Highbrow People with Lowbrow Tastes

...using an expansive interpretation of "highbrow"

Alfred Hitchcock's all-time favorite film - or "one of" his all-time favorites - was Smokey and the Bandit

President Jimmy Carter was a fan of Led Zeppelin

Queen Elizabeth II was a faithful viewer of the TV show Kojak

Eliot devouring detective fiction and laughing hysterically at music hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLyvszhFAC4

Gore Vidal describes Airplane! as possibly the greatest work of art America has produced in last 30 years in this video

Obv Jean-Luc Godard et al exalting Jerry Lewis, just to get that out of the way

...using an expansive interpretation of "highbrow"

... and lowbrow.

I mean, Beckett was a reader of Agatha Christie but is Agatha Christie lowbrow?

Borderline call

Leonard Bernstein loved the Beatles, even before they got artsy. Another borderline call.

Everything in this thread is middlebrow.

Be that as it may, I hope people get the gist of this thread

Honestly, before anyone really gets into that, I posted it because I thought it would be funny to throw in here and scamper away. I don't usually shitpost and I regretted it immediately. As an apology, I will try to think of a real example. (I mean, Zizek's whole career maybe?)

I remember Chris Morris doing a live q&a and someone asked who his favourite broadcaster working today was. he said "Danny Baker" and the crowd laughed. but it wasn't a joke.

I heard an interview where travel writer Pico Iyer confessed that he preferred eating at McDonalds while traveling

me liking your mom haha

more like me continuing to get a thrill from your mom jokes

Tony Williams was a Ramones fan. From a 1983 interview in Down Beat:

DB: You were quoted in [an article in] Rolling Stone, praising the drummer in the Ramones. Were you serious?

TW: I don’t remember the occasion, but I do like that kind of drumming, like Keith Moon, any drumming where you have to hit the drum hard; that’s why I like rock ’n’ roll drumming.

DB: Sometimes so much of that music seems very insensitive.

TW: It depends on what you’re saying the Ramones are supposed to be sensitive to. Just because it’s jazz doesn’t mean it’s going to be sensitive. You’re trying to evoke a whole other type of feeling with the Ramones.

I kind of wish Tony Williams had significantly less interest in rock 'n' roll, but I'll keep that to ILM controps

Boulez & Orinoco

https://thelondoncolumn.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/boulez-womble-2-big-2.jpg

I kind of wish Tony Williams had significantly less interest in rock 'n' roll, but I'll keep that to ILM controps

Let's have that discussion! I am a vocal TW non-fan.

Patti Smith goes on and on in her books about her love for the Law & Order TV shows.

Ingmar Bergman was a fan of Goldfinger.

Herzog has that dumb quote about Godard being intellectual counterfeit money compared to a good kung fu film but the fact he didn't even specify if he meant Shaw Bros or Golden Harvest or what makes me suspect he was just being a poser.

Patti Smith is not highbrow

She reads Rimbaud!

Gore Vidal otm

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown essentially created postmodern architecture critique when they wrote about strip malls, parking lots, casinos and bars in Learning From Las Vegas. Reyner Banham does the same for Los Angeles architecture in The Architecture Of Four Cities

Walker Percy and Eudora bonding over shared appreciation of The Incredible Hulk.

Eudora Welty

the one with Lou Ferrigno?

Chrome Hearts. In the first instance.

And then Karl Lagerfeld's love for Chrome Hearts as a second level. In a documentary Karl finishes getting dressed by grabbing a fistful of Chrome Hearts rings on his way out the door and finishes putting them on in the car.

And Bill Bixby, yeah. (xp)

Fine dining chefs who like Cheetos and McDonalds fries and such.

Eudora Welty was a big Ross Macdonald fan too (and a close friend of his)

These days I feel like it's more unusual to read about people who refuse to leave their highbrow lanes -- I seem to remember soemething by Rebecca Mead that fit this bill

Or, like, those Booktokers who list five obscure new YA books in their roundups, followed by The Origins of Totalitarianism or something

Wittgenstein had a love of Westerns and particularly liked Tom Mix movies.

Andy Warhol loved all kinds of cheap tchotchkes and trinkets.

ross macdonald is BARELY lowbrow imo

Right. He was considered the very high end of detective fiction iirc.

John Waters obv

Alain Resnais a big fan of comic books and strips, notably The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician and Marvel Comics, wanted to collaborate with Stan Lee (did end up collaborating with Jules Feiffer but that's more highbrow).

Kingsley Amis called Terminator 2: Judgement Day "a flawless masterpiece."

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown essentially created postmodern architecture critique when they wrote about strip malls, parking lots, casinos and bars in Learning From Las Vegas. Reyner Banham does the same for Los Angeles architecture in The Architecture Of Four Cities

Robert Smithson liked cheapie SF and horror movies like Creation of the Humanoids and Village of the Giants and I Was a Teenage Werewolf, claimed a lot of other mid-60s Minimalists were also influenced by them i.e. artist Peter Hutchinson "will go to see a movie on 42nd Street, like ‘Horror at Party Beach’ two or three times and contemplate it for weeks on end.", from the essay Entropy and the New Monuments.

Robert Bresson raved about Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only.

Warhol also liked Creation of the Humanoids, so maybe that’s an art film.

Warhol also loved Grease 2

I mean Warhol's whole deal was putting a high brow patina on low brow stuff I'm not sure it counts

I'm not sure it counts

Why? Surely it should count double.

i've collapsed all these distinctions into my unibrow

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown essentially created postmodern architecture critique when they wrote about strip malls, parking lots, casinos and bars in Learning From Las Vegas

that wasn't really about taste though, that was examining popular culture through a "highbrow" lens, which is closer to Adorno vs. The Cadillacs and less of the thing in question, which is like Godard liking Jerry Lewis ... or the rich dude formerly known as Prince Charles liking whatever pop music he liked because apparently according to the NY Times, he is very much a fan of the arts

I mean Warhol's whole deal was putting a high brow patina on low brow stuff I'm not sure it counts

otm ... it's not the same thing ... see also Jeff Koons and the Michael & bubbles / topiary puppy / balloon animals things

Kingsley Amis called Terminator 2: Judgement Day "a flawless masterpiece."

Also a big fan of Carlsberg Special Brew.

him and Italian beer hipsters both

Amis also liked Hammer films, Modesty Blaise novels, wrote the first notable critical study of science fiction.

Nabokov introduced crossword puzzles to Russia and wrote a whole book of them.

Stockhausen loved Janis Joplin. Would people consider her "lowbrow" in 2023? Probably not. Would Stockhausen's peers? Pretty sure that's a yes.

Brian Sewell was a follower of stock car racing

(xp) First I've heard of that! I knew he liked a bit of jazz.

That info courtesy an interview with the man in the German edition of Rolling Stone a few years before he passed.

Wittgenstein's love of westerns has already been noted, but he was also a Carmen Miranda fan.

Edward Gorey loved MTV’s first dramatic series “Dead at 21”.

Elgar was a Wolves fan

understandable that he shunned worcester city

Henry Green was a Villa fan (not the only Old Etonian to support them though).

i knew a nun that liked fart jokes

nice "Wolves are lowbrow" zing

apparently Elgar used to cycle to the Mol every week

xp how well did you know this nun? ... In the biblical sense?

but tbh, the career/persona of George W Bush is kinda the essence of this thread?

Don't know whether this counts or not, but William Burroughs's repurposing of pulp literature, comic books, stories for boys etc.

Every chef who works at a Michelin-starred restaurant but eats McDonald's and Taco Bell, which apparently is all of them.

I remember reading somewhere that Thelonious Monk would often watch The Price Is Right from his bed and while still wearing one of his impressive hats. Maybe a questionable highbrow by accepted opinion, but the high priest of bebop probably didn't care either!

Tolkien was a fan of the Villa, who, as everyone knows, had a striker in the 30s called Alf Gand.

"The Villa, the Villa, come on the Villa. Mr Connolly stood like transfixed with passion and 30,000 people waved and shrieked and swayed and clamoured at eleven men who play the best football in the world. These took no notice of the crowd, no notice."

Henry Green, Living

it's not the same thing ... see also Jeff Koons and the Michael & bubbles / topiary puppy / balloon animals things

the difference between these examples and Warhol is that Warhol genuinely loved the popular stuff we're calling lowbrow on its own merits, not as a vehicle for irony. he didn't pretend to look upon it from a loftier vantage point. he was fascinated by it, studied it, loved it and assimilated it rather than cynically manipulating it, which is the common failing of most highbrow 'pop art'. imo, he was the king of this thread's premise.

Ian McKellen appearing in Coronation Street.

the difference between these examples and Warhol is that Warhol genuinely loved the popular stuff we're calling lowbrow on its own merits, not as a vehicle for irony. he didn't pretend to look upon it from a loftier vantage point. he was fascinated by it, studied it, loved it and assimilated it rather than cynically manipulating it, which is the common failing of most highbrow 'pop art'. imo, he was the king of this thread's premise.

Having read extensive interviews with Jeff Koons I genuinely don't think he's smart enough to be ironic.

No-one is seriously suggesting Andy Warhol was highbrow are they?

Lookit that wig!

Godard also regarded Jerry Lewis as a genius formalist, he didn't condescend to those films or regard them as enjoyable junk.

The OP cited Queen Elizabeth II as highbrow for chrissakes!

I saw a live talk with Stan Brakhage where he and fellow experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder said they had just watched the Jerry Lee Lewis biography Great Balls of Fire.

i wish there was a better example of this than "lowbrow we all know is good actually" and more "lowbrow that's indefensible". like morton feldman reading maxim magazine or something.

philip guston: "i have kinkade's peaceful retreat in the dining room because it gives me a sense of peace and serenity at the end of the day."

the Pinefox reading Bono’s autobiography

lol, he listens to Talksport as well!

I realize there's a problem in calling QEII and others itt highbrow... maybe substitute "high status" to make it work

Think it's more that, as touched upon elsewhere in this thread, highbrow/lowbrow distinctions have been comprehensively dismantled in culture now. But we're all still sufficiently familiar with the old hierarchies to play this game nonetheless, imo.

true but it's kinda boring innit

Queen Elizabeth II having highbrow tastes is infinitely more unlikely tbh.

first example that came to mind was david foster wallace liked/taught(?) thomas harris' hannibal novels, at least the first two, which tho they've been ennobled in film and tv by several auteurs are pulp trash to the fuckin' core

No-one is seriously suggesting Andy Warhol was highbrow are they?

― Maggot Bairn (Tom D.), Tuesday, May 9, 2023 11:51 AM (three hours ago

otm! he was not.

honestly tho, Europeans are better suited to this premise, as the US has very few actually highbrow people ...

I realize there's a problem in calling QEII and others itt highbrow... maybe substitute "high status" to make it work

― Josefa

there's a sort of "U and non-U" subtext to the whole thing, isn't there?

thinking about it (in conjunction with another thread where i've been ruminating some) my tendency in matters of "highbrow" is to approach it as a genre. liking, for instance, classical music is considered in a lot of corners to be sort of dodgy and fash, in large part i think because it's often championed by dodgy fascists who see it as the ultimate proof of the superiority of European Culture. me, if anything, i have towards it the sort of condescending attitude that some "highbrow" folks back in the day had towards genre work - highbrow culture is disreputable, but mostly harmless, not nearly as nasty or vile as a lot of people make it out to be. as with any genre, there are certainly purists, just like there are people who _only_ ever listen to metal, but there are just probably as many fans of the genre who have a wide range of tastes!

otm! he was not

ok. an otm is inarguable. so, he was not.

uh, but can anyone enlighten me what it is that makes a highbrow? because I clearly have no grasp of this, since my one example is the only one offered so far that has been decisively rejected and most of the others seem to follow no coherent pattern I can detect.

i don't know but this whole thread i've been wanting to post this prog rock video game song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXlFyDMoALE

Godard also regarded Jerry Lewis as a genius formalist, he didn't condescend to those films or regard them as enjoyable junk.

― Halfway there but for you,

Nor did Morbs.

uh, but can anyone enlighten me what it is that makes a highbrow?

Step 1: don't get known for something that has "pop" as a prefix.

Are there any other disqualifiers or is that it?

Chekhov wrote a murder mystery novel where the narrator did it. I think a lot of literary writers were into mystery novels around that time.

T.S. Eliot is to music hall as George Will is to baseball.

Change my mind.

Think it's more that, as touched upon elsewhere in this thread, highbrow/lowbrow distinctions have been comprehensively dismantled in culture now. But we're all still sufficiently familiar with the old hierarchies to play this game nonetheless, imo.

Robert Williams is the Godwin's Law of this thread.

Andy Warhol, Egghead.

Are there any other disqualifiers or is that it?

You might try starting with Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class to understand a theory of signifiers of "high brow" culture, at least in Gilded Age America. It's kind of a diss on America's industrial class imitating European landed aristocracy. The more useless an activity or collectible object is, the more it signifies excess leisure and capital, and therefore status.

Warhol in his time might not have fit so much into the high brow person category because of his background as a commercial advertising artist, which he then brought in to the subject matter of his work, and his participation in the underground community. But his work has since become so canonized and commodified that you could say that owning his works now function as traditional high brow activities once did -- as conspicuous displays of wealth. I suppose that's all in line with the collapsing of the distinction mentioned earlier, and why this game is still fun.

Veblen is canonical, though more astute were French writers: Pierre Bourdieu and the dude whose name I'm blanking on that starts with a "V"

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class to understand a theory of signifiers of "high brow" culture, at least in Gilded Age America.

I read it many decades ago, when I was in my 20s and admired it. Although such signifiers have changed in concrete terms, e.g. keeping a kennel of hunting dogs, their function has not. As you said, Warhol has been assimilated into the 'high art' world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MOMA both have extensive collections of his work and according to Wikipedia, those of his works which have been put on the market and sold netted a cumulative $560+ million. That acceptance by the keepers of wealth and culture is what fooled me, I guess, into thinking Warhol had been raised into the world of highbrow. Silly me.

highbrow people with lowbrow tastes
'kast keep it jumping like kangaroos

(couldn't make it rhyme)

The thing about Warhol is whether he himself was highbrow or not, the fact that he liked lowbrow things should be self-evident from the topic of pretty much all of his work.

Critique of the concept of "*brow" is an inherent part of *brow.

Somewhere around here (pause while I rummage around among empty bottles of pinot grigio, Big Mac wrappers, and weed gummies) I have a volume of Eliot's essays where there is a section titled "appreciations of individual authors," and Marie Lloyd is included as an "individual author."

I think there's a preface where he makes a slightly arch reference to the fact that Ms. Lloyd is being cited as an author and that this is a welcome concession.

ILX has spent a non-trivial amount of pixels on whether "guilty pleasure" is even a coherent concept. I do not wish to open that particular worm-can but the present topic sounds very similar.

There's also a Virginia Woolf essay ("Am I a Snob?") where she contemplates whether it would be more fun to meet the Prince of Wales vs. someone with more cultural / intellectual cred. Haven't read that one in decades but it might be salient.

the fact that he liked lowbrow things should be self-evident from the topic of pretty much all of his work.

B-b-b-but the thread topic is Highbrow People with Lowbrow Tastes

add: So likely your point is that if you have lowbrow enough tastes it means you can't be highbrow, because you've crossed the line. But then how much evidence of lowbrow tastes are required in order to disqualify you as highbrow? This imperils the whole thread concept until we can solve this conundrum.

I'm not trying to make any such rules, just pointing out that much of his life's work involved engaging with various lowbrow things, so it's less of an odd one-off quirk from some otherwise ivory tower personality and more an intrinsic part of who he was.

That's fine. I recognize this thread is was intended to be playful, rather than serous, iow a fun game. It's just a bit irritating when it feels like the game is "let's just play around with this idea" for everyone else, but "let's challenge this indefensible opinion" when I play. It amazes me that every other personage suggested by every other poster itt constitutes a perfectly acceptable example of a highbrow person with lowbrow tastes, but no fewer than three people put my choice under a microscope. I'll get over it, but sheesh!

Oh I think plenty of other examples were pretty suspect as well, but Warhol is a particularly strange one to me because of his specific relationship to pop culture.

Where these current highbrow/lowbrow definitions come from is a good question, I think. New York magazine's highbrow/lowbrow axis on the Approval Matrix since 2004 is one of the few sources I can think of that unironically attempts to define things as highbrow or lowbrow on an ongoing basis.

As far as the thread question goes, Parisian food critic Anton Ego loved ratatouille.

I mean, you could say that loving tomato soup is lowbrow and loving the semiotics of a soup label is highbrow.

xp Aimless - another American source you could look to, that is a more fun read than Bourdieu is Paul Fussell's book on Class

I enjoy posting on and reading ilx

the Pinefox reading Bono’s autobiography

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:36 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

This reminds me of:

When Joe Orton was working with/for the Beatles on “Up Against It”, the would-have-been third movie, he got to hear the new single well ahead of everybody. I was surprised that he didn’t much like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and much preferred the more straightforward pop of “Penny Lane”

Irl lulz @ felicity

Parisian food critic Anton Ego loved ratatouille

"Eet ees a peasant dish!"

I think Chuck T is broadly right - nowadays (maybe since Modernism) it's harder to find someone who is pure pure Bach and Sophocles retvrn. Even Geoffrey Hill, who I think was taken as last stand for Eliotic(*) high culture poetics for a lot of the people who posture round that idea(**), did his poem for Jimi Hendrix & dropped Helen Mirren refs (prime suspect/the queen ambiguity iirc). Tho he slated The Streets and PJ Harvey.

There's a bit of relevant stuff in this old thread. Sadly, the Beckett on Dick Francis link is dead (& never told you what he actually said about him iirc) -

beckett's reading list

Gets into Larkin and Amis a little but I think they aren't quite 'highbrow' in the sense this thread is using it, tho they're maybe prime examples of a particular mid-century UK cultural process of pop assimilation by the establishment (the grammar school -> Oxbridge line) which maybe generalises a bit - almost everyone, growing up among the endless riches of mass culture, is going to find something they love (and if they were raised hard highbrow, or the general culture world disapproves, all the better - forbidden love & it becomes your own or your friends' thing). If they're an artist who tends to high-status/highbrow/whatever, they might assimilate it or lament its passing; culture-class types can curate it into respectability etc etc; academics will theorise, publish and teach it into canon.

(i think this is all sort-of-Bourdieu but I'm not going to back to look at the graphs and figure out which kinds of family background capital make things happen)

*yes Eliot has his own ambiguities round this stuff - there's definitely low culture traces in there but even the Marie Lloyd essay is about the death of old music hall & rise of mass culture.

** cf cunts like Gove touting their Hill-love even while he was writing "Corbyn must win. Though he is a flawed man it is not my belief that Hogarth / would set him down as a tout or a thief. "

This thread has probably set an ilx record for references to Marie Lloyd

Maybe it's time for a Marie Lloyd pox, or maybe a poll

Jon Stewart ran interference in a WWE match a few years back.

xp
song by song imo

Brian Sewell was a follower of stock car racing

― Master of Treacle, Tuesday, May 9, 2023 10:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I like the moments on this thread when I think we're moving into the jokes but actually no, still real.

The thread also reminded me of the list of people who loved Krazy Kat - Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, cummings - & I thought I'd dig a bit because I've never seen the source for the Joyce claim. Didn't find it but enjoyed the bits of this article that suggest unpopular pop culture was catnip to modernists.

Gets into Larkin and Amis a little but I think they aren't quite 'highbrow' in the sense this thread is using it, tho they're maybe prime examples of a particular mid-century UK cultural process of pop assimilation by the establishment (the grammar school -> Oxbridge line) which maybe generalises a bit - almost everyone, growing up among the endless riches of mass culture, is going to find something they love (and if they were raised hard highbrow, or the general culture world disapproves, all the better - forbidden love & it becomes your own or your friends' thing). If they're an artist who tends to high-status/highbrow/whatever, they might assimilate it or lament its passing; culture-class types can curate it into respectability etc etc; academics will theorise, publish and teach it into canon.

otm -- now that we've sincerely answered the question, we can have jokes.

Not entirely shocking since they've worked together, but apparently Paul Thomas Anderson loves Adam Sandler comedies, Big Daddy in particular.

An idea is emerging to collate how many 'highbrow' authors like pulp/detective fic/Mills & Boon/horror. Auden wrote about detective fiction in "Dyer's Hand". And if most of them did then the question is what is this distinction really? I could see it only as to identify someone's tastes as 'middlebrow', like a way of consuming cultural artefact in a flattening manner. But I haven't used it much in years, not sure how useful any of it is.

Tbh anyone pulling this stunt of "I love Highbrow" only stuff now probably has highly reactionary views. Like some kind of Roger Scruton type. Who would reject this mass of really good stuff that has been tagged as 'lowbrow'? Maybe we should check out an issue of The Spectator to see any young pundits at it. But maybe not.

A lot of it is played for pantomime - like Boris Johnson quoting classical authors to appear 'clever'. He tricked a lot of voters into it. That's the last time something highbrow has been used for damaging ends...

Paul Thomas Anderson is less highbrow than Warhol ... like, there is no case that can be made for him being anything above "solid middle" -- does that make you feel better, Aimless?

does Sam Waterston count as 'high brow'(s)

Auden wrote about detective fiction in "Dyer's Hand"

Yup Auden mixes it up thoroughly even in the actual verse - blues, jazz etc.

Was just seeing where he stood on Cole Porter and came across a transcript of Auden on Parkinson, which I didn't even know existed. "Cleo Laine sings an arrangement of Tell me the Truth About Love, accompanied by John Dankworth and The Harry Stoneham Five."

& yes it's a pleasant game of contrasts in this thread but as you say high-culture high-status bullshit in the uk is poisonous and absurd.

Scruton might be the last public figure who was all out high-culture-only.

Also interesting to see how this lines up when you go outside white culture: literature is traditionally highbrow and pop music traditionally lowbrow but does James Baldwin loving Ray Charles belong itt? Doesn't feel like it.

Admitidely if Toni Morrison had expressed a fondness for Ludacris that might have.

Sigmund Freud/ Le Pétomane

lol

see also the Phillip Glass of emoticon fart

tbf Le Pétomane was not considered lowbrow at the time

Pretty sure Scruton once confessed to liking some 60s/70s heavy rock and prog, though can't recall what. His aesthetic theories were tedious and regressive as fuck though

I think he quite liked sone metal? Or appreciated the musicianship at least.

I totally saw Roger Scruton in the mosh pit for Our Lady Peace at the HFStival in 1999. We smoked a bowl and chugged some Bud Lights. Good times.

Rog Scrotum was a keen follower of WWE, finding much to admire in the toned physiques and Spartan discipline of the wrestlers

the social status of krazy kat is an interesting question... where do cult works sit in relation to "lowbrow" and "highbrow"?

Fun fact: in my youth I went to the First Unitarian Church in St. Louis, founded by William Greenleaf Eliot (whose grandson was a decently well-regarded poet).

In those days, UU religious education for adolescents included an extraordinarily frank sex education program. It included real Scandinavian pornography and a show and tell session with decidedly frank sex toys.

So my first encounter with sex toys happened a few feet away from the stern visage of T.S. Eliot's grandfather. Not sure what this means but it probably means something.

In those days, UU religious education for adolescents included an extraordinarily frank sex education program. It included real Scandinavian pornography and a show and tell session with decidedly frank sex toys.

So my first encounter with sex toys happened a few feet away from the stern visage of T.S. Eliot's grandfather. Not sure what this means but it probably means something.

― coolgnoscenti (Ye Mad Puffin)

pvmic time, one of the most fun things about the "reject modernity, embrace tradition" is that "tradition" includes a lot of fairly explicit queer shit. i'm not even counting stuff like catullus 16, which to me just comes off as macho bro posturing. if there's anything i think of as "tradition" it's renaissance european art, and there's so much of it that's, like, marble statues of naked femboys (yes, "femboy" is an anachronism) commissioned by queer cardinals. all that pretentious shit genesis talk about on their early albums, "the fountain of salmacis", father tiresias. back in the '70s people kept putting down genesis with anti-gay slurs and all they were really doing was showing off their public school education...

PTA makes incredibly dull films, that has to count for something, surely?

-- does that make you feel better, Aimless?

marginally, but this thread was more fun when the candidates for inclusion weren't scrutinized for their suitability and confidently rejected out of hand according to standards that no one can adequately verbalize

Have you seen Empire? xp

My favorite story about Empire is, when MoMA digitized it, they found little surprises that nobody had ever noticed before:

During three of the reel changes, filming recommenced before the lights in the filming room were switched off, making the faces of Warhol and Mekas momentarily visible in the reflection of the window each time

(the reels were only 30 mins long, so they must have changed them 13 times).

It's pretty funny b/c obviously the reason no one ever noticed before is that the film is so insufferably boring that nobody had bothered to sit through all of it before, or managed to stay awake.

idk, i feel like i'm starting to at least appreciate warhol's work more. "boring" seems to be hardly an adequate word for such a film...

the film is so insufferably boring that nobody had bothered to sit through all of it before

you have to figure all that mattered to warhol was the concept, which necessarily required him to go ahead and make the artifact for the concept to be complete. once you know the concept there's really no further reason to view it. duchamp played similar conceptual games, except a urinal makes a better meta-art piece because it can be bought, sold, and displayed as easily as a sculpture or oil painting.

that might have been his intent (or might not have, who knows). but like... if you look at 4'33", the point of that work is that such a thing as "silence" isn't really possible. warhol may well have set out to make something purely superficial, possessing no meaning or artistic value whatseoever, but did he _achieve_ that goal?

"boring" seems to be hardly an adequate word for such a film...

i agree with this unless you're prepared to argue that it isn't boring. it's totally boring! but that was just meant to be a humorous comment re: PTA being less highbrow than Warhol.

once you know the concept there's really no further reason to view it.

i disagree with this :)

i get that Warhol is an odd choice for this exercise but i'm equally puzzled by folks insisting he isn't "highbrow" for more or less the reason Eazy said.

i like "boring" films! i like "ugly" music! yknow

warhol may well have set out to make something purely superficial, possessing no meaning or artistic value whatseoever, but did he _achieve_ that goal?

i mean surely it's about duration and asking people to pay attention to a still frame for 8 hours is an audacious move. and i think there's value in that, which is maybe what you're getting at here. it's okay to ask for attention, not necessarily for attention to be paid to oneself but just "attention" in general.

i agree with this unless you're prepared to argue that it isn't boring. it's totally boring! but that was just meant to be a humorous comment re: PTA being less highbrow than Warhol.

i mean surely it's about duration and asking people to pay attention to a still frame for 8 hours is an audacious move. and i think there's value in that, which is maybe what you're getting at here. it's okay to ask for attention, not necessarily for attention to be paid to oneself but just "attention" in general.

― No, 𝘐'𝘮 Breathless! (Deflatormouse)

i'd argue that it's _conceptually_ boring. i can't say whether the work itself is boring because i haven't seen it! this is arguably empire's greatest success as a conceptual work, i _can't_ just pull out a blu-ray, sit down, and watch the whole thing.

i haven't seen any of warhol's films in their entirety, but a few weeks ago i read a book about them, because my interest was piqued by that "500 songs" podcast on wl/wh

and the concept of _empire_ is that it's just looking at a picture of the empire state building, unmoving, for eight hours and nothing happens, but things _do_ happen, of course, because time progresses. day becomes night. lights go on. reels are changed out.

reading the book, the writer gives the impression that this is much of what warhol's cinema is about - the camera as an _unblinking gaze_. when turned on human subjects, the writer often talks of the cruelty of warhol's films. he's seems to be cruel to his "superstars" in a similar way to how reality tv shows are cruel to their participants.

maybe he filmed the empire state building just to see if it could hold up to the camera's gaze. you never know until you try. the camera has some sort of strange power to it.

Every time I see this thread title, I start singing, "IIIIIII've got tastes in lowbrow places . . ."

i'm a fan of Warhol's films, though his paintings and prints don't interest me much.

i've never watched Empire in full, it's up on Youtube but i've only watched a 30 minute edit of it on DVD.

I've seen a bunch of the screen tests which are probably the clearest example of the "unblinking gaze turned on human subjects" and how they cower before the camera. they're really great in how they invite comparison to portrait painting and photography, and add duration to an unnerving effect.

so like, i don't think things happening undermines the concept of Empire. i take the point that it's different in effect to assigning a fixed duration to wallpaper.

maybe he filmed the empire state building just to see if it could hold up to the camera's gaze.

Spoiler alert: it could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDDyzCagMY

i can't say whether the work itself is boring because i haven't seen it! this is arguably empire's greatest success as a conceptual work, i _can't_ just pull out a blu-ray, sit down, and watch the whole thing.

i take the point that it's different in effect to assigning a fixed duration to wallpaper.

one difference is making it fairly clear that the work exists to be viewed, not stored. imo

I'm coming around to the idea that it's not so easy to declare Warhol was not a "highbrow person" (whatever that means in America anyway), even in his time. His low brow persona was in many ways a deliberate and carefully constructed image.

Even so, molecular biologist and perfume critic Luca Turin loves Irish Spring soap.

A C Grayling? Mrs Brown's Boys.

Was just seeing where he stood on Cole Porter and came across a transcript of Auden on Parkinson, which I didn't even know existed. "Cleo Laine sings an arrangement of Tell me the Truth About Love, accompanied by John Dankworth and The Harry Stoneham Five."

"And then, the arts are our chief means of communication with the dead. I mean after all Homer’s dead, his society’s gone, but we can still read the Iliad with relevance. And I personally think that without communication with the dead a fully human life is not possible."

Thanks for the link woof, it's an excellent interview.

i'm not sure "highbrow" is even a concept that has meaning in a culture as avowedly populist as america... i'd love to hear people's thoughts on what "highbrow" american art is

Again don't think I can use the term in absolute earnest, but roleplaying a 20th century highbrow type I'd say John Cage, Donald Barthelme, Albert Ayler, Kenneth Anger, Jackson Pollock, Susan Sontag?

ilm criterati - morgan wallen

Again don't think I can use the term in absolute earnest, but roleplaying a 20th century highbrow type I'd say John Cage, Donald Barthelme, Albert Ayler, Kenneth Anger, Jackson Pollock, Susan Sontag?

No jazz musician can ever be highbrow enough for the gatekeepers, not even Anthony Braxton. Cage maybe, Morton Feldman definitely. I'd argue for Cy Twombly (all those classical references) before Jackson Pollock. William Gass (and William Gaddis, too).

highbrow america is that episode where frasier and niles try to get into the theatre but they can't get tickets

I feel like if someone's work is both out of the fiscal range and of near-zero interest to most people in a median tax bracket, that's sufficiently highbrow, which in some ways is great because at least it self-selects for people who actually want to buy it, and probably a good case for cinema being an intrinsically middle/lowbrow medium.

Can you think of something you really wanted but couldn't afford as being aloof and difficult enough to be highbrow (provided you are not an oligarch, or more likely, the investment art advisor to the oligarch)?

I do bet there are oligarchs with portfolios of Kooning paintings snapping up rare Pokemon cards, though -- but maybe most oligarchs are lowbrow at heart.

super fascinating imo, the picture of american highbrow that emerges from these names. "notes on camp", _new grass_, a concert at a coney island sideshow with sun ra, a dirt rag of well, basically flat out libel about hollywood icons, a movie soundtracked by a member of the manson family in prison for murder (after the director fell out with led zeppelin's guitarist, who was going to provide the soundtrack!). "highbrow" is such a strange thing in an american context!

i recall reading in caro's bio of lbj about him holding a soiree with van cliburn on piano, though his personal taste in music ran much more towards stuff like jackie gleason.

i'd love to hear people's thoughts on what "highbrow" american art is

There are some obvious touchstones if you go way back to the early modernists, but they are ancient now. In literature nobody tried harder to be highbrow than Ezra Pound, not even Henry James. TS Eliot felt his stature called for him to write Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, but he also published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, so go figure. Gertrude Stein would have disdained such a lowbrow label as 'highbrow'. In her eyes, she was simply a quintessentially American genius writing the first real masterpieces of American literature. It's no coincidence that every one of these icons moved to Europe to live out their adulthoods.

The further you drift into the 20th century the fewer American writers have even sought to be elevated to the status of icons of American genius, and those who did try to set up shop on that corner have only reached the lower steps of highbrow acceptance, where academics write theses about them. These days (in 2023) it feels like the 'real' American literary highbrows are all theorists, but don't expect me to name any, because like most Americans I don't care to know anything about them or their work.

Lol @ PBKR, same

When I was in college I think I made it through most of the sleeping-guy movie but bailed on the Empire State Building one after an hour or so.

Maybe if I'd stayed put through both I could get some kind of artsy cred points, but honestly life is too short to seek those. Happy to be lowbrow if highbrow means a constant diet of boring movies and whatever Yoko feels like doing that day

Sorry not sorry

i'm also kind of curious about, like, what's the relationship of queerness to highbrow? like, when i was younger i heard "highbrow" stuff dismissed as "effete". hell, it goes all the way back to catullus 16, right? he's really pissed that someone says his love poetry is kind of femmy and his response is to say "i will top you so hard you have no idea".

la monte young - very american highbrow

Kate you need to read sontag's essay on camp if you haven't already

It might be harder to find highbrow people (of the postwar era at least) who didn't have any lowbrow tastes. Sontag maybe?

it's the only thing of sontag's i have read! the thing that impressed me most about it was that it's not until page 12 (of 13), section 51 (of 58), when she mentions homosexuality. i admire that sort of evasiveness, and often seek to emulate it.

Zelda makes a good point. I think every potentially alleged highbrow person has already telegraphed their proletarian cred with some kind of "see, I'm just like you! I eat Big Macs" (or whatever).

It's a pre-buttal.

I can't claim to know what any current tastemakers do, because I am utterly outbid the loop. But I suspect that no one is going to come forth as a cultural figure in 2023 with only the most allegedly refined and seemingly erudite tastes.

Eliot (with whom I have a complicated relationship) is one of few people I can think of who made his elitism overt. Explicitly stating that he actively preferred stuff coded as "highbrow" over stuff that is coded as "lowbrow."

My next solid contact with a work that made this conflict explicit was in 1999's Galaxy Quest. Alan Rickman's character genuinely struggles with having played Richard III and also being associated with a low-budget Sci fi franchise.

Future generations will have

Uh outbid there should be out of

No idea where the last sentence was headed but whatever it is is not important, carry on and please ignore my rambling ways, thxbye

fwiw, from a 2023 vintage i do think... well, i'll just say that from my perspective it looks different.

sontag says (53) that the aristocratic posture w/r/t culture cannot die, and i guess technically this is true... my feeling is that aristocratic culture right now is rather wanting for aristocrats. over my lifetime i've seen wealth concentrated into the hands of an ever more select few, and i don't get the sense that high culture is one of their overriding concerns. "highbrow" simply is not something i know how _to describe_ without evoking queerness... and queerness has no particular desire, that i can tell, to be relegated to the background. we're pretty fucking flamboyant. so the idea that, as sontag suggests in 52, that queerness employs camp as an assimilationist gesture... that doesn't scan to me.

i mean look at what sontag says. "camp is a solvent of morality. it neutralizes moral indignation..."

and that's just not my lived experience. i view camp as an act which _heightens the contradictions_. it's the opposite of assimilation. it's everything turned up to 11, it's taking all of the things we're taught to believe and making a burlesque of them, portraying them in such a way that one can't help but see how silly it all is.

or something. i don't know.

like what comes back to me, because i've been listening to this album a lot recently, are the first lines of "above all else i want to see" from the new fire-toolz album:

What you hate is what I love
Nakedness. Failure. Woundedness

and the context of that probably isn't overtly camp, it's some weird esoteric christian mysticism trip, but for me, that's as good a summary of camp as anything.

i'm also kind of curious about, like, what's the relationship of queerness to highbrow?

Edmund White (I think in his 70s NYC memoir City Boy) suggests that a lot of what we think of as 1970s NYC avant-garde came from artists obscuring their queerness in experimental/indirect forms -- Sontag, Robert Wilson, Ashbery, and so on.

"Again don't think I can use the term in absolute earnest, but roleplaying a 20th century highbrow type I'd say John Cage, Donald Barthelme, Albert Ayler, Kenneth Anger, Jackson Pollock, Susan Sontag?"

Braxton, Ayler, Taylor were all pretty much accepted in Europe, even if in America they were kept at arm's length.

Beyond Cage you have the New York School, Young, some people around the Velvets lol, Lou Harrison and Nancarrow cannot be forgotten. Lots of talk about it in the ILM archives.

And yes a lot of American experimental filmmaking like Deren, Frampton, Brakhage, Hammer, etc. Warhol was really important too though he wasn't really in that scene as far as I know (his project was kinda Hollywood upside down). I single it out as I see that tradition as a lot stronger than Europe.

But with America it's things like pulp science and crime fiction, b-movies, Columbo, Rockford Files lol. That's actual American Highbrow stuff to me.

Lydia Tár had a New York Rangers hat

And yes a lot of American experimental filmmaking like Deren, Frampton, Brakhage, Hammer, etc. Warhol was really important too though he wasn't really in that scene as far as I know (his project was kinda Hollywood upside down).

no, though he is a constant reference point when people start talking about structural film etc., even if it's acknowledged from the beginning that his concerns were a bit different. Even so, maybe by the late '60s the kinds of cultural hierarchies and distinctions that earlier avant-gardists were interested in are less relevant even to people involved in that often self-consciously 'difficult' filmmaking.

I don't know about with Empire, but early screenings of Sleep were treated as a kind of social gathering - 'it’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing', sez Warhol.

Yeah the static camera work and attention, there are definite areas of common interest here. I'd love to see more.

But with America it's things like pulp science and crime fiction, b-movies, Columbo, Rockford Files lol. That's actual American Highbrow stuff to me.

― xyzzzz__

it's honestly something i've gotten really invested in and started thinking about a lot so i'm sorry if i'm getting too into this. i'm coming at this as a lady who's spent most of her life being weird and fucked up on obscure corners of the internet and because of that i always feel like i'm missing important stuff

the closest i can think of to highbrow these days is what i'd call "gutter intelligensia", back when text blogs were a thing i spent a long time reading a blog by an american lady named el sandifer called the TARDIS Eruditorium, she wrote all these really intellectual essays about doctor who and i really connected with it but when i wanted to talk to people i knew about doctor who, which was popular then, all they could say was "fezzes are cool" and if i pressed them further none of them had actually watched the show in years

then she started this long series called "the last war in albion" about a "war over the nature of magic" between two british comic book writers, alan moore and grant morrison

at the time she started it she seemed to be very much on the alan moore side

part of me wonders if transition has changed her perspective, given that grant morrison is extremely queer and alan moore is... since transition i've sort of come to view him as the epitome of the Clever White Cishet Man, which used to be an archetype i very much aspired to and is now an archetype i now try just as hard to avoid (i think of myself as equally bad at both aspiring to and avoiding that archetype). i guess he _is_ highbrow but he never publishes anything and when he does it's less interesting than andy warhol's films

apparently sandifer wrote a book of Discourse that was on the new york times best-seller list once and my impression of her writing about it was that she was like, nobody fucking cares, she makes more money and people care more about her doctor who and/or comic book blog than they do about some book about how conservatives suck

or "intelligensia" is maybe someone like natalie wynn who spent years being poisoned by 4chan and then transitioned and tried to overcome being fucked up like that and became super famous

but for every person like that there's dozens of people doing that work, kind of grinding away and living precarious and stressful lives with some niche patreon

like all the intellectuals are on like patreon or nebula or some shit, that was some highbrow shit, right, the "great courses", they'd get assholes like john mcwhorter (i think he's an asshole, isn't he an asshole?) to explain the history of grammar and rhetoric and shit, when i had time at work to listen to stuff i'd listen to those lectures instead of podcasts. i didn't buy them of course i pirated them. and "the great courses" i think has pivoted away from that sort of highbrow model themselves lately to... i don't even know.

"highbrow" to me is i write and it's not fanfiction set in the warhammer 40k universe and nobody has any idea what to do with that, when i tell people i write they assume that i want to get rich writing warhammer 40k fanfiction

"highbrow" is comic books that don't have superheroes in them, like milk and cheese, milk and cheese is highbrow, evan dorkin is highbrow

"highbrow" is like john berger doing "ways of seeing" and you know the closest i can think of now to john berger is something like philosophy tube, who covers the same ground but she does it while being hot and wearing latex. that's highbrow.

"highbrow" to me is /r/GoneWildAudio. that's highbrow. i mean i go there and the top post is called (M4F) Change That Damn Smoke Alarm (Soft MDom) (Improv) (The Most Annoying Noise In The World) (Roommates to Lovers) a little bit of (and here's the more NSFW stuff), seriously, a half hour of audio porn about a smoke alarm going off and beeping, that's pretty fucking highbrow

I don't know about with Empire, but early screenings of Sleep were treated as a kind of social gathering - 'it’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing', sez Warhol.

― lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux)

i mean that's the thing, if you listen to the bridge of "moon in june" by robert wyatt where he says:

Music-making still performs the normal functions -
Background noise for people scheming, seducing, revolting and teaching
That's all right by me, don't think that I'm complaining
After all, it's only leisure time, isn't it?

i _could_ go and watch empire at home on my computer screen in the background while working but that's fucking cheating, if you ask me, that's missing the point, that's not what warhol's long-ass films are _for_. that's not what cage's full performance of "vexations" or, hell. ASLSP, that's not what that's for, obviously.

Kate, just wondering, what is the attraction of the word "highbrow" for the things you describe, as opposed to other qualifiers such as "niche", "esoteric", even I guess "geeky"?

To me "highbrow" has an immediate connotation of elitism - it can't exist without other things being "lowbrow" - and if as stated previously I don't think it can be used in earnest, I think that's a good thing.

In other news:

i guess he _is_ highbrow but he never publishes anything and when he does it's less interesting than andy warhol's films

Jerusalem was awesome. waiting for his latest short story collection to hit paperback before passing judgement, but yeah, think it's total mischaracterization to say he never publishes anything.

Kate, just wondering, what is the attraction of the word "highbrow" for the things you describe, as opposed to other qualifiers such as "niche", "esoteric", even I guess "geeky"?

― Daniel_Rf

good question! i guess something more acclaimed than experienced. so, for instance, regular car reviews has a 2 1/2 hour video on the history of the american motor company that has 2.7 million views. how many of those people watched the whole thing, versus how many, like me, click on it and say "wow that's really interesting, i should definitely watch that whole thing someday", and then never quite seem to get around to it? that to me is "highbrow".

like what do you call a video reviewing the 2012 Toyota FJ Cruiser from a Baudrillardian perspective if not highbrow? but that video that includes the line "I'm gonna wipe my ass with your cat" in the script.

I always confuse John Berger with Thomas Berger

But that is a topic for a different thread

Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

ok i guess here's the difference between "esoteric" and "highbrow"

if i start infodumping to my coworkers about doctor who, they nod politely wait for me to stop talking but they just figure i'm a big nerd, which i am

if i start infodumping to my coworkers about rimbaud, they're likely to either admire how smart i am or think i'm being a pretentious jerk, even though to me, it's not really any different than nerding about about doctor who. if i start talking about highbrow shit people think i'm highbrow, because only highbrow people are supposed to know who rimbaud is

if i start infodumping to my coworkers about rimbaud, they're likely to either admire how smart i am or think i'm being a pretentious jerk

what's the correlation between highbrow/lowbrow division and being seen as the epicenter of world arts & culture?

seems like the French are very comfortable in that role & it's central to their identity as French people whereas the Americans are very uneasy with it and there's nothing more "highbrow" to an American than liking French things. Is this a thing in America outside of the 20th c?

Or else assume you're talking about Sylvester Stallone.

(xp) You got that from the English btw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P96cFKd4irY

As Dorothy Parker once said, I'm always chasing Rimbauds.

As Dorothy Parker once said, I'm always chasing Rimbauds.

― coolgnoscenti (Ye Mad Puffin)

the lady from the prince song?

so maybe i should make a blog post about this or something, idk, but i was rewatching that video talking about the 2012 Toyota FJ Cruiser and i thinking about it i think i'd like to argue that the present-day existence of "highbrow" culture is a simulacrum, like people act like the intelligencia or the cultural elite or something is something that still exists, but the only people who actually talk about these things that theoretically would fall under "highbrow" culture are doing so in the context of talking about the 2012 toyota fj cruiser or something. and this is probably a good thing, because the whole idea of "highbrow" as a mark of cultural superiority is just a load of total crap. the iliad _should_ be obscure nerd shit, the best way of approaching ancient egyptian culture _is_ probably through shitposts about ea-nasir. this is at odds though with people's ideas about the existence of "highbrow culture", which in the anglosphere seems to center around the approximate mediterranean area in ancient times (and yes, includes things like 19th century france and so forth, even if the specific manifestation is some weirdo queer person)

what interests me more is... so simulacra are things that people think of as being conceptually "real" but aren't, so what would you call shit like NotTheOnion? that's what interests me, is people being convinced that Sir Karl Jenkins (to my knowledge the only member of the Soft Machine to receive a knighthood) is actually Megan Markle in disguise. stuff where you look at it and you're just like "what the fuck no fucking way is that a thing" and yes it turns out it is, in fact, totally a thing. reverse simulacra, things that _seem_ fake but are real.

Aristotle taught us to organize our world by making categories, with sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, continuing to subdivide them for as long as necessary. It kinda works with things that arise organically through the processes of nature, like plant species, but when you create facile and arbitrary categories like high-, middle- and low-brow culture, the distinctions between them quickly dissolve into amorphous goo. Which is why I'd say this thread should be treated as a game, not a serious intellectual endeavor.

i don't know what to call it other than absurd or incongruous. there should be a name for the response, like the uncanny valley or deja vu.

the iliad _should_ be obscure nerd shit, the best way of approaching ancient egyptian culture _is_ probably through shitposts about ea-nasir.

no, the iliad is alive. dead writing has a way of getting buried. ancient egypt is alive in the popular imagination, it's great fantasy fodder and everyone should be able to enjoy it. the only thing that makes 'high' art stuffy or forbidding is cultural gatekeeping. that's what needs to stop. there are far more meaningful and rewarding ways to engage with this stuff than shitposting.

the intelligentsia/elite is deteriorating but real and it feels like we're living in its shadow. it's painful.

fuck canonization so hard.

xp

Persephassa on a rowboat in Central Park was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. Maybe the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0K0_TCrFH8
More of this please

As an incredibly high-brow person, most of the things I like are pretty low-brow

Me too. Personally I have read all of Virginia Woolf and almost all of James Joyce; I have written long essays about Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, and George Eliot. But I spend most of my free time standing around in my underpants drinking cheap white wine and playing with my lips while looking out the window

Not to taint the very fine highbrowsers here who enjoy a nice, cool lowbrau now and then, but Donald Trump seems like the ultimate example of someone who was afforded all the resources in life to be a genuine highbrahmin, but at every opportunity rejected it and went lowbrow while insisting it's all very highbrow stuff, like some weird delusional mirror-universe Buddha.

disagree

The classiest gold toilets, the best toilets, people are saying

no, the iliad is alive. dead writing has a way of getting buried. ancient egypt is alive in the popular imagination, it's great fantasy fodder and everyone should be able to enjoy it. the only thing that makes 'high' art stuffy or forbidding is cultural gatekeeping. that's what needs to stop. there are far more meaningful and rewarding ways to engage with this stuff than shitposting.

the intelligentsia/elite is deteriorating but real and it feels like we're living in its shadow. it's painful.

― No, 𝘐'𝘮 Breathless! (Deflatormouse)

i think you're misconstruing what i'm saying - i'm all for obscure nerd shit! my life is obscure nerd shit! i mean, what do you think i'm doing on this board? i mean some of y'all are actually cool or something but not me, i'm a big fucking gay nerd.

what do you mean by ancient egypt being "alive in the popular imagination"? like, people thinking the pyramids are grain silos set up by aliens, that the pyramids are built by aliens because non-white people aren't clever enough to create something like that? that's the popular imagination i grew up with. ea-nasir shitposts, to me that's a _better_ form of the popular imagination. like, don't get me wrong, _pyramids of mars_ is great aside from the random-ass transphobia at the beginning, but goddamn, i think you are underrating memes and shitposts as a vital form of approaching highbrow subjects. gen z people, you know how they know dave van ronk? as some random cishet dude who showed up at stonewall and started protesting because anybody who were rioting against the police clearly had something going on. i mean that's a _totally accurate_ way to understand dave van ronk.

shitposting is... i hate to use _disrupting_ but there is this whole... so much of "highbrow" culture is gatekeeping, i was talking with my queer autistic coffee group yesterday about it and they brought up the word "hipster", there's this idea of it of cultural superiority. and by presenting "high culture" things within the concept of "low culture", that makes them... less shitty. like i have a huge complex about not having much of a formal education like some people but at the same time academia, from the people i know who _do_ have that sort of education, is a joyless, gatekept hell. people spend all their time writing about this obscure nerd shit and nobody even sees it because of corporate gatekeeping, it's all fucking paywalled. why get a doctorate when you could get your stuff more read, more appreciated, and make more money with a patreon? i mean tenure? nobody fucking gets tenure anymore, right? everybody's a fucking adjunct who drives an uber at night to make ends meet.

the intelligentsia/elite aren't _deteriorating_ in my view, there's a _rebirth_, ea-nasir memes make feel less ashamed about knowing all this Great Work highbrow bullshit, because historically? historically american highbrow is, like, pastoral scenes of the gallant south. historically highbrow culture is a tool of imperialist and racist oppression. and building places _within the academy_ to resist that, i know there are... like, susan stryker, she spent her whole career doing that and i think it's cool that she did that, but for most of us, there's just not a place for us in that milieu. in the meantime your, you know, southern gentlemen, to the extent that ever existed, that the men in white suits with canes _weren't_ actually boss hogg, nobody seems to be really interested in the pretense now. southern culture now is red solo cups and some krautrock band named morgan wallen for some reason.

so you have these two trends, the abandonment of "high culture" by the ruling class and the reclamation of what used to be "high culture" by weirdo nerds, and i think god maybe there's a future for this shit, the shit that used to be _called_ high culture. high culture itself is fucking finished and thank god for that, imo.

first example that came to mind was david foster wallace liked/taught(?) thomas harris' hannibal novels, at least the first two, which tho they've been ennobled in film and tv by several auteurs are pulp trash to the fuckin' core

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Tuesday, May 9, 2023 4:15 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

he was first to mind for me too... some story about adulating fans walking in on him somewhere and he was happily eating KFC to their dismay

Even though calling him "high brow" is a real stretch, I feel like Kerouac's late in life love of getting wasted and watching The Beverly Hillbillies warrants mention here.

Look idk what highbrow or lowbrow means but I feel like Barthes/pro wrestling might just work

I assume people's use of "highbrow/lowbrow/foobrow" comes with a healthy side of implied irony because of the associations with phrenology, if not eugenics. Like "bluestocking" it immediately conjures a specific time and place.

Diana Vreeland has a nice quote about the importance of bad taste, like a splash of paprika.

Supposedly Bunny Williams, the interior designer, said every room can use a touch of animal print.

I think that one element that hasn’t been brought up is that when highbrow people are interested in lowbrow things, whatever those things may be, those things become highbrow in some way or another, and then often cycle back down to lowbrow when highbrow tastes (which in some ways dictate the market) move on, which they always do. In some cases, these things become both highbrow and lowbrow through sheer market saturation— of course no one can just own a Keith Haring, but many people can afford a $15 teeshirt or whatever with his work on it. The art market in particular is full of examples of this, wherein wealthy collectors “slum” with graffiti artists and part time DJs, the artist becomes “hot,” and then becomes more well-known and merchandised to the proles, thus becoming lowbrow again through capital’s mechanisms while maintaining its highbrow patina for those who can afford the actual objects.

What this often has to do with is what highbrow people think of as “authentic” or “real,” right?

Lars from Metallica drunkenly celebrating turning a profit on his Basquiat really brought Basquiat all the way down to lowbrow again, however briefly.

How would you rank the brows of members of Metallica?

And this was also the period when what had partly been a put-on — the persona of the reactionary philistine — began to rigidify into something real and permanent. Kingsley became the very sort of person he used to make fun of, declaring, for example, that England’s best living writer was Dick Francis and that henceforth he wanted only to read books that began, “A shot rang out.” Christopher Hitchens says he thinks that the process of self-ossification was pretty much complete by 1984. “I remember that Martin, Kingsley and I all had dinner, and then we went to see ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ” he said a few weeks ago. “Naturally, you couldn’t go to anything French or Japanese or Polish. All through the movie Kingsley was laughing with what we assumed was pretend mirth, and afterward he announced, ‘Yes, an absolutely flawless masterpiece.’ Suddenly it became clear he wasn’t joking and that he meant to defend the virtues of the film with absolute fidelity. It was a very striking moment — the sense that the face had grown to fit the mask and that the pose had become himself.”

(ie not terminator or terminator 2 as often claimed, eg in this thread and probably by me elsewhere)

i think you're misconstruing what i'm saying

that's always likely with me, unfortunately. i understood it to mean that those materials ought to be mocked or ignored by most people, and that we don't need them because we have a rich pop culture or something.

after reading your last post, i still think you're saying something similar? it's fine for the iliad to be mostly ignored (but passionately loved by a few custodians), it's enough for ancient egyptian artifacts to be mocked (because the mockery itself takes highly creative forms and there's an artistry to it- which i agree with, even though a lot of memes ultimately serve to distinguish an in-group from an out-group). and significantly, because this amounts to a reclamation of the material from oppressive forces. i could totally be getting this wrong! sorry. i do that a lot.

i've shown the outcome i would prefer, which is iannis xenakis concerts on the lake in central park with screaming children in the audience. i want us to share this stuff without tearing it down. i *do* understand the urge to tear things down, but it's not the outcome i would want wrt the arts.

i looked up ea-nasir memes, and they're not mean spirited or disrespectful at all, which makes me think that i am indeed misreading you... but i'm also not seeing what's highbrow about an ancient customer complaint written in cuneiform? it's the kind of fun artifact Nat Geo writes little half-page blurbs about.

and, for that matter, Treasures of Tutankhamun was the first and to date the biggest "blockbuster" museum exhibit, attended by actual millions of people? Being a corpse doesn't seem to have diminished his star power at all. so i think i am reading you wrong, but nevertheless these seem like dubious examples of haughty, elite culture. they're like the popular museum pieces?

i mean some of y'all are actually cool or something but not me, i'm a big fucking gay nerd.

nah you're cool 😎
ikwym but you're cool

what do you mean by ancient egypt being "alive in the popular imagination"?

for example:
https://www.theboyandtheboyking.com/
https://rickriordan.com/book/the-red-pyramid/

One of my buddies visited NYC last month with his 9 y/o son. The kid is outgoing and popular and mostly interested in organized team sports. anyway the very first thing he asked to see in New York was the Egyptian wing at the Met!

historically american highbrow is, like, pastoral scenes of the gallant south.

i take your broader point there, but

Browtallica

like i have a huge complex about not having much of a formal education like some people but at the same time academia, from the people i know who _do_ have that sort of education, is a joyless, gatekept hell. people spend all their time writing about this obscure nerd shit and nobody even sees it because of corporate gatekeeping, it's all fucking paywalled. why get a doctorate when you could get your stuff more read, more appreciated, and make more money with a patreon?

ok, here's a long winded, off topic response.
tldr: yep.

i'm a high school dropout with no higher education apart from a few night classes i took for no credit during what would have been my senior year. i think this is apparent, especially when i overcompensate lol.

i've also been in *some* kind of loving relationship with one of the oldest books in the world. i know it's a little out there. the canonical, received version of this book, and the people familiar with it, were accessories to royalty. they were the cultural elite of their day- because they could read and write, not because they were university professors. it's not like there were, you know, publishers. so WHY WOULD YOU EVEN BOTHER to write a book if nobody was going to be able to read it.

i saw a lecture by Edward Shaughnessy where he said that the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Yijing, the one Syd Barrett quotes from in Chapter 24, was and is *by far* the best selling book ever published by an academic press. now i'm not saying that every weird hippie kid who buys this book because they have an interest in synchronicity becomes something like an independent scholar of ancient Chinese literature, but it happens to a few of us. so you have a small group of 'mantic artists' raiding Sci-Hub for all the relevant gatekept material, not to be discouraged.

because books are *really fucking expensive*, right? i mean the kind of books with a lot of information in them that research libraries have. i happen to live in Manhattan and have access to the big Schwarzman library that has basically everything in English, but where it comes to materials in Chinese i have to pay out of pocket. there's some dictionaries online, and some primary sources, but as far as scholarship in Chinese I'm shit out of luck because those books are in the private libraries of elite universities. and the best one, the CV Starr East Asian library at Columbia University, is a few blocks from my house, actually. but how many people outside NYC have access to a research library like Schwarzman? and aren't those libraries offputtingly stuffy? i've corresponded with other 'enthusiasts' across the world and country who practically begged me to scan shit from the NYPL system so they wouldn't have to buy it. now, i used to scan print advertisements for a living and i basically got paid per scan. no joke, i am one of the fastest scanners in the fucking world. do you have any idea how long it takes me to scan a 500 page book?? with the tools i have, or the library has, i could watch Empire and then some.

That's how bad it is. That's how badly people want information they can't get because of paywalls and gatekeeping.

one of my friends was asking me if i knew anything about Christian Wolff a few years ago. Wolff's dad had published the Bollingen edition of the Yijing i mentioned, the "best-seller" lol, and he had some stories about hanging out with John Cage and Allan Watts. My friend was yearning for this time in living memory when people published books and read the Yijing with Alan Watts and John Cage. it was deeply upsetting to him that this kind of scene would be unimaginable now.

i don't know what to make of that. how many people in the 1960's got to be Christian Wolff? Is it different from saying you wish your parents were successful artists or academics?