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Gradual familiarization

A time to mention, quite a time to live. We see, we illustrate, we experience, we relate, we leave it for later when we should probably jot a few things down first.

Via The Paris Review, Theodor Adorno speaking about the effects of televised music – From an interview in Der Spiegel (February 26, 1968).

SPIEGEL

The culinary element seems to us to be especially prominent in music broadcasts. A candlelit Karajan and Menuhin concert framed by the plush furnishings of a Viennese salon; Bach passions and cantatas in the obvious setting, a baroque church. As the distinguished vocal soloist is singing his part …

ADORNO

The listeners make furiously sorrowful faces …

SPIEGEL

… And the camera fondles lovably chubby-cheeked putti and Madonnas. Is this acceptable?

ADORNO

It’s horrible, the worst sort of commercialization of art. Here the mass media—which precisely because they are technical media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit ancient keyboards. I think it’s more than high time for purging the mass media of all this illusional kitsch and of the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria that’s forever haunting it. … It engenders an absolutely inadmissible image, above all because here an illusional element also supervenes; it’s as if one were present at some sort of shrine where a unique ritualistic event were being enacted in the hic et nunc—a notion that is completely incommensurable with the mass reproduction that causes this same event to be seen in millions of places on millions of television screens. … One can never shake the feeling that such things must be regarded as grudgingly doled-out servings of schmaltz within the politics of programming, wherein the so-called desires of the public, which I have absolutely no inclination to gainsay, are oftentimes employed as an ideological excuse for feeding the public mendacious rubbish and kitsch. I would also include in this kitsch the kitschified production styles applied to the presentation of so-called—I might have almost said rightly so-called—classic cultural artifacts.

SPIEGEL

Take for example Brahms’s German Requiem on the second channel. The images concurrently broadcast with it were of trees, forests, lakes, fields, monuments, and cemeteries.

ADORNO

The acme of wanton stupidity.

SPIEGEL

Professor Adorno, a pedagogical argument is also always trotted out in connection with this. According to this argument, televised music gives consumers a preliminary introduction to the work and thereby stimulates them to attend concerts or opera performances in person. What do you think of this kind of musical therapy?

ADORNO

It’s wrong. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.

Image: Robert Rauschenberg Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art, from the series Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno1 959-60

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That Newspapers Are Generally Terrible

Like so many, many things, because of a fealty to investors and/or corporate governance that equals the same thing, newspapers are under a lot of pressure these days. This creates an enormous problem for newspaper reporting, which itself creates one Gargantua of a feedback loop, where newspapers keep sucking, reporting is inaccurate and sensational, newspapers keep sucking, the profit margin shrinks, reporting gets more sensational, which makes newspapers suck more, which makes them less profitable… ad abundantiam, they get skewed hyper-capitalistic sensationalist status quo.

A fine example of this, if one is needed, rests in the deflowering of the supposed takedown of the IPCC and the work of scientists connected to it. It would seem to be enough, on a blog about green, to write about how all the pushback against climate change and global warming is a bunch of wishful thinking on the part of first-worlders, Randians and energy suppliers. That even though they really really really want to believe it’s bunch of bunk and we can keep on digging and spewing and burning for as long anybody wants to, we actually can’t.

But NOOOOOOOO. You can’t just do that. Because green isn’t just about climate real’ry or fakery but about financialry, and because it is you’ve got to get a handle on at least a few of the interlapping conflicts going on and how they relate to the preservation of a way of life. It’s what one might call a complex system.

It is a way of life, right?

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No Ideas

That seems to be the case with this almost-unbelievable-except-for-everything-we-know-about-Republicans editorial on Cap and Trade by Sarah Palin in today’s Washington Post. Really. I mean a lot of people are concerned that newspapers are dying, but the dynamic changes when you realize that they may be killing themselves.

About climate change, like economic recessions and health care, the Republican party has no ideas beyond tax cuts and “drill, baby, drill”. And it’s a throughway to understanding how we got to the present predicament in which all three are intertwined and strangling us, if not a purgative toward transcending it.

I won’t detail how one party bent on resentment and victimization is unhealthy for our politics. But for the planet, time’s a wastin’ and the stakes are high. The thing is, as I have tried to outline here from time to time, a sustainable economy and a healthy ecology are very closely related. Having no ideas for how to make them work together with some degree of harmony is simply not an option. That’s what we’re here to figure out. We do politics as a means to solving problems based on mutual consent and the public good. A nefarious strain of anti-public has infested the party with the (R). They lionize the private sector without even acknowledging its significant other – and after a while, there are few routes back to a healthy respect for the public sector. Unwilling to defend it in certain instances, they forget how to do it all. And here they are, with no idea.

Again, as with newspapers, are they dying or killing themselves?

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What a Local Paper Looks Like

We all tune/dial up/surf/click on/re-direct to the NYT so often that it becomes, without our even realizing it, natural for us to project ourselves onto the grandest scale. And while there’s little wrong with that – and so along as the NYT remains the best source of actually reporting – our relationship to local news sees a thoroughgoing change and our national paper becomes another way we lose local connections; we have to pan out now just to select the spots where we pan back in.

And not just news, obviously, but issues become obscured when only viewed through a wide-angle prism. While I wouldn’t suggest we need to be led by any simple wisdoms of uniquely local warranty, and hope to avoid the condescending loyalty to any kind of flyover provincialism, we should realize that many national reporters/columnists strive to lead us back to these very perspectives, albeit from a distant, centralized point of entry.

By just this sort of scaling and re-scaling, you can see how things might get misconstrued or confused, accidentally or otherwise, and generally difficult to discern, much less do anything.

But looking at the way things might and often do happen – on issues related to food, health care or transportation just to name three – the power of motion is all local. Have a look below at this unsigned, front page admonition on a new health department, and a couple of things jump out, even beyond the ‘reality show with actual people’ category. On this scale, it seems that no amount of agitation against ‘socialized this’ or ‘abstinence that’ would or could make any sense. Imagine that, with or without all caps.

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What a Local Paper Looks Like

We all tune/dial up/surf/click on/re-direct to the NYT so often that it becomes, without our even realizing it, natural for us to project ourselves onto the grandest scale. And while there’s little wrong with that – and so along as the NYT remains the best source of actually reporting – our relationship to local news sees a thoroughgoing change and our national paper becomes another way we lose local connections; we have to pan out now just to select the spots where we pan back in.

And not just news, obviously, but issues become obscured when only viewed through a wide-angle prism. While I wouldn’t suggest we need to be led by any simple wisdoms of uniquely local warranty, and hope to avoid the condescending loyalty to any kind of flyover provincialism, we should realize that many national reporters/columnists strive to lead us back to these very perspectives, albeit from a distant, centralized point of entry.

By just this sort of scaling and re-scaling, you can see how things might get misconstrued or confused, accidentally or otherwise, and generally difficult to discern, much less do anything.

But looking at the way things might and often do happen – on issues related to food, health care or transportation just to name three – the power of motion is all local. Have a look below at this unsigned, front page admonition on a new health department, and a couple of things jump out, even beyond the ‘reality show with actual people’ category. On this scale, it seems that no amount of agitation against ‘socialized this’ or ‘abstinence that’ would or could make any sense. Imagine that, with or without all caps.

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Two Left Interwebbed Feet

The maelstrom and convulsion we entered some time ago, which we have been so slow to notice even as the  passing scenery has begun to repeat like the same bunch of clouds and mountains, documented in the incredibly shrinking newspaper sense, here. Maybe cartoon language is one of the few we still understand. It’s got to have something to do with that ‘all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’ sort of thing. If that’s true, good for you. Anyway, that’s an excellent piece above, so thanks, Andy.

You might wonder, and I can only hope you do, why the clockwise newspaper drain swirl, financial melt and eco/energy colossus are all coming of age at the same time. It could make you curious about what we’ve been feeding them. Born mostly at about the same time – say at or near about the time governments began insuring East India companies in their forays into the New World – all of our societal sub-structures are breaking up into mini ice floes, drifting out to Dieu knows where, as we struggle with how to tie them together again. As much as that might be an unfortunate metaphor, it can’t help but seem – even to a kindergartener – like practice for something.

To that end, and pardon the pun, it’s always better take in a geographer-anthropologist matinee:

PAUL SOLMAN: Of all the cultures you’ve studied that have tried to deal with severe economic dislocations, what’s the marker of resiliency?

JARED DIAMOND: It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome has to do with the role of the elite or the decision-makers or the politicians or the rich people within the society.

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they’re motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they’re likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

That last bit via the Poorman.

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Sunday odds and ends

So, I notice that the print version of my current Flagpole column that’s been out for a few days has not been made available online; maybe they’ve got some kind of blockage in their intertubes. Can’t say for sure. Look for further erratic behavior on this front. Newspapers are in trouble if you haven’t heard.

So is the South, with regard to new targets for renewable energy, apparently. Why the congressman won’t include the rest of the statement, that the South doesn’t have enough renewable energy sources if demand continues to spiral upward and onward is anybody’s guess. Thanks Ben, for the heads up.

There’s more on this and other issues on Georgia Public Broadcasting this afternoon. I tend to have a way of saying things people don’t like, so I’m sure there will be a little something for everybody.

Update. The internets are nothing if not self-correcting – and at lightning speed. New Flagpole column is here.

Posted on

Sunday odds and ends

So, I notice that the print version of my current Flagpole column that’s been out for a few days has not been made available online; maybe they’ve got some kind of blockage in their intertubes. Can’t say for sure. Look for further erratic behavior on this front. Newspapers are in trouble if you haven’t heard.

So is the South, with regard to new targets for renewable energy, apparently. Why the congressman won’t include the rest of the statement, that the South doesn’t have enough renewable energy sources if demand continues to spiral upward and onward is anybody’s guess. Thanks Ben, for the heads up.

There’s more on this and other issues on Georgia Public Broadcasting this afternoon. I tend to have a way of saying things people don’t like, so I’m sure there will be a little something for everybody.

Update. The internets are nothing if not self-correcting – and at lightning speed. New Flagpole column is here.