Charlie's Blog: Trash Culture, Part 2

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.
MILES DAVIS

Many years ago, there was a music critic that worked for my local newspaper here in SC. He was a cultural affairs editor and all that, and his tastes were extremely highbrow. That guy's job no longer exists now, but it did then. Our local NPR station decided to cancel some of the classical music programming and replace it with jazz. This editor lost his shit. He decried the decision as if it was the collapse of western civilization. Public radio was being turned over to the filthy unwashed vulgar masses!

All things considered, it was a minor deal. That station still plays the classics with a smattering of jazz and Prairie Home Companion. But the controversy over it pointed to a much larger issue. This is the issue of cultural selection. In my previous post in this series, I discussed trash culture and the concept of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We can't decide what everyone else will view or listen to or appreciate. But we can decide as individuals what we will consume from the culture. This requires prudence.

The easiest way to clean up our cultural consumption would be to simply go with the highbrow. Toss out those old disco albums and go strictly with Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. But as my story of the cultural affairs editor shows, such a strategy would cost you dearly because you would never get to enjoy the incomparable sounds of Miles Davis. Being a cultural snob does not make you richer but impoverished in the cultural sense. A better strategy will have to do.

The goal is to separate the treasure from the trash because no one wants to waste their life on trash. We want to keep the good, the true, and the beautiful while letting all that is garbage fade away for us. I don't always find the true, the good, and the beautiful, but I can tell you where the trash is located and how to get rid of it.

The Wide World of Sports

The vast majority of televised professional sports are not worth your time. There is nothing true, good, or beautiful about any professional sport in our day and time. This was not always the case. The Olympics had much to admire in them, but they got diminished considerably by international politics as governments doped their athletes to win pride points on the world stage. Then, amateurism gave way to professionalism which gave many incentives for athletes to dope such that what you see now is unreal. A sport now is nothing more than a spectacle performed by people resembling animals more than humans in excellent motion. A return to amateurism could possibly restore the Olympic ideal, but that just isn't going to happen. Participating in sports for health and recreation is always recommended, but watching sports on television is a waste of life.

Journalism

The supreme goal of any news program is to convey the truth. The supreme goal of propaganda is to persuade people of things that usually aren't true. There was a time when news was the former, but it is now largely the latter. Partisan journalism has replaced objective reporting, and truth has become a casualty in a propaganda war as people seek not reliable information but confirmation and comfort in their pre-selected worldviews. The ones who choose not to be partisan tend to care about ratings and entertainment as they strive to deliver eyeballs to commercial sponsors.

The idea of objectivity in reporting has fallen on hard times as the conservative smear of liberal bias in the mainstream media has finally gained traction. Granted, no reporting is going to be 100% free of bias because we are all human. Our beliefs cloud our judgments. But consider the case of Bob Woodward who is rumored to be a Republican and a conservative. This was the guy who brought down Nixon and reported on Watergate. Apparently, any right wing political convictions Woodward had did not stop him from working on a juicy story. But there is no way you would have seen an outlet like Fox News breaking that story.

Today, the likes of Fox, MSNBC, talk radio, and other avenues of partisan reporting have muddied the discourse to the level of insult and innuendo while clouding the facts to the extreme. This sort of reporting brings high ratings as people lap up the slanted coverage. The escape for this is to go with either the mainstream network coverage that tries not to rock the boat and the sponsors or the alternative fringe media on the internet that entertains every conspiracy theory under the sun and is just as slanted in their coverage. What's left?

I find that the reporting from NPR and the PBS Newshour to still be reliable. In print, there are still the New York Times and the Washington Post. Those outlets seem like dinosaurs in the age of the internet, but I find myself turning more and more to them for reliable information. CNN is almost decent, but they tend to throw in celebrity gossip to juice their bad ratings.

For most people, their news comes from the likes of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Stewart lambastes Fox News but even takes MSNBC folks to task when their sins are egregious. I don't ever see Stewart mocking NPR or the New York Times. The running gag on The Daily Show is the overt slant at Fox News and then calling itself "fair and balanced." Fox News is really trash news, and MSNBC merely competes with that trash from the left wing perspective. It is an undeniable truth that if your reporting can be fodder for a comedy show, it isn't reliable. Media should still aim for objectivity no matter how outdated that notion may seem.

Music

The temptation with music is to tell people to listen to Bach and call it a day. This is because most bad music is popular while most great music is classic and timeless. But there was a time when Bach was popular, too. As such, it is worth our while to sort out the popular music to find those pieces that make us better for listening to it rather than worse.

I can't tell you if Coldplay is good music. What I can tell you is that Justin Bieber is the spawn of Satan's loins. We can probably add Norwegian Death Metal and gangsta rap to the rubbish heap of bad music with a high margin of safety. But then you have Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. This is when we run into trouble.

Music has the unique capability of capturing human emotions unlike any other medium. Music has the ability to transport us to another place and to feel what the musician wishes for us to feel. But sometimes, it just becomes plain silly such as the endless repetition of early Philip Glass compositions or the praise of a red plastic cup from Toby Keith. It would be easy to be dismissive of entire genres, but classical music gave us Arnold Schoenberg, a detestable composer.

I am with Miles Davis in believing that good music is good regardless of style or genre. But not all music is good. In the case of Arnold Schoenberg, the music is atonal and little more than noise. With early Philip Glass, the music is monotonous and dull. These experiments in bad music may seem like a waste, but they tell us something about good music. Good music is entirely human. It is neither random nor mathematical. Ultimately, good music touches the heart and the soul.

Movies, Television, Theater, and Fiction

I group these together because they all perform essentially the same function which is to tell a story. This is why novels become movies and vice versa. Humans love stories. But why do they love stories? Why do stories matter? And what makes a good story good?

The most nauseating director in Hollywood today is Michael Bay. While other directors labor to produce fine cinema, Bay makes a spectacle for the screen that tells no discernible story whatsoever. The Transformers?franchise is the epitome of bad movie making. Steven Spielberg is the genesis of this bad cinema with that first Jaws movie, but no one realized just how bad the summer blockbuster could get until Michael Bay. The Bay philosophy is that a good movie has good special effects.

What makes a movie or any other form of narrative good is that it tells a story, and what makes a story good is that it contains a moral dimension. I remember back in college having a professor tell me that literature served an important and timeless purpose of providing a moral education. At the time, I thought this moral education was something you would get from a Bible story or something didactic like one of Aesop's fables. But this is simplisitic. As I began to read and study Shakespeare or the writings of Flannery O'Connor, I started to see this moral education idea much more clearly.

Stories reveal to us good and bad people in action. It shows us their choices and their motives. A bad movie shows us an evil character that just does evil things for their own sake. Think of Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. Dudley was the opposite of Snidely because he was just some boy scout of a guy. You can get away with this thing in a cartoon, but you will notice how a Michael Bay film is essentially the same as the cartoon.

All bad narratives have this quality of making the characters two-dimensional. This is why bad people in real life can watch these things and feel reassured in their false goodness because they are three dimensional in comparison. But then, you have a character like MacBeth who gives in to opportunity and commits murder and must live with the consequences and his conscience. This is more difficult to watch. You feel a certain sympathy for the villain even as he dooms himself.

The flip side to this cartoon version of good and evil is the nihilistic story where people are merely shades of banal evil. This would be the cinema of Quentin Tarantino. His work is thoroughly nihilistic from beginning to end with a few faint glimmers of morality in Inglourious Basterds. Unlike a Michael Bay film, you are entertained but left empty by these works of nihilism. This is why a film like Pulp Fiction can shift narrative focus like it can because a bad guy in one story can be a good guy in another story and vice versa. But good and evil are merely perspectives depending on who we are rooting for. In one story, we hope John Travolta's character makes it while in another story, we are pleased to see him shot to death in a bathroom. This is banality.

This same banality is also evident in the world of comedy. Nothing embodied this more than the series Seinfeld which was literally a show about nothing. Seinfeld did for the sitcom what Clint Eastwood did for the Western in the 60's. It emptied out the moral dimension of life. Seinfeld was a far cry from a series like The Andy Griffith Show, Mary Tyler Moore, and The Cosby Show.?All those shows told their stories from a moral framework. At the end of them, you felt like a better person. At the end of Seinfeld, you are amazed at how you could kill a half hour like that and not hate yourself.

Art

Art has caused a great deal of controversy over the years and cuts to the core of philosophies and worldviews. This mostly has to do with art's move from capturing what is beautiful to being shocking. Nothing captures this shift more than this work from Marcel Duchamp:

The purpose of art is to capture or express what is beautiful. Duchamp took a giant dump on this definition of art and opened the floodgates for all that would come after him. This is because Duchamp managed to shock people, and this shock became the basis for what was considered good. Art's original sin was to be ugly. Now, its sin is to be boring.

It is easy to judge art by the measuring stick of talent and accomplishment. Unfortunately, this is the wrong stick to use. We have all heard the refrain that a kid could have created these artworks. But talented artists can turn out bad art while humble artists can generate real works of stunning beauty. Here is a work from the underappreciated Charles Melohs:

This is an expressionistic work which does not seem to require a great level of technical skill. But I find it to be very stunning and beautiful. Now, compare it to something that did require a great deal of skill:

Salvador Dali's work displays at the same time a great deal of mastery of the art of old painting while also managing to nauseate you. If beauty was found in talent, Dali should rank with the masters. Instead, he painted popular crap that makes you feel a bit sick inside especially if the work has ants in it.

The flip side to the shock art is the sentimental art of someone like Thomas Kinkade, but it is nasueating not from being rotten but from way too much sugar. A fine example of this art as sugary confection:

This art almost wants to be beautiful, but it fails miserably. When he was alive, Thomas Kinkade was literally a factory for this sort of art. He had reduced it to a formula like the TV series Law and Order and just churned it out one after another. But this is not beautiful in much the same way that candy is tasty but not fulfilling.

Making beautiful things is hard. It is difficult for both artist and critic. But when you see the real thing, you know it. Here is beauty:

This statue is stunning in both technical achievement but also in its effect. It is simply a beautiful work. No Duchamp urinal can ever be equal to this. It is a damning indictment of our culture and times when we prize a plumbing fixture on the same level as this masterpiece. Here is a painting of the same scene:

Work does not have to be of a religious nature to produce in us an appreciation of beauty. It could be secular and as natural as this photograph:

Beauty has a nagging habit of coming out when we least expect it. It captures us by surprise like grace. It can bless the humble artist and elude the master. The error of both the Kinkade and the Duchamp is that they believe they can create and destroy beauty at will.

Beauty is almost magical, and I don't know where it comes from except from some divine place in the mind of God. This is why very few can capture beauty but everyone can recognize it. The aim of the artist, the collector, the critic, the gallery, and the museum is to fill the world with such beautiful things. Instead, they make the world ugly, and our museums of modern art are now the greatest indictment of our trash culture.

Why does it matter?

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This idea has led us to the trash culture we see today as egalitarianism holds sway over the excellent, the beautiful, the good, and the true. Basically, if you like it, it is good. But when we get sick of something, we know better. We have all had that feeling at the end of a bad movie of wanting to get back the time we wasted on watching it. This is why it matters. We live in a time thanks to the internet where so much is available to us in terms of music, images, art, video, and writing. Yet, the crisis of our age is that with such an abundance of culture we have no way of deciding what is worth the precious coin of our finite time. Quantity does not equal quality, and the quality is in danger of being buried in the avalanche of crap. So, we turn to social media to share the workload of finding and filtering what is good, true, and beautiful. The tragedy is the utter failure of that doomed project. It is akin to letting imbeciles loose in a library and none of them can read.

The good, the true, and the beautiful exist in a transcendant sense. They are not subject to the mere whims of the beholder. The sophisticated may scoff at this ancient idea, but they are the ones who try to divine something valuable in noise and excrement. If Hell has a museum, it is certainly an infinite display of urine and feces and maybe a Thomas Kinkade or two.

When deciding what we should spend our time on, it is helpful to think not in terms of the finite but the infinite. Imagine not wasting your time on these things but eternity on them. If you were to live forever, what would you want to fill your mind with? The reason we tolerate such trash is because they are temporary and endurable. But when things are good, true, and beautiful, we want them to last forever. They never grow old but are timeless and pleasing. They become part of who we are, and we carry them in our minds for the rest of our lives. This is why it matters. We should want to fill our minds with those things. And we will know the real things because we will not regret the time wasted on them but regret that we don't have more time for them or that more of these things don't exist in the world. And we will also feel that we are better and not worse for enjoying them.

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NOTES

?Bob Woodward and the trouble with "liberal media bias"

Source: http://charliebroadway.blogspot.com/2012/12/trash-culture-part-2.html

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