This indulgent Twee sensibility is ornate and yet horrified by the Vile.  Violence has no place in the home nor in the heart of the cashmere. It pretends that the violence necessary for Empire is invisible and divine in origin. It is as distinct a conflict as Kashmiri Shaivism to the Brahminical order of Vaishnavites.  It is the Racaille again, the Rococo response to the unnecessary and puritanical self-restraint of Martin Luther.

Classic is perhaps easier to start with. Less a sensibility then Classical or Twee. The ic as I have described before in earlier writings is denoted linguistically as a category. Class itself means set. Though to have class is again a sensibility and leans into Twee. “Very Classy.. nice. We got the best of everything, here.”  So Classic is to say that I have here in my set my favorite things. It is like a museum. It is like a collection of ephemera. 

Those of us who have mastered a sensation, (As my step father Jim can hear tones for example.) they hear what to the rest of us or to children is shit.  Steely Dan is shit to my ears.  Just as Barnett Newman might be garbage to your eyes. The ambrosia that Rip Torn eats, Shiva like, is shit to Albert. And the effort to turn, the effort to learn, to Master is forever suspect.  Albert was a funny kid. Garry Shandling was a funny kid, so was Seinfeld.  They might say if you’re not funny you will never be funny.  And yet, ask them. Ask me about painting. We believe we learned it and worked fucking hard to do so and we even believe we could teach you. And yet as like conspirators, in our Krishna heart of Krishna hearts, we suspect it can’t be learned.

The threat is real now.  The instinct is that these people, these Hicks and Hucks and Kings, and Kushners, given their brain shape, their disfigured amygdala disposition that is easily measured and weighed should just be removed. Forcibly. There should be a suspension to the rule of law. There should be a national cleansing and rewriting of the constitution that favors the majority of us who live in the cities and live peacefully. 

It is extraordinary how easy it is to slip into rational dehumanizing behavior. Extensions of logic that prescribe state sanctioned violence as an answer.  The cleansing act, the Romanoff, The Hick move, (the aspiration) the genocide has come from the left with Lenin, and it has come from the right with Hitler.  It has come from the yogi and the non yogi in Partition and with Robespierre respectfully, and it has come down to A Final Answer.

The alternative is too complicated for the Hick.

It is almost as if the ability to hold two separate ideas in one mind is like the many facets of a diamond. Richard Freeman, the jewel of yoga in the Western Hemisphere has made a sincere effort to evolve and become one sincere being that is always still and yet contains gravitas. There is no code switching with Richard. He is too presidential.

Several times I hosted Richard Freeman in Taipei, Taiwan where I was teaching yoga professionally. I commented then how surprising it was that we were both from Illinois, both Hicks from the center of the center of the nation, the middle of the middle, and yet somehow he was born a Prince and I was born this pig. 

There were no adult Virgil Tibbs in my life. Perhaps he was reminiscent of Perry Mason for me yet all the while oozing sexual and intellectual charisma. Vagal tone.

There were Great country dumb men in my life, sure, but no man like Tibbs.  My grandfather Ted and my father Bill oozed sexual charisma, it wasn’t just a black thing, no. They just didn’t have the critical disinterested intellect of Virgil or Perry.

What is significant about Tibbs is his silhouette. He is defined and mired by his environs. He is made present and distinct by this miasmic swamp of whiteness.

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.

Norm ran the talk show circuit a while back deconstructing what it is to go to a play. It is a perfect example of his genius. On a bit you can see him practicing on Youtube in a number of different venues.

It’s called Norm MacDonald hates Broadway plays.

He sets up the bit by explaining that he likes living in the city, but sometimes his mom from the boonies of Ottawa comes down to visit.  “She’s not big city people like us, Dave.”  He play acts as a big city guy taking his hick mom to Broadway to appeal to her petite bourgeois sensibility. He describes the polite fictions we are asked to believe about theatre that a table and chair is an office and a little picture with a moon behind it must mean we are in the nighttime. “But it’s not really night time, Dave.” And then he says, and this demonstrates his surgical thinking “I was just sitting there wondering what it would really look like on the tv.”

With this fell swoop we are lost and at sea in a world of truth. What is truth now?  What is real? Isn’t the TV a more real experience of a thing then our actual encounter? What is actual?

He, as the Brahmins will teach you, is born country. He transcends caste, born to power, to Kshatriya. And yet, he pursues Art, and the art of Hick sincerely. 

He pursues the artist merchant class within the 18 substratum of Vaishya sincerely. His pretense as a Waylon Jennings devotee is complete, sincere, and believable. We as the viewer, the society, suspend belief before the spectacle of Colter Wall’s great sodden vibrating Voice.  Just ask Baba on “Mid-Morning-Mojo” (CKUA Radio Network in Edmonton, Alberta) might say, “Oh yes, Colter Wall is truuly great.”

Here in American Gothic there is an interesting syncretic between material and style and intention. These motherfuckers, this Mennonite farming twain look severe. These appear to be unforgiving, unpleasured, ascetics - the trinity of his pitchfork, a reminder of the Lord’s constant judgment. The surface is dry like encaustic or egg tempura...