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”

The Sounds Of Our Lives

Today's soundtrack can be found by clicking here.

OK, I've figured out all the world's problems.  See?  You knew if you stuck around long enough, that I, your faithful correspondent, would eventually figure it all out.

The Problem Is (are you ready?)...

MUSIC

That's right...music.  Go ahead, turn on your radio to something other than talk shows.  See what I mean?

I don't know about your side of the world, but here on the Far Side, K-Pop is all the rage.  If you haven't been subjected this somewhat harmonized caterwauling, it's a bunch of Korean whatevers wearing make-up and flashy costumes sync-dancing to songs that remind me of the innards of a good-sized pimple.  In fact, I've had some pimple guts that were far more creative.

Over on the Near Side, the music scene took a belly-flop at the beginning of the Noughties and the demise of the Grunge Movement.  Lyrics became mantric repetitions of inane "hey babies" and the instrumentation bowed out and let the rhythm sections take over while the rest of the band went out in the alley to smoke a joint and talk about where to go from here.

Think about it...in the 40s, sweet pipes like Sinatra and Cosby crooned us into a stupor with grammatically understandable lyrics.  In the 50s, talents like Chuck, Elvis, Jerry Lee and Buddy brought R&B out of the smoky dens of dark inner cities and into the Rock & Roll revolution.  That movement blended with the wild explosion of creativity of the 60s, where folk met rock met gospel and they had an ecstatic orgy of sound and meaning.

In the 70s, we briefly saw the Disco Monster rear its horrible head, but it was eventually conquered by the Pettys and Springsteens of the world, and their harmonies inspired the Grunge Movement of the late 80s and 90s.

But, then a terrible thing happened.  Little did we realize that the Disco Monster, just before expiring, had thrown out an egg sac that fertilized with with another inner-city movement called "rap."  The offspring that emerged were horrific in their countenance.  The Pop Movement was born, and like any good bowel movement, it landed on the world with a resounding thud and immediately drew flies.

Lyrics have devolved into endlessly repeated catch-phrases - like diamonds in the sky - and the performers are all of the same pasty, limp noodle variety with little more than a well-placed sequin to distinguish them.  In fact, the most interesting product of this insipid movement are the videos, which are anathema to music, since music is intended to be (ahem) heard, not seen.

You can see the effect in the eyes of the Millennial Generation.  Their hollow haunted looks reflect that complete lack of creativity in their shared culture.  Like some warped Zen koan, they are forced to draw meaning from meaninglessness, and the result is a vacuous mentality that seeks nothing, because that is always the point of a good koan.

While pondering this article, I went and checked my own library.  My collection begins with the Dawn of Time and runs right up to the early 2000s, then abruptly stops.  The collection encompasses nearly every form of music ever recorded, even the sounds of planets and stars (oddly melodic by the way), but from the last 16 years, almost nothing, not even movie soundtracks or show tunes.  Creativity in music just died.

Music is one of those things we all take for granted, but is very important to humans.  Hearing is pretty much the strongest human sense. Our eyes aren't worth a damn, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.  Our sense of smell is only a fraction of other beasts.  However, nearly half or more of our experience in the Universe comes through our hearing.

Music is vital to culture, can excite vivid memories and can unite radically diverse groups across physical distance and across generations.  Creating music is one of humanity's most primal instincts.  It is a language that all people understand instinctively.  Music, in fact, is embedded in the very nature of all we perceive, and that is not hyperbole.

At its core, music is just harmonious vibrations.  We are sensitive to the harmony, finding some vibrations pleasing, while others irritate or excite us in a wide variety of ways.  Music is the expression of time and mathematics, as music cannot exist without time and its very nature is wavelengths - sine waves of various lengths.

Who among us can listen to Wagner without feeling our pulse quicken?  Is not Beethoven the embodiment of joy?  Even the sounds of the gamelan evokes the endless and serene world of tropical Earth.  From humanity's earliest awakenings, music has been a vital and uniting force behind our civilizations.

Yet, here we are.  We have arrived at the empty and meaningless Age of Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, the vacuous noises of Psy and Lee Ji-Eun, and the violet arrhythmia of Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols.

We have entered an era where art has devolved into something called "self-expression."  It has affected all media and forms, and it has laid waste to the very fabric of society.  It is hard to separate the devolution of music from the increasing courseness of society.  Whether art has followed the increasing destruction of harmonious culture, or led it, is of little consequence, but it is certain that a major change in music - a burst of creative force - would give great power to the restoration of peaceful and harmonious life.

If all life and existence is based on vibrations, then it stands to reason that the most powerful force we can unleash - for good or bad - is vibrations.  Meaningful and harmonious vibrations fill our lives with peace, while empty and vacuous ones cause strife.

We call upon the musicians of the world to return us to peace with your music!

Random Thoughts On Pop Culture

• I hope no one honestly believes the "race" flap at the Oscars this year; all the commotion and threats of antics are nothing more than a cynical attempt to get ratings, which have seriously lagged for all self-aggrandizing "award" shows over the past few years; no one in Hollywood does or says anything without first calling their agents and publicists, who in turn check with CCA;  it's all a show, folks.
• What in the hell has happened to the music "industry?"  It used to be music spoke to the heart and soul, tapped into the zeitgeist, stirred up mental processes; now performers compete solely on how big of a train wreck they produce both on- and off-stage.
• There is a big difference between an actor and a performer; Gary Oldman is an actor, Morgan Freeman is a performer.
• Indonesia doesn't have any public libraries, and the world is quickly following suit; it's a shame that people don't read anymore; now-a-days, writers survive by writing scripts, not novels; I love books; I can do my own casting and set designs, proceed at my own pace, never have to recharge the battery, and when I finish a good book I actually feel like the world has changed a little; only problem is that moving a library is a bitch.
• One of the most thought-provoking episodes of the original Star Trek series was called "A Taste of Armageddon." Two planets conduct war via computer simulations, but "victims" are marched into disintegration machines if they are selected to "die."  Most of the wars I see on the "news" these days reminds me a lot of that episode.
• William Shatner is a performer.
• Gardening is a lost art in most urban areas these days; I have always had plants wherever I've lived, even if it's just potted geraniums; potting, feeding, watering, harvesting, and pruning are all very meditative and rewarding activities; watching plants grow forces you to slow down and contemplate the beauty and genius of Nature; gardening is also a hobby that can be practiced well into old age and is more productive and less wasteful of resources than golf.
• Pro-sports are completely senseless, time-wasting spectacles; the whole idea of sport is to participate to promote healthy activity that's a lot more fun that lifting weights and running on treadmills; if you sum up all the effort put into pro sports, think of how much time, money and resources are wasted on watching someone else's exercise, and think of how much could have been accomplished if all that couch time had been applied to something useful (thousands of collective years).
• It used to be that picture books were for kids, and adults would read books that only contained text, because their minds had grown and expanded enough to be able to maintain complex visualizations based solely on words; now picture books are called "graphic novels" and are the pinnacle of modern creativity with multi-billion dollar industries based on these tree wasters and the movie empires they have spawned.
• On my recent trip back home for the holidays, I was shocked at how many people had never heard of Jakarta, much less knew where it was (or even Indonesia for that matter); I realized why Americans like to bomb foreign countries, because for most folks, those places are just abstract unknowns with no sense of reality to them.
• The modern concept of "diversity" is utter bullshit; diversity has come to mean "forced compliance" rather than "widely different."  As is it currently practiced, "diversity" only fosters resentment and animosity, rather than appreciation and solidarity; it used to be you could travel from place to place and experience how other communities and cultures viewed the world and acted upon it; now it's like porridge - an homogeneous bowl of glop with no real excitement; it also meant that if you didn't like a particular culture, you could get away from it; now it lives next door.
• I miss real art; art was once the perfection of raw materials and the idealization of our cultural goals and aspirations; now art is a woman drinking colored milk and puking on a canvas; glorifying someone's mental illness and hanging their effluvia on the wall is not art, it's a publicity stunt; rather than elevating the mind and soul, modern art drags us down into chaos and ugliness.