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.

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?