Irony and Action

Somewhat recently, I came upon several flyers advertising artists and poets with speaking engagements around the area. In each description of the artists I noticed a trend; several noted them as being post-irony or free of irony or ironyless. I was not aware that we have foregone the epoch of irony. Even a professor of mine once said in response to a story, “There is already too much irony in the world.”

Yet, I can tell there is something to this. Irony is a sour candy and a dog biscuit to philosophers proven right, but it is also a tool of passive cowards, as with the style of fashionable young things too afraid to dress like adults, or with the kind of shoddy writing apparent in a site like Stuff White People Like. Irony as base and a form always leads to the same place: the bargain table at Urban Outfitters.

But Hampshire has taught me the pleasure of measured, nuanced irony as a result of its unending display of programs without humor. Programs aimed at action an interest as opposed to disinterested cultural production. Last night I saw a play performed at College students and adults (the president of the school was in attendance). The play was not precisely designed for the audience, rather for, I believe, high schoolers. Its aim was to be educational and therefore its art identity was somewhat compromised. It produced direction without the need for interpretation. But now I am speaking generally of this type of action/activist oriented practice and I’m creating an oppositional relationship between that practice and irony. One one hand you have skinny white people who are to passive to do anything other than exist as jokes and on the other you have something far more problematic: the activist sans irony.

My school celebrates action and faculty and students alike often dismiss traditional studies of the humanities as without purpose (I would like to think they believe it decadent). It lauds student projects that can be summed up in terms of its direct effect or direct observation, and if the project has a seemingly beneficial impact on society it is held with high regard. But what is to be expected from a group of twenty year olds who should not be expected to have a choate world view? We get micro-climates of action and response. The essence of these climates is difficult to speculate on and the subject deserves close study. What exactly are the results of tens of thousands of socially engaged bourgeois youth with each their own project? I don’t know. We’ll see. I can however stress the importance of irony within this equation. Without irony you have tacky gaudy philanthropy.

 

 

 

The dissemination of timely thought

“The fault I find with our Journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it-oh! I don’t know shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?”

- Mm Swann in Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann

Televised news had humble beginnings, being required by the FCC that all national carriers produce at least some educational programming. Edward R. Murrow’s program, with his penchant for oratory, could barely keep afloat save for his well known controversy with Senator McCarthy. People were not interested in news on their entertainment platform. I know nothing of the history and rise of cable news but I can comment on the popular end at which it has arrived: a useful medium for a family to watch over a fifteen minute breakfast or for weary worker laying in bed and watching television before going to sleep: any easy way to get news.

Many of us find ourselves untrusting of the big TV news names for all their absurdities and ugly personalities but I think few people capable of understanding why exactly it is that they distrust these institutions without having Jon Stewart deliver them a prepared video segment that speaks for itself. It’s been a while since I’ve watched anything like but I think I can narrow it down to three points that illustrate the immaturity and drossness of TV news (and other mediums that I will get to), those being: philanthropy, rampant derision to both pedantry and rigorous language, and finally, emotional narcissism. In each case we see a reflection of what many people want scripted to the heads on their television screens.

If you read an AP bulletin or read stories from local newspapers, you find they all follow the simple formula for writing a news story. It begins with a summation of the event and then goes into detail, answering the questions the reader might have. Even editorials and pieces that contain interpretation and critique should do the same by concisely getting to the point. This all makes sense but it was sometime in the mid 20^th century that journalists started using the term ‘banging around’ meaning that a news story can prose off in different directions before getting to the thesis, thereby pulling the reader farther down the lines and into a greater investment of time. I suppose they believe this makes the thing sound more human. It poses a problem for a medium which is supposed to be an efficient and timely source of information, but the same problem has accelerated and mutated in different ways. For this I use ‘philanthropy’ as Jacques Barzun would, that being to promote human interest and empathy by means of softening the medium. I saw a FOX news segment where a host interviewed two guests in a crowded bar, which was simply a studio dressed up as a bar. The host and the men sat on stools and the clamor of the bar patrons could actually be heard throughout the segment. Is this somehow more casual than seeing an interview take place on a round table with a black backdrop? Is it just like any conversation I have with pals in the bars I visit? It’s silliness. I do not expect my professors teach me in a restaurant or in my bedroom; senates and parliaments do not convene in parks. Anyone with right sense would see such a show as FOX has created and would not be able to get passed its tacky producer, who has created some illusion of a space that might interest people where planning and content wont.

Madness and/of/in/with/without civilization

Yesterday I spent the evening in the city, at a vegetarian café-yummy bar food. This morning I woke up surprisingly early but went back to sleep and then woke up several more times. Tonight, time spent with D and B.

I’ve noticed this news piece about Esmin Green, a woman who died on June 19^th after having spent some 24 hours waiting at a hospital without being cared for. Security guards and other hospital workers are seen walking up to her, even prodding her, after she falls from a chair.

I don’t usually go for responding to news stories but this one is too inline with my thoughts to pass. I was reading Jacques Barzun earlier and he makes a point to say that it is fallacious to call modernity wholly evil, and to do so is defeatist and undiscriminating. That being said, I often despair at the state of certain institutions whose seemingly unflinching insensitivity contradicts the foundational principles by which they were created: insurance; banking; public education; and, of course, caring for the sick and mentally exhausted.

Every time I go into a hospital I see the same bored, soupy face on every staff member, the same dumpy face you see on rude guys who work in Radio Shacks and the DMV. The excuse for the lame bodies at those jobs is that they are responsible for customer’s needs that, are important in the grand scheme, but seems fleeting and insignificant in the moment. But as a hospital worker, you are part of the end of lives, the crushing despair, but also of birth and of those moments where people come to understand fragility, and what it is they have to lose.

What is it that is so distressing about this institution?

The healthcare complex is absurdly complex and therefore must be laid out into a series of protocols in order to be somewhat manageable: everything recorded everything through channels, monitored, and prioritized. I was once raced to an ER because of a heart pain I was having. I was rushed ahead of people who were waiting in the lobby and in corridors, visibly bleeding and in pain. I was rushed ahead of people because heart problems take priority over others. This is good for heart attack victims but it seems wasted on my un-alarming case of pericarditis. I was filled with morphine and several nurses rushed in, as did doctor. I was also given the services of a ultrasound technician and the opinion of a specialist. Then I waited on a bed in a rather large room for some six hours. And the cure of all this trouble? Ibuprofen. I simply had to take Ibuprofen for a week. And here I am reading a story of a woman’s existence unraveling while tired workers couldn’t even pick her up and lay her on a bed. The news stories simply say she was suffering from some kind of break down, I have yet to read the cause of death. I can’t help but wondering if she was killed by her own brain’s refusal to exist in such ugliness. She was said to have been sent to the hospital against her will and sat in a waiting room for nearly 24 hours.

Some people from the hospital are being fired and NY hospitals want to reduce waiting time from 13 hours to 10 hours. Such farcical reforms speaks to the lack of hope I can muster but I am always thinking about how this thing promised to us in our constitution can be shared and given without the loss we are used to giving.

The offense

My school is an institution of accelerated progressiveness. Some students deal with issues that our civilization probably won’t deal with unless we go all Logan’s run and have to micro-manage our ethics. The result is that I have become fascinated with everything offensive produced by the petty sides of our brains. I think about the words “nigger” “cunt” and “fag” often and look at propaganda created by bigots throughout the 20^th century. I do this because everyone, left to right, feels there’s a war against their idea of culture going on all the time, and that some action toward right speech and right think will lead to mannered and peaceful life. But of course, as Foucault recognized, even the most intelligent of our lot act in modes of exclusion and hatred, such as teachers who tout globalization but neglect students from the south and rural poverty stricken America while supporting often vain, philanthropic missions overseas, or those who laugh at Christian believers while fellating similar fraudsters like the Dali Lama.

I have never seen any measure in our society aimed and leveling these inconsistencies, no move to use strict logic to weed out the errors that infect daily life. Instead, there is a world of sounds and people who exist in a world of inflating and deflating cells of power, and they use the ability of their language and capital to degrade what they see fit.

The bigot words I said I was into represent some of the few chaotic materials left in our language. It is in those words that me may glimpse at how humans will be able to deal with older hatred on a dialectical level. Will they be reincorporated or will they be expunged?

Back from

I travel for some four nights. I’ve read hyperbole saying we may be nearing the end of cheap travel and left will be travel for the elite, for business, and all other travel will be afforded to those who are either passionate enough or clever enough to move about the world in the mode of older adventurers. The Poet nearly died on the Alps without a penny, was forced home, regained himself and pressed east once again. I think it’s awful that I have never thoughtfully considered stowing away on some commercial ocean going ship. The urge to go ex nihlo.

Chicago 1

Traveling was almost too easy. Short flight, short lines. I continued reading Jacques Barzun’s book that I purchased a whole year ago on my last trip here.  Chicago is cloudy and warm.

My family met Ari’s and they hit it off pretty well. We ate at the Prickly Pear, an interesting little restaurant that serves big, multi-course meals based on what the chef has and feels like, without any sort of menu. We started off with seasoned tortilla chips and pico de gallo, later they set up a sort of taco bar with fillings in little copper pots. There were things like chorizo refried beans and a sort of Mexican ratatouille. It was byob  and we bought a few bottle of wine and beers which they put in a big ice-filled kettle along with their stock of old fashioned sodas. It’s rare to see an American restaurant that operates like this one. Our ritual of food service is too formulaic to the point where I  barely need to speak with a  server because  I can look at just about any menu and  visualize exactly what is going to be on my plate and I will know the technique used to prepare the food. With the cult of the consumer attitude, we have lost our ability to trust people with expertise in service, allowing homogeneity of  experience to breed.

Today we’ll be seeing the Jeff Koons show at the MCA and there will be food to be had at the taste of Chicago.

Summer Cycle

I must not search for phrases, as Antoine Roquentin says. Self-discernment should be a shrewd practice. I have trouble with this. Tomorrow I spring for Chicago for a few days to see Ari. I anticipate it will be very hot and that I will have fun, but any anticipation of activities or sightseeing is nullified by those visions of being with a lover, of not being too alone at least for a while.

I packed after purchasing some good cigars for Ari’s father. I spent the weekend staying up very late after each shift of work. It has been a while since I have had a job that I hate so little. I think this is in part because Denver’s Mercury Café is a rare institution that isn’t overfed on money groveling. I also enjoy working at a place whose purpose is direct: people come and enjoy themselves, they eat and drink and dance. That is the business.

I worked at the wake of the late Don Becker and a man threw up on the bar after closing but little to no events actually transpire during the summer. It would be my routine ennui if I were wealthy. I jump-rope in the afternoons and read with a cigar every now and then. I work late and otherwise I go to see a friend or spend some time at a bar or a café, and then I am suddenly in the middle of the summer with an urgent sense of vacuity: I should be writing; I should be in something other than stagnancy. I cannot get into the honest “self-concern” and the “patient labor” Kierkegaard prerequisites for truth against untruth. Without change… etc. Tomorrow Chicago.

Denver’s First Friday Art Walk, June 2008

I had never been to one of Denver’s first Friday art walks, but with the city’s burgeoning art scene (the new addition to the DAM, the MCA, the Clifford Still Museum, etc.) I was ready to see its independent, or at least its commercial art scene.

The art district is on lower Santa Fe, a predominantly Latino area in Denver, made up of apartments, bungalows, and modest arts and crafts style houses. We arrived in the evening and the streets were packed for blocks. We planned to go to a praised Mexican restaurant but people were already waiting two hours to get in. We went directly next-door, to a shabby but delicious also-Mexican joint that was also pretty packed. I had a burrito made with cheek meat. My family and I sat on the patio and we could see hordes of trendy white people descend on the area. The street goers fashion was utterly homogeneous. Men either wore cargo shorts with flip-flops and t-shirts with inane screen printing, or they wore the typical after-hours young business-man uniform, consisting of clunky shoes, jeans, and should-have-been-out-of-style-two-years-ago striped dress shirts. Women were wearing, and seem to wear everywhere in America on Friday nights, those short cocktail dresses that resemble nighties or tit-curtains. They look like single pieces of fabric thrown over a body. Some women can pull them off but most look like little girls going to a wedding for the first time.

I speak on the people and their fashion first because that’s what apparently dominates first Friday; it’s about play and playing. For example, the first gallery we went to was called the Union and was some kind of co-op of younger, skateboard artist types. There were lots of terrible collages to be had; lots of magazine pictures with cut out eyes and over-saturated colors. Nothing of emotional or intellectual (or even formal) interest, as was the case with each gallery I entered. It’s as if each artist was either peddling smut (lots of nudes that belong in men’s magazines) or had taken a page out of recent art history and replicated it without any verve, without engaging with the core issues that made that art important.

There was this one woman’s retrospective set of works (1980-90) and it was all bad abstract expressionism with a touch of minimalism, which comes out looking like something you’d see in your dentist’s waiting room.

I saw another artist who made paintings with 3D elements and vertical structures, like Jasper Johns ensembles that referenced Barnett Newman’s zips. I did indeed see a poster of Johns’ Flag in his studio.

We had to move through the galleries at a hurried pace. I don’t think my sister was enjoying the atmosphere so much. Few people were looking at the art and preferred to look at the people.

When it comes to contemporary art I’ve always been biased toward the avant-garde and formal innovation, but what I am seeing more and more often is either folky art with the same kind of sentimentality of Grandma Moses and other pre-war folk artists, or otherwise posh décor. But I am willing to keep searching for good art in Denver.

Big day in New York

Last weekend I spent the day in New York. I’ve always felt silly for never getting myself there and I still feel silly that I was only able to spend a measly seven hours walking around.

The trip was through a service that Mt. Holyoke offers to students and alumni, where everyone is dropped off at the MET in the morning. The ride was tiresome and I slept most of the way. On 5^th avenue, I walked into the met with my pencil, journal, a tweed jacket and an orange. The place was loaded with obnoxious tourists, flooding into the Hellenic and ancient Egyptian exhibitions. I made my way to the European paintings and saw many familiar sights: paintings by Batoni, David, Daumier, and Poussin. I really took to Marie-Denise Villers’ Young woman drawing (pictured.)

I went on to the exhibit on Gustave Courbet, and was finally able to see the works I’ve been studying up close. The trip felt more of a reward than a learning experience, as I was so familiar with the paintings I was drawn to. I didn’t feel like lingering, as is hard when there’s a current of people pulling you from room to room. I can say that connected with a few paintings: In memory of my feeling (Frank O’Hara) by Jasper Johns, Death of Socrates by David, Arbuit Macht Frei by Frank Stella, and Modigliani’s Italian Woman. (I put up another image by Frank Stella because I could not find a good image of the painting I saw.)

After a great deal of time in the MET I went to Times Square and Rockefeller plaza just so other people wouldn’t say “You didn’t see a,b,d,x,y,z?!”

I didn’t take very many pictures. I saw a group of activists protesting outside of a Madison Ave. diamond and jewelry store, advocating for divestment from Israel. That has been a hot topic at my school so I thought it was funny to see it there, in front of a small business. It’s interesting to me that so many Americans are pumping up Anti-Islamic sentiment while Left-leaning American activists are thinking Anti-Zionist. But maybe I’ll write more on that later.

I had lunch and went to central park. Then I went to the Guggenheim to see Cai Guo-Qiang’s show. They had low lighting in the atrium and the place was packed. It was like a tornado of hot bodies moving up toward the ceiling. Many of the pieces were installed so that the audience was forced to walk with the pieces, only inches from them. The staff looked severely stressed, twitching ever time a thoughtless patron came within centimeters of bumping into a piece. I believe one’s body should be calm when viewing art, so the mind can get excited, but it was impossible. I was sweaty and needed water at each water fountain I passed.

I went a nearby bar and had cocktails until I was ready to go home.

Decadance

Over the last few months, I’ve read several decadent novels, including A portrait of Dorian Gray, A Rebours, and the Satyricon. The decadents were quite incestuous. Huysmans started by making a novel that praised the Neronian writer. Then, Oscar Wilde’s famous novel contains some direct descriptions of both A Rebours and the Satryicon.

I’ve taken to these three novels and so I’ve decided to start on a story in the same vein. The trouble is, each one of the stories largely involves aristocratic protagonists and we really don’t have those these days. I’ve come to believe that not even billionaires are above the rank of bourgeois. Unless you are a member of the working class, you are an outsider of some sort, a cleric of some kind, you are a member of an aesthetic that is interested in consumer goods and family, and not much else. Andy Warhol said this:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just thing, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

Even though they can have countries bombed, I see lots of images of CEO’s grilling while wearing average polo shirts. Sure, they own exotic things, but they do not have the refined decadence that the old aristocracy had, they just more silly things than the rest of us. This isn’t to say there isn’t a vast disparity at play here; it’s to say that we’re all boring.

My protagonist will contrast Dorian Gray and Des Esseintes by being hard-up for cash, but with the same pompous attitude. It will be a study in contemporary decadence. What is that anyway? Everything is decadent for a middle-class person. I can purchase chocolates and rich liqueurs whenever I want; I have virtually unlimited access to free music and art; and I pretend to be fashionable and critical of the world as dandy or a flâneur would. It’s truly bizarre that these extravagances have become common place.