“Ordinary Americans, frankly, resist such notions as best they can, but they receive little support from the nation’s professional intellectual class, of which the artistic class is only the most demented and most estranged. People in most cultures throughout history, after all, have historically ‘stuck with their own,’ been ‘ethnocentric,’ thought their own culture best. …
Somebody’s Idea of An Argument
Just finished talking with the cops about an incident last evening. When I came home last night (June 26, 2006), I checked our mailbox by the road before heading up the driveway. The mailbox contained a used condom, or a condom doctored to look as though it had been used. Now there are two basic …
Cool Off the Rack
“Cool required no specialized knowledge. Cool could be bought (but hopefully not cheaply). Cool was hip plus demographics.” [John Seabrook, Nobrow (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 188].
Mix and Match Identities
“When you say about a painting, a music video, or a pair of jeans, ‘I like this,’ you make some sort of judgment, but it’s not a judgment of quality. In Nobrow, judgments about which brand of jeans to wear are more like judgments of identity than quality. These judgments do not depend on knowledge …
Salt and Vinegar
I spent a good portion of the day in the air, working my way back to you, babe. No, no, that’s not right. Working my way to the ACCS convention in Covington, KY. And, as is my wont on airplanes, I got a goodish bit of reading in. The book I finished today was Ann …
No Kidding?
“When you do away with the old High-Low [brow] hierarchy, people become more obsessed than ever with status” [John Seabrook, Nobrow (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 168].
Before the Dawning Sun
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! So then I cried with all my heart, Hear me, oh Lord, I pray. I will keep Your statutes pure, Again I cry, please save me now, And I will keep Your holy law. I rose before the dawning sun, And I …
False, False, and False
For those who for some reason want to follow the saga of the most recent secularist and hypocritical (but I repeat myself) attack on Christ Church, you can see a particularly ripe sample here. This kind of thing is of course crazy. So why respond to it then? Why give the time of day to …
Why NPR Listeners Think They Are Aristocrats
“For more than a century, the elite in the United States has distinguished themselves from consumers of commercial culture, or mass culture. Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status—the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically …
The Movie of Me
“I stood there for a moment longer in the yellow tornado light while the techno music in my ears reorganized my consciousness into cleaner lines than the gangsta vibe . . . implanting in the folds of my cortex the way poetry used to before I got a Discman and made pop music the soundtrack …