What American Mainstream Culture Doesn't Need

Another movie about an angry man past his prime starring Al Pacino

Another comedy with Robert De Niro

Any movie with Diane Keaton

Another story about a broken down writer who turns into an alcoholic

Another movie about a reclusive cranky old man

Another movie about a reclusive cranky old man who is estranged from his son and is emotionally rehabilitated by his loving daughter and/or by his at-first reluctant friendship with a boy without a father

Another novel by Philip Roth

Another album of jazz standards by Bob Dylan

Another movie about vampires

Another movie about an escape from a prison that is impossible to escape from

Another movie about an angry young man who becomes a boxer

Another novel by Stephen King

Another book or movie about the Nazis

Another book or movie about the Holocaust

Another Hemingway biography

Another remake of a classic movie like Ben-Hur

Another Star Wars movie

Another movie with Anthony Hopkins playing a homicidal maniac or a ruthless corporate executive with a young wife or mistress who hates him but loves his money

Another movie version of Romeo and Juliet

Another Woody Allen comedy featuring a young Woody Allen clone

Another movie about a road trip across America

Another movie with over-the-hill stars who come out of retirement for one last bank robbery or gambling trip to Las Vegas

Another movie about a comic book hero

Art and the Personality Cult

Today more than at any other time in history the art world is dominated by the personality cult. Personality, or charisma, seems to be of greater importance to the general public than the actual work produced by any given artist. This appears to be true right across the art spectrum – actors, musicians, writers, and visual artists are all vying for more attention in the media, and the stronger their personality cult the  more the more time they are given in the spotlight. Of course the internet is greatly responsible for spawning this phenomenon, but it was on the rise throughout the 20^th century. A major shift occurred in the 1960s, sparked perhaps by the Beatles, and gaining momentum steadily from then. And today many leading museums, in an effort to capitalize on this, are changing their emphasis from art to artifacts of the artist in an effort to bring in more people.

Da Vinci's Birthday

Last Saturday, April 15th, was Leonardo da Vinci's birthday, but there was barely a mention of it in the media. Google did not have anything on their home page. Why not, I wonder? Do they consider his work over-exposed? Then why not use one of his lesser known images, a drawing of a fetus or a machine perhaps? Seems like a strange omission. Da Vinci's coming into the world was a miraculous event, and should always be acknowledged, regardless of how often we've seen his work.
Shame on you, Google!

Musical Mania

American theatre producers seem to have a mania for turning hit movies into musicals. The latest productions in this genre are Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie, and Amelie, based on the popular French film of the same name. The skeptic in me just shrugs and says, “Yeah. Anything to make money.” But the admirer in me of classic musicals like Oklahoma, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music is horrified. Ditto for the lover of such great modern musicals as Cabaret, West Side Story, and Chicago.  I loved Amelie, the movie, but I don’t think I would care much for the musical. The reviews have been tepid, but more importantly I just don’t think the magic created by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his wonderful star Audrey Tautou can be replicated on the New York stage.  When it comes to the money-machine known as Broadway, nothing, absolutely nothing, is sacred. Mammon rules over artistic integrity in every way. They will turn anything into a Broadway musical if they think it will make them a pile of cash.

And the same is true for re-makes of great movies. There are some movies that are so perfect even the godless money men are keeping their dirty hands off them – great movies like Casablanca, Roman Holiday, Sunset Boulevard, (turned into a musical with Glenn Close, by the way), The Seventh Seal, and La Dolce Vita. (Perhaps they simply can’t get the rights to them – in which case I say BRAVO! to those who own them.) The great epic Ben-Hur with Charleton Heston, directed by William Wyler, was recently re-made with all the latest CGI tricks, and my artistic soul cried out, “WHY DON’T THEY LEAVE SUCH MASTERPIECES ALONE?” Do they think they’re going to improve them? Can you imagine someone trying to reproduce Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescos because they thought they could make them better? What an outrage! And what would be the point?

A Few Random Thoughts

Hollywood produces the Iron Man. Literature creates the Ironical Man. Philosophy gives rise to the High-minded Man.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and it has become so vapidly commercialized that it is laughable. To think that our culture should celebrate such trite and sentimental romantic nonsense is beyond ridiculous. Of course it's all about making money -- what else? We live in a materialistic society. But where O where is the passionate joy of Eros? Gone forever, I fear.

On the Sudden Popularity of Dystopian Novels

According to The New York Times, there is currently a surge of interest in classic dystopian novels such as Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, P.D. James' The Children of Men, and Goldings' The Lord of the Flies. I find this puzzling. Apparently people want to read grim stories about authoritarian societies because they believe Western democracies are headed in that direction. But beware! Morbid fascination with dystopias will help make them come to pass, and we should never, never, never resign ourselves to the inevitability of a world without personal liberties, especial in the US and Europe. So I want to ask the people who are reading these novels --- why be so pessimistic? Wouldn’t it make more sense to read classic literature that encourages us to be strong and resilient? Stories that inspire us to fight against these forces of totalitarianism and fascism, novels about people of spirit and courage who overcome the forces of destruction? If we would change the world, we must begin by changing ourselves, as the sages have been telling us for centuries. And as an alternative to all this negative futurism I recommend the novels of D. H. Lawrence who believed the hope for humanity rests with the individual's inherent capacity for love.

Making Movies

Technology has made it relatively easy for the new filmmaker to make a movie. Now just about anyone with a modicum of desire and drive can see their story turned into a film in the digital format. But this ease of creation does not ensure that the content will have any depth. When movies were made the old way, on celluloid, it took a lot of money, time, and effort, and those requirements were enough to discourage anyone who did not feel compelled to tell the story they believed had to be told.  Today’s young filmmakers have been raised on what Martin Scorsese calls “theme park movies,” movies that rely too much on special effects, imagery, and celebrity actors. Scorsese says he feels like one of the last of a dying breed of filmmakers, the ones who take risks and make movies with personal themes of scope and power. Movies must have scope and power, and they must be made with a passion for truth and a depth of psychology, otherwise they are nothing more than exercises in vanity.

Trumpty-Dumpty

Trumpty-Dumpty built a great wall.
Trumpty-Dumpty made it so tall
that no one could get in or out.
Said Trumpty, "That's what America's all about!"

The Day of the Dead in Mexico

Cultural festivities for  the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) in Mexico should emphasize the spiritual over the commercial. Much of the activity I’m seeing around San Miguel de Allende is much more commercial than it should be, and this seems to be the result of too much media attention in the US. Caterinas, painted skulls, and skeletons abound. Is this respectful to the sacred tradition of the holiday? Families get together to make flowers and use them to adorn altars, they gather at home or at el cementerio to remember their departed loved ones, they DO NOT dance around with someone dressed up as a Catrina, and to multiply these Catrina figures (a skeleton dolled up as a tawdry female, for those who don’t know) does a terrible disservice to the spiritual beliefs of the occasion. You might even go as far as to call it sacrilegious. As a cultural festival in honor of the day, it is all rather tasteless. This is just another example of how the US mass media have commercialized and corrupted the traditions and cultures of North America.

The Nobel Prize Has Lost Its Prestige

I’ve always liked Bob Dylan’s music. He’s written some amazing songs. But I don’t think he deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maybe in songwriting, but that category doesn't exist. And now he says he will not attend the awards ceremony, which shows extreme disrespect and is further prove that he doesn't deserve the award. There are many little-known authors who should be recognized and given global attention by that high honor.  Was there no one else to whom they could have given such a prestigious prize? If not, then it should have been withheld for this year. The Literature Prize has now been cheapened, and it has lost much of its value by this one act of disregard for the highest possible standards of literary art.

Too Many Books

Too many books are being published today, placing too great a demand on the modern reader’s time. Why does humanity need so many? The truth is that we don’t really need 90% of them. If far fewer books were published then we could focus on the ones that really matter. In the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote Cervantes writes: “For I know very well what the temptations of the Devil are, and one of his greatest is to put it into a man’s head that he can write and print a book, and gain both money and fame but it . . .”  He goes on to say that “bad books are harder than rocks.” We might say today that it is not the devil who puts the idea of writing a book for money and fame into someone’s head, but rather it is a kind of madness. That madness has overtaken many well-intentioned people who, like Don Quixote himself, are afflicted by a delusion, the delusion that they can write a book of importance which should be published.

What's Wrong with Western Culture?

What’s wrong with Western culture? We try to systematize and explain too much. We use too many words to express our ideas and feelings, and we have lost what the Chinese American writer Lin Yutang calls “humanized thinking.” We spend too much effort trying to categorize and classify ideas, and we have lost sight of the integrated wholeness of life. We have lost the spirit of being reasonable, and those who spend time arguing a point, which is what most of our news and social commentators do in the media, are wasting their efforts trying to prove who is right and who is wrong. To hell with trying to prove rightness and wrongness. Better to have compassion for human suffering then try to explain why suffering happens with pure logic. Pure logic is devoid of compassion, and those who are logicians have forgotten how to be generous of spirit. Descartes declared “I think therefore I am,” and Walt Whitman said, “I am sufficient as I am.” I prefer Whitman’s belief because it is more human. And like Whitman, our culture needs to be less concerned with correctness – political or otherwise – and more willing to accept human diversity and to look with humility at the mystery and grandeur of life.

America's Cultural Golden Age Is Over

American culture has had its fifty-year Golden Age (1920-1970) and now it is in a rapid decline. Market values have opened the sluice to a flood of mediocrity that  gushes forth with a reckless ferocity. Beauty and truth are being shoved aside by the banal, the freakish and the vulgar. This is nothing less than cultural bullying in the name of progress. There are no longer any criteria for judging what is worthwhile and what isn’t. All that matters is what sells. There are no values for separating good art from trash art, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down.

Each artist creates to his/her own taste, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm all for freedom of expression, and the more people who make art for their own enjoyment, the better. The problem is the spirit in which most mainstream art has been made since the 1970s. It's no longer being done in the spirit of play, purely for spontaneous pleasure, or for serious artistic reasons that satisfy and uplift the soul in its search for truth, but rather Hollywood movies, bestselling books and pop music are churned out in staggering numbers in order to make a buck. Commercialism is the dominant spirit of the art world today. Market values rule. And that's very bad for the culture.

The Last Great American Playwright

The last of America’s truly great playwrights has died. Edward Albee, author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, among other plays, showed us American society’s false   values and gave us characters who were emotionally damaged by their own inability to face the truth.  Who is writing with such depth and putting such complex ideas on the stage today? No one that I can think of. American theater no produces playwrights of the caliber of Albee, Miller, Williams, and O’Neill. Why? I think the blame lies in the culture, which has lost its hunger for the truth and rewards authors for works of escapism and entertainment. Audiences today no longer want to search for the truth. Contemporary culture has lost its soul and its humanity and younger playwrights of the post-internet age are unwilling to hold a mirror to society and show people how shallow and deluded they truly are.

Absolute Culture

Culture is the gateway to the kingdom of the psyche. It is the delicate but dynamic interplay between past and present, between perceptions and imagination, resulting in a mysterious and mystical concoction we call art. By means of both language and images, by means of storytelling, mythology springs from the cavern of the past into the field of the immediate present, from the unconscious into the conscious mind. Mythology remains dormant in our subconscious minds. Mythology is the very fabric and foundation of our cultural consciousness. And mythology must tell its stories over and over again in various forms. This is vital for our psychological and emotional health. 

Much of the violence in our society today is the result of the psychic blockage that prevents these stories from being told. By psychic blockage I mean that our contemporary culture is not serving its function in a healthy way. Instead of allowing for the flow of this energy from ancient mythology into the present culture, our social conditioning has strangled it at the root and replaced it with sensationalism.

Our so-called contemporary literature, for example, is governed by the spirit of the times rather than by the laws that have historically made these forms immutable. They have been given shape and substance long ago, in the traditions of storytelling which were forged like swords and plowshares that became the tools of our understanding and our means of passing on knowledge from one generation to another. 

Words, images, and sounds are the means by which all artists everywhere and in every era must tell the stories that have taken possession of them. This process is fixed and unchangeable, and, for convenience, we might describe it with the term Absolute Culture.

So much of our culture today is not Absolute Culture. It is temporary. Remove the “con” from the word “contemporary” and what you have left is “temporary.” Absolute Culture is anything but temporary. It is timeless.

Killings by Crazed Fans

The killing of pop singer Christina Grimmie by a crazed fan outside a concert venue in Orlando, Florida in June 2016 is eerily and disturbingly similar to the tragic death of the young woman in my new novel, ELORA, a Goddess. It reminded me of the murder of John Lennon. Why does this type of homicide continue to happen with such frequency in American society? What is it about the culture that pushes the unbalanced to commit such horrific acts of violence? I don't have any answers, but I have a hunch that it has something to do with the overhyped media attention given to these stars. Some of their fans who are on the borderline of sanity become obsessed. Consider the number of movie stars who are stalked. What happens in the mind of a stalker that turns him into a hunter and then a killer? I've tried to address this mental condition in the novel with the portrayal of Willie Switzer.

What Celebrity Culture Has Wrought

That an individual as shallow as Donald Trump could run for president and get so much media attention is the inevitable result of America's obsession with celebrities and the culture of celebrity worship. Trump is the product of that culture. He has been called a "false prophet" by Mexico's past and current presidents. I think that is a very fitting epithet -- his public babble is extremely dangerous, and if taken seriously by the moronic masses it will only lead to destruction on a "huge" scale.

A Few English-American Pop Culture Satires

DOWNTOWN CABBY, the newest import by PBS from the BBC

The shocking drama of a London cab driver's family caught up in the conflicts brought upon them by their sudden and unexpected wealth. When a rider dies of a heart attack in the back of  Bob Crowley's cab, he discovers a lottery ticket in the pocket of the man's suit. He keeps it and the next day learns that he has the winning ticket to a jackpot of ten million pounds. He now becomes one of the most affluent of London's upper crust and buys a mansion in the country. His crabby aging mother and both his wife's annoying parents move in with him and his wife and three daughters. A few years later, when he is diagnosed with a fatal disease and given a few months to live, he must decide how to divide his wealth among his three daughters and tells them that whoever proves she loves him the most will get the largest share of the family fortune. Set in merry old England at the turn of the century.

MISS MARBLES MOVES IN by Aghasta Christie

In this latest BBC production of an Aghasta Christie novel, Miss Jane Marbles is feeling bored in London. There haven’t been any murders in days and she is at loose ends, so she decides to visit her cousin Emily in the country.

She arrives in Manchester on a Friday evening and the next morning the local pastor is found dead in the rectory. Her cousin tells her to leave at once because every time she comes to visit someone is murdered. Offended and frustrated that she won’t be able to stay long enough to solve the crime, Miss Marbles boards the Flying Scotsman for Edinburgh. She arrives at her great nephew’s castle, the Wee Dreadful, and later that day the gardener is found dead in the greenhouse. Her great nephew insists she take the Flying Scotsman home, saying, “I’m so sorry, Auntie Jane, but every time you come to visit someone is found dead on the property. The neighbors are beginning to talk. Have some tea while old Donnie packs your bags.”

On an impulse Miss Marbles decides to disembark from the Flying Scotsman at Sheffield so she can drop in on her old friend, Lizzie. As she is walking up the path to Lizzie’s cottage, she hears someone scream. She rushes to the door and knocks loudly. A woman’s voice from inside the cottage cries out, “Go away, Jane!” Crestfallen, Miss Marbles trudges back to the station and waits overnight for the morning train.

As the train pulls into the station Miss Marbles picks up her suitcase and waits to board, feeling rather downcast at not having solved any of the murders. She gets on and finds a seat. A moment later she thinks she hears the sound of a gunshot, but she can’t be sure. She asks the conductor who is taking tickets if he heard a gunshot. “You must be Jane Marbles,” he replies. “Take your suitcase and come along with me.” Miss Marbles happily follows the conductor thinking, “At last. I have a crime to solve. And this time no one will tell me to leave.” As she is passing between the train cars she is suddenly shoved out the door, making a hard landing on top of her suitcase beside the tracks. Flummoxed, she stands up and brushes herself off. Fortunately she is unharmed, but her pride is terribly wounded. But she is a plucky woman. She grabs her suitcase and begins walking to the nearest police station where she hopes she can be of use, or at least find a ride back to London. 

Charles Dickens on Oprah

NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Dickens, how do you feel about having two of your books, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, chosen by Oprah for her book club?

CHARLES DICKENS: Who’s Oprah?

NYT: An African American woman with a nationally broadcast television show.

CD: Ah, I see. And this means . . . ?

NYT: That more people will buy and read your books. They will give them as Christmas gifts to people they think will enjoy them. You see, it’s all about marketing and publicity. There are too many books being published today and readers are overwhelmed.

CD: Really? But they should already know about my books because they are classics, shouldn‘t they?

NYT: True, but as Mark Twain said, classics are books everybody talks about but nobody reads.

NYT: Yes, Mark did have a great sense of humor, different from mine but still as great. Well, here’s what I have to say about all this marketing hype . . . Bah humbug! If Americans are in need of some television personality to tell them what’s worth reading then you’re a nation of very silly people! And I wish you good day, sir.  

THE ROYAL BALLYHOO, a dialogue with the Cynic

CYNIC: Why hasn’t humanity had enough of monarchs, royal bloodlines, aristocracy, and ogliarchs? Why aren’t we heartily sick of of throne-sitters and other such parasites?

REPORTER: I wonder too, but I don’t have an answer. I was hoping you might enlighten me.

CYNIC: Bah, humbug!

REPORTER: Okay. Well, what do you think of the “Royal Baby” phenomenon?

CYNIC: Why all this fuss over a child born into the House of Windsor? Do we really believe that this baby is somehow superior to all others because of his paternal bloodline? After all, only one of his parents is “royal,” and that parent is himself only a half-royal given that his mother, Diana “the Princess” Spencer, was herself from a family of non-royals. Similarly, President Obama is called black or African American despite the fact that he is bi-racial.

REPORTER: Good point. I guess a lot of people have a hang-up about the Queen and her family. And not just in England.

CYNIC: What foolishness. Their lives are very empty, and they need some kind of a thrill. They want to believe in the myth of an elite eschelon of superior beings. It gives them a sense of security, but at the same time they hate them for being rich and privileged.

REPORTER: Exactly.

CYNIC: So why all the media frenzy and public ballyhoo? Thousands of children are born everyday to loving parents, and if each child, healthy or not, wealthy or not, is indeed a miracle then why aren’t the news media crowding around a few other hospital entrances with their cameras thrust forward like the hungry maws of so many sharks? What a royal farce!

REPORTER: May I quote you on that?

CYNIC: Absolutely.

THE OVER-THERE STORY

Feeling overwhelmed, I went into my local pub and sat down in my overcoat for over and hour. I thought, “I wish this episode was over.”  It all started over lunch, when he told me it was over, and I started feeling over the hill, thrown over for a younger lover. Damn it! I fell into a funk and thought seriously about taking an overdose of my over-the-counter drugs, just to get it over with. But I heard it takes over five hours for them to take effect. Huh! Is it worth it? I guess I’m just over-reacting. I’m starting to feel I’m over it already. Time to turn over a new leaf, I guess. I’ll call my closest friend and ask her to come over. Better yet, I’ll invite her out to a restaurant and we can talk about it over dinner.

Today's Cultural Immaturity

To sum up the current state of American culture, I’d have to say it has a brilliantly glittering surface but no depth, very much like American culture of the 1920s. It took an economic crash and the Great Depression to restore some gravitas to American thinking, which gradually found its way into American society and culture in general.

Let’s look at the reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, as an example. Fitzgerald worked hard on that book for nine years, harder than he had worked on his previous three novels, including The Great Gatsby, and when it came out in 1939 it sold a mere 12,000 copies and was all but dismissed by the critics as lacking in wisdom and maturity. Although Malcolm Cowley has written that it remained in people’s minds “like an unanswered question,” and Hemingway said that it got better and better in retrospect, most readers in the years that followed its publication found it difficult to care much about its wealthy and privileged main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, as they struggle to overcome marital discord while enjoying life on the French Riviera. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the novel as shallow – it does have some emotional resonance – but I wonder if it is about to be rediscovered by readers who don’t care much about wisdom and maturity in the books they read. (The story does reflect the lives of many privileged people today, particularly celebrities and movie stars.)

At the present time, American culture has returned to its adolescence, to the frivolities of the 1920s, and many of us who love and value the seriousness it once had must wait for it to mature all over again. Will it take another global disaster on the scale of the Great Depression to bring that about?

Pulp Culture

Without a doubt, the US is the world’s most outrageous producer of pulp fiction and moronic mass entertainment. That’s a reality I’ve accepted and have learned how to ignore. If the majority of Americans want to veg out in front of the idiot box after a hard day’s work, or take their families to see the latest mindless comedy or hardcore special-effects “product” calling itself a “movie,” or numb themselves to sleep with a romance or crime novel, that’s their business, and who am I to tell them they can’t?

But what gets me really worked up is the inescapable reality that Americans in general are hostile to anything that is serious art, be it a book, a painting or a film, anything, that is, that has a challenging theme, anything that questions their fundamental prejudices. The average American just doesn’t like new ideas. He is fiercely hostile to them because he feels threatened by anything out of the ordinary. Complex works of art undermine his basic beliefs and if he tries to think about them they only end up confusing him. And anything that confuses him is just not worth bothering about. Art must be simple – in the worst sense – it must provide him with an escape from drudgery, from harsh reality, from the meaninglessness of making money, and from the senselessness of convention. It must validate his own ignorance. And most importantly, it must distract him from the emptiness of his life.

Now take a pulp author whose books are still going strong as an example – Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, as well as westerns and science fiction. As a young man with a family to support, Burroughs worked at a variety of low-paying jobs. He read pulp fiction in magazines such as Argosy and decided he too could write such rot (his own words) for money. Yes, for money – that’s the key to it all. How any self-respecting individual could spend a lifetime writing “rot” for money when there are so many other interesting ways to make a living is hard for me to grasp. Burroughs was well educated and came from a family that had fought in the Revolution, He was an American brahmin and his attitude towards his readers was scornful, condescending, patronizing, and contemptuous. No doubt all writers of pulp fiction feel the same way. They hate themselves for writing it and hate their readers even more.

What would people do if there weren’t a pulp culture? If Americans had nothing else to satisfy their need for escapism and entertainment, they would learn to read the classics or go to the opera or the theater. Or they would amuse themselves with games or singing or playing musical instruments with a group of like-minded folks. They would find ways to have fun by using their creative abilities (just like children do) rather than succumbing to mind-numbing mass entertainment falsely identified as “culture.”