How important is it for you to be 'cultured?'

I recently found some art at a head shop----do they still call them that? A smoke and vape shop.

It was an original piece by a local artist----painted, very obviously, on Blotter paper, and that is a thing now. It was a psychedelic piece about Sponge Bob Square Pants---riding a bicycle, and he made it for bicycle day---a day which does not commemorate riding bicycles, other than the bicycle ride of a specific historical figure (look it up if you don't know what I am talking about).

This framed piece of pop culture was selling for $60.00. I haven't had a chance to get it yet, but I definitely want to add it to my art collection.

Pop cultural items express meaning, have historical and cultural references, and are a part of history in themselves. They are very much a part of culture.

 

I find it important to be cultured.
That's why I have a spoonful of yogurt everyday!

People who don't are uncultured.
My flora want nothing to do with theirs.

Yes, being cultured makes one a bit snobby.
Still, it's a healthful hobby!

 

Yes---we were cultured in counterculture. And then you have the regular tobacco shops which might sell a little drug paraphernalia on the side. We have Freaky's here in Colorado which is the closest to the old head shop. It still sells the posters and the t-shirts, drugs that are marginally legal---I once saw packages each containing what appeared to be amanita mushrooms----in some kind of a thin gravy-like liquid. The cashier said that if I take them while in a hot tub, they supposedly worked. But I don't know what was truly in it. Then there was that herb---I forget what it was, that was trending before marijuana was legalized that some people said would briefly get you high with possible hallucinations if you smoked it (but most people said, "Nothing happened"). The underground newspapers are a little more mainstream but still have a counterculture fill to it-----they are commercialized hipster I guess you could say. There is still some influence from nearby Boulder here were so many hippies became rich.

This shop were I saw this art was kind of like a miniature Freaky's. There were shirts, posters, and decals by LSD-themed artists. But they aren't the same. You can't buy Freak Brothers comic books anymore. (But now you can watch them on cable.) I usually don't step into those shops too often. Because I prefer edibles today than smoking, so I don't need a bhong, or a metal hash pipe from India (and I still have one)... I happened to step into that shop because I had some time to kill and there was a new Middle Eastern market opened next door, and I went in to buy sugar-covered roasted chickpeas, and look around.

The one thing that is long gone is the underground bookstore. Denver had, The Radical Information Bookstore Collective, aka, The RIP Bookstore. I hung out there quite a bit. (Probably why years later, I was stuck in the Philippines for almost 2 years while my wife and families immigrant visas were stalled---the story being that the paperwork got lost in the shuffle of a new law that required fingerprints, and vetting applicants through interpol and other international police forces. The other story we were given was that the fingerprints were smudged, I say this because, 1.) the FBI was always getting in trouble for bugging The RIP. 2.) there was always a closed-up shop across the street with the windows boarded up (I would jokingly tell my friends who I would bring there---usually their first time there: "Smile and wave at the FBI cameras across the street." Which we did.) 3.) In the Philippines I was befriended by an American through the American Chamber of Commerce, Philippines ( which I had joined), shortly after we submitted the applications. He suggested we do business together, as he was on the American Desk at the Philippine Department of Trade, and if we could locate properties for American companies trying to locate in the Philippines we'd all make a huge profit. We became good friends only to have his wife (as the official story went) be relocated. At his ACCP going away party, I discovered that he was a 'retired' CIA operative (retired being what I assume the official story was), and everyone except for me knew about this! and, 4.) It was at that same party that I learned that his wife was the Consulate of the Visa Section at the US Embassy! Anyway, our visa application was supposed to take 6 months tops since I was an American citizen but took almost 2 years until my parents got a Senator to get to the bottom of it and get it approved. There were a few other innocent incidents when I was a kid that may have contributed to that---one time I went to the RIP Bookstore and asked if they had back issues of the Socialists Digest they could give me. This was a monthly magazine that looked like a Reader's Digest, but was filled with all kinds of socialist pseudo-intellectual crap. (Yes, I briefly had a subscription, and still have them in my library.) They gave them all to me--all the unsold back issues when they found out what I wanted to do: There was a marine recruiter to whom, a kid down the street who I barely knew, gave my name to as he was enlisting. They kept pestering me----until I went into the recruitment office, and quickly went from desk to desk distributing this Socialist Digest, and gave the last one to him as I walked back out the door. He never called back. It also probably didn't help that I studied Russian all through junior High and High School, and even had a subscription to this Soviet propaganda magazine---Soviet Life which was directed to American youth. I thought the obvious propaganda was funny. And then I was in Victoria Canada when a Soviet fishing trawler was arrested for fishing in Canadian waters and pulled into the local port. I went down their several times to practice my Russian and trade blue jeans for Russian souvenirs.) To this day I still have books from RIP with the RIP Bookstore bookmarks in them.

 

Here is one of the bookmarks:

 

You know, I think I should write a manifesto based on my post #17. But what to title it?

I could go with humor---for example, a title inspired by Stephen Colbert's book, say, 'I'm Cultured and You Can too.'

Whatever the title, it would be a manifesto to save culture, truth, and authenticity from a technology induced oblivion into simulation, counterfeiture and artificiality and thereby save our species. (Its a work in progress.)

This may seem trivial, and yes there is a bunch of irreverent humor involved, or it may seem like philosophers once again making a big 'to do' over nothing, but in all seriousness if we don't wrestle back control over truth and authenticity, we are left with Nihilism. I have mentioned a few times here on Hip Forums, when Kellyanne Conway stated on National Television, only a few days into the first Trump Administration, that Trump was not lying, he was simply stating alternative facts, that I knew that Nihilism was now the official policy of the American government.

Towards the end of the 1800's, Nietzsche wrote about the rise of Nihilism, and that we were entering into the Age of Nihilism. What he was observing was the fin-de-siecle, and the collapse of the old European bourgeoisie culture. The nail in the coffin was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and thus began World War I. This saw the rise of Naziism in Europe, and the Fascism of Mussolini. Fascism feeds off of, and generates, Nihilism. It is the primary tool it uses for control. The Nazis even took Nietzsche's own words and twisted them into something different; leaving us with interpretations of many of Nietzsche's ideas that are still expressed today!

You could say that Post #17 was overly dramatic and reductionist. As Baudrillard attacked modern culture and the establishment, people reacted by claiming he was too dramatic and reductionist, and argued that he was no philosopher. But the things he was saying have progressed even further and it seems to be an accelerating phenomena. Will technology and fascism actually destroy culture and art? Not exactly---there will always be some form of culture, and people will always be inspired, and even driven to create.

But look where we are----in an insane world where truth is under severe attack, and nothing makes much rational sense. We are on the verge of a war in South America that would be started by a president who claims we are fighting narco-terrorism, and this is happening at the same time that he pardons and frees one of the biggest Narco-Terrorists in our history, who we had already captured and convicted after proving his crimes in a court of law. We are in a world where government agencies and offices are being demolished, and often times we later discover that the move was so utterly stupid that we have to try to immediately rehire all the workers that were fired. Our government institutions, such as voting, are constantly being attacked by the stupidest of lies and so-called evidence. Do you remember when Giuliani had this amazing proof that was going to prove once and for all that the 2020 election was stolen and after months of such claims he spread these packets around Washington that were so sloppy and amateurish that anyone should be terribly embarrassed to have had anything to do with it? He tried to make it look like some of it was on White House stationary, but apparently had no idea what White House stationary actually looked like. He might as well have produced it in crayon. Seriously, if I had a High School class and said that the class project was to produce fraudulent evidence that supports government lies, I am sure that they would do a much more professional and believable job then the clowns in the GOP. And yet, a third of our nation believes these clowns. And this is only scratching the surface of the complete shit-show circus our government has become.

We all laughed at how stupid Trump was to think that Kilgar Abrego Garcia actually had MS-13 tattooed on his fingers, and yet a third of the country believed Trump! Numerous people tried to argue with me and even pulled out their phones and pulled up that picture asking, "How can I deny that he is MS-13?! It's tattooed on his fingers!

For these people, reality is no longer out there in the real world. It is digitalized and on their televisions and smart phones. We really do have to take back control of our truth, authenticity, the narratives, and put an end to these moronic culture wars. It is all interconnected through culture.

 

--------änd thereby save our species." (it's a work in progress) it's been ever thus----yes?

 

Yes, that is right----and collecting art is not going to save us. (Sharing grey poupon from the backs of limos is definitely not going to save us, and is actually a big part of the problem.) But feeding a quest for knowledge, enhancing one's education at a personal level, and seeking cultural pursuits feeds a mass movement that can retake control of the narrative to make that agreed upon approximation of reality rational once again. The elite in the MAGA universe know this, which is why there is this attack on, not only higher education, but education in general. It is a big part of Project 2025. Simply looking at the demographics of the MAGA movement demonstrates how important education and culture are to preventing its spread.

In an essay Baudrillard published in 1990, he identified the dynamic which put us in the situation you refer to----this rise of egotistical delusion and dysrationalia. He wrote, "Nothing is truly reflected anymore -- whether in a mirror or in the abyssal realm (which is merely the endless reduplication of consciousness). The logic of viral dispersal in networks is no longer a logic of value; neither, therefore, is it a logic of equivalence. There is no longer any such thing as a revolution of values -- merely a circumvention or involution of values. A centripetal compulsion coexists with a decentredness of all systems, an internal metastasis or fevered endogenic virulence which creates a tendency for systems to explode beyond their own limits, to override their own logic -- not in the sense of creating sheer redundancy, but in the sense of an increase in power, a fantastic potentialization whereby their own very existence is put at risk."

Baudrillard, as I understand him, would argue that the corruption of value is at the center of this. And it is through culture that our values are determined.

Just as I have argued that atheism is the logical end conclusion of Christianity (and I demonstrate this by how science began as an attempt to explain God, and how his universe works---the early empiricists, and scientists such as Newton and Bacon, were simply trying to make rational sense of how God formed this universe, which in turn led to materialism, and eventually, God is dead), I would say that this egotistical delusion is the logical end conclusion of the objectivism of the Enlightenment. And this in turn creates and fuels the dysrationalia of the world around us.

If we can rescue 'value' from the corruption modern culture is forcing upon it, this may not save us from the wrong fork in the road, but it is certainly a tool to help push us to the other side. After all, at the core of the hippie movement was value. The Beatniks started the cultural shift towards new values, but it was the hippies that took it and ran with it. And they weren't really new values----they were a return to human values----love, peace, freedom, the value of the individual human.

In fact, I have argued for years that we were heading down a path of destruction in the 1950's, and that we were saved, in large part, by the hippies. We still went through Vietnam, and Watergate, Nixon pushed back, and so forth. But it was the hippies and the counterculture that was very instrumental in waking America up to what was happening in Vietnam, and therefore got us out of it. It wasn't perfect. Drugs did a lot of damage, communes and crash pads helped create dysfunctional families, and so forth. Dionysian forces, once awoken in a society bring forth a lot of new problems just as they create new opportunities and growth. Hence Dionysus is the god of madness, just as he is the god of wine and nature. And as much bad that came out of the movement, there was far more good, such as a return to humanistic values, some wins against racism, sexism, and so forth, the liberation of sexuality and so forth----I think the impact that it had on culture and the modern world has largely been underestimated, and underappreciated.

I have been saying this for quite some time, but, once again we need a revolution of values to save us from the brink of our destruction.

 

LMAO!

Good point! I was actually referring to the convoluted language I wrote, but yes, it is a work in progress.



I thought someone might say, 'Counterfeiture' is not a word, to which I could respond, yes it is----though its common usage ended in about 1880.

 

Post 29---That second paragraph made my head spin!!

 

I think that anyone who translates French Philosophy should be elligible for a Medal of Honor, or at the very least, demand that they are paid hourly.

Every paragraph of Baudrillard reads like that. As does Sartre, and many others...

 

I commend you for reading such!!