 short weeks, though they fade just as quickly.  Indeed, the stage has produced some of the greatest talents ever to emote a catharsis.  Even their deathbed scenes are truly of note. 

The great Victorian actor Edmund Keene is still quoted "on the boards" for his Earth-quaking last thought as he expired, "Dying is easy...comedy is hard."

Perhaps the uninitiated will not remember Wilfrid Lawson, but there is a tale of Titanic proportions among theater folk:

Sir Lawson met an old friend on the street after a long absence.  They retired to a pub for a long list of courage.  At one point, the friend suggested they take in a show, and Sir Lawson said there was a show up the street that was "fair".

They stumbled their way over to the theater and, with luck, were able to get two tickets in the back of the house just moments before the curtain rose.

As the show went on, the friend remarked, "Seems a bit slow, old boy."

To which Sir Lawson replied, "Hold on, it will get quite a bit more interesting in just a moment."

The friend inquired, "How so?"

"Do you see that woman on stage there?" said Sir Lawson.

"Yes," came the reply.

"When she finishes dressing, I'm supposed to enter," he hissed.

Such incredible toying with the Eternal Now are not possible in film and TeeVee.  They are edited out.  Theater is immediate and gut-real.  There is no "cut" and do-over.  There is only NOW...

Film and TeeVee people are known for drugs and overdoses.  That doesn't happen in the theater.  The high from just one tiny show is so overwhelming that there are only two answers: one, the orgy, and two, drinking heavily to bring you down.  Theater people don't need drugs, they live the greatest of them all - NOW.

 In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that one could look into the eyes of a traveler and see how far they were from home.  When Arthur looked into Ford's eyes, he was nearly thrown from his stool.  This was a metaphor not for aliens or travelers, but for theater people.

We know each other across time and space, no matter the distance or medium.  We can look into each other's souls and know that both of us have stood upon the threshold of Time and touched the Big Lie at the center of the Universe.

Theater is a unique and wonderous thing.  There can be no other experience like it, for even the shamans know theater.  It is the deepest of all human experiences, which is why audiences crave a taste, though they dare not step into that abyss.

Theater has no rival.  It is mystical in a way that no solitary artist will ever experience, for ultimately he cannot share his experience with anyone, even those looking at his tints or brushstrokes.  Only those who have journeyed to the Center together and survived can ever share the Mystery that is theater.

That is why the very stitching of culture uses the lines from the stage.  That is why the undergarments of God are the Costumes of Ages.  That is why even the Universe uses make-up to show us her best face - though we call them flowers or so other appellation.

Once you have tread the boards, you cannot see the world in the same drab way that the rest of humanity envisions it.  Once you have played on the Far Side, nothing less will suffice.

As Shakespeare himself noted, "The play is the thing in which we shall catch the conscience of the king."

Theater is dangerous and should be handled with the utmost of care.  Those who toy lightly with it are bound to receive radiation burns.  The older the play, the deeper the magic.

Can you name a single work of art that is more than 2,000 years old?

I thought not.

But the Greek plays and the Roman plays are still produced today, as fresh and alive as they were millennia ago.  They don't need restoration because they have not faded.  They don't reside in a single place but are available to anyone anywhere at any time.  Theater IS immortality.  Shakespeare is just as relevant now as he was 400 years ago.  So too Aristophanes and Thespus, Ionesco and Wycherly.  The past lives in the eternal NOW, and it is connected to the future, because at some point those great plays will be produced long after we are dead.

Show me a Mona Lisa that can achieve that.

Oh, to tread the boards once again and live in the immortal moment for just one second longer.

Human, meet thy true god...