Saturday, September 08, 2007
Sing with angels, Luciano
Moved by the spectacles of Luciano Pavarotti's funeral & another inarticulate speech by our president, blogger Jurassicpork rails out against American culture & education by praising 19th Century Italian opera & the paintings of traditionalist artist Andrew Wyeth in Art: Do We Have It?. I enjoy Pavarotti & Italian opera & Andrew Wyeth. But I also revel in the "skewed relativism" that infuriates Jurassic. I've been promoting & skewing culture in a relativistic manner for a long, long time. I was fascinated by the odd juxtapositions of genre & style & quality well before I appreciated the mixes & contrasts in any self-conscious way. That's what happens when one had, as an impressionable youngster, an unsettling feeling that the only thing Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Supremes, Napoleon XIV, The Beatles, & Petula Clark had in common was that they all had hit records in the Top 40. New York AM radio was playing only the hits in a rotation that made no musical sense, but was nonjudgmental.
In popular culture, Pavarotti coexists with everything else, neither for nor against anything else sharing the stage. He understood this. I could argue that an unwillingness to separate "high" from "low" art is inherent in Italian culture. As one might expect in a country built on the ruins of the Roman Empire & where masterpieces of art & architecture are as common as billboard advertisements.
There's nothing remarkable about someone being both a political leftist & a cultural reactionary. But let's have no cranky, conservative snobbery about "adolescents whose sole cultural contribution to America is in wearing its clothes backwards and having committed to enduring memory the lyrics of thousands of heavy metal and hip hop songs while not being able to perfectly recite a single line by Shakespeare or Keats." William Bennett could say that, or a grumpy uncle. I had to memorize chunks of Shakespeare & Tennyson (& Longfellow & Edward Rowland Sill) as tedious assignments from bored old public school teachers, & I'll tell you it did me no good. Amazing that I wasn't totally turned off, & sought better teachers & other paths to classic poetry, & to contemporary art & music. George W. Bush may be more representive of his generation of Americans than we are willing to admit.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
In popular culture, Pavarotti coexists with everything else, neither for nor against anything else sharing the stage. He understood this. I could argue that an unwillingness to separate "high" from "low" art is inherent in Italian culture. As one might expect in a country built on the ruins of the Roman Empire & where masterpieces of art & architecture are as common as billboard advertisements.
There's nothing remarkable about someone being both a political leftist & a cultural reactionary. But let's have no cranky, conservative snobbery about "adolescents whose sole cultural contribution to America is in wearing its clothes backwards and having committed to enduring memory the lyrics of thousands of heavy metal and hip hop songs while not being able to perfectly recite a single line by Shakespeare or Keats." William Bennett could say that, or a grumpy uncle. I had to memorize chunks of Shakespeare & Tennyson (& Longfellow & Edward Rowland Sill) as tedious assignments from bored old public school teachers, & I'll tell you it did me no good. Amazing that I wasn't totally turned off, & sought better teachers & other paths to classic poetry, & to contemporary art & music. George W. Bush may be more representive of his generation of Americans than we are willing to admit.
Labels: culture
