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 [] LA Times: Ruling Halts Internet Limits. The government may well fare better in the high court. The justices are more inclined to say government-subsidized speech is not necessarily free of regulation. Four years ago, the court upheld a federal law that required the National Endowment of the Arts to take into account "general standards of decency" in awarding grants. [Tomalak's Realm] That’s interesting. I ought to look up the NEA ruling before I spout off, but prudence never stopped me before opening my extra-large size can of yap on topics I know nothing about. The NEA is important, but it ought to be creating grants to foster a national culture, symphonies, &c. More local endowments ought to be made by bodies closer to their communities, with a better sense of the local aesthetic and axiology—is that the word?. Artists who want grants for more experimental projects and installations ought to rely on patronage of the old sort: go to the eccentric rich, create art celebrating their status, and use the spare time to create art of your own. The discipline of subordinating one’s artistic vision to an arbitrary one (the iambic pentameter, the patron, representationalism) has never hurt a work of art or its guiding aesthetic that I know of; the opposite case is harder to make, I think, though I haven’t thought about it much. As for the CIPA, librarians should be the keepers of the local standard of taste and decency, being closer to their communities than a national body. 4:40:13 AM    comment [] I was at Vintage Vinyl today looking for a replacement Sky Cries Mary RttIE (nope, couldn’t find it) and forgot to check for this. Nineteen Songs With a Single Beat. "Diwali" is an extraordinary rhythm album named after a beat by Steven (Lenky) Marsden. By Kelefa Sanneh. [New York Times: Arts] 4:05:49 AM    comment [] Ooh, how serendipitous. Milky Way Tidal Forces Rip Apart Star Clusters. The disruptive tidal forces of the Milky Way have for the first time been caught in the act of ripping apart a dense cluster of stars, astronomers reported Monday. By John Noble Wilford. [by way of New York Times: National] Actually, there’s another show right after it that I partially missed because I just set my TiVo to Unfolding Universe and didn’t check for context; isn’t that always the way? The narrator seems to enjoy rolling Supermassive Black Holes off his tongue right before each commercial: luckily there’s a Saturday showing. 2:55:34 AM    comment [] Am I ready for talk-back? Well, ne’ertheless, here goes—comments! 1:20:53 AM    comment []

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