Tuesday 4 June 2002

After watching Thunder Road (1958), Dave Hickey and his teenage friends sat around the table: ...we just gave up and admitted that nobody was cooler than Mitchum. Not even Elvis was cooler than Mitchum, and thus it was, in recognition of this fact, that I made the best decision I have ever made in my life: I decided that if I only dated women who thought Robert Mtichum was cool, I would be okay—and, amazingly enough, as long [as] I did, I was, and still am. This may sound like a joke, but I’m being perfectly serious. This is what culture does: It correlates us in relation to one another. So, again and again, applying the Mitchum test, I found myself in sexy, dangerous, kaleidoscopic relationships that, somehow, at their heart, were grounded in calm equanimity. When, on the other hand, hormones and ambition drove me to ignore the Mitchum test, I immediately found myself adrift, lost and confused in alien latitudes of the gene pool. So the Mitchum test worked, like a charm, and I still don’t know why. Nor do I know what it says about Mitchum or myself of the women who found us both presentable. [Dave Hickey, “Mitchum Gets Out of Jail,” O.K. You Mugs: Writers on movie actors.] “This is what culture does: It correlates us in relation to one another.” And in a society diverse and heterogeneous as this one, culture becomes even more important than when a single, unified monoculture dominated our little Gemeinschafts, our village ethics. When a man and a woman of a village, say, meet, it can be presumed that their values are similar, having been bred out of the same matrix of cultural values. But in our patchwork society, when marriage and filial or friendship and commitment are at stake, where culture is a matter of choice, values are not readily discernible. This used to be solved by longer courtships, I think; nowadays it seems to be solved by abnegation of commitments undertaken. It is imperative that those to whom we plan to dedicate no small part of our lives have some similar compass of values, if only to agree on the fundamentals of proper conduct, friendship, commitment; if we mean anything at all by “dedicate.” 10:08:37 PM    comment [] Am I ready for talk-back? Well, ne’ertheless, here goes—comments! 1:20:53 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Richard Allan Baruz. Last update: 11/17/02; 2:19:05 AM.