Two weeks after the marriage, I knew it was a mistake. All we had in common was movies, sex, and hamburgers.
— Bettie Page on her second husband as quoted in BETTIE PAGE REVEALS ALL, currently streaming on Netflix. Thanks to Fabrizio for tipping me off to the movie, which I enjoyed a lot.
Click on the image to enlarge. (If you catch my drift.)
1) The language used in pro-critic writing versus enthusiastic-amateur writing can be a tip-off. Jargon (of whatever field we’re talking about) is a sign of familiarity with the topic, but even more importantly, it’s a signal to fellow members of the club. But new-style web reviewers have little to prove, so they are able to express their thoughts in clear and un-technical language. Jargon can, in the correct context, be clarifying, but too often it’s used to obscure and obfuscate. As if the more tortured and opaque your prose is, the smarter you must be. (Plenty of lib-arts critics have made this argument before.)
2) The rise of the web has enabled the explosion of criticism and informed discussion of topics that were previously deemed by the “gatekeepers” to be unworthy or unimportant. If there is a hobby, interest or collectible out there in the world, sure as sugar there’s also a passionate group of devotees talking about it in minute detail on a blog or forum. The mainstream Cathedral may consider it beneath them, but the devotees don’t care. This was brought to the fore when Chandler Burr was briefly appointed “fragrance critic” at the New York Times. The big media exploded in sniggers and derogatory comments. But for those people who have been witnessing the amazing growth of online forums and message boards full of hundreds of knowledgeable “perfumistas” (as I have), as well as those who consider perfumery to be a form of art (as I do), this was a rare example of the media “getting it”.
3) More and more people are twigging to the expensive fraud that goes by the name “higher education”, especially when it comes to the liberal arts. It has been alarmingly clear for a few decades that the academy is a place to become indoctrinated and coddled rather than educated. The great thinkers of the past discarded with a self-congratulatory sneer, for failing to live up to today’s standards of enlightenment (and I use that term very, very loosely). White male? Screw ’em. Had uncouth opinions on people of color? Unworthy. Wrote (painted, composed, designed, philosophized) in a manner not currently considered fashionable? Don’t waste your thoughts. It’s a terrible and sad symptom of current culture that people can consider themselves qualified to comment on the present without understanding the past, in the context of the times. Even if you’re planning to chart your own course, you can’t be an iconoclast without understanding what you’re rebelling against. As one wise artist told me, “You can’t break the rules without first knowing what the rules are.” If universities are no longer able to provide this basic grounding, curious people will turn elsewhere.
4) Horn-tooting time: for a prime example of how enthusiastic aficionados can be as enlightening and informative as the pro critics, look no further than this here blog. Paleo Retiree excepted, none of us have made lifelong careers in the fields we tend to write about, yet here we have some of the best culture-content on the web. I’d rather read Fabrizio and Sax’s blog posts on movies than most “official” film writers. Same with Blowhard, Esq. on books and art, PR on architecture, Sir Barken on popular music, and Fenster on….lots of stuff. (I’ll modestly admit to coming up with a few choice words on musical theater and food.) The ability to communicate to the average smart reader who isn’t an expert in the field is, as they say in computing, “a feature, not a bug”.
. . . I’m left wondering how much the arrival of so many engineer-scientist types on the public-discussion scene has driven the growth of the Dark Enlightenment / HBD / Game / Reactionary part of the online world.
I was in the midst of drafting a long comment to this post, complete with links and a video, when I got booted off by Word Press and I lost all the text. Word Press is remorseless about such goofs as I understand it. So rather than try again and get booted off again, I am taking the liberty of drafting a new post.
Here’s what I remember writing.
I expect you are correct, Paleo, in looking for a link between the voices of scientists/engineers and the growth of a certain kind of right-leaning thinking such as DE, neoreaction and maybe even Game (but see below regarding the latter).
Certainly Moldbug is a techie. But what to make of that?
You’ve got the blog Outside In arguing as follows:
Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable. The nerds are steadily finding ways to do all the things ordinary and sub-ordinary people do, more efficiently and economically, by programming machines. Only the nerds have any understanding of how this works, and — until generalized machine intelligences arrive to keep them company — only they will.
Well, that’s political philosophy, of a sort. But it is also maybe revealing in other ways.
The right-leaning blog The Watchword is Excelsior notes that quote and makes the link between neocameralism and autism, linking in turn to yet another right-leaning blog making the argument more explicit. A lot of good points about the inherent friction between an engineering view of life and a political one, no matter how you define the latter.
Now, autism and political philosophy . . . that is a kind of ad hominem argument that I object to on its face for the sake of propriety, but nonetheless find compelling/persuasive.
I mean, Moldbug himself plays the part pretty well, at least of the nerd, if not of the autistic individual who is damn sure that all that peskiness has been consigned to the proper box.
And that’s just his odd affect. Then there’s the problem of content.
This is just the last few minutes of a longer presentation, one which is worth seeing in its entirety. I have struggled like many others with Moldbug’s prose and figured hey let’s see how he does just putting his philosophy into plain English, as he attempts to do here.
He starts by staking out pragamatic terrain–what is to be done? He acknowledges it is complicated but says he likes to “simplify” things (!), and he tries, ever so fitfully, to proceed “simply”.
Honestly, though, when he is asked to just get up and say what he means, he is a lot more Chauncey Gardiner than Vladimir Lenin or Isaiah Berlin.
Over at your post, you and Will S. got into a fun back-and-forth about surgeons and novelists. Is it easier for a surgeon to go on to be a novelist than the other way round? Perhaps, though novel-writing and many other non-scientific pursuits have their own need for discipline.
In this context, I would agree that it is possible for a software engineer to develop a coherent political philosophy, and I look forward to that prospect some day. Maybe it’s even been done already. . . but I don’t think MM is the one to have done it.
Maybe all he’s saying is that we need to be more like Singapore. But that’s not all that controversial–big sections of the Cathedral are already in favor.
Meanwhile, Paelo, doesn’t Moldbug’s affect make you wonder about how closely DE and Game are to be linked? Are DE types typically Alpha? Just asking.
How well would Mencius do in a bar room?
Or Nick Land.
Or Ramzpaul?
My conclusion: not very well.
In sum, I see the connect between science/engineering and DE/neoreaction, but I don’t take the “movement” (?!) seriously.
One of the things that has fascinated me most during my years of hanging out online is the way the web has given many superbright, very logical people an outlet for their thoughts and observations. Until 2001 or so, nearly all of the people who were getting their thoughts about culture and politics into mainstream print were English, Arts and History types. But since 2001 we’ve seen a lot of engineers and scientists putting their ideas out there too. And god knows they’re just as bright, if not far more so, than the usual American Studies crowd. Plus: they’re organized, they can think logically, and they’ve got a lot more respect for facts than lib-arts people tend to have.
The arrival on the public-discussion scene of these people, mostly guys, has really shaken up the usual liberal-arts crowd, IMHO. It’s been hard on their collective ego, for one thing. To my mind, the beating that the egos of the traditional opinion-makers have taken helps explain the tone of hysteria that sometimes shows up in discussions of “the end of journalism” or “the end of movie reviewing.” Imagine being a pro movie reviewer, for example, and being forced to wake up to the fact that many people are just as happy to take part in informal online discussions as they are to read reviews. And now imagine waking up the additional fact that some of the people who are using blogs, comments, forums and Amazon viewer-reviews as outlets are in fact just as smart, informed, funny and perceptive as you are.
Plus I’m left wondering how much the arrival of so many engineer-scientist types on the public-discussion scene has driven the growth of the Dark Enlightenment / HBD / Game / Reactionary part of the online world. After all, they do tend to like systems, they aren’t afraid of blunt facts, and they do tend to have more politically conservative views than the usual LibArts crowd does.
Very curious what everybody else’s thoughts on the matter are.
Think cupcakes are passé? Try cake cups instead. (I tried these at Bee’s Knees Greenwich Village outlet this past winter, and I can confirm that they beat cupcakes like a cheap rug.)
Was Uruguay’s poor performance in the World Cup due to Brazilian customs confiscating their dulce de leche?
What makes for a good guitar solo? Lord knows it’s easy for them to slip into self-indulgence, but it seems to me a good solo functions a lot like a good bridge — it elaborates on the melody or chord progression to open the song up, giving it a larger, more epic feel. Conversely, good solo works almost like a standalone piece — a mini-song within the larger song, just like a good fight scene is like a mini-movie within the larger one.
What’s your favorite recent solo — be it guitar, keyboard, or otherwise? Above is mine, already cued up. It lasts 1:14 and for me contains just the right amount of elaboration, improvisation, and repetition. Sounds to me like the guitars, Dan Auerbach, is working off primitive pentatonic scales (The Black Keys are solid revivalists, not innovators), but he never lets it devolve into wanking. He frequently (at the 4:35, 5:05, 5:13, 5:30, 5:42, and 5:52 marks) finds a hook and repeats it, thereby grounding the music — and giving you a chance to groove and rock out — before moving onto the next riff.
Related
Back here I shared my embarrassingly overeager fandom for this band. (Hey, it was the first concert I went to in a long time, gimme a break.)
As regular readers probably know, every now and then I like to put on my Movie Geek hat and make a semi-inane list of movies. I’m not sure why I do this. Perhaps it’s because I like to evaluate my aesthetic responses. Perhaps it’s because list making appeals to the organizer-historian side of my personality. Not only does pushing the titles of these movies up against each other generate a certain frisson, it helps me take stock of my tastes and preferences. What does it mean that I’ve chosen these particular movies? What do my choices say about me? What would have I have chosen 10 years ago? A week ago? Tomorrow?
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the ’90s, which probably means I’ve clicked on one too many Buzzfeed links. But whatever. I think most would agree that the ’90s were not a great time for movies. And yet one could make a decent argument that they were better than — or at least fundamentally different from — the ’00s. Think about it: We were still getting sexy, adult-oriented pictures in the ’90s, and the meanings of those pictures seemed neither freeze-dried nor vetted by committee. Film had yet to be replaced by digits. CGI was still this new, only-used-here-and-there technique. And superhero films were still something of a rarity. Seems like a different time, doesn’t it? Is it fair to say the ’90s saw the close (or death rattle?) of the era of traditional filmmaking? I wrote a little — and somewhat incoherently — on this topic back here. Let’s not go there again.
Without further yammering, I give you some of my favorite films of the ’90s. As usual I make no special claims for artistic greatness or for-the-ages noteworthiness. And I won’t be offended if you disagree with my choices. On the contrary, I’m interested in learning what your favorite ’90s flicks are.
The Last Bolshevik (Marker)
Vanya on 42nd Street (Malle)
Six Degrees of Separation (Schepisi)
Romance (Breillat)
Where the Heart Is (Boorman)
A Confucian Confusion (Yang)
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
Carlito’s Way (De Palma)
Haut/Bas/Fragile (Rivette)
Before Sunrise (Linklater)
The Matrix (Wachowski/Wachowski)
Irma Vep (Assayas)
Bitter Moon (Polanski)
All About My Mother (Almodovar)
Three Kings (Russell)
Mon Homme (Blier)
An Autumn Tale (Rohmer)
Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil (Blier)
Babe: Pig In the City (Miller)
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (Girard)
From the ashes of Japan we have Rain Tree Crow, which is basically the same people but too pissed off to use the old band name. This one goes down as one of the many albums birthed by rancorous hellish recording sessions, complete with walk outs. And as sometimes happens, a masterpiece is born.
Well naturally, one can’t go to this legendary New York restaurant with “tea” in its very name and not order tea, right?
The Russian method of brewing and serving tea is a bit different to what we’re used to. Obviously a samovar isn’t practical for a high-traffic restaurant, but I was still a bit nonplussed to see tea bags used. You’d figure a tea room would do better. Not to mention the tea selection is pretty standard: you choose between English Breakfast, Darjeeling, Oolong, mint and chamomile. They weren’t bad, just ordinary.
The thing I like best about tea a la Russe is the fruit. Tea is sweetened and flavored with either jam or fruit compote. Here, in the background of the photo near the sweeteners, you’re given a small bowl of sour cherries in syrup. I’d probably eat crushed glass if it came with sour cherries, so given my affinity for flavored tea it was a no-brainer. The sour/sweet combination is one of my favorites, and the glass mug is a nice aesthetic touch. The dish of sable cookies was free, and they were a perfect, meltingly buttery complement. The blintzes in the foreground had a double-sour hit of cherries and tangy farmer’s cheese which caused swoons all around.
I’d not have gone there, had a friend (whose birthday we were celebrating) not confessed to a longstanding near-obsession with the place. It is every bit as gaudy and overdecorated as you’ve heard, but in a manner which appeals to me (better this than another starkly minimalist boîte with crammed-together tables, right?).
The food was delightful, frankly better than I’d anticipated given the tourist-trap reputation and wildly varying reviews, and the service was excellent (including a knowledgeable, not-pushy sommelier). I’m of the opinion that there aren’t nearly enough Russian restaurants around: I still have fond memories of the pelmeny and piroshki at the late, lamented Rush’n Express on East 86th Street. But for a special elegant meal, the RTR will impress the heck out of you. And if you’re lucky you might even score the booth where Dustin Hoffman ambushed Sydney Pollack.
Just for the heck of it, here’s a picture of some lovely blini topped with caviar.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
