6-6-05

Pretention

I am a Philistine.  I'm actually the worst kind of Philistine because I understand what goes into great art, but choose popular culture, anyway.  And I don't choose it for ironic reasons like "kitsch" value.  I like to be entertained—sometimes, mindlessly.
          So when I start a rant, as I am about to, about idiot masturbatory artists and the pseudo-intelligentsia, please remember that while these are the opinions of a Philistine, my viewpoint is not invalidated by my lack of appreciation, nor does my failure to appreciate in any way suggest a lack of comprehension.  I understand art.  I also understand crap.
          And that's my big issue:  pretentious crap.  For every "Artistic Movement" spawned by a true genius of a medium, there are 500 lame-ass pretentious wannabes who neither comprehend the genius's message, nor are fully qualified to use his new movement as a valid means of expression.  There are also 5000 pseudo-intellectuals, many of them college professors, who are more than happy to write a masturbatory book about how to appreciate the new movement, all containing phrases like "one can't possibly comprehend the synergy of the metamorphosis without first engulfing the enraptured history of the artist's miasma."  It's crap.
At the risk of sounding old
I find nothing quite as amusing as kids in their early 20's, some still attending college, who try to talk down to me as if my refusal to recognize their "genius" makes me somehow inferior.  Oh, I don't mean me, personally.  I mean me as a member of the "unwashed masses", those poor stupid people that the intelligentsia feel it is their duty to patronize and correct because we're so fucking stupid we were busy raising a family instead of slouching around a college for eight years.  We don't understand.  Hollywood (Madison Avenue, George Bush, etc. ad inf.) has dazzled our small minds with shiny objects.  The world is a darker and more horrible place than it was when we were young.  Our artforms are no longer valid (except the ones that have been co-opted without comprehension, like Punk Rock—more on that in a bit).
          Well no fucking shit the world is different than it was when I was a kid.  I helped make it that way.  I was there for every lost battle, every failed protest, every dumbass revolution.  But it's not darker.  It may seem so because now you can get on whineycollegeartists.com and slouch around the chat room with 3000 other depressed poets gabbing about how Global Warming, US Imperialism, and Napster (or Big Music) are destroying the world and making everyone's life miserable.  But trust me, it's not.  At least not in the West, you can tell things are pretty good here, because you have time and money to go to college and bitch about the plight of the Hawaiian Goose (the species is dying out—it was all but extinct until a captive breeding population was established, but the sample was too small and multiple generations of inbreeding have rendered the birds too stupid to be believed).
          At the risk of sounding like a middle-aged man (I am one, but no one wants to sound like one), when I was a kid we had serious problems in the United States.  For one thing, we had the highest unemployment since the great Depression.  In those days, being poor didn't mean you didn't have cable and the latest Playstation game.  It meant you probably didn't have a TV, you might not have a phone, and you had serious questions about where your next meal was coming from.  In 1974, my mother worked 72 hours a week as a filing clerk at an orange-packing plant in Ocala, Florida.  It was probably the worst year of her life.  Not only was she desperate to keep four children in food and clothes, but she spent a lot of her time trying to keep us from realizing how poor we were.  And we were lucky.
          We had a roof, we had three squares (without using the free lunch program--for which we probably qualified), we had a nice television (except that it had a bad voltage regulator that blew out the demod tube on a regular basis).  We had a car that worked most of the time.  There were others who were much less fortunate than we were.  There were people, at the time, who still lacked indoor plumbing.
         My point here is that the simple fact that you are free to slouch around the dorm typing self-important essays about the deeper meaning of Descartes and whining about the lack of good music at Target suggests that the world is nowhere near as dark as you seem to want to believe.  At least not your part of it.
Punk is dead.  You don't get it.  You never will.
Punk music had a time and a place.  In that time and place, a generation was forgotten and left to wither on the vine.  I know this, because I was part of that generation.  As rough as things were over here at the end of the seventies, when the national "malaise" was taking shape as a recession (it's like a depression but without the discounts) that moved us up to almost ten per cent unemployment, things were far worse across the Pond in Merry Olde England.  They had unemployment in the serious teens, plus runaway inflation, plus Margaret Thatcher, whose philosophy on dealing with the poor and working classes seemed to be to let them starve themselves out of existence.
          Thousands, millions, of emerging youths on both sides of the Atlantic looked around themselves and said "What the FUCK?"  This was punk music.  The Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Ramones, all of them were a scream of rage and frustration from a forgotten generation.  A generation that had been lied to.  We were promised a better tomorrow, and we were looking at a future where, assuming the US and Russia didn't get monumentally stupid and blow the world up, we would not even be able to feed ourselves.
          They say you had to have lived in the Summer of Love to understand Acid Rock (this isn't entirely true...you have to be stoned to get Acid rock).  If you've never lived in the world we lived in, you don't get punk.  We weren't hippy artists with long hair bitching about the man.  We were the man, we wanted to be the man.  We followed the rules, crossed our t's, did as we were told, and in the end we were fucked.  At the risk of sounding like one of those flower-munching self-righteous jackasses who get up my nose..."You can't possibly get it.  You weren't there."
The infinite Blowjo—I mean Canvas
I have never read Scott McCloud's book on Understanding comics (or whatever the hell he goes on about).  The great thing about being a philistine is that I don't have to learn  how to appreciate art.  I just appreciate it for what it is.  If it's funny I laugh.  If it's sad I cry.  If it sucks big green monkey ass I demand my money back (I once went to a free performance of the world's crappiest musical and was incensed that I didn't have that option).
          In any case, one of the things McCloud apparently mentions in his book is the concept of the "infinite canvas" of the Internet, and about how comic artists would no longer be bound by the limits of the physical page.  The upshot is a bunch of self-indulgent crap where you have to scroll seven hundred pages in three directions to even see what's put up there.  Of course there are some "infinite canvas" pieces that are worth looking at (my comic, and the comic from whom I stole my format, Queen of Wands, technically fall into that category, except that the QoW drop format is a true piece of art and I never pretended that CN is anything other than crap).  The lion's share, however, are crap.
          It annoys me that cartoonists (yes cartoonists, that's the word, not comic artists), at least some of them, feel the need to pretend that comics in general and webcomics in particular have to be high art.  That popularity and mass appeal are some sort of crime.  Get over yourselves.  It's a fucking comic.