We are becoming slowly aware and perhaps suspicious that the notion of the “Sincere Self” in fact laid the pitfall for kitsch, and the ready-made feeling. This sensibility that Phillip K. Dick describes so well in the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or that Holden Caulfield dismisses as phony. In our culture we have come past the point where an idealization of truth has led to the permission of immoral behavior. If you have met a devotee of Osho you know what I mean. “I betrayed you by sleeping with my sister because that was my truth.”
And yet what is real is not formed of whole cloth. Real is made, real is haptic. The way Michelangelo is wonderfully modern and hand-made and his characters Brechtian. H.C. Westerman made the real out of hick bottlecaps and wood. He made his own body. He deserves his own face. Not the face we are given at 20, but the face we earn at 50.
There is the Renaissance notion that our humanness is “natural” to us. Our inevitable corruption somehow a total and complete fiction woven of the whole cloth of social education. This belies the actual experience of child rearing. The Lords of Flies are real.
Far be it from me:
On Friday, January 20, 2016 Donald Trump got the conch. As I watched the new President descending the steps of the Capitol to the deus for his inauguration all I could think about was William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. But instead of a group of British boys who find themselves deserted on an island in the Pacific Ocean that sends them down a dark path, it is America and the West who have officially lost control of order and morality, and are now descending into total savagery and chaos.
Golding’s novel takes place during an unspecified nuclear war when a group of 25 boys are marooned on a tropical island. Although things get off to a reasonable start with Ralph elected leader and his fastidious organization of teams for shelter-building, food-gathering, and constant maintenance of a smoke signal fire, it doesn’t take long for the group to devolve into disarray with Jack seizing control and turning the boys into savages.
What began as an island of reason, peace, and hope, eventually becomes an island of impulse, disorder, and pure evil. Instead of relying on innate wisdom and critical thinking to save themselves, the boys are overtaken by Jack who promulgates a collective fear of a mythical “beast” hiding in the jungle. To appease the beast, Jack impales a pig’s head on a stick as an offering. As the flesh begins to rot and flies surround it, the pig’s head becomes known as the Lord of the Flies. Suddenly, murder, torture, pleasure and vengeance — all fueled by groupthink — become more important than civilization itself.
See the full article here BY BRENT LAMBERT • JANUARY 22, 2017
“Nowadays, of course, we are all of us trained to believe that the moral life is in ceaseless flux and that the values, as we call them, of one epoch are not those of another.” said Trilling in distaste.
If the values of Hick are not our own. They what are they? Are these people sub human, pre civilized? Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Conversation isn’t possible if one person is yelling at you across a tv platform, a barbershop, squawk-box, while the other is adding context to a nuanced paragraph. Like Sontag I am revolted by Hick and yet mired in it.
This was Stu Loeser’s best advice to me in our kids yoga company media training. Speak in simple digestible phrases. Stop talking like you read or listen to NPR and the Times every day. “But I do,” I said. “I can tell.” He said.
Stu was press secretary for Mike Bloomberg and we are all fucked.
Just to qualify my previous remarks, these choices are not racial, these speech objects that I denigrate here are just intellectually retarded. I am with Trilling on this. The liberal agenda would be aided by an educated and civil foil, a discourse, that sought governance over napalm.
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now 1979 The Cowboy Hick in all his splendor aspiring to be something greater than Charlie, greater than the Soviets. He aspires to a California Wonderland. He aspires to Surf.
As Trilling says “The classic literature of our century whose masters took the position that, in relation to their work and their audience, they were not persons or selves, they were artists, by which they meant that they were exactly not, in the phrase with which Wordsworth began his definition of the poet, men speaking to men.”
So in the context of #metoo the art of Pablo Picasso, Chuck Close, and Kevin Spacey are now suspect, they were separate from the genius who talks to man, the god who talks to man, and the man who raped the woman: A Hick move, and a Trumpist conceit if I ever saw one. I do agree that moral lives matter. And yet I look out across the distance of time at a misogynist and anti-semite and see a wonder of Love. Is Degas not a humanist that celebrates beauty?
My Hick magnets. We have other kitsch magnets, but these are the aspiring.
“Which is not to say that the moral temper of our time sets no store by the avoidance of falsehood to others, only that it does not figure as the defining purpose of being true to one's own self.”
Here Trilling is speaking of the moral equivalency of the authentic artist and poet. What is lost is the moral evolution of the sincere man. Has it taken the complete umbrage, humiliation, and moral disgust of an entire gender and multiple ethnicities to bring this point of view to bear?
It is uncomfortable to be sure, to be this thoughtful and nuanced. Prof. Bonesteel, a specialist of graphic novels at SAIC experienced the discomfort of adjunct professorship (and of vulnerability in the marketplace) while inadvertently offending the LGBTQ community for his choice of reading material. He resigned in disgust.
Our culture needs desperately adequate forums in which to speak softly and still be heard. I can say with some experience acting as I did as the Modern Korean woman in Kate Hers Rhee’s performance at SAIC “How to be a proper Korean woman” that Korean women in the audience literally told us during the performance that this was not the appropriate venue for this articulation of notions on self.
As an adopted Korean woman. Kate strenuously objected to her treatment by Hick Korean Taxi drivers and wanted to speak to that insidiously normative behavior.. a taxi driver becomes a Hick when he, like the Sophist, speaks to that which he has no bearing. He is aspiring in that moment. In Uhmerica, we have a representative democracy, a Republic, precisely due to the reality of an uninformed public.
As my old friend Kevin Russell of the giant Austin, Texas punk Country band the Gourds sings:
The doctor cut me, the lawyer lied
Stop yer waiting and just go
Don't be saying what you don't know
Forgive me, but the video above is Kevin Russell’s later band Shinyribs performing a Gourd’s classic
Let me address again the transitive performance above from Chicago in 1999. An African American studies professor from SAIC wrote that our performance and its subsequent scandal reminded her of how within sub-cultures there are unspoken secrets that are embarrassments and indiscrete reveals to that overculture. This becomes fodder for upbraidings by its members. The hairiness of Indian women, the infidelity rife within the gay community, the pussyn***er remarks between niggardly white men nominally sniggered off as hipster racism. These transgressions are humiliating for the subculture and not without their own punishments. The most cutting? To suggest that person is not truly of the subculture. She is not really black, or Korean. Her identity is now suspect.
Kate Hers Rhee If life gives you lemons, make lemonade 2017
Let me speak here more directly to the notion of Artist as fabrication:
If you delve more deeply than the standard take of Small Town by John Cougar Mellancamp you begin to hear a nuanced understanding of Hick, His song’s consistent anthemic refrain Aint that America is undermined by the prescient notion that little pink houses and other consumptions of the Great American fantasy like that of the presidency possibility for everyone will lead only to a death by oxycodone and other pills that kill. Dreams that just kind of came and went.
(As Born in the USA was similarly misunderstood and trumpeted as a Republican Anthem).
Mellencamp has always beautifully described the Hick in America while also being that enlightened Hick himself. Now reinventing himself as a Billy Jo Shaver type folksinger.
His own Achilles heel (his Indiana hickory Hick move) is that he ever tried to name himself as Johhny Cougar. There is strong correlation here to Bruce Springsteen’s evolution as a public figure. Bruce started very self-consciously as a beat poet and folksinger. His evolution into working class hero and country Hick is a contrivance and a dumb down (Therefore an aspiration).
See the transition from Blinded by the Light to Glory Days:
In the first column Bruce seems to be trying a very American elliptical and rhythmic style of beat poetry. Say like Dylan looking at Ginzberg looking at Whitman.
from Tangled up in Blue by Bob Dylan
Early one mornin' the sun was shinin' I was layin' in bed Wondrin' if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still red. Her folks they said our lives together Sure was gonna be rough
from Howl by Allen Ginzberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
from Song of myself by Walt Whitman
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass-ing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
Following the melodic pulsing beat of the line that is both free verse and an inconsistent meter (though all three tend to follow lamb or trochee where one syllable is stressed and then followed by another unstressed;) Springsteen in Blinded by the Light is clearly, to my ear, placing himself in this tradition of All American Beat poet.
And then in the second column you can hear a very different cadence. Perhaps this is now a film noir story telling like Raymond Carver or James Ellroy. He is just telling a story straight without trying to maintain a poetic affectation. Maybe much in the same way as Bukowski
from The Great Lover by Charles Bukowski
I mean, at that place in east Hollywood
I was so often with the hardest numbers in town
I don't speak as a misogynist
I had other people ask me,
"what the hell are you doing, anyhow?"
This sincere affectation as Hick is an unequivocally successful and also truly Hick. I would like to say again that I believe Springsteen is seeking and digging for something epochal and American and is sincere in that interest. It is affected of course, as Art is all at once performative.
Andy Warhol Reagan ILLUSTRATION BY BRAULIO AMADO