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jamesdazell · 4 years

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Happy New Year 2020

Happy New Year. I hope this year brings more love and less hate. More peace and less pain. More kindness and less jealousy. More self-love and less comparison. A time to embrace new beginnings and wave goodbye to toxic times.

I posted one thing to Instagram last year. I had a really productive year and it was so full of growth in every important way to me. You cant Instagram that. It's something within you. You dont photograph it; you recognise it by a change of behaviour and outlook. Everything else in a year to year comparison is acquisition, age, or a change of scenery. I'm more excited and fulfilled by the experiences of personal growth and major changes of perspective than a drive for success in a career reshaping myself after the ideal habits and image that would more undo me than make me. I have no interest in a success wherein at the end of the journey I wouldn’t know myself, nor enjoy the company I shared. Success at all costs, is not very interesting. At the moment, if I were a successful writer by exactly what I wish to do.. who would I sit with when I got there? No. I won’t become published. There is more to success than pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and rolling up your sleeves. That’s a straight white male Christian’s romantic rhetoric. who gave themselves a free passport to show up anywhere and set up an imitation of success back in Europe. Nothing betrays the reality of white male priveledge like success and failure as an act of one's own will or quality of mind. In reality, there are circumstances and situations to take in to account. Success in the end is a kind of assimiliation; a manner of fitting in, and imitating the model of success. One finds the same thing succeeds in the same place time and time again, with subtle novelty to make it seem new. But on deeper analysis, there are places where certain achievements never occur at all, even in the richest conditions, because it wasn’t the nature of the place; it's not to their particular temprament or personal contstitution. One is successful because they lend power to already existing success. They are useful to power or that which desires it.

My existence fulfills me, more than the world’s idea. Life and all its difficulties and lessons, learning how to become a better and a more contented me. In a way my life is a series of finding ways of preserving myself and not being shaped after the pressures of life or adapting after the world's image and excitement, because I've always known who I am and what I'm about. But it does become hard to preserve and to affirm oneself in the ever changing world with its innovations that change the very farbic of society. There is always a need to find my defensive and offensive strategies to preserve and affirm myself in the face of the world. And my interests and passions - though this may be true of everybody - are ways of retaining, maintaining, and developing the best parts of myself, without giving them up for popular fads that rise and fall. Learning about myself, the world, and what everything is really about. Finding my own drama, meaning, goals, and adventure of life on my own terms, out of my own experiences, not those shoved into me from media and social pressure. How could I Instagram that. The moment I post a moment I am happy with is the moment I doubt my happiness and put my memory up for public validation. No. I validate myself and I validate my own experiences and memorable moments. I dont need to know how much something is likeable: I have liked it. I dont need to know how agreeable a thought is: I have thought it. I dont need to know how achieved an act is: I have done it. I dont need to know how good this is: I am proud of it.

I envy the blind person who has no use for the narcissism of Instagram, is spared of the passive agressive anxiety and pessimism on Twitter, and still appreciates life for all the things truly worth appreciating. Whose appreciation for life cannot be photographed, and does not know the dopamine addiction for a validation 'like' counter to compensate their low self-esteem. Social media is a petri dish for narcissism. And every woke person is a basket case with the same narcissistic anxiety as everyone else on it hoping to be validated and gain followers for their wokeness. Narcissists crave validation. Disable them by disengaging. Narcissists are made not born. They are overindulged in validation and underindulged in emtional connection. They dont reflect. They socialise to have conversations about their problems in order to be forgiven and receive consoling kind words about themselves, and pretend they dealt with it. Because all narcissists want is validation. And it’s the epidemic of our time.

Our self-impression of ourselves we upload onto (anti-)social media, is not nearly as interesting and attractive, as the details, humour, idiosyncracies we are unaware of, because it's not interesting when we try to impress - especially by such superficial things, most of which aren't even things to do with ourselves, but places we arrive to and things we acquire. Images of ourselves without context, a macroscopic gaze devoid of the energy and life of its context: namely, existence. All the things that make up the rest of the picture that a healthy perception takes into account. It rubs away so much of a human being that they are left little more than a skin surface. It makes us into journalists of our own lives (except not reviewers), and advertisers of everything we don't need.

I understand I could use social media to gain success in my aims, but I dont want to become what that entails in the process nor want a success that would depend on other people being on these platforms to grant me it. Work hard and succeed quietly, making your work your achievement. Do good deeds in silence. Don't do it to then post on social media because you still need the excess validation. Do it because it was a good thing to do. Absolving your mistakes by your own conscience is the long road round of not caring about that you made them all. If its not forgiveness by a change of behaviour, or attitude then nothing has been learned and nothing changed.

Dont just travel to places. Make memories there. Theres nothing impressive about boarding a commercial plane and showing up where it lands. What else was expected. If there was no growth or contribution there, were you even there. Just passing through like an invisible wind. Lifestyles are for people with no real meaning in their life. It's a way to fill the void of daily meaninglessnes that they have to stylise their life. It used to be that there were things unnecessary to buy. Now it is things unnecessary to know. You must know? What for? Knowledge without purpose is decadence. Keep to your lane. If it's youre job to know, then know and do your job. One voice of reason well articulated can silence a room of idiots. Thats how the world works. On social media, the idiots gain ascendancy by liking each others idiocy 10k skyward. Power is reversed online.

Once you no longer care for the validation and public reception, and once you realise that politically social media is ineffectual to substantial change - snce it's effectively a right wing publishing model with every ounce of sense falling off the algorithm - it's just watching the world go to hell one post at a time. And that to thrive on it is to assimilate with its ideal: a narcissist. A juvenile superficial arena of naval gazing dopamine addicts. Everything else on it is somewhere between a complaint box, click bait, and ‘food-food advertising.’ Then there feels no point to it regarding your health and self-esteem. Filling your mind, your eyes, with things which were not present a moment ago, which may have stirred and disturbed you for a much longer time. It's made by and for narcissists to peak dopamine hits.

Dopamine acts as a neurotransmitter made by different parts of the brain that is part of our evolutionary chemicals that gave us the drive to do things that were positive for our survival. The chemical that made our brain drive us to eat when hungry, find warmth and shelter when cold, to reproduce our genes to survive, now that same reward chemical in the brain floods in excess. Your brain wants the dopamine not the thing. Its the motivation chemical. We need it. We evolved by it. It keeps us positive by controlling memory, focus, attention, motivation. Without can cause lack of focus, restlessness and irritability, erractic impulsive bodily movement, and indecision. And prologned deficiency due to the excess of it swell and depletion it, cause stress, anxiety, depression to ensue.

We live in a dopamine driven culture. We sell this idea that drugs are enhancing. Drugs are not enhancing at all. It's evident that no feeling of reward from alcohol, smoking, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, meth, other pain relief and psychoactive drugs, etc is giving you anything that your body wasnt already giving you, and if anything those substances only reduce the same chemical that is desired to attain by one using them. And naturally this deficiency therefore leads to dependency and addiction, because the person thinks these substances are where they got them and how they got a boost of them. When actually they use them up and it takes a couple of weeks to restore to normal regulation which is why people go back to substances, then bulld up a tolerance and need more. Tolerance is actually your body's natural adaptation trying to regulate your body to new circumstances. Tolerance isn’t you handling the substance more. It’s a natural adaptive response that the body undergoes to re-regulate, to counter-act the effect of alcohol and drugs. Your body thinks it’s sick and adapts to the change. That’s why you get drunk faster if you drink less frequently than if you drink regularly long-term. It’s like resetting the zero point on weighing scales manually. So, a drinker will need more to tip the tolerance, because your body reset ‘a-lot-more-alcohol’ to the new zero point. The reason a person gets drunk less quickly after drinking regularly is because the body reduces its GABA inhibitiors and increases the exciters, because the effect of the alochol had been increasing the GABA inhibitiors and reducing the exciters. But the alcoholic wants the GABA inhibitors because the dopamine has now associated it with the reward chemical, and so drink more to tip the balance in favour of the GABA inhibitors because they get the “good feeling.”All which the body would have given you anyway. Whats more, is that its the same of one-click online shopping, advertising, high sugar food and drink, high carbs, junk food, binge watching TV, image scrolling sites, porn, dating apps, and social media. As well as anything that increases stress, because it depletes dopamine, which results in further stress, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, depression. Our cultural lifestyle is dopamine addiction. But it’s effect is the reverse. It’s self-depricating and makes us less ambitious because dopamine is needed for motivation. The only thing that adds extra boost of reward chemical of dopamine, endogenous opioid, serotonin, and endogenous cannabinoid, is by eating healthy food, getting sufficient sleep, and getting regular and intense aerobic exercise, and some stretching/strength building. The healthier we are, the more powerful and stronger we feel, the motivated and ambitious we are, the more daring and inspired, the happier and more tolerant of things that would otherwise stress. We are a better human being for it. Big business exploiting our evolutionary chemicals to keep us addicted to unnecessary lifestyles, media, and products. And because it takes a week or more to replenish naturally, an addiction cycle to quick fix substances occur. It used to be that a person should just not do drugs, but now its a whole lifestyle that should be avoided.

Our most legal drugs are the worst. Alochol and cigarettes have more death related incidents than illegal substances. 5 minutes of doing nothing is better for your brain than 5 minutes of social media. You improve your brain and subsequently your body, having the same feel good pain relieving chemicals that are desired, and subsequently the power over your environment and subsequently your life by doing nothing, compared to engaging with most of culture available.

Here is a video explaining drug addiction and dopamine (same applies to carbs, sugar, fast food, junk food, and other quick fix dopamine reward high)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxHNxmJv2bQ&t=2s

The reason is people want the inhibitors. Even though its not giving them anything that their body wouldnt give for free. Its wiring the brain to respond to stress, suffering, and pain. Drugs alleviate pressure. But whether for pleasure or for stress, it’s a response to a situation. It’s not the danger of drugs that matter to me. It's a mental health issue. But your body gives you what it needs, and drives you to get what it needs. If you would only allow it to do its job. You want to make life lighter. But in reality all real things are heavy. The pressure of life ought to stimulate a response that demands more health and more strength. The body wants to give you more health and strength. The very feeling of struggle in life, psychological feeling, and at times physical strife, is your body signalling to you that you need a higher health and strength. In strife, the body fights or flight. In other words, innately decides if it behaves decadently or towards health; existentially or ecstatically. The proper reaction to pressure is to be stronger, the reaction to signals of low moods is be healthier, the reaction to de-motivation is to eat dopamine increasing foods, get exercise, sunshine, and sleep; the proper reaction to insecurity is do something daring that would require confidence. “To have strength, one must first need it” Nietzsche. It’s a resilience and strength of mind that has to be trained. Drugs don’t alleviate depression, they perpetuate it, by never solving the problem. They decrease the feel good chemical in the brain that would have pulled the person out of depression. That’s what rehab centres are really doing, they are taking the person out of the habits that are disrupting the body’s natural chemical regulation. The body has to rewire itself to desire healthier habits, feel good, and motivation. The pressures of life are life demanding you to be more and you have to go meet it. That's just the game of being a functioning human being.

You are getting the feel good drugs all the time. You are actually depleating your body of things which it thinks it wants. You get those chemical in such a surge that they create deficiency. You think its an uplifting buzz. You're getting a buzz from things that wont improve your life when your body is trying to give those chemical to you to motivate you for things that will. Knowledge is not power. Health is power.

Drugs just block stuff. It doesnt give. It just blocks so that your body supplies more of what it already has because it thinks it cant provide. This deprives people of realising the native vigour of their human potential. Whats needed to realise the ecstatic nature of a human being has always been Great Health. There are however obvious remedies, none of which define post modern culture if you bring them all together. Getting plenty of sleep, exercise, sunshine, socialise better, have healthier and uplifting hobbies, read, draw, learn an instrument, learn often, eating certain dopamine increasing foods, less carbs, less meat, less sugar, less coffee, less alcohol etc less of everything that is post-modern American culture. Read more, great things, with charisma and intelligence, with depth and meaning, things beautifully written and timeless. Listen to music that reaches into you and excites as much as it calms, a catharsis of emotion that needed to be recognised and explored. Visual art that belongs to great times, and not artists who think their pain is worth your attention. A culture that brings out the best of you. The best mind. The best health. The best company to be around. The best aspirations for yourself. The best diet and lifestyle. It’s an interesting time because it feels to go with the flow is the worst thing to do, not only boring, but bad health. And to experiment with exploring your own direction is essential. Find yourself in your own culture you invent. Design your own culture. Experiment with everything and explore what brings out you the most at your best.

Our genetic code is like a piano. It has all the notes laid out. But it makes proteins, and it decides which to make based on responses to situations and experiences, that is epigenetics. So it's like your genetic code is a piano, all the available notes laid out, and epigenetics is like the music being played on it. Choosing which of the available notes to use when in response to situations and experiences. We live by the piano made by generations of our ancestors. Each one of us trying to play new beautiful music to pass on.

Foods that help increase dopamine are fish for omega 3, oregano and oregano oils, probiotic foods that help absorb amino acids to make dopamine, green tea (as it helps electrical signals to move around the brain), tumeric (easy way is to add it to rice or pasta) which lowers inflammation in the brain allowing for more dopamine release, high magnesium foods like pumpkin, beetroot, spinach (this also helps for good sleep), blueberries, everyday vegetables like broccoli, tomatoes, garlic, asparagus. Plus good for boosting serotonin are walnuts pistachios, lactose free milk. For both, have avocados, and eggs.

This is not to denounce hedonism and Epicureanism. On the contrary give me all the Saturnalia Lupercalia Bacchanal you like, the more ecstatic culture the better. Music and dance are the only arts of the twentieth century that got anywhere toward the ancient ecstatic culture. And because it looked beyond European tradition to world cultures, on other continents like Africa and Asia. But this trans-Altantic post-Modern culture is just decadent self deprecation. Naturally, spawned by Christian cultures, which favoured transcendence from everything bodily. And has always had an aversion to power and strength. which the body is trying to supply but we keep kicking it away for cheap fixes. Principle causes for a love of Minoan-Mycenean-Greco-Roman cultures, utterly in contradiction to Abrahamic faiths. Not Ancient and Modern. Polytheism versus Monotheism as a whole frame of mind. Ecstatic versus Existential. Greco-Roman vs Abrahamism. I don’t want to get rid of Abrahamism, but there are much better alternatives healthier mind and body, from which emanates a whole culture and art, indeed, civilizations.

There was a recent study of the healthiest countries in the world with the obvious result that the Mediterranean (listing Spain and Italy first and second) and Japan as the healthiest cultures. Of course, the traditions of their culture are entirely health driven. "a Mediterranean-style diet, which has been shown to reduce cardiovascular events, mostly stroke, compared with a Western diet. A Mediterranean diet includes generous quantities of olive oil, fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, and fish; limited portions of red meats or processed meats; and moderate amounts of cheese and wine." explains Dr. Ron Blankstein, a cardiovascular imaging specialist and preventive cardiologist at Harvard-Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Post-war America created post-modern society and the PR/advertising industry. Post-modernism, not only a juvenile variation of modernism, but a hijack of evolutionary biology. Everything innate to our nature stimulated into an excessive overkill, exploited in order to get us hooked on unnecessary media, lifestyles, and products. To be healthy is to be unAmerican, to be unPost-Modern. Everything introduced is psychologically detrimental. Walk around and try to find a place that isn’t junk food, gambling, alcohol, shopping, coffee.

The more capitol cities are the epicentre of post-modern culture as we 'move forward' into regression, I am lured away to less notable locations, that have been spared and still retain some health without artificial substance abuse just to keep afloat. Cities now brim full of juvenile yuppie narcissistic kidults on finance living like they’re still at university, and cultural funding dwindling as we’ve regressed back into the 1980s yuppie culture that made all the baby boomers rich. You can almost map the baby boomer life with the creation of post-modernism. The PR industry, nicotine, plastics, sugar, the colour television, LSD, ketamine, the 60s in their teens, the 70s love-in in their twenties, the 80s wealthy cocaine yuppies in their thirties, repackaging their youth to kids in the 90s, and ever since, and the masterplan that has been the 21st century of white nationalism they were raised on in their earliest memories in the 1950s. And what is “progressive” today is only what was progressive in the 60s almost as a left-wing conservativism because things have moved so far-right,

But it has become clear (as big business, big tech, fossil, and right wing gain ever more ascendency) that our knowing is ineffectual and only depresses us. "We absorb so much information that we've lost our common sense" Gertrude Stein once said. Politics has become worse since the advent of social media, not better. We don’t know more, but find those comments that argue our own opinion for us. People buy books, go to the theatre, to hear about things they already believe. Armchair activists are not as effectual as they think. And hardworking Foundations and Charities still exist. The richest of the rich only take care of things that concern them, and believe if the poor suffer enough they'll take care of themselves. The detriment of engaging with the platform, outweighs the good intentions of using it. And consequences are always more important than intentions. It's not important to know, if prudence and profoundness are lacking.

My life has its own universe, and social media inhibits that to the degree that I cannot see the situation of my own universe enough to do enough about it for its own sake. My existence is it's own universe. Make your world your passion. Better to do whatever makes you feel empowered and proactive and take care of your lane as much as you can. The more you listen to the news the more you live after it. You react to whats todays news and tomorrows and the next, forgetting your own personal power. Be disruptive as a child that is full of energy and aim not living after the world but their own happiness. The world must always find its arrangement. Where people find where they belong. Not fitting in to any success at all costs, but knowing who you are and what you are about and finding an environment which stimulates enriches their potential. What a life needs to thrive is not social comparison, but a mirror to reflect ourselves. that we enjoy ourselves, to make the positive changes necessary, and to be present within our own existence, with our own circumstances, working within its own sphere of influence.

Be the light and goodness in your own knowable and experiential world. Avoiding unnecessary information entering your mind that really serves no purpose but to inform you of things others are doing, or have, that is far beyond your sphere of influence, that wouldn't have entered your mind at all if you had not taken out your phone.

There is a real luxury: Living without concern for the conversation on social media and the news. Being present in your own existence. Not thinking about every corner of the globe, but what you can do where you are. Feeling your own life and being present within it, positively effecting things around and within your physical proximity.

🧘‍♀️🧘‍♂️🚶🏽‍♂️🚶‍♀️

#happynewyear newyearnewme socialmedia detox rehab dopamine cleanse purify feelgood health narcissist narcissistic power

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jamesdazell · 5 years

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jamesdazell · 5 years

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Un Monstre Sacré

ART AND REPRESENTATION

(2019)

Enamorado de ti, de tu vida y de lo que quieres.

- Frida Kahlo

I’m tired of reconsiderig my story in the mind of the idealism of present fashionable criticism.

Concentrate on what you have to say and the images which manifest themselves to you. Stories are more than their features, their meaning runs much deeper than its costume. Consider the representation and diveristy only if it tells your story better, makes your characters explore their themes better, adds to their own story. You can make whatever art you want to make. No matter if it goes against the idealisms of the day. Idealisms come and go, the whole of art history shows us, but no one has the right to shut down your own stories and interpretation of life that you need to express. We’re running close to a prescribed imagination, not a free one, where the manifesto is a total and political movement, not an arts movement. Full of ideals but not ideas. Right now its like the Puritanical movement, if not a bonfire of vanities, against those who transgress the ideals of the day. Make whatever art that has been revealed to you to make. Make art with whatever great inspiration you had to make it and do not apologise for how it is manifested.

Your imagination is a cerebral reflex. Don’t apologise or criticise it for not representing the ideals of the movements of the day. I’m not bothered about representation in art as I think it goes against the whole job of art.

Artists and writers are representations of the cultural history of their time (they're not the only that, but even that is informative about the time). Not everything about them is going to be golden, maybe everything will be bad taste and bad intelligence. But in any case, it is far far more important think with them as if in conversation and disucssion. Their purpose is to stimulate thought not to emboss on it on the minds who receive it. To be honest it seems clear why the Bibles were so effective. Most people want to be told what to think and to have their own thoughts amplified back at them, they want to have something celebrate them, and to rise up in significance by celebration.

No matter where or who the work comes from, I wouldn't favour anyone for their cultural representation but for the talent and ideas their work carries. Great work is recognisible immediately. It affects on a cross-cultural level. I'm always looking to become foreign to myself, both in culture and time. The act of de-culturising seem more to the task than to represent it. Foreignness might illuminate and ignite dormant aspects within me that my own culture may not. So it is better to be in conversation than to outright reject, because it mattered, and if it mattered enough to be remembered and preserved, and to be copied (often by hand) through the centuries or ever just the last hundred years, then it probably meant something on a deeper level that is beyond their cultural representations, into a deeper part of humanity, whether the good or bad side. So through them we can understand ourselves.

The purpose of representative writers is more needed by institutions and publishers etc but in artist's work the aim ought to be to dissolve those differences and to find the human being in experiences and the stories we tell. Like Susan Sontag said in conversation with John Berger about story-telling, she doesnt need to be a Russian man in Russia, or even feel like one, to read Tolstoy. And any reading of it in that way would be a superficial reading. That's not what’s on offer in a work of that magnitude. Likewise to quesiton whether the lead in a story is a man or a woman. It doesn't matter in itself. It only matters to the dramatic nature of the story. There are so many possible ways to unravel a narrative, that the lead doesn't signify anything but a focus. The lead could be positive or negative traits, the purpose of a lead could be celebratory or negation. The point is the same as ever. To tell great stories.

It annoys me when people say how sexist Japan is (and it always comes from the Anglosphere who have a terrible time of seeing themselves as they are). When Japan has such a great history of female lead characters (and female charaters in general) who are both heroic and admirable, that Japan should rather be an inspiration for telling female lead stories more than the west's tradition. What representative writing is doing (though is not saying) is suggesting that certain ideas and arts belong to different races, genders, sexualities. There are certainly particular experiences only certain people will be able to tell, but then you run in the problem that certain races, genders, sexualities, are supposed to tell stories in a certain stereotyped way because it represents them. Take class for instance; that a working class writer is supposed to write about working class life and in a stereotypical way. It makes no sense but to write with and read it with your own humanity. That is the point of reading and writing, to reengage with our humanity. Hemmingway innovated, but that style doesn't belong to his race and sexuality. At the end of the day, no matter how representative, all you're doing is telling a story and or making an artistic choice, and it needs to be coming from your deeper humanity, that dissovles boundaries and shows there isn't a difference between us. I don't believe there is necesarily homosexual art anymore than homosexual science. The purpose isn't to write autobiography. I would never begin to think of Lorca's poetry as a homosexual perspective. His poetry is universal, he transgressed those social, political, cultural representations. He dissolved as he defied them: as a human being. He humiliated them as he transgressed representation. He became everyone, on everyone's essential journey, a primordial everyone. That rather seems the ambition and the proper task. So, I can never see the seduction in representational writing. Art’s very purpose is to liberate ourselves from the privilege of an authorial stance of representation. To dissolve differential representation back into a unity of a human being. To reveal, from the cultural political delusion, the communalness and universals of our being human.

Characters exist to embody a theme to tell a story, they define their character by decisions and actions they make. Without that they would be autonomous, independant from the story, representing exactly what they are for the sake of being. We have a name for that: reality TV. Reality TV as the fulfillment of modern dramatic theory; the most naturalistic, identifiable, devised, post dramatic, audience participation, theatrical entertainment one can imagine, unfolding in real time along the lines of life without the logic of narratives.

Turn on the TV and Reality TV is there either as the news, people eating, people dating, people’s jobs, people’s cultural aspirations, or people selling things on the market. A frieze of national life as an interactive game show. We even now demand that fictional characters are played by their representative real life identity. Reality TV is all people really want. Real life stories about real life people, played by real life people for real life people. There is no question who the ideal character is. Theres no point in having idealistic characters, because they have nothing to learn. They are in themsevles a fulfilment. What journey do they have to go through. What themes are they able to explore. Reality is more conplex than there being good people whose attitudes we like and bad people whose attitudes we don't.

Characters are representations of themes, they help explore themes. If the themes and meaning of the story is good, then the characters will be good. Then the representation will be justified. What matters is from how a deep an instinct, an interpretation, if for lack of a better word a soul the story sprung from.

Progressives in art: I always find progressives in arts, especially those who outright reject the past, to be a continuation of that same spirit, which they are sadly too ignorant to have perceived. It was rather that they have found a different expression, maybe a more honest expression of the same spirit. And the very idea that it was able to seem progressive was because the culture had changed underneath. That it was this time and not another. In in the final analysis of their progressiveness you see they were bondaged to the time their lived in that it hardly seems a progressive act at all but one that was merely an expressive of prevailing conscience of the time that had erupted in a few people. But there is no such thing as progess in the arts. Every activity in art is the art of a human or a group of humans. Their life is its own condition within a certain set of condiitons. They are representative only of the condition it was made. Their lifespan cannot be compared to the life of another in terms of progress. Neither has art a goal to measure progress upon. And if it did, are we further towards a goal now than in any earlier time? And any possible yes, then an earlier time must have had the same goal as the progressors in art to.... I give up. There is no progress in art. Everything is a representation merely of a human being, the community, or the age that it was made it, each with its own values and ideas that belong to being a human being, not the progress of human beings. For in fact nothing in humanity progresses, because the measurement of progress itself depends on parameters of leaning towards or away from our values, which can only be a subjective axiom.

Anything "progressive" means an old aspiration conducted more openly and honestly; which appeals to all subterranean risings; perhaps a crisis which for a long time has been in conflict with a masterful way which, to the subterranean, now seems simply an old fashioned idealism. But it is only a re-expression. Even the masterful way was really their way but unfaithful to its condition. Whatever becomes progressive is merely a more honest approach, a step towards being more faithful to its impetus condition. Progress is a condition striving to express itself more honetly and value itself more openly. "Improvement" is arbitrary to the matter.

Popular culture is often more conservative than so-called elite culture because it reflects a caricature of the general public, and so isn't intellectual curious or demanding enough to be ahead of the curve by the ideas it embodies. It perpetuates old ideals in flashy new colours.

Now we're surrounded by ordinariness masking itself as extraordinary. The ordinary is no longer embarrassed before itself. It has even become critical of the extraordinary. Instead of being humbled by the great achievements of the past we are arrogant even before the future.

People now have so little historical minds. All those who want to break from the past are always the most ignorant of it. Art right now lacks an intellectual energy that has soaked up the intellectual thought of humanity and can say "this is an intelligent thought in 2020 that on its own merit could be in conversation with the thoughts past and knows where it would be placed in the lineage.” However, people are having anti-intellectual ahistorical attiudes. People are attacking history for not being diverse in cultural representation, are attacking the best minds for not being their Jesus figure of imitation, and have great disbelief in things which they cannot do themselves. There is no genius that belonged to this race or that, or this religion but not that, or this gender or that. We talk of them because of what they had done, and what that meant to the time, and to us, and that we dont talk about some of the people worth talking about is an historical expression of the time. There are many clever people, many talents, but the genius is the humanity within it, that they transgressed their “character” into something more fundamental either about ourselves or the world around us. That they dissolved their cultural and political position, and became a human being.

However, people are now saying the literature canon needs revision. Kafka said on how to choose a book that literature should be the axe that smashes the frozen ice within you. Discover your books that mean the wrold to you. Read whatever you want, but don’t read a canon. Read whatever makes your heart beat, your breathing clearly, what positively changes your brain, and makes you feel at home in their words. Any really great writer will ascend beyond what they are. Discovering art should not be deprived to us. And we should not expect children to admire the artists and writers they were taught about at school, no matter if it is revised. These schooled artists will always be those artists they had to study and do homework on. On rarely will they become the artists they love.

I dont think we should revise anything. An education is not being taught what to learn, its discovering your own thoughts. And real educatioin isn’t like stacking knowledge up in a warehouse but mixing wine in to water, it alters the whole composition. Being knowledgable is knowing more things - there are game shows for that - a real eduation requires much forgetting. We should be far more encouraging of independent guided learning. School should help develop general characteristics of the brain. The Greeks had their nine canonical of poets, the japanese had 36 inmortals of poetry (one for men and women). They dont have to be our favourites. No one has robbed you of that choice. But these canons tell us about the way people thought at a time. And no time, no matter how blind by its idealism can be, no time is the truth and end of a conversation. It is easy to look back and dismiss it, to avoid the harder choice of measuring up to its cultural affect.

Every artistic decision has a psychologically relative world view. Artistic choices are reflexes. In art (rather in everything) nothing is purely theoretical. Everything is fully representational of your conditional perspective, and feeling of existence. You always have to wind it back to that. Everything else is a secondary effect. Ideas and attitudes are just reflexes. An art cannot be a definition of its form, but only of the condition of the artist who made it, which subsequently gives us some impression of the age it was made in depending on its context. No painting defines painting, no music can define music, no poem poetry, nor dance dance.

People go to the theatre not to think but to see a caricature of their own views, executed with the technique of a children's toy commercial. Showing them everything they love. Now people read books this way too. In valuing books, people only want to see themselves reflected in them. Even when great books are in vogue, they choose to read them because they already know what they are about and going to say and they finish with the same mind as they had begun reading them. People read 1984 because they already know what it is about, and what it is going to say. Most people simply want to amplify their own point of view.

Right now stories are like a dramatised op-ed article, featurig their token selling point of diversity, with critics acting as the puritanical bonfire of transgressions of the ideals of the day. But the game is the same as always: to make incredible stories. To interpret life artistically. You have to research in order to find the right symbols for your work. Like going through layers and layers and doors and doors but you keep running into the same symbols. For a visual culture were actually really bad a symbols.

So you have an idea, fine, but thats not enough, you have to be able to pull it off in the form of a great story. Its not enough just to say youre against something and that you made your work from an ideal. You have to tell great stories, or make great performances. Our story telling is becoming conceptual where the idea behind it is supposed to mean more than the actual merit of the work of art. Which shows our minds are becoming conceptual, less artistic, and more scientific. The concentration on the technique of great arts, of all great arts and great artists, is an insight and experience of reality much higher than that of science.

There has been an increase in melodrama this century. All American television and film (that wasn’t but somewhat including the Marvel / DC films) seems to have been melodrama (of course French cinema, and independant, has been for longer - its their penchant). Melodrama is sadistic. Its full of pathetic characters who if they werent so pathetic they wouldn't be in this mess. If not of their own fault then they deal with it in a pathetic way. The effect on me is not pity but frustration, like watching a sympathetic horror movie. Sympathy is a sin in art. It makes your characters pathetic and all i can think whilst watching them is if they werent so patheric they wouldnt be in this mess and this wouldnt be a story. If a solution is befitting and negates its whole existence, the idea of the story is bad. Its not their circumstance, its the sympathy that is requested. Melodrama is sadistic - and this is coming from a guy obsessed with Greek tragedy. Euripides wrote melodrama, he wrote romanticism, satyr play, and tragi-comedy, but Euripides did not write tragedy. Character drama/study is always melodrama because it depends on the investigation of the 'soul' the innermost of them. Tragedy is concerned with overarching events that reveal the religious (Dionysian - most closely today related to Shiva that they’re almost the same) nature of the universe, people as agents of action, but not people as characters.

Art can be whatever. Yes. But don't just go with your instincts like an amateur. You have to understand the meaning of choices, in order to change your instincts. To make your instincts artistic. Otherwise there's no difference between you and your audience. And you don't take them anywhere than they arrived.

Then there is the insistance on “accessibility” which can be unhealthy because it rejects the high bar and creates stereotypes of styles. It creates new idealism in the character of the work. And it gives marit of accomplishment just for showing up. Make accessibility wide but on the same basis of making great art In respect and recognition of where the high bar is set.

The worth of a book, music, film today is merely judged by how much it is needed at the time it arrives. The public and the critic have the judgement of the tradesman weighing cattle at the market, as they estimate everything merely for value of supply and demand.

Frida Kahlo "I dont give a shit what the world thinks"

Critics and social media seem to be having their own insular conversation and they go to movies or listen to music or whatever and judge it on how much they can continue to have that conversation whilst experiencing the work of art, which cannot exist on the merits of its own.

Majoritism is to anoit bad taste and bad talent over good. To put amateurs in charge. I think less educated and amateur care much more about it.

"There is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own." R. W. Emerson

Social media has created the method audience. Instead of the method actor disagreeing with the director over the way a character is portrayed its the audience. Or maybe they feel themselves executive producers. But certainly anything but an audience. They complain as if theyve been forced to pay at gun point.

The idealism our age has just put a chip on people's shoulder and given all a licence to have an attitude about everything. The opinions of the public dont matter, thats why they feel their deep rights to have them. I'm not an audience first type of artist. The public come to market, and the market sways, but it has no reigns on the artistic activity that has travelled further in its pursuit of ideas than they may have ever been. To make a work of art involves obliterating and exhausting oneself, in pursuit of techniques and ideas that inform the works direction and merit, and reassembling oneself. To dicard that for the public who come to market and place it on the weighing scale of ideals is a joke.

Plesse be rude, derogatory, offensive, insensitive. Its a cruelest humanity that sacrifices its cruelty. It's against our nature. The 21st century is the conservative 40s and 50s, with the yuppies of the 80s, that overturned the free spiritedness of the 20s and 30s, 60s and 70s.

Make whatever goddamn work you want to make, and that will be the work you made. Just be proud to have manifested what you had envisioned in whatever form you wanted to tell it and be proud it has your name attached to it. And dont take criticism from those who do not inspire you.. Being an artist is to be your own beast. Un monstre sacré.

#represenation #representative #writer #poet #poetry #writing #literature #literaryblog #writerblog #writertumblr #littumblr #literarytumblr #socialmedia #social media #frida kahlo #fridakahlo #jamesdazell #james dazell

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Tragedy as the Joyful Art; or, The Ironic Art of Tragedy

I took this photograph in April of last year. This is the first permanent theatre ever built in the world, where some of my favourite plays were performed for the very first time. The original site where all the formality of what we know as theatre had its origins. It was also a civic art, created simultaneously with democracy, where public speaking and talking about their lives was so important. And the most important site during the festival of Dionysia. I went to Athens to read the plays sitting in the theatre seats that someone sat in watching these very plays 2,500 years ago.I think Greek tragedy is the greatest artform and the greatest approach to art there ever was. I’ve been studying and writing about it for ten years. Meeting with scholars and practitioners of theatre. Learning from so many books, talks, and documentaries. And testing out my understanding in writing my own work across stage, books, and poetry. As well as hiring art spaces out to staging some of my own performances.This is an artform that demonstrates the power of art. It’s an artform of immense passion for life, and demands its artist a great capacity for comprehending reality with all its good and bad qualities. Tragedy was no art of optimism, nor was it mere melodrama, and certainly it wasn’t grave liturgical passion plays. Tragedy is more than a genre, it's a world view. And so its technique has to be in-keeping with that world view.Over the centuries we have corroded the original meaning of tragedy. We associate tragedy with death, but not a single tragic hero dies in any of Aeschylus' best plays. And, with the exception of Ajax’s suicide, not one tragic figure dies on stage. There was no pleasure taken from death in this theatre. Its about a dilemma of existence. Its an art that's been misunderstood and has been misunderstood since Aristotle. Aristotle thought the objective was to arouse pity and fear, and produce a cathartic effect from being overwhelmed by them. This is a complete misunderstanding, of both its effect and how the work would arrive on the page at all.It’s evident that original subject matter wasn’t of much importance, since all the tragedians wrote plays on the same subject and characters. What the theatre-maker did with it was what was of importance; what they invested into it; what the play was doing not what it was about. And given these plays were written in the context of a festival competition, it would be befitting that they should write on the same subject, so that their works could go head to head, as competition was everything to the Ancient Greeks. “potter strives against potter, craftsman strives against craftsman, singer strives against singer” writes Hesiod in the Works and Days. “Strife is justice” writes Heraclitus.But even the Greeks lost their way. Euripides turned tragedy into mere melodrama, Aristotle misunderstood it and ruined an understanding for centuries. The Romans didn’t know how to handle it correctly. When the Christians revived theatre as instruction of the Bible to the illiterate they turned tragedy into its present meaning. Even Nietzsche blundered aspects of it with his loony Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy. Shakespeare borrowed from conventions unGreek, such as the Christian medieval passion plays of Christ’s crucifixion which featured enduring suffering and death on stage. Roman tragedies of Seneca that were pathos of suffering and revenge. And the comedies of antiquity which he borrowed their oscillation between protagonist and antagonist. Even the idea of the fall of heights comes from a medieval concept of the wheel of fortune. And if you combine these with Aristotle’s misinterpretations and Euripides’ melodrama, given his work survives more than any other tragedian, then our general understanding is naturally inaccurate. All in all, we’re just missing the point, and our understanding doesn’t do justice or describe any of the examples of what is going on in any of the earliest extant works of tragedy by Aeschylus, whom even in his own time was considered the greatest of the three surviving tragedians. The comic playwright Aristophanes, just after the death of Euripides, wrote a play called The Frogs wherein the patron god of theatre, Dionysus, goes to the underworld to bring back one of the three playwrights because tragedy has fallen to a terrible standard since they’ve died. Sophocles umpires whilst Aeschylus and Euripides have a kind of literary criticism competition, lampooning each others works, and in the end Aeschylus wins.When we think of this art being created, the rules for this aren't coming from literary criticism. So the rules for these works were born from their culture. Real Tragedy rose and fell in its richest form, much like what happens with our popular culture. It doesn’t seem to have been based around hard and fast rules, as with Japanese Noh Drama that keeps to its tradition. These were not professional playwrights. Theatre had only just been invented merely decades earlier (albeit in the previous century). But it had reached a refined and sophisticated brilliance, much like cinema in the sixties and seventies had done merely decades from the birth of cinema. For the same reason that we have culture of the eighties, nineties, twenty-tens, etc, the meaning of art changes. This is little or nothing to do with progress, politics, or technology, except as being part and parcel of that same consequence. As the prevailing condition of human character changes, the disposition to the world by the artist changes, both artists and in audience. The change in tragedy came with Socrates. With Socrates came rationalism, and with rationalism came optimism, and with optimism came cheerfulness, with cheerfulness comes attitudes to life of consolation, with consolation comes defensive doctrine of morality. It was this new scientific attitude that took hold of Athenian culture that was the prime symptom of the demise of real Greek tragedy. An attitude that stands in opposition to the embryonic pregnancy of how tragedy can be conceived. Not only Socratic influence in the case of Euripides’ work, but this was the age of Plato, which it is agreed upon, is a philosophy that is wholly proto-Christian, and significant to the development of Christianity by Neo-Plantonist Jews who studied his works in the Library of Alexandria. This is not all too dissimilar from the Puritanical, rationalistic and scientific age of Enlightenment that followed the period of Shakespearean tragedy.The art of tragedy differs also from our very familiarity with the presentation of theatre itself. Not only was this not a naturalistic theatre, but more stylised than even the mannerisms of opera, more in fact like the movements of a puppet theatre, the dancing of African and Indian dances, and the music of medieval secular music and our popular music, to the degree that our Modern theatre cannot be used as a frame of reference at all. If an ancient Athenian were to sit in our theatres of tragedy they would either be wholly confused or roll about laughing. It’s important to remember that Ancient Greece was a culture that looked East, and were influenced by world views and religions of the East. How sterile and cold a Modern Western European culture feels when held next to Ancient Greece, with its almost colourfully Brahmic culture. Two-thousand years of Christian Europe has lead to a lot of misunderstandings.Pageant wagons depicting scenes from the Bible were the first cinema or TV screens. They would roll through the town like a float parade representing the whole universe of the Bible. They were literally a window to the world, which incorporated all the people of the world and beyond it, whilst the audience watched, removed from its settings.This was not what tragedy was doing. Tragedy was a superimposed performance into a very real world, which didn’t have a metaphysical beyond. Olympus and the Underworld are in this one and the same world. The performances themselves were of, not Athens, but of real cities. Their plays consisted of characters absent, conjured by theatre, but the rest of the world consisted of those in the audience watching and this very same real world. The characters were not rolled out, being born from trying to re-present the world realistically, but born from a realm of poetry, with only three characters on stage at one time. The necessity of characters merely to move plot forward by bringing in new information, not because that’s how the world looks. It’s believed the first tragedies would have been only one actor and a chorus of fifty singers. Although limited, this must have a powerful kind of poetry-performance-art-music-dance-drama. The speech is stylised and poetic. compared to our modern theatre, since we see the stage as a re-presentation of a window to the world, writers naturally concluded why don’t people in the play talk like they do outside our windows, and ordinary realistic speech was pushed onto the stage. But again, we’re just missing the point. This was not a projected window to the universe, nor was it to be held up like a mirror to ordinary life. This was a drama of poetry-music performance art. The poet was by nature also a musician in these dramas, and in the case of Choral poetry, which was so integral to tragedy, a poet-musician-dancer. But the Greeks were not pessimistic. The Greeks didn’t underestimate the power of poetry and music. The tragic heroes were not poets but they were endowed with poetic abilities. The model for a poet was Orpheus who could transform the world around him with song and music, could make birds sing, and fish leap out of water. Just as the poet suffered in life they were also considered to posses divine abilities by the effect of poetry on others, and subsequently were mythologised. This was not a re-presentation of the world. This was an art. The very drama of tragedy is born from the intoxicating rapture of music and poetry, not only in to a vision of scenes, but the drama and all it contains that unfolds. The choral separations between “acts” are to reenergise the drama with its original intoxication for the drama to then spring from. The drama springs from the music, the character embodied by the poetry. Breaking up apart from out civilised cultural self into our primal nature and rebuilding into a character who cab stand in a world of such a reality, in a cycle of creative destruction. Think of that two minutes as Friends begins followed by the theme song, narrating the themes of the show, and then the acting resumes. It’s not all together different from what happens there. A pop rock quiet verse, loud chorus, quiet verse, loud chorus. Or the use of the music of Morricone in Leone's movies, in a Tarantino or Scorsese picture. The moments of talk by a singer between songs. All this is closer to tragedy than opera which literally dramatises action, feeling, words into the music itself. Opera, which is truthfully merely poetry as music, and considered a high art because it was associated with high society, the vogue of intellectual rationalism, and church music - in short, all things which modernity considered to be of refined and sophisticated high class. Modernity is Socratic art par excellence.To understand an art you have to understand the condition of its pregnancy not by its affected reception. You have to view it in embryo and look for under what conditions this would be conceived. If you study it as an afterword there are all sorts of interpretations possible. But if you study it in conception then every interpretation must end with the work. Not how do we analyse the written text as an afterword, but how you go from a blank page to this written text. We need to analyse it as the author not the audience. It's not enough to analyse effects because often the process of creation is inverse to the desired effect they produce. You can have a innumerable interpretations as an audience, but whatever interpretations you have here, all end with this. And if you apply those rules to a blank page you should end with the work too. Until I can fake a Greek play, I haven’t understood it.Challenges are what make us grow, are what make us demonstrate our outstanding qualities, and create goals which give our lives meaning. How do you give life meaning when it's full of horrible things that are hard to comprehend? It's normal that we prefer to want to live in a world of a limited amount of perception about the nature of ourselves and the world we live in. Or live optimistically and pretend that negative consequences are not likely to happen, that in the end everything works out. We prefer, not to live in a world of those difficult realities, but a world that consoles us for those things. And we put blinkers on and black-out just enough of reality so we can enjoy living in it. That can't happen in tragedy. It demands you to take in all the difficult things to comprehend about the world as a reality of lifeIn a similar way to how a pop or rock singer will sing a lyric contrary to its written expression, joyfully singing a sad lyric. And how an actor playing a villain doesn’t play the role as the audience feels about the character, but how the character feels about themselves, so to play the role convincingly they have to play the bad guy as a good guy. Tragedy is an art of irony. And irony is the essence of all great art. It sets up its pessimism and overcomes it with art. Pain shuts down language. It is such an intransitive experience that it is near impossible to express in language. Pain is the flip-side to imagination, and as such then is pain overcome by pure creative force. Pessimism is overcome by the creative act of poetry, that has a diction too strong to succumb to the very subject of their expression, overcome by their musicality and metaphorical beauty. What was pain is overcome by the power of art. Art, which stands beyond the reach of intransitive pain and suffering. And yet has by the very nature of art sprung from them, affirmed that very aspect of life which contains pain and suffering. Pessimism in the audience is overcome by the experience of the plays, of beautiful lyrical speech, the ecstasy music and dancing, performing to a collected public audience not in the dark but in the midday spring sun when everything was undergoing regeneration, in the context of a festival of wine and sex, devoted to the god Dionysus who embodied ecstasy and liberation from gloomy cares and worry. By allowing an audience to revel and feel exhilaration in a scenario of this scope of reality and spectrum of being a human being. When pain and suffering is universalised in to a collective experience being human, and again overcome by a collective experience of art. Similar to a crowd listening to an anthemic rock song all singing at the same time, liberated and reunited with that primal human being that lurks behind the overbearing cultural citizen who exists in daily civilization.Unnaturalness is the essence of archaic art because it shows the defiance of art in the face of aspects of life that would ordinarily make us gloomy. Tragedy was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Some of the most similar examples of its technique are not from the renaissance, neo-classicalism, the opera, the Romans, but from the twentieth century. This was the pop culture of the American 1990s. This whole approach of popular culture from the 60s to the 90s. This was the art of Spain in the early twentieth century. This was some of the work of Italy and Japan. The rock music of England. The atmosphere of the Olympics, the superbowl, Glastonbury festival. Although tragedy and comedy were not mixed genres, there was no differentiation between high and popular art in Ancient Greece. Tragedy contained the popular arts we're familiar with today, and all the wisdom of Aristophanes' comedy was punctuated with fart jokes. Greek tragedy is high art popular culture.All great periods of art were during undesirable political times. The antagonism is a positive one. It shows the defiance in the power of art over aspects of life that make us gloomy. The whole objective was that pain and suffering, where a stimulant for overcoming, and therefore affirmed into the whole theatre of life, the whole horror of existence was overcome by art. This was an exhilarating joyful art. It was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Not to use art to talk about the terribleness of the world but to use it as weights that test our strength for loving life even in that reality of the world. Like a weight lifter's strong arm that needs heavier things to test their strength. The Greeks used art to lift the heaviness of life. This was done in competition. This was the stage where the Greeks competed to demonstrate who loves life the most. That’s what I feel art is, the myth over the reality, an illusion we place over the world in order to love it more.

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ON HOMER’S ODYSSEY

James Dazell

"Homer, who was in time first among most poets and by his power first of all poets" Plutarch

Homer was the alleged author of two key Archaic works in Greek literature: The Iliad, and The Odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey was probably the second written, around the late 8th Century BCE, either by an individual poet or a collection of poets.

Homer’s Odyssey is one of the earliest stories we have in the Western cannon. It has had enduring influence since its inception, and thereafter Homer was effectively a Bible to the Greeks. We have all heard of the story of Homer’s Odyssey in one way or another. Whether of its Cyclops, or the songs of the Sirens that lure men to their death, the journey to the underworld, or Circe turning men to pigs. It has been retold countless times, and has been the source of inspiration for countless works of art. But what is Homer’s Odyssey really about? What does the section of the odyssey serve to the story? And have we really understood it?

When we commonly think of Ancient Greece we think of its Classic Period of the 5th Century, BCE with its Socratic period of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. But this 5th Century era is a very different era, and many ways even a counter-force, to that Homeric era. The 5th Century was leaving behind its Greek mythological assurance though far from become secular. The Sophists brought in a sceptical insight, which Socratic ushers in a sceptical logic, filled with rational optimism, moral insistence, vastly moving to the mentality that would later coincide in Christianity. Plato has many times over been said of his views that he was a proto-Christian and it has been speculated if Plato had met Jeremiah (a Jew) in Egypt and was at all influenced by Judaism. The Archaic Homeric world, in this sense could not be further from the Greek Classical Period. The poetry of the two periods is remarkable different, from spirited martial songs and drinking songs, to more domestic songs of love and sorrow. Even the tragedies turned from stories of public life to stories of private life.

Our Western minds - which focus on individual objects as opposed to whole environments at once, view conflict as essential for stories, view that plots must develop the story forward and be full of action - have misjudged The Odyssey, with its very non-Western method of storytelling. The Greeks were a people who borrowed from everywhere, the best of neighbouring cultures they borrowed to develop and assemble in their own Greek fashion. Whilst they borrowed arts from Egypt, their warrior spirit form earlier neighbouring peoples all around, there seems to have been an influence of Brahmanism (proto-Hinduism) on early Greek thought.

The Odyssey borrows much more from Eastern thought than traditional Western thinking in how it tells a story. The Greeks were, after all, much more Asian in their thought. Their stories have a foreground and background, an individual and its surrounding world, they have the present stroke of action and flash back contemplation of action, their stories are modelled after the nature of things, they are morally ambiguous stories. In many ways I think this is what keeps the Greeks so fascinating to the West, because they assembled themselves from everywhere, defying our sense of regional traditions.

We can see in many Asian stories up to the present day how much flash backs are used in the similar way as they are in The Odyssey. Asian storytelling is much more about reflection than Western stories, which are action focused. And it is the second half of The Odyssey, the slower moving part, that is more remarkable storytelling. The odyssey itself is the more childish - more 18th century picaresque-like - than the latter half.

The Odyssey is divided in to Twenty-Four Books, much like a novel’s chapters, or a narrative poem’s cantos. The premise of the story is given in the first four books, which is that Odysseus is presumed dead, many suitors have occupied his palace and are wasting his land's resources and his son's inheritance, wooing his wife and being horrid to everyone. Telemachus is young of age and not strong or brave as we meet him, and his character arc is becoming bolder over our journey of reading of him. Penelope had tried to trick the suitors for three years to delay choosing one from among them to wed, but now her strategy was revealed, and she is being pushed to choose a suitor, and yet we do not know whether Odysseus is still alive or dead.

The story of the odyssey as told by Odysseus is more in service to the story rather than being the principal story. It’s neither the premise, the climax of action, nor the resolution. It serves to illuminate Odysseus, for us to sympathise with him that he has been wronged, to hold him up as the greatest mortal man of all whom we are introduced to. When we meet Odysseus as a beggar with the suitors who do not recognise him, we know that Odysseus is both undeserved of their brutality and is also the most powerful one their unbeknown to the others. It gives Odysseus the 'heroic right' for what happens after his odyssey (as Quentin Tarantino said of Daniel Plainview's origins in There Will Be Blood). It justifies the fact that the Odysseus we encounter after the odyssey story is the deceiver and murderer. Without it we would not be rooting for Odysseus to bring doom and destruction, we feel that he cannot come back to Ithaca after all this enduring suffering and loss. We are of course reminded in the story of Agamemnon, who fought alongside Odysseus in the Trojan War, who after returning home was murdered by his wife’s lover, which is the story retold by Aeschylus as The Oresteia (457BC).

What we get with the second half of The Odyssey is a suspense drama, asking ourselves questions like “will they discover that it's Odysseus disguised as the beggar?”, “will they say something out of line and bring doom upon themselves early?”, “will Odysseus break his cover?”, “will Telemachus realise it's his own father he has welcomed as a guest?”, “will Penelope realise it’s her husband?”, “will the suitors realise?” - after all, the maidservant realises when bathing Odysseus in disguise by recognising the boar scar on his leg.

Odysseys himself is held back from an introduction until book five. This is no common place storytelling technique - after all we meet Achilles straight away in the Iliad. But here we must feel the loss of Odysseus with everyone else, we must feel his absence because he is absent from our story too. When we meet him, we meet him so separate from the four preceding books of action that he seems more alone than if we were introduced to him at the beginning. But with exposition and premise out of the way, he can be revealed as isolated - something Aeschylus used up too. The actual story of the odyssey of Odysseus is flashback and only takes at most one quarter of the whole story.

The odyssey of Odysseus is noticeably more surreal than any other part, featuring giants and magic spells, whereas the rest is written with near realism. This is not without exception, as Calypso gift, Thetis appearance, the ship turning into a rock, and Athena’s dramatic appearances and transformations. Yet these godly appearances are illuminating Odysseus’ stature, that so many gods interact and reveal themselves to him, both detrimentally and helpful. The manner of their surreal appearances are written with realism, but these are gods after all. It is only in Odysseus’ story of his wanderings do we find non-god characters who are surreal. All before the story and once the story is over, we have human characters. When Odysseus as beggar tells the swineherd of his ordeals, which is a false account, the swineherd pity's him but also tells I’m that he supposes that his tale is also somewhat left foot of the truth as storytellers are often to do. In fact, so much of The Odyssey is in the form of mini stories being told, that it is also an ode to storytelling itself. The Odyssey features both the narrator telling the overall story, telling mini stories of characters present and absent, and having characters telling stories, sometimes having characters telling stories of characters telling stories. The Odyssey is has a theme of storytelling much the same way that the Roman poet Ovid's epic poem Metamorphosis was also about of myth making. In essence when Odysseus is telling the story of his odyssey, he is being a rhapsodist (a singer of excerpts from epic poems). When Homer in narration talks of bards and everyone quietly listening, is he not talking of himself? Is Odysseus not being Homer telling us The Odyssey, and the real rhapsodist being Odysseus? When Achilles was at the tents strumming the lyre and singing of heroes not also being Homer the poet singing The Iliad?

“From this it is evident that Homer sets before us, through the “Iliad,” bodily courage; in the “Odyssey,” nobility of soul.” Plutarch

We seem to relate so much to the odyssey of The Odyssey because it feels like a metaphor for the tribulations of life. And it resonates so well for that. The islands feel like the different experiences and stages in our life, and we relate to the disposition of Odysseus towards his life and fate on his wanderings. It is in the odyssey that we most think of our own lives. It is in the odyssey that our imagination is so stimulated, that we have adventures, we are most excited, and for many reasons the most memorable part of the story as a whole. Yet because we enjoy it so much we have selectively decided that it is what it’s about, and so when we think of The Odyssey that is what we think of.

There is a foreground and a background to Greek literature. The foreground story is rarely what is really going on. In Aeschlyus' Oresteia the present action is a small phase of action to the larger scope of "what is going on." In the tragedies of Sophocles, Professor Kitto said it well, "the dead are always killing the living." In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata we know the sex-strike plot is a silly joke in the foreground for the real point of the story that lies behind it, in its meaning. What lies outside the present action, often it’s never said, is much involved with the present action of the story too. The Odyssey divides time up in an interesting way. We begin in medias res, in the middle of the whole arc of the story, of which we receive earlier incidents via flashbacks. What takes place in the present is the climax of action, the stroke of action. What we receive in flashbacks is the preparation for it, and meaning within it. Therefore, would Odysseus’ return and slaughter of the suitors have the same meaning without the odyssey flashback? The stokes of action carry the weight of their history with them. The arduous journey of Odysseus, as well as the Trojan War, and the Trojan Horse, are all bound up in the meaning of the destruction of the suitors. The action alone cannot suffice without reflection upon the whole matter. The present of life is always its stroke of action, and yet we make sense of it through contemplation - yet in Homeric epics it’s a contemplation, and action, that is full of fire.

During the odyssey itself, Odysseus cannot save his men. Odysseus is not a hero of men but a leader of men. Often his comrades perish by greed, laziness, foolishness (of course Odysseus is foolish by taunting the Cyclops). In the opening lines from the invocation to the Muse, it says "to save himself, and to bring his shipmates home, but not by will nor valour could he save them for their own recklessness destroyed them all."

The opening lines of The Odyssey speak of nothing but the wanderings of Odysseus and how much he has endured. However, the line says "sing in me...the story of that man." So the next lines are characteristic of "that man" not that story. The opening lines are not a blurb for the story. They are not the subject matter. They are exposition of a character we will not meet until Book Five but must know something about because he is the subject of everyone's thoughts until we meet him. So when we do meet him in Book Five, we already know this about him.

The Odyssey is from the outset a story of the doom and destruction brought down upon the suitors who have occupied Odysseus' palace. It is perhaps what the Oresteia would have been if Agamemnon had not been murdered upon his arrival home, and had murdered the wooer of his wife which had to be left to his son Orestes to be fulfilled. Both the Odyssey and Oresteia are not only homecoming stories, but are both father-son stories, where the son has to grow bolder, from the prince of the house to an authority of the house. Telemachus even shouts to his mother in Book Twenty-One of The Odyssey "And now go up to your room again... Authority in this house is mine."

It is a dark and brooding tale full of conspiracy, plotting, scheming, and deception. And yet it is not Shakespeare's Hamlet. The character of Hamlet is beneath the stature of a Telemachus - though a Hamlet seems to us more complex, he is not bolder, nor wiser, nor more calculating, nor even compared to an Orestes or an Electra. Hamlet by comparison to these Homeric sons is a gloomy coward, a melancholic nihilist. More brash than bold, mad that manly, wild than wily. Hamlet is more interesting, but he is not a greater character.

Shakespeare's heroes are too self-conscious. These Greeks were not self-conscious. We, much more modern readers and writers, cannot imagine people to be so self-conscious. We were raised in a world of a much different psychology. A Christian psychology that taught us self-suspicion, guilt, we were raised in a much gloomier disposition towards life than these Greeks. A Christian version of a Telemachus or an Orestes, may very well turn out to be a Hamlet.

Greek literature is not told in a Christian Western format, they are not stories of good versus evil, but of higher and lower grades of characters, of rank of worthiness, from the gloried to the base. There is an aristocratism to the Greeks, which holds a very different meaning to the modern sense of aristocracy. They were obsessed with excellence. They are stories of apotheosis. The enduring suffering of an individual is typical a Judaeo-Christian tale. And perhaps we have focused so much on the odyssey in the vein of a Christian Passion Play and a Jewish pilgrimage tale. When this misunderstands both the purpose of the odyssey within the story, and the Greek view of it too.

There is also the nature of the decorum of the house and its hospitality. In all the places Odysseus travels we are given a sense of life in that palace, and how to treat guests, and the nature of their relationships with their family, housekeepers, and people of that land. Of course, in Odysseus' own Ithaca we see that everything has gone asunder in Odysseus' absence, and what will restore Ithaca from its ruin is Odysseus' return. It is not only the return of Odysseus to his own land from his wanderings that we yearn for, but to return to his proper title. In fact, the story really is about the reinstatement of Odysseus to his proper position.

Just as in The Iliad, Achilles returns to the battlefield and slays the Trojans almost single-handedly, so does Odysseys return to Ithaca and his home and slays the suitors almost single-handedly. Just as Achilles was in exile from the battlefield, Odysseus was in exile from Ithaca. Both of these techniques Aeschylus seemed to admire, holding back his main characters introducing them in isolation, and having them single-handedly accomplish their goal - such as was Prometheus and Orestes. And yet there is nothing of Romanticism about these stories, because there is so much more to “what is going on” than what can be understood by focusing on the protagonist and an individualistic-centred nature of storytelling. The Oresteia is named after Orestes, who is not even in the first play of the trilogy and held back a while in the second play before making an appearance.

Homer's characters are hard to draw. Their character comes from their boldness and their stratagems, not from their conscience or their virtues. Machiavelli no doubt enjoyed them if the Italian Renaissance weren’t so anti-Greek. They would be out of place in a novel. There is nothing meek about them, even when they are meek. They are always active characters, with strong motives that are driven in every moment of their presence on the page. We meet them at their height. The arc of Telemachus is merely from a boy to a man, but he discards nothing of himself but his boyhood. Their character arcs are physical, or rather psycho-physical. Homer creates characters that are unnatural and more beautiful than man. As Aristotle says tragedians make characters better than they are. And Aristophanes when he puts the tragedian Aeschylus in his play The Frogs has Aeschylus say that his plays made men brave. They are characters that inspire, which is perhaps worth more than characters as they really are - despite their faults, Homer shows solutions. We see Homer’s Odysseus speaking poetry on the brink of drowning in the sea. But he finds resilience and means to get to shore. Is it in the intention of the poet that it is in such boldness and strength of character that he did so? Homer’s is a poem of apotheosis. What seems unnatural to us, is merely the morality of Homer. A higher valence of suffering that is defined by its strength both mentally and physically. They are willful even in their weeping. If we do not relate to his characters, it is because their essence is higher than ours, though we may condemn some of their actions in our present world of laws.

Homer’s stories were about men, war, and civilization - and Greek religion (which was closer to what we mean by art, philosophy, and festivals – culture - than what we mean by religion) - from the perspective of the universe. Homer’s universal view does not accept modern characters, if he does, he condemns them. We modern writers would more likely have made a story out of the characters that repulsed Homer. The arrogant, the cowards, the fools, the greedy, in The Iliad and The Odyssey.. Characters which the Greeks reserved for comedy. The Greek saw that, to solve the issues of men, it was better to write stories of men who are better than they are so that a people might aspire to them. But men always veer to what is easiest and what they more readily relate to. Thus, the Classical world of morality overtook, because it was easier to say what men should do and not do, than it was for them to realise higher versions of themselves, it was easier to relate to more comedic like characters, than epic and tragic characters.

Homer set his work in the legendary history of the Mycenaean age of the late Bronze Age. But Homer was composing in the Iron Age. Homer was writing after a period that modern historians call The Greek Dark Ages. This was a period of invasion and decline in population of Greek settlements, the art in this period is significantly different. Greece were behind the technology of the times during this period, other people’s had better war ships and had developed advanced iron age weapons that crippled their bronze armour, whilst Greece had gold. To my opinion, it seems that these stories served as a way for Greeks at the end of the Dark Ages to revive a sense of cultural identity and spirit, and was in a sense a kind of Renaissance. Homer mentions in The Iliad of a character lifting a boulder and remarks it was a feat which no men of his time could do. Clearly Homer did not perceive the men of his own time to be like the men of his stories, which may well have been his (or the Homeric writers’) motive.

Throughout history we have focused too much on this small background of the poem that was the arduous wanderings of Odysseus. Such is our feeling of injustice that he enters his own palace disguised as a beggar to the taunts and brutality of the suitors, Odysseus is the greatest figure of Ithaca. It is made clear through the story that Odysseus is almost godly, and must take back his rightful place and restore order to Ithaca. Odysseus already has glory, this isn't a story about kleos (glory/excellence), and this is more than a story of nostos (homecoming), this is a story about díkē (justice) of Odysseus taking back his rightful place, and setting Ithaca right again, what that rightful place means, and why it matters to the whole universal spectrum of things. For it does not only matter to Odysseus to return, it matters not only the houses he encounters in his wanderings, it matters not only to his family and the palace, but more importantly to the gods. It expands The Odyssey from a personal story of an arduous adventure of a forsaken man, which we have come to see it as, to a universal view of the structure of a civilization, which had attained its highest specimen, and subsequently lost it (for such specimens are brief) and must return to prevent its ruin. That is the present action, the foreground, the stroke of action of The Odyssey.

(In 2013 I wrote my interpretation of Homer’s other work The Iliad

You can read it here

http://jamesdazell.tumblr.com/post/44211099354/my-interpretation-of-homers-iliad)

I would like to add to that that The Iliad is a story of the apotheosis of Achilles, of not only his kleos (glory) but of his apotheosis (elevation to divine status). The key of Achilles is the dilemma he is faced with. His mother tells him that he has a choice that he can either leave the war and live a long life but die obscure or return to the battlefield and die young but have immortal glory. Achilles subsequently leaves the war, out of being enraged with Agamemnon. He cannot be convinced to rejoin the war. It’s only when he lets Patroclus enter battle with his armour and is killed that he turns his mind to rejoin the war. Again there is really little character arc in Achilles (in a Western Judeo-Christian sense). Achilles remains enraged, wrathful, throughout the story. It is that Achilles realises he is war, his very being is war, and he cannot return home, for then he would not be what he is. Really there was no choice, either in Zeus’ view, or in Achilles’ nature. Homer writes stories of apotheosis. The Greek stories are not moral tales, Homer would never tell a tale that tames his heroes, that would diminish and de-gleam them. His stories are in essence recognising how powerful one is being what they are, and that we must be what we are. As Pindar says “learn what you are and become as such.”

#*#homer #odyssey #iliad #greek #greece #greek literature #literary theory #literary criticism

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#frederico lorca #lorca #poet

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On FREDERICO LORCA

Frederico Garcia Lorca. Born, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. He was a musician, dramatist, artist, and above all, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. In the earliest part of his life he was devoted to music, then to poetry, in which he quickly became celebrated, whilst in later stage of his career he was drawn to theatre. Tragically his life was cut short during the Spanish Civil war, under the rise of fascism, where was arrested and executed for his liberal political views. Like most writers, his life was filled with lots of travel, and he lived not only in various parts of Spain but also in Cuba and New York city where he lived in Manhattan in the early 1930s before returning to Spain. Lorca naturally had a great fascination with Greek tragedy. His own tragic plays were written during his mature years although he says of himself that he had always been so far a novice and was yet to reach his mature period. It has been said that Lorca was a poet of desire, of impossibility, which went unsatisfied. I believe, on the contrary, that he was a poet of possibility in the face of impossibilities. And that his works were not melancholy expressions of unreachable yearnings, but that they are mirages that one can never reach, that disappear once we approach, and when we arrive to where we headed there is yet still much more beyond. His is a poetry of boundless possibilities, that therefore never grasp their yearnings, but always fall in to new mirages, as dreaming in to dreams. His lyricism plays on this, and I admire his lyricism more than any other writer. He uses words which point away from themselves. He uses words together to allow the reader to grasp something beyond them that he means to direct you to, visualised and felt through his combinations of words. They are triggers, and alarm bells, that have meanings outside of themselves, in the effects they inspire in the reader. As such his work is deeply lyrical and not rhetoric. He fills us with sensations and images, but not information. He shows and doesn’t tell. He embosses lyrical pictures into us that only a capacity for imagination can rework into description. His work was consistently influenced by poetry he retrieved that had been forgotten and lost of influence, he always looked backwards to move forward with his work, looking for absent styles in his search for inspiration. I believe no doubt that he turned to Greek tragedy - and his insistence that Europe rediscover its roots - because it was a poet’s theatre, other than the Naturalism of staging and writing that had developed out of the nineteenth century. He felt closer to these poets, whom poets shared his own artistic talents. The lyricism in his own plays, particularly Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, both listed as tragedies, evokes the lyrical quality of his standalone poetry in the mouths of his characters. He seemed to search, not for the poetry in the mundane as the realists had done, but to find the poetry as a means to manifest more marvellous truths. His characters speak unnaturally - and musically - they speak out in poetry. And this allows them to say more than one would in real speech. As if speaking out of the air and music around them. It also allows the play to show more, and to communicate more line by line. It’s a lyricism that doesn’t evoke the tragedies of Lope de Vega of the 16th Century, but more akin to the lyrical plays of Japanese Noh drama. And it’s not unlikely that he would have encountered them, in the growing European fascination with Orientalism, as shorter forms of poetry such as the haiku were being explored in the poetry of his own day in the work of Imagist poets. In Britain, the English poet W H Auden was a huge admirer of Japanese Noh drama, who wrote lectures on the art as well as crafted his own plays through his fascination with them. I’m unsure how much philosophy Lorca read to shape his particular perspective of tragedy, such as Heraclitus, but I do know he studied philosophy and letters as a student. But in his lecture essay on the duene (meaning to have a soul, a heightened sense of expression, emotion, and authenticity - not far removed from the sense I mean of ecstasy in this zine), he says to have duene one must be fully aware that death is possible. Tragedy features closed horizons. Life’s circumference is clear and inevitable. He says of Spain, “Spain is unique; a country where death is a national spectacle” he is of course speaking of the bull fight, and that “music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same?” His ideas parallel the German philosopher Heidegger that only through awareness of death can man envisage his authentic freedom. It is facing the present with full-sight of ability to be in the moment. He argues most art is created out of hindsight or foresight, but duence is made impulsively in the present moment, with full sight of the circumference of life as though it shoots up out of the blood. “All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds the greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them.” The duende as Lorca expresses it in his lecture seems to bare resemblance to that ecstasy that the maenad women of Greek myth would experience under the mystic influence of Dionysius. Lorca had read Nietzsche and no doubt had experienced his Birth of Tragedy, discussing the Dionysian aspect of Greek tragedy. That it represented the music, the unculturalising and anti-intellectualism of man, freeing him from the bonds of everyday in to the eternal and nature-returned. Lost in the frenzy of wine, song, dance. All which were combined dualistically with the Appolline of poetry, which constructed character, gave eloquent wisdom, visual action and physical form. Together Nietzsche believed they created an artform which was as much Dionysian as it was Apolline, as much irrational frenzy as it was intelligent beautiful form, as much the abyss and the figure of it, as much the horror of life as the individual which confronts it. Lorca’s duende is the artistic inspiration that rouses artistic creativity. An intoxication, but a spirit of the blood, that is shot in to a chosen art. His plays were no mere Greek revival but, like his poetry, seem to reach to yearning possibilities. His lyricism of dialogue lifts out of realism in to musical language, drawing the characters not in to the fantastical, but with the exotic truth. Mouthed from a lyrical plane of expression. Lorca described the theatre “as a poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.” And described poetic theatre quite simply as any play written by a poet. The acclaimed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote of Lorca in his memoirs: “What a poet! [of] grace and genius; when did a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, ever come together in anyone else as they did in him. Federico Garcia Lorca was the extravagant “duende,” his was a magnetic joyfulness that generated a zest for life in his heart and radiated it like a planet.” Lorca presents his plays like a dream. Stanley Kubrick said of cinema “with film, you don’t photograph the reality, you photograph the photograph of the reality.” I think that’s what Lorca does too. His dialogue is so gifted with poetry that it takes us to a perspective of the world that is the photograph of the photograph of reality, where art is articulating art to tell the truth. Rider’s Song is one of Lorca’s earliest poems. It narrates the journey of a rider to Cordoba, who believes he has a long way and will never reach his destination. It is the sentiment of ambition, Lorca’s own ambition, that he believes he may never quite reach. An ambition that may have been to restore European poetry to its former height of excellence. It’s a philosopher’s poem, a metaphor for his own journey, and it’s also a poem of a young man. The journey of himself, not to personal maturity, but an artistic maturity. Lorca continuously borrowed from the absent, and it’s no doubt that his ambition included the absent which Lorca consciously sought for by his art. Lorca writes elegiacally of human existence, and perhaps wrote of the experience of existence more lyrically and vividly in poetry than almost any other poet. By photographing the photograph, he allows us to feel what we already know in the experience of language. I want to end this segment with my favourite poem of his;

Floating Bridges

Every step we take on Earth brings us to a new world. Every foot supported on a floating bridge.

And I know there is no straight road in the world - only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.

And steadily our feet keep walking & creating --like enormous fans-- these roads in embryo.

Oh garden of white theories! garden of all I am not, all I could & should have been!

#frederico lorca #spanish #poetry #poet #playwright #theatre #literature #books #writer #writers

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this is one of the first books I intend to pick up after exams and I can’t wait☺️

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UNFOLLOWED

IF YOU’RE NOT GETTING UNFOLLOWED, YOU’RE NOT SAYING ANYTHING

By JAMES DAZELL

A TRIBUTE TO POP CULTURE

The Golden Age of Popular Culture 1954-2001

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order, and the best one’s start in medias res. In an age when popularity is everything, to be unfollowed is against the current. To say a true and beautiful thing and someone hit that unfollow button is the most counter-culture you can be right now. The unfollow button is now the counter-culture symbol.

This isn’t an overview of a who’s who of pop culture, there’s a hundred extra names I could have included, but what causes and changes the energy in pop culture. I originally tried to make this in to a documentary film out of archive footage but it makes so many comparative references that it just looked like a scene from A Clockwork Orange.

* * * This was written the week in April immediately after finishing the first draft of my latest book, and was written to Nick Knight

UNFOLLOWED

THE MIDDLE

At the beginning of the 20th Century Paris was the capital of culture, by the end it was New York City. The First World War had scattered artists from Paris around Europe and America. Although the entire history of the 20th Century can be retold by no other single city than Berlin, the history of popular culture belonged to Britain and America. The foundations for a new musical culture was being set by black artists Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard to name just a few. The music of jazz and blues popularised during the 1920s and 1930s made popular through dizzying live performances and was being distributed to new generation’s ears through radio. Radio meant listeners got a collision of country, jazz, swing, and blues, and black and white music together. Yet the traditional social mores were still apparent in the family and society, and crooning was still the preferred music on the mainstream audience. But that was all about to change. On December 10th 1953, the first colour television sets went on sale just in time for Christmas. On March 1st 1954 the United States of America deployed Castle Bravo nuclear test that exploded 2.5 times larger than expected. Twenty-three men on a fishing vessels were contaminated by the fallout. Unevacuated islanders suffered radiation sickness. That same year on July 19th 1954 Elvis Presley released his first single “That’s Alright.” People sat around a colour television set, watching the nuclear explosion, to the sounds of Elvis Presley. Suddenly this was a new world.

1957 Jack Kerouac publishes On The Road and reads a newspaper after its publication and gets to say those famous lines of Lord Byron "I woke up and I was famous." Ideas of reckless freedom from the conformism of the city sweeps across America.

1961 Bob Dylan gives his first live radio performance in New York and releases his self-titled debut the following year. 1964 The Beatles perform their first live show. And ever since young boys began to grow their hair long, the idea of counter culture was testing what people could handle and finding those limits. In the 60s boys grew their hair long, in the 70s girls shaved their hair off.

1965 Bob Dylan performs at Newport Folk Festival where he shuns his acoustic guitar and goes electric, but not to an electrified audience expecting a folk guitar, and their voices can be heard booing whilst he plays. That same year Dylan earns a hit song with Like A Rolling Stone. 1965 some other Rolling Stones go to Number 1 with I Cant Get No Satisfaction, whilst raising the awareness of the contribution that black music had made to rock and roll. 1967 the Velvet Underground and The Doors both release their self-titled albums.

In 1967 a new era of Hollywood appeared with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and New Hollywood was born.

In the 60s everything was experimental. No one really knew what they were doing it, they just believed in it and got on with it. But there’s no hiding the importance that drugs would always have on the impact of popular culture. From the LSD of the 1960s, to the heroin of the 1970s, to the cocaine of the 1980s, to the ecstasy of the 1990s, and marijuana throughout the whole thing.

In the 70s, a real business method for rock music took shape. In Britain the punk scene exploded, but it didn’t take off in America until much later and without the raw aggression of British punk. Punk was an raw anxiety right in to music giving a voice to the working class. The rock and roll of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, everyone came out of art school. Although the music carried the ethos of the 60s, rock music had become big money. It was the era of tour buses, private jets and big wooden studios. Every aspect of rock was phallic. Eventually even punk bands were playing sell out arena’s singing about poverty. Concerts were huge and elaborate like theatrical shows. The shows were as big as the money.

When John Lennon was shot by a fan in 1981 the whole spirit of the 60s and 70s died. The practices of the 70s split in to two directions between ‘the bigger the better’ side of the 70s and the down to earth political and social voice of the 70s. The mainstream was where the money was. Greed was good, the bigger is better ethos landed on heavy metal, pop, and glam rock. Brands paid artists huge money to sell their products. In the 60s and 70s radio existed simply to advertise records. The unification of advertising and art came out of the 80s, when brands sponsored artists like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and George Michael. Now suddenly you've got the Rolling Stones advertising for Budweiser because the kids who listened to them in the 70s are grown up and buying beer. Radio began to play only radio friendly music. In cinema, the 80s was the decade of the blockbuster movie, beginning with Jaws and the pop movie soundtrack where pop music was used instead of an original score for the film.

Of course not forgetting through his time, the creation of MTV in 1981. At first they had only 66 music videos, 22 of which were Rod Stewart. The major label bands were experimenting with music video, at first crude experiments of live performances, wherever they weren’t they were surreal and dadaist. Duran Duran began making more feature film like videos. In an interview in 1983 David Bowie rightly accused MTV of not playing black artists. After fighting for MTV play a young black artist got a video on for a song called Billie Jean. Michael Jackson later changed the whole idea of music video with his video for Thriller. Not only did this bring the ensemble dance with the pop star principle dancer in to a major part of music video but also narrative video that exploded in to the 1990s famously with Madonna Like A Prayer, Meat Loaf I Would Do Anything For Love, Aerosmith Janie's Got A Gun, Puff Daddy’s Victory among many others. On the underground the down to earth reality lived on in new wave, post punk, hardcore, hip-hop and the stripped down folk of R.E.M. By the mid-80s the culture was gaining a global conscience, AIDS was public concern, poverty and education of Africa. Live Aid became a political collaboration with music concert and songs to raise awareness and charitable finance. Whilst at the same time the underground artists that radio weren’t playing were getting air time with videos on MTV. From this they were selling records competitive to radio played major label artists and making it to the number one spot. By the end of the 80s the underground bands were bought up by major labels.

In 1989 The Berlin Wall was demolished, the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the British labour government and American democrats come in to power and a new sense of freedom and individual personal power came over the culture. George Michael released Freedom in 1990. The 1990s was to became a homogenising of all of the past in to one. The indivisibility between art and advertising. Commercials and music videos looked like feature films and CDs were released in packaging like antiquarian books, rock posters like vintage art nouveau memorabilia. A music with the power and ecstasy of the 70s and 80s undercurrent fused with the club culture that took the world. Every form of music had its place side by side at once. There was no single overbearing genre. Each one applauding the other. Rock had dance beats, dance had classical, hip hop had rock. By the end of the decade every genre was fusing with other genres that journalists would find it hard to pigeon hole anyone.

In to the 90s art and advertisement was seemingly indivisible. Budding film directors getting their starts in career doing music videos and commercials. Music videos and commercials were indivisible from feature films and appreciated like works of art in themselves. Films and adverts featured pop music. Pop music video made by film and commercial directors. This continued to be apparent right up today when a musician does a photoshoot they now expect it (and we expect it) to look like a fashion billboard. The indivisibility between artist and advertising was very 90s.

But at the same time, the news began to blame popular culture as an explanation of a perceived break down in society. No change in laws of gun control but Marilyn Manson gets blamed for influencing the Columbine high school shooting despite that millions of other people also listened to the same records without taking any similar action. Tarantino was also used to blame for violence in society, despite that he argued that Japanese cinema is the most violent cinema and yet the most peaceful society. And throughout a nearly thirty year career was given that same question. It’s evident that Tarantino makes some of the least violent action films. For instance, in a Hollywood action film it's not uncommon that the hero will burst into a room and murder hundreds of men single handedly. And the director will make it seem like this is a very good thing and that the hero is amazing for doing it. In the course of killing a hundred people the hero might get a scratch and it will seem like an equal act of retaliation. At least in a Tarantino film when someone dies it matters. And we have a new feeling about the character for having killed someone. We have a sort of moral reflection about them. Not only that, we're also made aware of the consequence of it, and we don't necessarily feel satisfied by it because we invest ourselves in to all of Tarantino's characters as there's no real bad guy. It's not this bland Good versus Evil story where so long as it's been imprinted in our mind that they're Evil it's justifiable that they've killed someone. There's never an evil character, someone who acts contemptuously perhaps, but not evil. If there's a bad guy we like - well that's on us. It’s a story construction perhaps borrowed from Eastern story-telling. The difference is we actually care when someone dies in a Tarantino films because even the bad guys are good guys to us. If it feels more violent its because, unlike mainstream Hollywood, we realise and feel that violence is violent. We see the consequences of violence, which is something Akira Kurasowka is also very notable for. And what’s more Tarantino makes use of music during violence that makes us aware that we are watching a movie which distances from emotional participation in violence that film scoring creates, which turns violent drama in to music so that we feel the violence.

The 1980s was a kind of mezzanine between the 70s and 90s. The 1970s perhaps produced the great artists of the popular culture, bringing the intelligence and the avant-garde from the art world in to popular culture as artists. But the 1990s was the triumph of popular culture itself - when it was no longer counter-culture, but culture itself. Blurring the lines from the mainstream industrial dance rock music of the early 90s to William Orbit producing some of the best rock and pop records from Blur to Madonna. And in 1998 Bjork’s Homogenic fusing classical music with club beats in a ways that didn’t feel overlayed like samples or antagonistic but as if out of the same soul, that there was no difference between the origin of these kinds of music. And the fact that electronic music originally came out of classical musicians says it all. Whilst at the same time resembling music that was pre-Classical that was full of instrumental percussion and dance. In the end it’s all just music. Everything was colliding with each other beautifully.

What was so exciting about 1999-2001 was that in the best of it there was beginning to be no major difference between pop culture and high art. An age when Aphex Twin was playing clubs, airing controversial videos on MTV, whilst also performing with renowned composers like Philip Glass, and having classical symphony orchestras reinterpret his work. The 21st century had two ways to go. Either there was no difference between high art and pop culture or there was no difference between advertising and pop culture. Whilst artists from the 1960s became revered as founding fathers, artists from the 1970s became relevant again, and those artists who survived the 1980s only got better in the 90s. But that was all about to change.

The events of the 1989 and 1990s made people feel they were stronger, freer, above their problems and situations. The ecstasy of the 1990s, its idea of a new birth of freedom couldn't continue to wave its flag in the wake of something as dreadful and devastating as what was about to happen. And if it had done so, it would have been a great insult. Pop culture couldn’t go on in the same way after that. Although it may be exactly what people needed to lift their spirits, it wasn’t the time, and it wasn’t in our hearts. It needed time to respect those lost, and those thousands of families that had lost loved ones. And the West was looking at a new uncertain future.

THE END / fin de siècle

On September 11th 2001, the Twin Towers in New York City were hit by two hijacked airplanes. Nearly 3,000 people died. No sound of music. People around the world watched the planes explode in to the buildings on colour television sets in horror and silence. The once tone of individual power over circumstances, a rockstar attitude to life, was shattered. The world was a living reality, itself as chaotic as the pop culture.

People became increasingly wary and confused by the world around them. The overwhelming amount of information pouring out the news of devastation every day made young people feel lost, powerless and hopeless in a chaotic world. Since 2001, people felt increasingly overwhelmed by the world. And the information overload made people feel subdued by an inevitability of disasters, by its events and messages. And arose a state of mind that held a perspective of the world which placed them once more beneath their world. And a feeling of powerlessness creeped in again. If there's one thing that has devastating effect on culture it's war. So why didn't the Vietnam war have the same effect on pop culture that the First World War had on Paris and the Iraq War had on New York? Simple: it didn't take place on home turf. War changes the tone in the streets, the homes, the work place of people. And a bleak silence took hold after 2001.

Even things down to the Eastern influences faded out. The Hong Kong film influence, the influence of Hinduism, Buddhism that influenced films and music disappears because of a refocused attention to traditional Western Abrahamic faiths. Now the conflict between the Abrahamic faiths preoccuupies culture. In a large sense it was a return to the 1950s with a 21st century face.

The era that we live in now is a world that seemingly moves so quickly we live in a world that we don't understand. As the costume of the age changes there is a sense of alienation from one’s own life. We also have is a generation of people growing up where this speed of change is so normal, they demand change. They get bored with stability, they're constantly needing the next. A restless culture used to a culture on demand. Therefore they have little patience for substance, everything is about the transient appeal, the beauty of something in the moment, and whatever is appealing. Culture has as much appeal as a single moment of their lives, a day of their lives, a year of their lives. There is no actual culture which defines the times, any more than a day or a year which defines a life.

The culture began to reflect it in its bleak and vacuous nature. Rock music became sad. The wave of emo music, post-rock, indie became quiet, solemn and depressed, and its found a voice across the melancholic streams on Tumblr. The minimalism design and architecture to the popularity of music of Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Tim Hecker who borrowed from 70s minimalism of Brian Eno, William Basinski, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Tim Hecker’s (2001) The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural Over Production was almost the real sound of that time set back from everything that was going on, as if you were able to watch it all from a distance on fast forward. It’s hard to believe that's the direction music took considering that Bjork just released Vespertine and Radiohead just released Kid A. The most successful American alternative rock band of the 1990s, The Smashing Pumpkins, after they broke up in 2001 sent 5 copies of an unreleased vinyl to 5 fans they knew had the ability to copy the vinyl and share it around the internet. This was Machina II, which still today feels like the furthest idea of a sound that a rock band pushed the "rock sound."

On the mainstream the 2000s was the commerciality of the 90s. If the 90s was alcohol, the 2000s was the soft drink version. Napster arrived. Apple undercut all competitors by selling music for 99 cents, labels now needing revenue from live acts, simple three piece bands, pop up bands with a quick turnaround, bands dropped from contracts before they’ve even released albums. It became a turnstile industry. Labels were losing money and wanted bands that were simple that could pop up do a show and move on to the next. The more shows the better to score any revenue to recuperate losses from file sharing audiences. Music was now about the live act again. File sharing continued and labels and studios lost more money. They began to take audiences to court over file sharing. The Arctic Monkeys after having amassed a large number of followers on MySpace was the first time I heard of a band being signed for their internet following. Bands from emo to indie like Interpol and The Strokes dressing like "suits" (in the same way that Nirvana spoofed in a famous photoshoot) whilst echoing 60s Beatles and 80s bands like Madness. Perhaps they wore suits because they just left work and jumped on stage, and their audience just work and turned up to a gig, and it was a way of being relatable to their audience. But culture is an escape from work, and cultural icons have always tried to restyle the conformism of fashion's traditions. As the industry wore suits, for a rock band to dress in suits was like dressing as the enemy - those that curtailed artistic creativity. The idea of being an artist in part so you didn’t have a job where you have to wear a suit. Razorlight and The Libertines in the army officer regalia like the 70s bands. But the underground in the 2000s was full of ideas. It was all about production. Supergroups like Fantomas who made Suspended Animation in 2005 which remains a largely unheard masterpiece. There were also groups like Dalek and Death Grips in California that were making the kind of hip-hop Kanye did with (2013) Yeezus as early as 2004. Particularly in Dalek’s record called Absence on California’s Ipecac label, and Death Grip’s album Exmilitary. I’d see Dalek play to crowds of maybe 200 people at most in preeminant clubs in the North of England. We'd talk and I’d ask them to do remixes of my poetry but I couldn't afford it. They did collaborations with 70s prog rockers Faust. Out of the file sharing wave, kids with laptops were posting music through Myspace, Bandcamp and Soundcloud, playing in basement clubs in the city with a laptop to about 100 people. Journalists were calling them bedroom-producers and bedroom-musicians. Platforms arose like Majestic Casual, a youtube Channel set up in 2011 in Berlin to share music laptop kids were making, which exploded in 2012 to the point that the Youtube channel released an album in 2015. It showed that a platform really has a voice. To trust in the content, but allow the liberty for its metamorphosis, but there was the feeling of a collective spirit behind it that you're a part of and that everyone understands when you talk about it. Then major artists by the mid -2010s began to recruit laptop artists for production - some like Tourist winning a Grammy award. Once new music streaming services arrived it meant that labels and platforms could generate income from streaming and the platforms collect advertising on streams.

Of course the end of advertising is to make money, its largely been entwined with music artists came from the 1980s when big brands began to give artists endorsement deals. As in the 1990s when there was no difference between advertisement and art. a car advert or a music video was as artistic as a feature film. Culture is now purely advertising. Now companies will collect and sell your data to other companies so they can send you advertisements tailored for you.

The old counter-culture and so-called subculture was now mass produced. It proved even counter-culture could be carbon copied, could be a cookie cutter culture. Even for the well-dressed well-bred became popular as they appealed to common aspirations and anxieties: to be rich.

Similar to the 80s the rich are getting richer and the poor are losing homes, unemployment rate rose higher, public money spent on war instead of the public, pensions not getting paid and the population age rising, a time when we feel that technology changes the world more than politics, resigned in to the current of technological progress, a people who are jumping through hoops to join “the next big thing,” who are trainspotting life away because they can't keep up with it, afraid of the future with no interest in the past, no grasp of the world with no feeling of identity within it, and loss of meaning in life. Voices that get lost and forgotten on the stream Everybody felt lost, and like the 1960s, was making it up as they go along, protesting the same rights movements, to crack the tarmac street and disrupt the old conformist views, to break the twitter stream and break the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s the voiceless had a centralised voice to express their anxieties. Now in an era of user generated content and social media we can all have a voice and we see that these deep and burning anxieties are general anxieties that we all go through. The task however is overcoming them not simply expressing them. And that's the rarer and less relatable thing, but nevertheless, the right and better thing.

After the financial crisis young people had less disposable income, and during a time when everyone steals music. Pop culture has always thrived on young people having disposable income; being able to buy records, go to gigs, buy clothes, books, and even drugs included. I can’t imagine how life feels for young people growing up who were born after 2000. For me the 21st Century is just a part of my life. For a lot of kids it’s all they know and I think we deserve to give them a culture they really benefit from. We are waiting for the world to come up with crap so we can buy it. Because we want something else and we expect the world we live in to be significantly different in ten years time. Products that have very little necessity to your life but they sell it by saying soon every household in the world will have one of these products. They used to sell it by telling you you wont impress a date without one. But disposable products that each are designed to quickly need replacing. An age when the present was disposable for the next moment. A disillusioned generation in a disposable world of disposable teens. Perhaps believing the only escape is to be rich and buy everything that life demands because you always have to buy the next new thing or get left behind. Hiding from the world like bad weather waiting for it to pass along.

Kids used to be kids and live for the day and not worry about tomorrow and now they're asking what's going to happen to the world. Kids are being told what they’re future is like, and they’re scared of their uncertain futures, and so they listen. The world is changing so rapidly that people are making absurd hypothesis about the future because they have as much absurd understanding of the past. There’s no truth in forecasts of the future if there’s no grasp on the present. If history shows anything is that technological, political, social phenomena always throws predictions out of the window. I want to tell kids not to be afraid of their future. Kids feel overwhelmed and powerless to their future so they fall in to place believing that it gives them stability and control. Young people have indescribable pressure. Young people are scared of the future and feel so powerless to the current of change in the world, and yet all the demand from the world is more change, as though the world were on rotation and they're just calling out “next!”

Advertising controlled magazines supposed to give us an eye to the world and understand it better but the overload of headline click bait makes everyone more jaded and confused about it. How many headlines magazines saying “How____ is changing the way we see _____” just perpetuates the whole “NEXT!” culture. Anyone who releases something in to culture needs to put a Best Before End label on it.

The only way that media seems to have an authoritative edge on a user generated culture is by having the voice of the next bit of information. Media is now simply trying to be the first one to tell you what’s next. Instead of building on the substance of present, just handing it over for what’s next. A stream culture will never be better than a platform. Streams will always produce disposable content. I know some people who want their magazines to be archival platforms that last and people keep like coffee tables books, but magazines are serial publications and in their nature self-disposable. Superseded by their next issue. Similar to a newspaper but a magazine can at least document a period of time through a very personal lens which may at a later date become archival if it was poignant to the era.

Everything had become the appearance of difference. The “alternative” kids were really two thirds of society were found commonly everywhere. An attainable difference. What was needed was a platform that recognised the genuinely exceptional. Unique and hard to reach talent. That was lead by creativity and intelligence that championed exceptional and rare talent.

It's strange that given the opportunity of unmediated self-expression, we've somehow managed to make the most inauthentic culture, representing ourselves and lives ingenuinely for as many people as possible for likes and popularity. Complete priviledge of user generated content and we fill the internet with cat videos. “Sometimes it’s hard to know how well you’re doing when someone puts up a cat video and it gets a millions views too,” FKA twigs. Between England and America, countries with the greatest resume of modern popular culture artists in the world, yet we make game shows to find new music artists. Reality TV stars showing you can make a career out of just being a person.

We have a culture that can express freely without any middlemen. What’s missing is the expression of overcoming the explicit description of how we're feeling - we have too many confessions of complaints and not enough arguments for solutions. The heads above water. An attitude of dealing with the reality of those problems not only expressing them.

Our online profiles are our own personal TV networks. of which brands pay our TV network for advertisement. Instagram isn't a photoalbum or a portfolio, it's a billboard. In a real sense we are all just billboards on instagram posting images that look no different to fashion billboards, or food photography you expect to see in a magazine. “The camera makes us all tourists of our own lives,” Susan Sontag. A diaristic culture that reports incessantly on itself through vlogging, blogging, instagram/snapchat stories, and twitter. Building brands of ourselves like soda pop. We have turned into Wharhol's Canned Soup. People are retail items. As unique as an ISBN number. We live in a culture of billboards of aggressive self-promotion, selling our identities like energy drinks and cigarettes. I am Coca-Cola, I am Diet Pepsi, I am Persil Automatic, I am Nike. Buy in to Brand Me. The currency is popularity. Our only platforms are our lives. We become our own TV networks. Success is measured by numbers, money and data. Not on the impact on human conscience, ideas, and feeling, culture. Everything is numbers. Even the news driven by click bait headlines. Culture as pure advertisement. Using these things to advertise our 'brand selves.' Instead of being vehicles for self-expression its become vehicles to hide behind. To be inauthentic and hide most of ourselves and only project what we select to. Not reflecting how we feel but we use it to conceal how we feel because we're so afraid to be judged for how and what we are that we make an inauthentic projected impression of ourselves. Everyone’s lives are just an advertisement brochure for lifestyle, marketing oneself like a billboard. We quote ourselves on twitter. Commenting on our Facebook lives like museum artefacts and gallery info boxes. We create documentaries of our lives as vloggers and instagram comedy sketches. Screaming for an identity. In the biggest social connectivity culture has had we become isolated behind phones and computer screens. As global literacy actually increasing and with access to the biggest library in the history of the world, accessible to anyone with a smartphone, we nevertheless become more stupid, because we’d rather spend time seeing what Selena Gomez wore on the red carpet and work on our dubsmash. We have the tools, its just how you use them. And interesting things always arise when using things other than the way they were originally intended to be used.

The 60s-90s had generally been a voice of common unrest. In a sense the culture of common anxieties, the demanding impermanence, the ethos of “making breaks with the past”, created Brexit and Trump as much as the protests that followed. But expression of democratic anxiety alone isn’t enough without democratic understanding and intelligence of those anxieties.

A democracy that simply expresses anxieties is not a democracy it’s a reverse-tyranny. The anxieties towards immigration that caused people to vote Brexit or Trump. They might hear two sides, but they only have to engage with one side: their own side, from their friends and whatever sources they subscribe to. It revealed a huge unspoken anxiety. Without having better understanding of those anxieties and overcoming them. The minority vote didn’t matter. The minority is now the counter-culture. Popularity failed. The individual unrest was now under threat. A less than zero culture ruled, whilst plus one's were ostracised. The crowd wanted to see themselves and culture had become a house of mirrors. Brexit and Trump was a revealed appearance of anxiety, naturally therefore, once voted became regret. The anxiety was satisfied in the vote, but not in the result. Our ages shows everybody has the same anxieties, the current on social media testifies it, but some people know how to deal with and overcome them through seeking intelligent perspective and a broader understanding.

The former punk magazines that represented the counter-culture and the unrest of the unvoiced were now in a user generated era of only the voice of common anxieties and unrest but unserviceable for individual unrest and understanding. Counter-culture became general, and culture was generic counter-culture. Themselves only an inevitable mass voice by assembling the voiceless to the general, all too general public. Even counter-culture became the norm, to which the individual now rebelled. There was only one way and everybody just followed the leader. Special was defined by unmerited accomplishment: Youthful beauty, inherited financial wealth, birth in to high class, bestowed material wealth, race and gender. This was approved by the crowd for its common and general aspiration. The generations that created the culture then proceed to call the generation that uses them “narcissists” and “sociopaths.” The act of using them in the way we do does reinforce certain personality traits but it’s not their fault. The popularity of anything in the culture signalled the appeal and protest of general society. Whatever appealed to the basest interest and its usual suspects, not what challenged and pushed us above ourselves. Progress in such a culture was impossible. The minority was now an single individual up against both conservatism, counter-culture, and corporate censorship. Counter-culture was the current, and media and corporations were eager for people to get on the next wave.

Not what stood out and changed direction, no views that you didn’t want to see on your timeline stream, no images the apps would ban you for, no views people would unfollow you for, no posts that broke the stream, everything had to flow in to the other. It was possible to be different if that meant unspoken commonness, unvoiced but any uncommon elevated opinion, that really singled a person out as an individual was distasteful. The crowd ruled. And ironically individual expression only demonstrated the voice and power of the many over the one. The less you stood out and the commonly approved your expression, the wider it appealed the better it was, the more popular you became. But the stream not only flowed as one. There were the unfollowed, the unashamed views, views that were on their own stream. That didn’t link to other things but was its own timeline, its own need that existed in different frame of time and desire, that was able to break that current like a damming tree that fell in to the river.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I just got to be a kid. I got time to understand the world and learn why to love it, therefore learn how to be able to make a real contribution to it. I got to admire the world and not be afraid of it and confused by it. I didn’t grow up always being told what my future would be like. Except for Y2K and look how that turned out. You can only contribute to what you love. I feel sorry for these kids always being told how the world is. But if history proves anything it’s that technological, political, social phenomena throws all predictions out of the window. Economists trying to sell you products by telling you what the future is going to be like, political agenda of overwhelming you so you feel further powerless. Don’t be afraid of your future. I was watching television growing up and would see programs from the 1950s to the 1990s. Now despite the fact that its TV on demand it seems we just get new television. But it was beneficial to see other periods of culture. The surreal and existential from The Twilight Zone, to Twin Peaks and the X-Files. Surreal satires that were social commentaries on reality through popular entertainment such as The Simpsons and comedians of the time who criticised with laughter. Middle and lower class comedy show, upper class mystery detective shows, The television talk show, well scripted human touch of drama for young people. The format of culture doesn't suit popular culture for the framework and the architecture of it. The #tbt and #regram is a user generated interception of the stream. #Latergram as almost an apology for it not being so chronological. Culture that’s experienced purely chronologically is like words in a conversation getting lost in the seconds of the past. Revisiting things often help to uphold the spirit of things. Re-Runs don't appear on stream sites. Instead of re-runs its whole re-productions. The 21st century rehashes older movies, television shows, foreign films already released, and book adaptations, and as the British comic book writer Alan Moore said "Hollywood hasn't had a new idea in twenty years." Televisions direct imitations of popular earlier shows. Scripted television shows replaced with reality television. Although popular reality TV started with the Real World in the 90s. It got a new purpose in The Simple Life, Meet the Osbornes, Big Brother, The Newly Weds, The Hills, to the Kardashians, and all the Made in Chelsea variants. Game shows permeated the 90s famously made a joke of in the Rage Against The Machine music video for Sleep Now In The Fire. The more money mentality of the 80s came right back.

There's a story of Johnny Depp when he was starring in 21 Jump Street that he saw a billboard with his face on it. And he and a friend stopped the car, climbed up and began to deface the image and paint over it. A security guard appeared and told them to get lost. Depp's friend said to the guard look it’s his face. And the guard looked and Johnny and looked at the billboard and said "alright, but hurry up." What could be more the antithesis of the selfie age.

Everyone begins to look the same on instagram, and similarly the strict dress code of clubs ruined the club scene. The whole explosion of clubs was that it was this collision of different cultures and costumes colliding together creating something new. People who may not ordinarily outside of clubs intermingle with each other. This doesn’t work if you go in to a club and everyone’s dressing the same and so probably comes from the same demographic background.

Is this the inevitable fate of pop culture? Is this an error or is this the apotheosis of pop culture? The 80s cyberpunk that envisioned advertising everywhere, came true, only its not on every thing, its in everyone. Art and advertising so far that now art and the artist is just advertising. So far that even music itself is made to sound like the character the artist wants to project of themselves. Just as an advertisement will put music over the advert of their product to characterise it as fun. Advertising meant that just as music had been used to characterise products, musicians use music to promote the character of the product of themselves. Becoming actors of music. Selling themselves through music as brands and products, the music serving only to characterise the artist like an advertisement. A musician making the music of the song sound characteristic of the image they wanted to project, badass in this song, have a broken heart in this one. The point in the past was that music sounded contradictory to the feeling so that you overcome the feeling. U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday sounds fun but it’s about the Bloody Sunday incident in Derry. 80s Hip Hop used music much the same. This is Wagnerian music now, it's music of cinema, when a piece of music appears that shows us how the person is feeling. We are just our own little TV networks beaming out our own content. We even have apps that will deploy it at regular scheduled moments. Now in a user generated content, we get to decided what we follow and what we don't. Steve Albini, the record producer of Nirvana and R.E.M, said the great thing about our time was that it killed the radio, now nobody has to listen to music they don’t want to. What we don't want to see on our feed is what we unfollow. We don't have the opportunity to make people uncomfortable to shake up their comfortable little life with a new and beautiful truth that is often disturbing or to make topsy turvy the formality of normal and expecting living because whatever you don't want to see you can switch off. In a culture where there can be no bad taste, there will only be bad taste. Because everyone will only have one kind of taste, their own. Taste which makes them comfortable, and taste which sells products. A good culture is full of variety not idealised perfection, it embraces both the ordinary and out of ordinary, so culture is influenced by lots of different directions that it may ordinarily reject. Not only that but it also helps us understand things different from ourselves. A culture that is purely what it wants, becomes antagonistic to anything it does not want.

The antagonists of culture are the people who get unfollowed. They're the one's who are the electricity between the points. They're the ones that are making people uncomfortable. If you're not getting unfollowed, you're not saying anything. Young people are getting social disorders from feeling they need to be liked, followed, popular, and companies are insisting that they do it so they have an audience reach. And it's very useful, but it's not right. If culture doesn’t overlap you only get what you want. As Glen Lutchford said that our time does not facilitate for good photography.

Stream feeds as the equivalent to channel surfing. Passive trend nostalgia as you scroll idly through instagram like children counting blue cars from the back seat on a motorway. The 21st century is an incredibly exciting period but its a culture that is so scattered and the means to express it so disposable.

The follow button has created new censorship. A censorship of conscience. Anything that collides with our conscience is unfollowed. We have a bureaucratic culture of good conscience. Creating lanes and channels separated and segmented. Daniel Day-Lewis said of Martin Scorsese in a real must-watch interview on Movies 101 “Marty is a master, and I don't use that word lightly there are very few of them and he's one of them. And God knows why he remains unrecognised in this country” to which the interviewer responded "what are you talking about? Marty is revered here" and Daniel replied "well he's revered by everyone who reveres him."

Cinema switched from the reluctant hero who found they had to help because they had the qualities to help, in to wall to wall superhero. Films of born or self-created heroes of super human capabilities that found a duty to save the world that had such a dystopian problem that nothing other than a superhero could save it. The reluctant every day hero gave the view that one could have a job to do that wasn’t just their job. That they had an inner personal qualities that could really make a contribution and impact on their world. The man who assembles the worst sports team imaginable from a bunch of raggamuffins and then goes on to win the league because of their team spirit. A whole theme of defying the odds. Not just the superhero who shows up and says “never fear, faceless working people, this is a job for an implausibly superior superbeing.”

I was listening to an interview with Tarantino before he made Resevoir Dogs. He'd already written True Romance and Natural Born Killers. But he couldn't get past the readers, it was only when someone high up in the studio read his work that things moved ahead. Business relies on predicted certainty. If you send an uncertain script, demo, book to an administrative level, it's received by someone who is uncertain of their future in that company and wants to look good to their boss. It's uncertainty meets uncertainty, two negatives together. But if an established success gets work infront of that reader they'll pass it forward because it makes them look good to their boss and attaches themselves to something already successful. If you're an unknown you go to the top, that person is already established, worried about seeming old fashioned and eager to attach themselves to something new and fresh, so they get heard. It's not the priority of low level administration to see the difference between good and bad work, but certain and uncertain work. That's always going to have a problem for creating new excitement in culture. Whatever is uncertain is risky, but that's why it's exciting. It's uncertain because it's taken a step forward. The company isn't going to risk the rest of their roster which they draw revenue from, for the sake of one new thing, which might reduce a buying audience elsewhere. The time and money to build a new audience is not going to be appealing to a company. The internet should be able to cut that out and go directly to your audience. The only obstacle is the censorship of the good conscience of culture, a culture which itself doesn't want anything that it's not used to. Now no one has to handle anything they can't. They can cop out. A new censorship arrives. It doesn't matter how independent the source is. The audience becomes the BBFC. In the 90s you had Marilyn Manson and boy bands on the same channel and both revered by the station and the audience of popular culture. What we have now is lanes of culture. Disturbing images aren't disturbing to people who like disturbing images. Cutesy images are not disturbing to people who like cutesy images.

Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, pornography is and has always been a part of popular culture. It's been a part of the background since the 1960s but if there's anywhere in popular culture where sex is dealt with without beyond the censorship of taboo it's pornography. Everywhere sex is conveyed still with the Christian taboo. It holds the only place in culture where it’s presented without taboo or moral censorship. In almost all other places its positioned as though sexual activity were a bad thing, a secretive shameful act, that one ought to turn one’s instincts away from. Outside of pornography, it's perhaps only now in the instagram age of female nipple censorship despite its censorship being okay with derogatory images of women in submissive poses leered over by chauvinistic men, and being fine with the male nipple, that popular culture has given sex a perfectly human and normal status. After all every human on Earth was made through sex, and it's something common enough that we are all doing it. It's confusing when it's used provocatively when it's as common as eating and breathing. The more you portray it as taboo the more it feels taboo. The pornographic accessibility has broken that taboo down. Like some ancient Greek lewd comedy, a sexual sit-com, no more sex depicted through the lens of Christian taboo but through the lens of all good and healthy cheerfulness. But where it's used as even for headline click bait, it's odd to me that it gets the reaction it does. It's as if sex is some secret that only a few people know about. Sex is something we do like driving a car, or buying groceries, it's a part of our lives. And although pornography isn't the same sex you have with your partner, it's where kids are now learning about sex before having it - for better or worse. The mere use of it as a selling point suggests that its still taboo. I’ve never quite understood the selling point, since it doesn’t involve the actual act of sex. Porn is a kind of joke theatre. Sex is of course an altogether different thing. Pornography discharges the libido and apostrophies sexual urges. Sex gratifies them, and is transgressive, by affirming the natural instincts. Whereas porn is something to laugh at, at life with all cheerfulness, or it would be reductive. Sex on the otherhand is affirming of life-driving instincts. You can’t confuse the two, but there should be a place within culture for it because its such an important part of life it shouldn’t be treated with taboo. It has always been a part of popular culture, not because pop culture revolves around sex, but because it revolves around high libido, which can express itself also in energy of creativity.

One feminist ability via instagram. is that it allows women to show how they like to look and feel sexy as opposed to how a man likes to perceive women sexy. The selfie has created that at least.

We have a culture where not only do we get what we want all the time, its a culture where wherever we see what we don't want, we get to eliminate it. Our culture creates segregation because we can curate everything. But good culture is variety. We end up creating a stream where there are no interruptions. We only have a culture which pleases us. Even to those who have a sadistic pleasure of cyber bullying. Cyber bullies would never say these things to their faces. They enjoy it because they're unreachable. They can be cruel and hurtful without ever fearing any repercussion. They can make someone feel horrible and then go and eat a sandwich.

We are all curators of our own content. To say instagram is terrible is a misnomer, as it’s self curated, it's that they're following content they don't like. But given a user generated medium like Instagram and we invent the most inauthentic place. Advertising and pop culture have always gone hand in hand. As advertising evolved pop culture evolved and vice versa.

The culture isn’t bad, culture can never really be bad, there’s always some good in it. It’s just the framework of the architecture with which we uphold it which allows us to experience it. Pop-culture at its best was always an experiment, always stepping near to avant-garde without ever stepping in to it. To be able to look at the entire bulk of pop-culture is an advantage. To be able to see it as one entire Golden Age. As one giant experiment that perhaps eventually became too formulaic and rationally devised. Too commercial that it became commercials.

Michael Jackson had been doing the “visual album” in the 90s for his Dangerous Album releasing nine short films for the record. The 80s were doing "visual singles" all the time. Pink Floyd made The Wall movie in 70s, and The Beatles maybe first experimented with that in A Hard Days Night. Plus it wasn't unpopular to do because the big 80s blockbuster movies were using pop soundtracks to their films, so when you saw a film you heard pop and rock bands, compared to 21st Century film which has returned back to the film score, with obvious exceptions such as directors like Sofia Coppola. Before Beyonce's visual album the end of 2013, FKAtwigs had self-directed four videos to her four tracks of her self-released EP1 in 2012.

Illustrators like Derek Hess who has done amazing work in the 1990s was doing amazing work in the 2000s and rock poster art was still thriving on the underground circuit. I was a big fan of his and he gave me some good advice “Don’t forget, James, wherever you go, you go with you.” There was an lo-fi 8-bit wave with Crystal Castles, Postal Service, and Nuuro (eventually to become Arca). The Dresden Dolls having still the best feminist song of the century with The Perfect Fit. So much that was exciting but it was under the radar. Directors like Floria Sigismondi who made beautiful odd videos for everyone from Christina Aguilera, to Sigur Ros, to The White Stripes, to David Bowie.

1960s surf rock come back with bands like Beach House and Best Coast fused with Velvet Underground and My Bloody Valentine drones. Lana Del Rey as a kind orange peel of the whole thing, an aesthetic homage to the Golden Age, taking a slice from everywhere. Very significant issues like Black Lives Matter, Feminism, sexuality equality, and other issues which resemble the 1960s that felt to have underscored the era than defined it.

A significant 21st century platform as a festival was Alex Poot's creation and artistic direction of Manchester International Festival between 2007-2015 where pop culture and high-art was still intermixing, was still full of fire and experiment, and where everything is a premier and a project outside of the artist’s usual way of working. And it was in my hometown and I would volunteer with it working with Bjork, Wayne McGregor, Anhoni, Robert Wilson and other artists making incredible work in my city.

One artist who since the 1960s has been marrying surrealism, high art and pop culture is theatre director Robert Wilson. From Einstein on the Beach in 1976, to his collaborations with William Burroughs and Tom Waits in 1990, to Timerock with Lou Reed in 1997, to the unrealised collaboration with David Bowie for 2000, to the The Life & Death of Marina Abramovich in 2011, (which I myself participated in working with) and much more beyond and in between with adaptations of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Monteverdi, Euripides. Wilson also collaborated with Lady Gaga for live VMA performance in 2013. What pop culture icon has done more for fashion in the 21st Century than Lady Gaga. Kanye West and Lady Gaga are probably the only major artists that arose after the 90s that are continuing the ethos of 90s pop culture and yet still very much part of the 21st century aftermath. What’s more of a brand than Kanye West or Lady Gaga. Who more cares about the art of music video, the staging of live performance, music packaging, disdains the status ‘celebrity’, uses interviews and performance to comment on world, fuses high art with pop culture, not playing it safe instead testing their limitations, loves being distasteful in the mouth of media, and who’s work is unafraid to verge on the surreal than Kanye West. Yet that Kanye made the Wolves music video a Balmain campaign is both completely 90s and completely 21st Century that it is far more a commercial than a music video that it is actually an advertisement. Artist, art and advertising now utterly indivisible. There’s a quote from Nietzsche “nothing popular was ever great.” No one of Kanye West’s first singles from an album did particularly well. It always takes a while. Great culture doesn’t give you the same taste you have in your mouth, so it takes a while to get used to it. Great culture is like medicine, it’s good for you but it kinda tastes bad. Advertising tried to speed that up by giving us bubble gum flavoured medicine. Eventually it’s just bubble gum, and that sugar’s gonna rot your teeth.

I feel 2007-2017 is an era of itself. The world moves too fast to be out in neat little organised decades anymore. The minimalism of fashion photography and interior design to the stylised and peculiar. From the birth of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook to billion dollar companies which many business rely upon. From small phones to big phones. From the first iTunes to Apple Music. 2007 Radiohead used the internet for a pay what you want plan within the file sharing era to Frank Ocean releasing an album directly through Apple Music. And the transition to acceptance of gay marriage and sexual diversity in hip-hop. The Obama era to Trump. The Financial Crisis to Brexit. And many other examples that it was itself a little ten year pocket. But things aren’t making the impact that they can have because they’re scattered around millions of mini-networks and over disposable streams, or appearing on platforms for click bait headlines, but which doesn’t allow for memorable creative impact. Sometimes I think even the ability to voice so easily means that the burning desire to say something gets diffused before it reaches the art. As great as it is, there was something about that the artwork was the opportunity to say something that meant it was just full of so much more. But if you get so much out on Twitter first the work doesn’t get stuffed with the message. Everything seems to just drift from one thing to next, nothing puts on the brakes or changes gear. Once it happens on a stream its over - on to the next thing with a resigned “I can’t believe you’re still talking about that - that was so March 24th.”

THE BEGINNING

There is another precursor outside of the music, politics, and recovery after the economic depression: the art and literary world. Popculture makes countless references to Tracey Emin in the 2000s, Daimien Hirst in the 1990s, Jean-Michael Basquiat in the 1980s, Andy Wharhol in the 1970s, the investment that the American CIA put in to art is significant. Expressionism was also a means the United States saw to show to the world it's ideals of freedom, that even art could be this free. The American government saw it was another way to show Soviet territory that America was a kind of paradise, and the way forward, beyond and away from rigidity of their Constructivists.

The 60s and 70s were hugely intellectually inspired periods by writers and theories of art that they delved in to beyond the turn of the 20th century. The creativity of literature in the very tail end of modernists, and 19th century philosophers and writers like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had significant influences on artists such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop, as well as artists like Duchamp and Picasso. German expressionist theatre had been changing both stage and film to create how a scene felt, not literally was, how it reflected the inner state of mind. But if there's a movement that seemed to have faded out and yet can be found in many ways across the whole scope of popular culture's Golden Age, it was the art movement of Surrealism.

In some sense Surrealism is the beginning of the popular culture artist. The use of the concepts of "subconscious" was more a necessary concept for a changing of the guards, from modernist culture to pop culture, rather than a concept in reality. The unconscious was the suspicion of the truth behind modern soberism from the 17th - 20th century. And it was really what gave way to the 60s to be the event that it was at all. Andre Breton and the Parisian artistic intellectual culture scattered around Europe, kind of created what became pop culture as much as the music coming up out of the United States. It seemed to disappear quietly, but Surrealism dipped it's toe in to everything that was popular culture. The whole of the Golden Age in a way was kind of an experiment, which is what made it what it was. It didn't have a plan, and the more it had a plan, the more formalised, the more rational and sober, the more suited for certain business, the less interesting and the less energy it had. Popculture was always an avant-garde movement, at its worst, a hell of a fun ride, connecting with people not on a general level but on a universal level of big questions that preoccupy us all.

The surrealism that began with Andre Breton in 1924 in Paris, only it's not a representation of the unconscious mind but that dreams are a way that we face the concerns in our lives through mythical re-represenation. When we dream, we are focusing on the concerns in our own lives, imagined in a way that we can witness them, as themselves, beautiful works of art, existing in the imagination. Activated in dreams. And that great art whether high or popular is essentially doing the same thing.

There are those bad artists that enjoy pain and those bad audiences, and those good artists that overcome it. We want to depict ourselves as art to see ourselves. We can see ourselves better often in art than in rational explanation. Look at the Roman sculpture of Laocoön and his sons being eaten alive by giant snakes. The story was the subject of a lost tragic play by Sophocles.

If there's anything exemplified in the Laocoön sculpture its strength within that ordeal. And the Romans would have known the story and known he doesn’t make it out alive. So its not an image of victory but tragedy. But what you see is strength in a beautiful artwork. Although it’s follows none of the Archaic Greek sculptural principles during the tragic period, what is more Roman than strength in ordeal. It does this by a fictional image crafted with the precision of reality, cloaking reality with myth - which is not at all unlike the surrealists. Much of what we think of Classical art is that it’s about rationality which is a misunderstanding. Most of the work are unreal images, taken from myth, envisioned with the same precision of reality. We’re told that classical art is about rationalism, but in a way it’s just as irrational as surrealism whenever it’s myth. It might even be perfect surrealism. Tragic art is ugly beautiful. It's recognising the terrible truths of the nature of life and the terrible crisis, but painting it with beauty so we can endure it. That was the same genius of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer. There's no happy ending in these masques of tragedy. Yet we come away from Shakespeare not filled with gloom but full of exhilaration. There’s more similiarity between our pop culture and ancient and Renaissance art than in Neoclassicalism and modernism, which was far too rational and sober to create surrealism or tragic myth. There's no rosey-eyed glasses of romanticism, the truth is ugly, nevertheless, life is beautiful. Didn’t Alexander McQueen say the same thing that he was attracted to the grotesque and wanted to show that something could be messy but also elegant. And how many of the fashion shows with Simon and Joseph Bennett were envisioned out of a dream vision. In fact it was beautifully expressed by the name given to his exhibition “Savage Beauty.”

Those who think that figurative art has no intelligent substances compared to conceptual art, well the difference was they artists like the Greek sculptures saw no difference between intellectual pursuit and superficial aesthetics. The famous Discuss Thrower for example is not only a great figurative sculpture but embodies the philosophy of the balance of opposites. The taut arm at the back the limp arm at the front, the bent leg and relaxed leg, the curled under toes and curled back toes, the shape of the arm is as a bow and the legs like a taut bow string. The intellect was concealed within aesthetics. They Greeks knew the intoxicating effect of aesthetics just as our so-called superficial culture does today. But they saw it as a path to access intelligence and wisdom - in a similar way to how some people believe is accessible through drugs, they saw that through art.

Conceptual art is that one can’t see life with any clarity so the artist sees it through impressions, distortions, and concepts. Lies because he does not know how to see the truth.

Conceptual artists don’t want to believe or accept that art is fundamentally superficial. Not to use that word in a demeaning sense. Painting, sculpture, visual art is aesthetic. Bottecelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello and Giotto were all superficial artists in a profound way. All ideas were prior to the presence of pure aesthetics of the object. The craftsmanship of the work, the dreamed up imagination of the work, the meaning and significance of the work, all resulting in the visual image they manifested. This isn’t much different even than the surrealists of the twentieth century, who wanted to access the subconscious mind and paint dreams. The reason surrealists images are more warped and strange is only a difference of the lack of myth - and perhaps a clarity of their own imagination. Greek, Roman and Renaissance art is perhaps perfect surrealism. Myth. But conceptual artists felt that they wanted to make a case for the ideas in art, so they wanted ideas to take precedence. They placed ideas before aesthetics. They thought in doing so they were making what was superficial now deep. but it’s not even shallow.

Everything after Duchamp was a failure. You walk in to a plastic essay. Conceptual art is a plastic essay. I’m probably not the only one who’s tired of walking in to these plastic essays. The superficial aspect of art - its pure aesthetics - is the rush and awe of art. Perhaps an artists does not get the effect from the viewer he wants, and disdains not his craftsmanship but the medium for failing him. He wanted to convey ideas. Then he should write an essay. And how many times now we walk in to art exhibitions and have to read so much, essay after essay, often they even hand them out, so that we understand this plant pot on a white stool in the middle of the room and other ridiculous art. What is now called Classical art is not about rational thinking and proportions and that modern art is about irrationality. Nonesense, and mere pandering to modern art’s desire to find its shallowness deep. Great art is superficial. Great culture is superficial. Aesthetics takes precedent. The so-called Classical artists were manifesting dreams out of myth with the clarity and measured proportions of real life - yet the basis of which were the most irrational things, dreams. And the only place ideas had was in the purpose of the work and the craftsmanship of its execution. It’s only in the modern period that artists failed to understand the profoundness of that superficiality, or that they failed their own work to place profoundness in it, or that it lacked an audience to find profoundness in it. In any case, conceptual art and its children were all failures of art, who in trying to become deep were not even shallow. Whoever doesn’t like modern art, who take no pleasure in it, who hates the idea that you have to now appreciate and understand art, has every right to. They are themselves much deeper and smarter than these artists. On the one hand art is superficial and pure aesthetics the more perfect it is, on the other hand it is born out of myth the more perfect it is. Art that tries to be intelligent and deep is not even shallow.

The unconventional. These are the people who see themselves in the ugly beautiful. The different but strong not weak. Unconventionally beautiful and intelligent, as opposed to vacuous and obvious beauty. For instance, Isamaya French’s work is neither diaristic nor advertising, she's satiric, comic, and condescending to the commonalities of the age. She uses them to speak. It’s something that is more frequently coming out of the stylists now.

The history of art is just a variety of communication. “My work is always about communicating” Laurie Anderson. For instance, in a contemporary sculpture that has a man with an oversized arm or its designed to have bits missing, the basis of that work is still in the rational reality of a man that is then distorted. Surreal and ancient art were both from the basis of dream visions. And yet who would ever say that the 1990s was on the verge of the Renaissance? But in the history of culture, the only chunk of culture that was ever really out of place was the 1600s to the 1900s. The rest fits together quite nicely. Neoclassical architecture only superficially tried to imitate classical architecture but less so than Corbusier. Much of it was really facade. Opera that only superficially tried to imitate Greek Tragedy but less so than Robert Wilson’s artpop opera. The Greeks wouldn’t have understood Opera and laughed at Shakespeare. I’m sure Baz Lurhman’s Romeo and Juliet, and Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet, were more thrilling than a Victorian theatre experience. There’s no way than any high culture was ever made without an ecstasy in to high spirits and intoxication and that’s exactly what pop culture gave us. You can’t passively make Shakespeare. Hamlet at the crisis under some universal spotlight, what is that but the rockstar on stage, the tragic anti-hero. Pop culture’s media has always been vocal about breaking with the past but the culture itself has always been about making connections. Connections between diverse and seemingly estranged things.

From radio, to television, to festivals, to MTV, what drives popular culture is collisions of otherwise divergent forms. Every era of popular culture was segmented by its political, social, technological, economic shifts, and within that there had to be a stage, with which to voice and express how it felt to live within that. All popular culture is really made on the stage, whether a theatre, screen, concert, or channel. There is always a platform. Culture needs what it’s always needed: platforms. Whether that is festivals or channels. Not lanes, not steams, and not idealisations of perfection - so that any young girl with a thin waist, big bust, peachy butt, and a toothpaste commercial smile can make a career out of instagram. But the stage to allow for the metamorphosis of cultural variety on that stage. Periods of culture are like cocoons, concentrated periods of intensity that nevertheless undergo metamorphosis. Divided and defined by their technological, social, economic and political shifts. It can’t be divided so neat and tidy as the decades of the Gregorian calender. Life isn’t so convenient as that.

Look at some of the most defining videos of the era - Rihanna, Sia, Beyonce - have been people singing through pain. Look how many more women are making better videos than men. But they look how badass, and full of strength. Not as a glamorisation of the terrible, but as a lens through which we can handle the truth of reality so we don’t ignore it.

Literature is more the complimentary counterpart of music, it’s never very good if it aims to do just the same thing. The 1960s through the 2000s wanted to do with literature (rather than for literature) what punk did for music. Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, etc Controversial literature and poetry that is full of swear words and draws illicit lewd content doesn’t do the job because it is just another appearance of the world. Huge exterior lives of characters with horrible interiors. It’s just another moral appearance of the world. Horrible things happen but it’s not our reality. Horrible things make up a lot life, but it’s getting past the appearance of the horrible in to the universality of life’s pain. And I don’t see why I’d spend time writing about the specific people I spend time trying to avoid in actual life. Okay, greedy self-absorbed economists are not the nicest of people and drugs don’t equate well being - we get that. Literature that lasts is literature that gets in to the heart of us no matter what the costume of the world is. It’s about being able to say the truth without unbearable explicitness because you’ll end up glamorising the truth incidentally. To get someone to sit through two hours of a film about a horrible thing you have to make it look good and entertaining, and therefore you glamorise the very thing you’re trying to discredit. The Great Gatsby is one example of a commonly misunderstood one. Fitzgerald wrote it to be cynical about the growing material decadence of America and yet what we remember is wanting to attend Gatsby’s wonderfully extravagant parties. Outside of the Surrealist poets, the major influence to surreal literature that took that direction would be Marquez' One Years of Solitude, Lorca's When Five Years Pass, Pirandello's Five Actors Looking For A Director, and Kafka's Metamorphosis. With science fiction also contributing. But writers like Ovid and Homer are no less surrealists. In literature we're much still in the age of American pulp fiction, the English fantasy fable, and the modern social realist novel. The surrealist novel is yet to be a part of culture.

Nick Knight once said in an interview from a McQueen shoot with antlers protruding from the models shoulders, that when people criticised it he said "why can people accept images in horror movies but have a problem with it in photography. Film is twenty-four frames per second, this is just one frame." In a horror film people find it agreeable to find terrifying images terrifying, but Nick Knight's images are beautiful. And those people found it disagreeable to their own conscience to find antler's protruding out of someone's shoulders beautiful. Nick Knight’s work makes everyone who feels, looks, are, and may be judged differently feel OK and feel beautiful. We all feel our own pain and life’s beauty at the same time.

From everything from David Bowie to Alexander McQueen there is the ability to dream and take something messy and make it elegant, to take the possibly ugly and make it absolutely beautiful. I see that same thing in SHOWstudio and I think England has always been very good at that. I think Shakespeare was very good at that. But also Andre Breton and the Surrealists, those of Lorca and Dali also, were doing the same, theatre directors like Robert Wilson, and music video generally verged on the surreal. And I see SHOWstudio as a great continuation of all that energy. If there was anything post 2001 that kept that energy and creativity it was fashion. If there is anything since 2001, that is a platform that is curating culture it is SHOWstudio. SHOWstudio still exists in a world of dreams, whilst other platforms that look similiar are putting it in reality. It is still just photography with them, SHOWstudio seems to be image making. Not only does SHOWstudio feel like what I loved about my MTV in terms of cultural electricity, but also what I love about the all the artists whether literary or visual of the twentieth century.

Whether surrealism or myth it is an art as a way of being able to say the truth without having to directly look at the truth. A way to handle the truth at a safe distance. It makes it creative instead of scientific. It makes it creative, instead of explicit. The 90s revelled in such dissonance. Yet good conscience culture follows the trend of whatever else in in vogue. Unfollowed is dissonance in culture. Despite all the technology in the world, our time is very much the 1950s and 1980s combined, which carried such a different cultural ethos from the 60s, 70s, underground 80s, and 90s. Because despite all its innovations, technology doesn’t change people. And pop culture is kind of a tussle between the two, where they married briefly in the 70s and 90s. Which is perhaps why surrealism is again so relevant.

The 80s was so visual that the 90s was kind of a return to what people felt like, but what they felt like within the 80s visual world. The 90s had so many satirical comedies. We knew ourselves again. We began to understand the world and talk about how it felt to be in that world, to ask big questions again, and dealt with those issues on television. If filmmakers like Alejandro Jaradowski and the opening of Fellini's 8 1/2 as more art house cinema, then in popular cinema Stanley Kubrick was the most symbolist and surrealist filmmaker during the century. "The most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts - beyond the reach of reason and language" Stanley Kubrick. Like every great piece of visual cinema it mixed symbolism and surrealism with an existential concern. Even1990s television in The X-Files, what made it so relatable was the slogan The Truth Is Out There. To search for the truth in a world that was so far removed from truth. We could all relate to that. Every copy of that show that was just about aliens and the supernatural no one could connect with.

Isamaya Ffrench, Nick knight, Harley Weir, FKAtwigs, SHOWstudio in general (not to mention, though I mean them, Rei Nadal, Marie Schuller, Ruth Hogben, Pavel Brenner, Vincent Haycock, Tabitha Denholm to name only a very few), and fashion designers too numerous to mention - not that it defines the time, but there’s options to see a energy of a culture that there wasn’t before. A culture that seems more surreal that is also more intelligent. And a new visual culture through instagram has opened up a new surrealism, a satirical and cynical take on ourselves and on censorship itself. Not out of expressing and appeasing an anxiety but out of an intellectual understanding of the world around us and our own behaviour within it. Out of the decades of political, social, and economic reality, it became almost too much to bare with. Now we’re turning more to satire and surrealism to be able to handle facing reality. Out of a necessity to handle the truth with high spirits.

Too much explicit realism is making us all low spirited. People want to feel they have power over their own problems and power over their own life. The feeling that they can overcome the problems in their lives, face life. to have power over their obstacles. A part of that is to see the world clearer; to be engaged with inspiring people who make them feel they have power over their life; the feeling that life is bearable, endurable, and enjoyable; the feeling that they are okay and great. Fundamentally the feeling of power over their life even in the irrationality and chaos of the modern world. And take comfort in the uncertainty. “Uncertainty excites me, baby, who knows what’s going to happen, lottery or a car crash, or join a cult” sings a lyric from Bjork. The 14th Century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenko had remarked similar words in saying “the most precious thing in life is uncertainty.”

Literature helps us momentarily stop and make sense of everything and to assume the identity of that which can make sense. Literature is form within the chaos. Music is chaos out of the form. Music break apart and literature puts together in a new way. Great writers don’t describe the time they live in, great writers elevate the attitude of the time they live in. They help people see the time and give expression to the spirit and feeling of the age. And it’s only long afterwards that the culture holds up their work as the way it wishes to remember it. A generation of writers who said what they see. Writers as Seers, as Thoreau had used the word.

The Golden Age of popular culture is over. Now popular culture is no longer culture, it’s just popular. Whilst Kinfolk-culture would appear as a reinstatement of that 1950s traditional values, the rockstar mentality and the surrealist aesthetic lives on from the Golden Age of popular culture. The electricity in culture now is who is being unfollowed. And whoever walks unfollowed, walks their own path. Maybe the better way to describe the next phase will be “unpopular culture.” So unfollow me, unsubscribe, and unlike me.

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jamesdazell · 7 years

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~ Relief of Jupiter. Culture: Roman Place of origin: Asia Minor Date: A.D. 1-150 Medium: Silver

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jamesdazell · 7 years

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DIVINE BEAST; or SUPER-ANIMAL II : a revaluation of suffering (part 1/2)

Sometimes the known future is more terrifying than the known. Suppose you are a nonentity, pre-born, looking into your life from the beginning and saw how it was all to be; all of the pain, all of the disappointment, all of the challenges, all of the obstacles, and all the stagnation to fulfilling your goals, the opposition to your will, the loss of love, the deaths, the physical and mental torments, entwined with all that was good, and you were just about to begin, destined to live them all over again in exactly the same way - would you embark? If you knew how painful life was going to be before, would you live it. That is the question; “to be or not to be?”

It's easier to say that we can accept the pain we have already experienced. In hindsight, we can accept our prior suffering. But what about the suffering ahead of us, the suffering to come. Not with hindsight, or foresight, but with insight. What if you were to know the reality of an experience of life in all its pain beforehand.

The answer of Yes might be easier for someone who has lived more trivially in their life, who have avoided any suffering, who have had minimised goals, compared to someone who has suffered profoundly, had to sacrifice everything for their goals who has suffered greatly for a great goal - things which a trivial goal has no experience of. The only possible Yes to that question can be that we want it. That we want the suffering included with the whole experience. There is no other ability to say Yes to that question other than to want pain and suffering as well. Therefore, in life there must be some valuation that pain and suffering is a positivistic valence, because we must also will it, that we must will it in order to live, and we must will it in order to aim and pursue great goals.

People commonly say “desire to fail” or “fail harder; if you're not prepared to fail you're not prepared to succeed.” This is not so different from the kind of attitude that you are hear from an athlete or from a successful entrepreneur perhaps - a no pain no gain kind of attitude. Although the adage of "no pain no gain" and "what doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger" and "you have to bite the bullet" or "walk through the fire" etc There is also the common adage that there is no such thing as misfortune but everything works in your favour. Whilst this is true, good, and helpful, they’re also speaking about more trivial goals. And not the really serious things in life that can effect use extremely. No one would say them after a car accident for example, a divorce or a funeral or an illness. They’re only used before a minor difficulty often one that rarely has any broad affect on our lives. Most kinds of misfortune don't obstruct and inhibit one from achieving their goals, they usually only cause an amendment to a goal. But a great goal can be restricted detained or abolished by many more things are much more easily. Great goals have less chance of succeeding than trivial goals; great goals are greater risks, and great goals have greater misfortune. The kind of suffering of which that speaker talks of is not the same kind of suffering that makes one profound. The kind of surfing the speaker is referring to is trivial and common suffering, the kind of suffering one experiences at the gym or in the workplace. The kind of suffering that is available to all. Not the suffering that few people make the choice to endure.

It is very post modern and very common to recognise failure and misfortune as comport to success and not to be afraid of it. But that is not the same things to say to value it that is not the same thing is to recognise it as positive. It is again merely another attitude of adversity. Although the approach to suffering is a better one than religion ever taught us, it’s nevertheless still an evaluation of the misfortune and suffering as a negative valence that happens despite the path to success. If suffering is valued as 'bad' then we want to have an explanation for this intrusion on all that is 'good'. Even "triumph over adversity" still values suffering as 'bad.' Religion explained suffering with bad conscience - and promoted self-contempt, blame, and revenge for suffering. We were to blame ourselves or someone else. We might maturely even take responsibly, but the value of suffering remains 'bad'. It still remains a negative intrusion on our life that has interrupted and obstructed all that is 'good.' It’s to do with how we're taught to approach our suffering as a prejudice against themselves and life. To flee from pain is fundamentally to retract from life. But lets not be silly. To live well one has to embrace the dilemma.

It concerns me as a writer that there is no story telling where suffering is not a bad thing. I save exception for the ancient Greeks, in whose tragedy they almost entirely solved my problem. The Greeks had a different explanation and answered it in a very different way, it occurred to me whilst realising how the tragedians wrote tragedy. The stories that we tell in the West are built around conflict because stories are still based on western Abrahamic heritage which posits suffering as a negative valence. Eastern story telling is traditionally built on reflection and revelation (until western influence) because their stories are based on eastern Hindu and Buddhist heritage which aims to abolish suffering. This meant that universally we are perpetuating values in society and culture based on the geographic region of the religious heritage. And their errors which only answers given.

When the Ancient Greeks of the tragic archiac age (10BCE - 6BCE) suffered, they didn’t think it was 'fun' but they acknowledged their suffering as a call or demand of the body for increased strength - like when the fire is low and someone calls for more coal or wood. Without first suffering they wouldn’t have strength "to have strength one must first need it." Then were able to sustain that strength with a goal - the goal would occur them out of their strength. We only dream up goals we have the strength to achieve. To maintain the pursuit for a goal we make a promise. And the cycle repeats. We make the promise to a goal so our suffering has meaning. A positive meaning that enables us both to endure and to grow stronger because of it. That is the tragedy. Not the waste of the good as A.C. Bradley saw it in his book on tragedy. But to embrace the dilemma of suffering. All sages have sought to live well, diminished of suffering. Except artists - in particular the tragedians or tragic artists - whom acclimatized themselves to life so perfectly that they wholly embraced life's tragic dilemma. That even the best life comes with its own suffering. And everything you truly want requires it. And yet when we embrace the suffering involved in a pursuit, we embrace a mirage and in its place is strength, profoundness, prosperity, creativity, and transfiguration. Life tests you and those brave souls who stepped out to suffering out of love for life, walked through a mirage, stepped through the waterfall unknown of the other side, and found an even more self-fulfilled, self-rewarding, and beautiful life. The negativity of life comes to our minds as a trick, as a test of oneself. Only those who love life can step out towards it and discover the beauty on the other side.

The Greeks saw suffering as a positive because without it they would not achieve anything great or become strong. Whenever they suffered they thought “okay that’s my body telling me to become stronger.” They didn’t only do this, but art and athletics was a huge part of their culture: which both approach suffering positivistically. They saw suffering creatively and transfiguringly. It was a creative aspect of life and the source of all good things. That life was by its nature, naturally life enhancing and balanced in antagonistic-harmony. They didn’t call it 'bad' and they didn’t want to lessen or abolish it. But they also saw that a strong person well accustomed to suffering couldn’t suffer a little or less than they had the capacity for, otherwise they would suffer in a bad way, suffering from diminishing returns. It would make them worse - not all suffering made them better only the kind that made them stronger. Positive suffering increased strength and a feeling of their own empowerment. But the wrong kind of suffering defeated that strength and power. So they practised suffering well, with athletic games and artistic competition. Their culture was agonistic centred by nature (meaning that competitive was as a key aspect of their culture and state). The result of this was the procreation of the Greek genius, which in their day was as common as musical talent in ours.

We suffer because our strength wants to congratulate itself. Suppose someone wanted to show they were strong, they would lift a heavy weight to congratulate their strength. It’s through its antagonistic opposite that we congratulate our gifts we possess. What were the key aspects of Greek culture? Healthy competition, healthy bodily physique, intellectual vigour, the beauty of forms, a musical ability, dance education, sex, wisdom, the artistic disposition towards suffering, and life’s natural balance of opposites. There was an interesting insight made on the Greeks, that why would a culture so rich, happy, positive, human, healthy, colourful, intelligent, why would it NEED an art like tragedy, which they esteemed enormously, an art which is full of suffering. It was argued that a culture which has a superabundance of strength will seek out suffering as a means to take pleasure in its strength. It can not only endure it, but it can enjoy itself, by creating a vision of life where itself is NEEDED where all its strength is called on. A circumstance where its abilities, it’s own nature, is demanded. The Greek poets would compete every year in dramatic contests of tragedy. Let alone is democrat civic nature, they used art in the relationship to suffering. And tragedy - an art of suffering - was the esteemed art form of the culture of the most colourful, positive, strong, intelligent, artistic culture ever known.

There's also something to notice in Ancient Greek literature, particular Homer and Aeschylus, when the character is going through pain and suffering, they don’t shout out in pain, they speak beautifully, eloquently, and poetically. Completely unnatural. Not because this was realistic to do so, but because it was how they valued and understood suffering and so became part of their aesthetic. This was due to Archaic archetype of the poet. Poetry is a courage in the face of all things. An aesthetic projection on to suffering. They act like gods out of a dream, they speak and think like poets and talk like gods out of a dream like a divine beast. That it was related to "noble" character. In the Odyssey, the Greek's favourite intelligent and wiley hero, he was made to go through near unending suffering, which was all a sign of his noble character - not that he suffering, but how he was well-constituted to suffering. The poetic abilities of the archiac poet’s archetype was that they could alleviate and overcome painful experience through aesthetic response. In experiencing the onset of suffering they were able to project aesthetics in response - not indulge in it, but to transcend and be transguried by it in order to overcome it. To make their own suffering, too small for them, that a dragons bite would feel like a pin prick. Look at their sculptural work too, even way on to the Laocoon (based on a scene from a lost play by Sophocles), they made this sculptures that was beautiful to look at of a terrible events, full of beautiful physicality of Greek example and heroic depiction of horror. Aesthetics are really just character, the character of the art, which within it contains all the values and perspectives of the artist and their culture. Suffering might just be a value and perspective that we've misunderstood for a very long time.

The Greeks were too early in history, that they saw no need to make any formal explanation for it. So they didn’t see coming the formal contradictions of value that was to come by religions which proceeded them and were subterranean even to their culture. Perhaps less did they realise how much Socrates and Plato would influence those contradictions. But sentencing Socrates to death for corrupting Greek culture with his philosophy perhaps shows some premise to it. For them, because it was so good in itself, they could expect that people would CHOOSE a worse disposition, would prefer to become pessimistic. The Greeks didn’t have a formal religion as we understand it, no doctrine or dogma, and in fact not even a word for religion. The closest we can say is a culture, in which there was no evil, and every aspect of life was received with gratitude and a kind of artistic embrace. For the Greeks what can we imagine suffering felt like - off course much like all our own, but also more than that - it must be thousands of years that people have felt towards suffering like a Greek had. The Greek experienced suffering unlike we modern men. They suffered orgiastically. As a victory, as all men and women feel when they have conquered themselves and overcome themselves - which suffering is essentially asking one to do. An elation, ecstasy, and euphoria came over them. The feeling of suffering of profound meaning. A hundred times the ecstasy of blood that one experiences when lifting weights or a long run, when they’ve overcome their former boundary of capacity. Suffering demands greater and unfamiliar spaces. It desires to extend its parameters. Otherwise strength becomes so abundant it feels claustrophobic. That is what it feels like to suffer from strength. When one suffers from strength, it is strength desiring to congratulate itself and to test itself. It dreams up goals for itself. Goals that not only demand great strength but demand great suffering. In every suffering one grows in capacity of strength to bear suffering to take responsibility for that suffering. The greater the suffering the greater the capacity for life. To have strength one must first need it. The suffering is the sidekick of strength, perhaps the ammunition of strength, for one only has the strength that one needs. Suffering might well be a intuitive response and extra sensory perception, an actual instinct, that we should listen to. That it might be the wisest aspect of ourselves. In Ancient Greek tradition, Zeus guided men to acquire wisdom through suffering. And that in its necessity it makes brave, strong, and wise. The Tragic age for Greeks was, lets face it, a period of secularisation, in a similar way that our secular world still celebrates Christmas and Easter as pleasurable traditions. In other words, out of the pleasure of art and festivals. Their mythology was born of an age much older than Homer who had written his works in the eight century, and the free creativity he uses it within his work it suggests he didn’t himself believe in the mythology, so much as saw the use in it. The state itself used it as merely a way of having cultural unity among Greeks. The artists found a use for it as an aesthetic response to suffering. They had an aesthetic projection for every aspect of life. Tragedy was not a misery play. They strong enough for it and it was a way of showing and congratulating their strength and love of life. It is only through the stories we tell and share that we affirm and celebrate what we are, that we solidify and cement, perpetuate and exalt our values of life.

When their body called out excruciatingly they discharged this too into the word of God. Their body had a message for them too. As a discharge of their own physiological sickness. A message that only the ill-constituted could. That this person needed to make others like themselves inorder to survive. That sickness was no match for even a strong few. This person needed a whole people to be just as ill-constituted as themselves. This happened to all religious people who think they heard the word of God. What all religions have horrifyingly deduced was that suffering was a cause of the body and is only eliminated with the absence of the body. Therein the religious set about a prejudice on the body, not only, but on all that is natural about the body. In so doing, set about falsefying all that is natural in life, the very nature of life itself. So that their consciousness was acclimatized to their physiological sickness and inept/inability to acclimatize to life was satisfied. They willed above all nothing for this life. Everything within life became overwhelming. What could be discharged from the body was attributed to God,, whilst what could not and remained bodily was called Devil. The entire pursuit of life was to leave life behind, leave the body behind, toward the afterlife - in the belief of a place free of suffering. A subversion of the nature of life. That sanctioned the whole human race to live under their gross misunderstanding of life for thousands of years. All suffering is the body calling to itself more strength. It proceeds to create a goal and a vow in order to maintain that strength. But not even the religious founders were able to realise this. And we might not suffer until we actually have the strength to suffer. We are body and nothing but. And all that is in life works for our advantage.

Suffering not as a mistake or a problem, but as a benefit. Suffering is a positive valence and creates all higher kinds of life. It is the creative aspect of life. It creates all profoundness of living. It the source of all wisdom, creativity, procreation, work, all richness of life. Its the transfigurative aspect of life. I really cannot speak of suffering highly enough. But great suffering means precisely, great strength, great goals. The greater the suffering the greater the goal. We suffer to raise up strength, we use that strength to create goals, we make our promise to ourselves to achieve goals. We give our suffering meaning. We may not actually be able to proceed in life without giving our suffering meaning. To the extent that it may constitute what we mean by meaning of life. Not as a universal meaning, but a personal one. Each individual prescribing their own meaning in life, based on the capacity to suffering, and in turn the meaning of given to that individual degree of suffering. The meaning of life is in the process of suffering-strength-goal-vow. One recognises the pain, creates the strength, forms a goal, and then makes a promise. Now that suffering has a fulfilling meaning. Our suffering and our strength are always holding hands, exchanging places, dancing in rings towards our goal, laughing like playful children.

Mankind is overwhelmingly special, too special for religions to have comprehended. They had rather waste us. ‘Man’ is merely a mask to hide his greatness. Modernity was built on declining suffering to a trivial level. It made life trivial and a man a trivial specimen of man. We must not have little goals in life or we will be little people. We only dream of those goals which we intuitively feel to have the strength to achieve. No goal comes to us that we do not believe we have the strength to achieve. It is the body desiring its dragon. We must not minimise our goals - not our suffering nor our strength. And give ourselves great vows that give our life meaning. We celebrate our nature through them. Suffering can also be a sign of superabundance of strength and power - more often than not it is - and equates with pleasure. Life has a natural enhancing nature. All suffering is pregnant with possibilities. It is suffering that is the source of life, and the source of all value and meaning. The original source of happiness and pleasure. The source of great goals and strength. The source of every positive aspect to life. Without suffering life would have no value or meaning. The only suffering I ward against is one of diminishing returns, whether it be trivial or too great. Suffering in the endurance of transfiguration must not make us weaker. We can see that the root of the problem in modern men, beyond its religions origins, might also be something much more common. Man’s subconscious laziness, which is what essentially divides all men from genius. The problem is always, not that people didn’t try, but that they didn’t go far enough. Laziness is mankind’s greatest handicap. He is even more lazy than he is fearful.

There is still the problem of decadence. That when a person suffers, they do the more harmful response because it’s comforting (alcohol, drugs etc) or the do the painful thing. It raises adrenaline because it’s animalism is lacking in modern life and it gives them back a feeling of adrenaline (such as cutting themselves). These people have an attraction to pain as a revenge on life. To severe suffering, that instinct to grow, enlargen. Life has told them that their suffering is their fault, they should feel self-contempt, that they should feel pain for pain. This only encircles them in unending trauma - they cannot get rid of suffering. It’s clear that although they hold no desire to abolish suffering, they use it only as anarchy upon life. Cursing it. They make themselves not stronger but weaker. And so suffer even worse for suffering with less strength to endure it, or worse and commit suicide. Is suicide endemic to modernity? Have we learned to cope with modernity simply by trivialising life so we don’t suffer too much. Remain cheerful and moderate? But also comfort seekers? Desiring comfort trivialises and minimise suffering, which minimises the bodily demand for strength. Trivial people want luxuries because it’s comforting, profound people want luxuries as an aesthetic expression of their own qualities, beauty itself comforts, and as a means to come back to health when one loses it again. No one should trivialise life, it trivialises animality and vitality, it trivialises profundity. Controversially, one needs strength to suffer well. Compassion on the other hand diminishes strength to encounter their suffering. Compassion weakens the spirit, and in the midst of suffering one needs every ounce of strength. It can stir up more self-contempt or feelings for revenge. It seeks accountability but places it wrongly. Compassion does not only not help someone overcome suffering it worsens it. Pity is fundamentally the value that suffering is bad. One should of course feel empathy and desire to help others, but see that they need to regain strength, health, and well-being, because they need to cope. Pity only weakens already waning strength. It is not for no reason that ancient men depicted man as being made from clay. That he was not only made hard, but sculpted, his mould fired and burned, that it all brought man to life. Enduring a repetitive and unchallenging job which trivialises us, doesn’t make one better. That diminishes one’s animalistic vitality and is corrosive to the human being - this isn’t the kind of suffering we mean. We live in a world made by trying to minimise suffering but its made us stronger and now we suffer from too petty and trivial suffering, desiring for more profound suffering from adventurous life and to be more profound people. We can only have great strength great goals great vows great pleasure and great lives through great suffering. It is the source and catalyst of all good things in life. Native American Indians would wander on to the forest for days until they saw a vision. Isn’t it obvious that the vision sprang from the ecstasies and sweat of the body, a hallucination from the body. We like the Indians, must listen to the body and see its visions, made not by rationality, but by sweat, and instinct, after (figuratively speaking) days of wandering in to a dark wood. It must come to us. And at the proper time. For after all, exercise makes us stronger, but incorrectly done will result in injury. We build to a goal. The athlete knows there’s no other route to a strong and healthy body but exercise. That involves some endurance of suffering. One doesn’t always want it to begin with, but once begun one feels and sees how positive it is. Sometimes pain in the process is a pleasure.

What’s interesting is its not a whole distance from us today. We, who live in an age of sport and arts. Who want to be athletes and artists. All our popular music comes out of an aesthetic response to suffering. It all cane from African slaves spiritual songs, chain gang prison songs, work songs, and the black African gospel church. That became blues and soul music, and rock n roll.

One of the main problems of the value of suffering in history has been because it is been called spiritual suffering. We are physical creatures not spiritual creatures. Suffering has always been attributed by religions that it was a connection with the divine, or a route to the divine, or an distinction of our spiritual cleanliness. This value, that still is the succubus of our own age, was swept away and changed underneath the culture of Greece and Rome by the subterranean Abrahamic perspectives which reversed this value because they needed an explanation of suffering and called it 'bad.' All the weaker side of the world accepted that too. All those who were too weak for strength over their suffering and needed to blame and revenge and resent others and taught self-contempt upon others for causing suffering. But they say religions preach love. One can suffer profoundly for love. Love gives suffering meaning - without explanation - but with meaning. And more than that, love is state wherein one sees things wholly different from what they are. Hence religions always say they are religions of love. For love too can be a way of believing in things as they are not, and therefore suffering for things as they are not. As an aphrodisiac narcotic in to the world as a lie. How much reality is not recognised in love, not even seen, how much one endures and submits to in love. “What is faith? Not wanted to see what is true.” The wisdom of religion is the manual of self-deception. Religion was created for the unacclimitized to life. They could not suffer to the degree or in the same way the strong and powerful, and well-constituted to life could suffer. To live they had to lie. And would rather make false of the world than perish. The value of suffering as 'bad' comes down to us through the Judeao-Christian-Islamic cultures. But even in Hindusm and Buddhism which tries to abolish suffering to reach nirvana would mean there would not be a response for strength or goals etc. as needless and has to be diminished and abolished, arguing that suffering is a result from desires (often meaning unclean or excessive desires). But along with this one would diminish and abolish every value and meaning of life, every worthiness of life, every strength, goal and greatness of life - because our suffering is the source of all of these things. There would be no great goals or the great strength to achieve them. Although it does teach patience with our suffering. Suffering for us is not a route to the divine but a sign of the divine in ourselves - as a stimulant to realising our own greatness. Only the Greeks offered this conclusion. Socrates and Plato also went against these Greeks. Both the Romans and Christians were influenced by Plato who was un-Greek. Un-tragic. Who took his foolishness seriously. What is Plato worth at all compared to Homer, Stesichorus, Aeschylus, Heraclitus, Diogenes, or Thucydides? Each of which are cures and medicines against Plato’s anti-Greek thought. It’s said that Plato was a dramatist in youth until Socrates told him to burn his work. Clearly he was writing satyr characters with a seriousness. Mixing tragedy and comedy, in the way that his own diaologues try to mix many styles of writing. Comedies we take all too seriously - a proto-novelist. Even the profoundest Greeks thought of bad things as simply foolish, a comedy, and laughed. They never took them with seriousness. Tragedy was embracing the dilemma of suffering. Comedy was laughing at foolishness that caused actual bad things. Socrates and Plato didn’t understand either. This affected the Greeks so much that even Sophocles began to question the nature of tragedy and his later works have nothing of the tragedy of his early works. When Euripides began composing tragedies, he wrote merely melodramas not tragedy. Gradually suffering was being valued as 'bad.' And our present mental health is a long drawn out consequence. The Greeks and Romans were better than us in this regard us not because they suffered more or less, but because they suffered better.

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