The Intellectuals and the Mases

(Well, Carey DOES argue this, but he is such a fckn intellectual lightweight heh)

i think Andrew L makes the most apposite point on the "home truths" thread, by a country mile

I think what I was irked about is the idea of 'normalcy' and started out by saying there's no such thing. People always use the word 'normal' to try to regulate the behaviour of others, to conscript them into a national service that won't allow registration as a conscientious objector. I've always been well left of centre and I've had to take a few lumps as a result and when I'm really down, think, 'well I tried to be 'normal' but nobody was having it.'

Having spent most of my time in London as a consumer journalist (what the critic of popular culture invariably becomes in a society that only pays lip service to criticism as a value) I come by my opinions honestly; I'm painfully aware that the owners of companies can barely conceal their disdain for the people they produce goods for (Katie, you're pretty passionate about food issues and you'd agree with me that 95 per cent of the food produced is not good for you or the planet-type DRECK) and this lackadaisical attitude trickles right down throughout a complacent, comfort-oriented society. I think many people are ground down and bullied into accepting the way modern life is played out, though often in subtle ways. People aren't really encouraged, after a certain point in their lives, to think outside their basic needs, and this makes me really exasperated.

Momus, that's lovely and i applaud you for it. now try it with more kindness and fewer insults please.

Also, equating the health benefits or otherwise of various diets with the 'benefits' or otherwise of different modes of cultural consumption is dodgy thinking at best.

What I was trying to get at was that the effect of a bad diet - physical damage - is clear, and does not map onto the effect of consuming culture dismissed as 'mainstream' (or just rubish) by our cultural critics.

Of course the "conformist" bloc, being vastly much bigger, and perhaps by definition more given to socially approved pre-manufactured public EXPRESSION of its identity, its likes and its dislikes, is actually (behind closed doors) much more varied and weirder than the "bohemian" bloc.

where is n.?

momus can you cook?

(eg joke = actual real life)

I was romanticizing the suburbs long, long, long before I left them. THE BAY SHORE SOUND IS NOW!

Madge Jenkins makes a lot more sense, and is a lot more soothing, than 'Othello' or 'Vexations'. But Madge Jenkins cannot create a parallel universe of imagination as the Bard and Satie can. Or do you think she can? Or do you think the creation of other worlds, the worlds we call art, is simply over-rated?

Why not a mix of both?

Haha once more we reduced to the founding problem of momus-logic. Whence these two "hences"? (Which even he doesn't believe for a second...)

I find it odd that people believe that normalcy is a quality which can be possessed rather than a state thrust upon you by mere statistics (ie to be the norm). Does the fact that I am aware that I am doing the same thing as the majority by watching Eastenders make it any different to me doing it without that knowledge. And which motive is more valid for not watching it - me not liking it or me not wanting to be part of this norm.

re "creativity": do we get to quote marx and reification yet?

(Josh is gonna HATE me for saying that.)

I would've thought we were able to understand excellence in sport not despite but because it coexists so often so happily with non-elite athletics (I was thinking watching bits of the simultaneously laughable marathon on Sunday; good lord, the plebs are dressing up in cliched costumes). That is, the existence and appreciation of a Beckham doesn't diminish but exalt a million Sunday kickabouts, both culturally and in a participatory sense.

This I absolutely agree with you on. I think the problem (and maybe why these threads have caused so much heated debate) is that it is your definition of art, which seems to be a very psychadelic 60's grooviness. I'm a teenager in Canada. I've heard John Peel maybe 3 times. I know one Incredible String Band song. I don't really care, they already seem so hopelessly dated in the sense that Shakespeare never will to me. But I think placing the Incredible String Band as an artist to say, Shakespeare, is just as absurd as comparing Home Truth's artistic value in society to Shakespeare's contribution.

But isn't this diminishment precisely because of the romantic idea of the artist as being different in all respects from your everyday person. Artist does something 'normal' = it is not artistic cry public educated to believe that artists are really crazy, wild and not like tham at all.

Yes yes I know your first first initial initial point was that you were conflicted here and that you were aware yr position was not logically coherent...

I sympathise with your idea that you would like to preserve the idea that certain activities, art works and so on are more worthy of our interest, discussion than others. However this falls down if one wants to instigate an objective canon. The tales on Home Truths are as much a form of cultural expression than the Creed piece - the truth is that its one that you care less for. I have works of art, works of society which loosely jumble round ion my bonce as being more or less important than each other - but this is to me. My favourite film may be Dr Strangelove - but truth be told I would probably prefer a rollicking good argument down the pub than to go and see it again.

Is the existence and appreciation of a Momus, creator of fine electronic music, dimished precisely by the fact that we all use computers daily?

Mission Accomplished!!

No i really don't think we do. For me, the interest quotient of this/related threads has been v low. but it is just monday. things may pick up tomorrow.

& Hell momus, you've done as many hi-lo colisions as the next guy, if not more.

Gary Flitcroft's specialness on the other hand, was the central cog in arguments for or against whether he should have his bedhopping all over the front pages of the tabs. When the courts allowed his name to be published and the story changed from "Premiership Footballer Is Love Rat" to "Gary Flitcroft is Love Rat", the general reaction even from the papers themselves was yeah, sorry, he's a bit of a nobody.

But Flitcroft is the captain of a mid-table Premiership side - surely he should be seen as special in a society where sportspeople generally are? But of course he isn't because not all sportspeople are seen as special, only the very best are. Flitcroft was interesting because of who he might have been. Merely being a "sportsperson" doesn't confer specialness.

Now what Momus is suggesting that simply being an artist ought to confer specialness, rather than being a good or well-loved or popular artist. His attitude seems to be - judge and respect me on the fact of my creativity, rather than the output. Actually Britain's best- known artists are generally respected, a smaller number than its best- known sportspeople certainly but the category of 'artist' doesn't meet with the disdain Momus is suggesting.

But going back to Flitcroft we notice something else - he *is* thought of as special, presumably, by the people who follow his team. And this is the case with artists too - Momus has the respect and admiration of a smallish fanbase and a wider quasi-fan-base who, like me, bought an album or two once. But my relation to Momus is much like my relation to Flitcroft, or to be fairer (if perhaps crueller), to a sportsman in say the Third Division. I respect what he's capable of because I couldn't do it myself, but I don't respect it enough to consider it outweighs the stuff I can do, makes him my 'better' or more 'special' than me. People in the core fanbase would disagree.

What I'm arguing, I suppose, is that Britain is a country which considers the cream of any talent-based profession 'special', and has a prove-it attitude to the rest. Perhaps this attitude is 'brutish', but I think it's healthy. The problem arises when the media increasingly focusses on this 'cream' and ignores anyone else - but that's not the fault of the British public precisely.

I can only read this as saying that you like to keep a stale and stalemated argument going because it's interesting to you. Why not give up on the existence of the experience, move on.

I look down upon you from a great height, yes.

More seriously -- my one long post over on "Home Truths" says most of what I have to initially say about this general issue, while I like Pete's thorts as offered. All I'll say right now on top of that is that Arendt's excerpt strikes me as incredibly self-serving, a vision of "I *truly* keep the keys to the kingdom while these other bastards are destroying it, hmph!" Sounds a bit rockist to me, if you will. "Those damn fuckers who use samplers, they're not *really* musicians," etc.

(I think refining your argument down to Visual Art is a bit of a cheat, anyway - that same pull-down menu has 'Books' and 'Film'. Anyway the Guardian does have regular Arts and Architecture sections as well you know!)

Actually it is anyway: Cutler's OK, but the "imaginative world" he conjures is basically Home Truths c.1955. Peel isn't an "erstwhile aesthete", he's ALWAYS been an anti-aesthete. And I don't think his values have changed AT ALL. What he does on radio now is IDENTICAL to what he did in his Sounds column in the late 70s.

Momus - I would imagine because surveys have told them that people interested in one kind of art are generally interested in other kinds of art, whereas a lot of football fans don't care much about other sport. If it is cultural it says more about the Brits' attitude to football than visual art I think.

Haha we got a purler of a hate-letter from some non-metropolitan potter a month back, abt how all we care abt is our Hoxton-profile, and thus by implication pour sneery contempt on all the many many many suburban and rural craftsmakers. I think I wd take Momus's position more seriously if I didn't actually work on a mag which exists to give coverage to the creativity he says can't possibly exist.

Or even Martin Creed's (whose dad is of course a famous silversmith whose work is regularly featured in Cr*fts magazine...)

Christ, now I see why Greenspun complains of how much this place costs!

unfinished mark s project #13865672: to write a piece on the commodification of the intellect, which would in fact simply be a LIST of all books and articles which contained the phrase "in the age of [insert adj here] reproduction"

sadly reality has outstripped me here as there are now 210 kazillion of these, 99.9999% of the lamenting the lack of imagination in every discipline except their own...

1) Whenever anyone dares to say that any form or object of artistic/cultural expression might be better than another, Mark S invokes the lingering spectre of aesthetic hierarchies mit fascism, as though the act of judgment automatically clapped one in a special-ordered pair of jackboots.

2) A lot of people really do think art is nothing more than entertainment, or at least that its primary function is to entertain. This I find depressing and solipsistic.

3) Going back to the aesthetic hierarchies, the possibility that the canons of yore reflected something real -- in other words, that they weren't purely the constructions of a beard-stroking white male power elite, but also reflected the ability of the human mind to react to articulate aesthetic communication and to want to elevate it so that others too could know of it and see/hear it -- doesn't seem to be getting much "ink" around here.

4) If you take away all the arrogance and/or elitism and/or what-have-you, both Momus' and Arendt's arguments hold up better than the ones being offered in opposition to them.

5) No one has really answered "ultimately you agree with the producers of Home Truths that everyone is simply oozing with talent and worthy of being up there with Shakespeare and Erik Satie. In fact they have a huge advantage over Shakespeare and Satie, which is their approachability. No jacket required, no interpreter necessary." Where do you stand? Do you believe that everything is the same as everything else -- in some sort of grey fucking post-structuralist world-flattened universe -- or don't you? Do you believe that the arts are a way of talking about the world that deserve attention, or just a form of entertainment, essentially beside the point, that can be dispensed with when it fails to sufficiently distract you from "tough questions" like your own mortality and the ennui of a self-preoccupied life?

(And I can't stand it.)

Having said all that, I should also P.S. that I generally find the question "What does this have to say?" far more interesting than "Is it good?" I often end up taking a position here that's decidedly more hardened than my real-life POV...

Which makes your first question - about everything being the same as everything else - not strictly relevant (we covered subjectivity pretty recently on an intentionality/canon thread over on ILM and I don't really fancy going over the same ground yet again, so count me out if you do want to pursue this line of questioning, which ends up fruitless on both sides IMO).

Your second question is presented as if it led on from the first but I don't see that it does. It's maybe more to the point though. Anyway, I think you are underestimating the value the people saying "art=entertainment" are putting on "entertainment", by separating entertainment from other (presumably more important) things art does, rather than imagining that those other things are in and of themselves entertaining. "Entertainment" and "escapism" are different things, to put it glibly.

the "ultimately" in the line you quote approvingly is exactly equivalent to the "judgement = fascism" line...

I think it's more accurate to say I'm inherently distrustful of anyone who claimed that the comfortable shoes that suit them wonderfully well would therefore automatically work for me in turn.

A lot of people really do think art is nothing more than entertainment, or at least that its primary function is to entertain. This I find depressing and solipsistic.

Well, define entertainment. If you mean entertainment as happy fun pep, then that's terribly limiting. But is that what entertainment is?

the canons of yore reflected something real

Shall we refight the 'bad' fight? ;-) I suspect neither of us would be up for that again, so I'll just say here that what a canon can hold is the possibility of that connection -- whatever it is -- that speaks to the individual soul. But that doesn't mean it is always there for everyone, nor does the canon contain everything unless it is described to be everything -- and within that, we encounter and choose.

If you take away all the arrogance and/or elitism and/or what-have-you, both Momus' and Arendt's arguments hold up better than the ones being offered in opposition to them.

I've already made it clear what I think of Arendt. I did not ask for the approval of self-appointed cultural gatekeepers when artistic visions suggested themselves to me, regardless of how they borrow, twist and revamp. I will not seek their approval in the future.

Where do you stand? Do you believe that everything is the same as everything else -- in some sort of grey fucking post-structuralist world-flattened universe -- or don't you?

You see grey, I see a kaleidoscope that you are attempting to paint black and white. One day I'll die -- but the kaleidoscope thrives.

Tom:

"Entertainment" and "escapism" are different things, to put it glibly.

I'll buy that, certainly, but where's the line of demarcation?

unlike you and momus, i don't think judgments should be made based purely on the packaging, or on the commodified object stripped out of the world surrounding it (well, worlds: most things exist in several spaces at once)

Where you find it. I mean, I know as a consumer, Phil, that some artistic experiences I have are just escapism, by which I mean that I get away from my life and the world while learning or understanding nothing different about it. Others offer insight into myself, my circumstances, others' lives and circumstances, the state of the world, beauty and its relationship to my surroundings and life, etc. etc. - all these are things I find worthwhile and usually "entertaining" too, and probably while consuming them I "escape" also.

Where I think you and I differ is that while I can demarcate one experience from the other, I don't think that neccessarily says anything final about the thing that created the experience. A piece of profoundly moving art can be smoothed into something escapist when it's hung in your living room, a song which seemed like a trifle can suddenly strike home, and the person next to me might have reversed reactions to these two artworks.

The problem I have with Arendt is her apparent horror with the very idea that Hamlet could be entertaining as well as everything else it is. Where I am in sympathy with her is in a fear of the notion that to make something entertaining it has to be *changed*, not just 'done well'.

anyway, the point it's making is (via a vis yr posts) where did "why then, HOME TRUTHS = SHAKESPEARE!" come from? And how is it different (as a thread-bomb) from "ALL JUDGMENTS = FASCISM"? They're exactly identically ridiculous and unanswerable.

"doctrine of equivalency"?? what has this got to do with ANYTHING i have said or think?

That wasn't so much directed at you, admittedly. Reading the thread, I just got more and more angry at what seemed to me to be an attack on the idea that Shakespeare has something that "Home Truths" doesn't -- or in any event that something does, that there is something pernicious about leading a life in which entertainment is the watchword...

i don't think judgments should be made based purely on the packaging

I don't think so either, so what are you getting at? If you're saying that I think "Home Truths" is wanting purely based on the subject matter, then that's barking up the wrong tree a bit -- I'm assuming that what people are saying about it is true.

or on the commodified object stripped out of the world surrounding it

I'd need to go back to my Hegel to really answer that one properly. Quick thought: shouldn't it be a synthesis, really?

Having written this I now can't think of any! Except Blade II.

We're in danger of getting into Keats v. Dylan all over again, but it's worth remembering that the original statement of this question was not about the status of works but about the value placed on people as communicators. So it was Bob Black versus Ivor Cutler (or Marc Bolan, if you prefer), with 'tastemaker' Peel's curation of them both being the link that makes you stand back and spot some kind of 'sublime to ridiculous' pattern emerging in the carpet.

If you mean entertainment as happy fun pep, then that's terribly limiting. But is that what entertainment is?

Perhaps the word I'm groping for -- in opposition to entertainment -- is "learning". A key question, then, might be: do you believe that there is something one can learn from [x] that one can't learn from [y], and that the thing one can learn from [x] is more important, more world-expanding, more illuminating, than the thing in [y]?

what a canon can hold is the possibility of that connection -- whatever it is -- that speaks to the individual soul. But that doesn't mean it is always there for everyone, nor does the canon contain everything unless it is described to be everything -- and within that, we encounter and choose.

You know, I think I completely agree with that.

You see grey, I see a kaleidoscope that you are attempting to paint black and white.

You see a kaleidoscope; I see people pressing on their own eyelids. ;-)

Tom:

A piece of profoundly moving art can be smoothed into something escapist when it's hung in your living room, a song which seemed like a trifle can suddenly strike home, and the person next to me might have reversed reactions to these two artworks.

In one sense I agree with you -- and as a devotee of ambient music and Satie, I can hardly be diametrically opposed. But I think one crucial difference in our POVs is that, while I acknowledge the emotion-emphasizing aspect in your argument as important to me as well, there's a different kind of reaction I'm not seeing stressed in your argument -- that being the power that art can have to make us understand, as well as feel. And I do think that there are works of art that have more of that power than others do.

The problem I have with Arendt is her apparent horror with the very idea that Hamlet could be entertaining as well as everything else it is.

But see, that's not her point, or at least that's not what I'm getting from it. My read of it was that her "horror" was at the notion that people should fail to acknowledge that there is something in art more important than entertainment.

but this generalisation-abstraction is IDENTICAL to tbe process of reification (it IS the process of reification) => which in the ahem age of Global Capitalism is structured and determined by COMMODICIFICATION hurrah boo hiss

hence if you make judgment shortcuts based on DISCIPLINE or ART TYPE, you are basically looking at the label not the [thing].

OK, let's assume that PAINTING and COOKERY as disciplines and/or fields have not been entirely blurred and conflated (this means: ignore the underregarded cross-over micro-medium of PASTA PICTURES). If you simply argue that ANYTHING that falls into the COOKERY zone is by definition of lesser "creative" content (give or take agreed-on definitions of this), then you are judging by the packaging. QED. OK yes yes some marvellous Performance Artist is allowed to reach "down" and momentarily transfigure cookery => however BY DEFINITION no "cook" is allowed to reach "up" and transfigure sculpture??? But of course AS YOU AND EVERYONE knows there are paintings painted every day which of less worth ON ANY SCALE OF VALUES than the cakes yo momma bakes. And besides: it is a painting of a cake = cake has transfigured art. IF YOU CONSTANTLY DEPLOY THE SLIPPERY SLOPE ARGT in re large-scale DISCIPLINES, which I'm afraid on these threads you HAVE been doing, then YOU HAVE TO MAKE JUDGMENTS based primarily on things sometimes only distantly related to the thing itself.

Thus for example if you super-carefully safeguard Martin Creed aesthetically the way you did upthread, you (I think) remove EXACTLY the ambiguity which allows him to be interesting, useful, provocative entertaining, _________, _________. If you just parachute him into Arendt-world, he'll shrivel. She'd hate him: he would be the Devil. But unless you allow THAT argument to speak — which to do justice to HA and MC you MUST — then you are just flourishing a PARTICULARLY specious read-the-package argument (viz "Creed says he's High Art, Arednt is in favour of High Art => they belong together...")

But once you let that argt start, you have to allow a whole bunch of stuff you excluded to troop back in and wait to be RE-judged in the light of the outcome of the Creed-Arendt throwdown.

(actually if ethan had actually evah listened to home truths i suspect the first post on the other thread would have been, "Yes, spot on momus, it's shit isn't it?")

Taking Sides: Weatherby vs er er I cannot think of a pop group I despise enough to put there and actually create a contest!!

Also, how does opposing certain forms of normativity = opposing the notion of difference anyway? Many suburbanites LIKE shakespeare and read him in school and go to small-town productions of his plays and watch movies like Shakespeare in love which require knowledge of his works to "get". Maybe they could use more in their lives -- so they seek him. You, on the other hand, could possibly use more Home Truths and less Shakespeare.

My reality is not different from the intersubjective reality I'm contesting. I'm just adding my voice to the process of adjudication, though arguably by doing it on ILE rather than in some BBC meeting I'm wasting my time. I think what I'm really trying to do is remind people that there were times (the 60s) and places (Japan) when things were / are done differently. 'There are always other possibilities'. Being a bit of a traveller, I feel qualified to remind people of that.

Which just takes us back to the old conundrum of whether art pleases or uplifts the soul. Personally, I think it can do both...but not in the way often intended.

You know, I think I completely agree with that.

Wa-hey, one problem settled!

You see a kaleidoscope; I see people pressing on their own eyelids. ;-)

Better than someone else doing the pressing.

Anyway, you're left with the same problem -- you quite rightly argue that numbers != victory. but is victory even a criteria here? what is this fale opposition you create & on what scale do these hierarchies matter?

Besides, if everyone liked Creed, that would sortof fuck up his *point* wouldn't it?

(b) Also re: "Home Truths" I'm not certain what's wrong with satisfying the basic urge of humans to see what other humans like them are up to. If this is wrong then I'm not certain how to defend a message board where people ask questions about how often others shave and where they like to buy clothes.

(c) Also Momus should perhaps keep in mind that possibly the Japanese are so much more interested in "creators" as personalities because THE JAPANESE ARE ALL ALIKE: as economically and ethnically homogenous as any nation you're likely to find. Clearly such a population is bound to be more enthralled by the artist as a "special" individual being (and a creator of differences).

When I'm creating a record, I tend to focus simply on the playlike activity of bringing another, usually rather odd and implausible world into existence. When I'm offering opinions, though, as on this board, I tend to reveal the flipside of that activity, which is a strong need to attack value systems which I see as evangelical, monolithic, imperialist. And 'Family Values' is one such system. So when a man whose job it is to play records which are full of strange new worlds (perhaps the only man still to be doing this in my homeland, John Peel) switches over to the celebration of The Normal, alarm bells ring *very loudly* in my head. I can understand why the show seems totally innocuous to most of you, but try to understand my perspective.

A good thing, surely?

"WARM...leatherette..."

One other thing: part of your argument has centered around the issue of a lack of available bandwidth that you feel should not be wasted on the mundane. I feel comfortable saying that more media is generated each day on this Earth than I could consume in the rest of my life. There IS room for entertainment and comfort. We can't better ourselves 24 hours a day. EVERYTHING in moderation. All work and no play makes Momus a dull boy. :-)

Only later did I find other channels. Working in the musicbiz, I came to meet people like Daniel Miller (since we're talking about The Normal, Ned!), who had rather different canons of taste from Peel. Then I travelled to France and read magazines like Les Inrockuptibles and Magic, which looked at obscure music that appealed to me more than Peel's eternal Wedding Present and Bogshead sessions. Then finally there was the internet, with US college radio streams, sound clips in the Other Music news letter, mp3 sharing. New worlds open up, power is devolved.

Finally, Peel, while not entirely dethroned, begins to seem like he's blocking the light somewhat. The BBC's domination of UK radio allows all sorts of non-populist stuff that commercial radio doesn't, but this same domination, and the emperor-like permanence of Peel in my particular sector (combined with the fact that he alas made an early decision never to play or give sessions to Momus, for some reason), begins to seem like tyranny.

Hence my Peel ambivalence. He is a benign dictator. I want him, since he's there, at least to keep fighting the good fight, even if my own records play no part in his canon. Instead he edges into shows about the bloke next door. He becomes 'John Peel, broadcaster'. He wins Sony awards for Home Truths. His music show becomes a smaller and smaller part of his activity, and of Radio 1's activity.

The only consolation is the rise of shows like Making Tracks on Radio 3, which play the 'difficult' end of music as though electronica had become the new avant jazz. But somehow the experimenters are pushed into a smaller and smaller ghetto. And ultimately you have to say, 'we need to enliven the times, agitate educate and organize to stimulate people's appetite for 'other worlds' and for sonic adventure. You're right, Ron, we do have to keep battling to persuade 'the mainstream', because without new blood our adventure with wither on the bough.

Running a little label now, as I do, is a bit like being a gay rights crusader in the 70s. You know that your right to be deviant is worth nothing unless it is widely accepted by the public. You can't necessarily recruit new gays from amongst the hetero masses (the ludicrous idea behind Thatcher's Section 28), but you can create awareness and a basic atmosphere of acceptance of your right to exist. And, for people who are just discovering they are gay, you can make things easier by being visible and reachable and, apparently, acceptable and prospering.

ferry, tennant, coverdale, knophler - templates for acheivement thru escape.

there has been a noticable lack of protest about the new gallery and music centre - mind wiz divint nar hoo tee ryte.....

not everyone can do great stuff with any consistency - learn from those who can [or at least rip them off goodstyle]. the pitman painters = art, ambition, exception, excellence.

john peel has smelt fishy longtemps - wedding present - fuxache!!!!!!!

full timerz = one trick ponies - careering fckrz

yeah - me jealous

Disillusionment with Peel is probably only natural since you previously raised him up to ridiculously high pedestal in the first place. You assumed (incorrectly as you later found out) Peel playing the only avant-garde you heard = Peel playing all the avant-garde there was. Now you not only know that that was not true but you also see some contradiction in Peel not being constantly mired in these new worlds at all in Home Truths.

This idea of having "betters" who are more qualified to make these subjective judgements about art and creating at leastsome kind of canon is direct development of your previous like for Peel. In your youth he did that (Cutler was in his canon). Now you feel like someone - and hey why not you - should be doing this too. However you seek some kind of external justification for this that just does not exist. By all means set yourself up as a cultural pundit, tell me what I should be listening to, looking at, reading and why. If I like it (and there are suprisingly plenty of people who would probably listen to you on this) then fine - I'll go along. But the search for some reason why you are more qualified to do this than John Peel, or Bob wid his bad back is fruitless.

Is an idea I will kick against until the day I die. Someone may be *better* at something than me, but why should they filter what I should see, hear and read?

tesco oriental range, tv quick, word of mouth, the sun, ceefax, internut, whsmif recommends - we choose gatekeepers on a daily basis e.g. me telly -> gary bushell on latelamentedBB or that camp blerk off gmtv

automatons/unthinking plebs -> fidge used to say the same of the followers of simon reynolds in late 80s -> creation/nme/4AD fans also.

gatekeepers are not automatically positive as they pick and choose - and we may choose different e.g. the guy at forbidden planet who only ordersand recommends the crappy Tsui Hark movies.

dR c. IS so OTM across BOTH threads

I think that he's right that this can happen (it's happened to me!) but not that it's an inevitability.

"They might choose something different from you" - fine, then you deselect them as your gatekeeper.

momus - so what freaky jap shit should we listen to today ?

[and i mean that in a nice way] ?;~{-

"Listen to this!" = gatekeeper.

"Don't listen to this!" = worse gatekeeper.

"You can't listen to this!" = policeman.

i am a gatekeeper -> listen to chaki, have children, do more gardening

Leeds Poly RPG soc motto 89 - ^come roam our dungeons^

momus - come roam his website

In othere words don't presume a right to tell me what's good and bad. By all means tell me about new things, but leave me to work them out for myself.

**dR c. IS so OTM across BOTH threads**

Thanks a-33. I don't think I posted more than once to the other one. I had plenty of posts written in my head, but others had beaten me to it or the argument had moved on. I also rejected many possible responses as they would have been quite offensive - I kept getting angry. It is a great question and one which I spend time thinking about constantly. It deserves better than it got on the *other* thread. Also it predictably attracted a certain crackpot with many guises which signals the useful end of any thread IMHO.

See also - Kate St C. on slash fiction, Alan T. on int-fiction - there is a whole range of creative pursuits which are neither normal or art-world respectable. Where do they fit in?

believe me, there was nearly two on there...........

And when Peel does the voice-over for adverts? Is he celebrating the ordinary and eccentric then too?

(ie why must there be an 'artistic' decision behind Home Truths rather than an 'I've got a load of mouths to feed' decision?)

And along those lines -- exasperating as you may be sometimes, nobody wants to kill you for your musical taste. Gay people, even today, don't have that luxury.

a) the estimable Robin C

b) bankers

- therefore 95% of creativity is suburban (other 5% = Robin C?)

as a generalisation it is surely no less silly than any one-word summary of a nation ("ze french zey are masters of ze art of luhve"), but the idea it introduces is interesting, because it twists the unexamined bought-by-the-yard commonplace at the root of the original into a more provocative and suggestive shape...

even if the unexamined commonplace proves correct in the end, its content is better served by being questioned and thought about than just blandly bandied around

(i'm going to swear off ironically patronising as a mark s mode, after the hopeless attempt in my last post: i have no talent for it and i don't enjoy rereading it — back to safe ground, and semi-transparent fake humility, i think)

But Momus what I think you need to remember here is that throughout human history and through most of today's human population, people haven't developed their identities or their thinking based on their media consumption: their senses of who they are and what they're "for" have had more to do with concrete physical and emotional activities like feeding families and digging wells and fighting wars, and their cultural affiliations have boiled down to loyalty to whatever traditions were first taught to them (cf religion). We'd like to think that comfortable middle-class westerners who consume loads and loads of media would sort of break out of that traditional sense of identity-formation and start being selective and critical about what they're consuming -- I completely agree with you in this sense -- but the fact is while the Japanese seem to have gotten really far down this path, the bulk of middle-class post-industrial people still think about media and culture as only mildly-relevant tangents to the bulk of their "real lives," which consist of emotions about births and illnesses and weddings and jealousy and feeling angry at people and feeling good about people and getting drunk and driving fast. You're asking people to be savvy about something that is a major part of their lives; the problem isn't that they bull-headedly refuse to be savvy about it, but that they don't really consider it a major part of their lives yet.

Yesterday one of my friends served as a pallbearer at the funeral of one of his wife's relatives. Standing in front of the grave, he suddenly realized he'd never actually been to a burial before: he described the experience as "surreal." This is those of us who are worried about culture and being informed about it and appreciating new ways into it. But for the people you're railing at, the burial is the reality, and what's playing on the radio afterward is just a meaningless footnote.

You're asking people to recognize a truth: that the world has reached a point where "important things" happen in broad sweeps, and you have to be critical and attuned to small developments to engage with those things. But for most people, their own lives are big enough.

(Other thing to consider: on the other thread, Momus, you just made a joke about something "really creative ... a little difficult ... not for most." That last part gets me: if you set up a line of thinking where material that is "not for most" is prized, you have to be content with "most" people not caring for it. Besides which if they did start caring for it, wouldn't you just raise the bar so you could congratulate whoever was winning the race by staying "not for most?")

Personally, what exasperates me is not that this is 'your' talent in debate but your definition of exceptional talent existing in the creative alternative worlds of the 60's and Japan. Perhaps this is merely your 2 favourites of a list of many. Personally, I think the Native cultures of Canada and America are a lot less conformist. While Japan is a wild, experimental world of CreatorSpace and Indoor Skidomes, a world I have never known, it still offers all the creature comforts, shopping and luxuries 24 hours a day. How many of us could have our exceptional creative, life and poetry so deeply entrenched with the land that it is The Exceptional, not merely a place to build things on? For me, that is a truly radical other possible world. While I realize not many people live in rural areas anymore, isn't nature in its varying degrees of beauty and sublimity, one of the most impressives sources for creativity?

Momus, if you think the word 'jap' is completely unoffensive i would consider talking it over with, oh say, a Japanese American who was put in a prison camp during WWII.

Or alternately, maybe you could try calling all of the Japanese folks you meet tomorrow "Jap" and catalog their reactions

Thank you a-33 for your timely acknowledgement of the importance of not introducing racial slurs into the argument (even unintentionally). Notice also that in my remark I was hopeful that it was just lazy typing, which (of course) was the case. IMO, this was an idiotic thing for you to harp on, Momus. You were correct to identify 'all Japanese are the same' as an offensive statement.

that is all, thanks for hearing me out

Does the latter part of that statement not make clear that I mean this is a purely statistical way? (Does the capping of the first part not make clear that I was reducing that argument for rhetorical effect?)

That said, to be honest, when i first read yr 'all alike' post, those words did jump off the screen in much the same way as 'jap' did. I understand yr intentions, I just feel that in racial areas extra caution is prudent. I am probably over-senstive in this area.