Clifton Duncan’s Podcasts Are Great
I encourage everyone to listen to more of Clifton’s podcasts. Highly recommended!.
https://cliftonduncanpodcast.captivate.fm/
3 Likes
Really Did Enjoy This Episode, Thanks To Both Of You.
Really did enjoy this episode, thanks to both of you.
1 Like
As long as they leave Popeyes alone, they can do whatever they want to kfc
3 Likes
Great To See…
Saw you two guesting on Gonzalo Lira’s Roundtable and it was great to see two people I admire separately, in a discussion. Will definitely be watching this - Clifton is very switched on.
1 Like
Cultural Degradation
Some years ago I was in London and went to the British Museum and then the Tate Modern. The Brisih Museum is astonishing, and you walk through halls and ancient cultures speak to you about what mattered to them. Then the Tate. The first exhibit in the Tate was one in which a woman had emptied the waste basket from her bathroom into a plexiglass rectangle mounted on the wall. So here we all are in a fancy museum gazing at trash: used Q-tips, used kleenexes, used tampon applicators and so on. The theme at the museum at the time was this kind of “art.” Ugly. One was an upended sofa and a disembodied voice repeating cheesily: help me, help me. I wandered from room to room becoming increasingly demoralized and distraught for reasons I could not articulate. Unfortunately I was traveling with a family friend who had an art degree, and he mocked my distress, and lectured me that art does not need to be beautiful. (Apparently I am a low-brow plebe with bourgeois sensibilities.) The last straw was when they brought a group of schoolchildren through and they were gazing at the bathroom trash while some elegant-sounding British guide explained the importance of art like that. Something just rose up in me: I started to cry and could not stop and told the guide and children that this was not art by any historical definition of what art is or was, it was simply trash, and they knew that already and could see it with their own eyes. And then the family friend dragged me off.
A few months after this there was an international incident at the Tate. One of the art displays was an unmade bed with rumpled dirty sheets and used kleenexes on the floor next to it. Two Japanese tourists, who had been over-served at a local pub saw instantly the bullshit and hilarity of it and jumped on the bed yelling “Banzai” and belly flopping onto it. They were dragged off to jail and there was talk of charging them with felony art destruction, the same as if they’d taken a hatchet to the Mona Lisa.
Somehow, and I still can’t articulate it well, but somehow there is a direct line between the inability to differentiate between trash and art, and the inability to defend one’s culture, an inability to understand what a woman or a man is, and an inability to refuse the injection of an experimental mutagen.
28 Likes
Now I am all riled up reliving this experience. All these hipsters who believe that it is modern to be cynical and mocking of everything…they don’t know that they are passe, they are the avocado-colored kitchen in this story. Because there is a new modern coming, which is the restoration of beauty and meaning. Many of us feel that in our bones, and some of us will help build it.
8 Likes
I had a similar experience, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was just like you describe. A lot of the “art” was simply stupid and empty. At most it generated a thought or two - but it did not inspire you or “move you” emotionally. It actually left you feeling flat. Other exhibits were not worth the trip to a museum to see.
I do like some modern art. There was a metal sculpture at the Tate that I remember and a Picasso sculpture/construct at the Museum of Modern Art. Both were inspiring with their harmony of design.
But they are the exception and not the rule.
And I think that you are correct about the connection between the decline of art and the decline of culture. Too many people are “living in their heads” and have lost any emotional connection to the world. They have lost any sense of the sacred and any sense of awe.
They are like these words from t.s. eliot:
“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”
8 Likes
Yes, the Tate is a building housing examples of how we have become degraded as a society. Once garbage becomes art a society is in trouble. My response was the opposite of yours however. My brother and niece and I had just arrived in the UK that day, and were struggling with jet lag. We were walking around, trying to stay awake, and saw that the Tate had free admission (the only thing that can be said in its favour). It was so ludicrous, and we were so tired, we started laughing. The kind of uncontrollable laughing where you just can’t stop and the harder you try to more you laugh.
7 Likes
Thank you, Mike. You’ve expressed what I could not find the words for…it is the ability to recognize the sacred…which also confers an ability to recognize the profane. An inability to do that makes drag shows for tots okay, and the Nuremberg code fungible.
2 Likes
Yours by far the wiser…and funner…response! ?
1 Like
Hey don’t insult cactus by comparing them to so called “art”!
1 Like
Amen.
There’s no accounting for Tate.
5 Likes
Actually, I love cactus from the time I spent in Arizona.
That was the one part of the poem that bothered me.
dread is ever present but not on this election. Dread is on ‘24. A few strings might snap in the fabric of civilization but I don’t expect the garment to be torn asunder. In the next 2 years, famine, spot energy shortages, bankruptcies, and global economic decline will have sufficient strain on that fabric for it ripping hem to hem then. Prepare yourselves and pass the popcorn.
1 Like
Just take care not to be a shocked rat in a cage attacking others nearby. We are all in this together and no one gets out alive.
1 Like
Well, that was a horse of a different stripe
What a beautiful comment. Thank you.
2 Likes
I had home schooled my son through much of high school. When he was in 8th grade though, he was out on medical leave from the public school. (He has intractable epilepsy and was suffering from a lot of medication problems at the time. He was 13.)
Well I’d taken him to Buffalo NY and we went into a bunch of different museums that day. He really liked the history display about WWI weapons and uniforms in one museum and we had gone into a couple of art museums.
The first art museum he was a bit ambivalent about; but he liked the Ming Dynasty Chinese vases, Japanese swords, the Egyptian artifacts and the craft displays on how they loomed tapestries in the Middle Ages.
Next we went into a modern art museum. He walked through and nothing made much sense to him. Some of it I had trouble grasping too.
When we left though and others were just coming in; he noticed the people paying for their tickets. He turned to me and asked: “Mom, did you actually pay for us to come in here?” And I said: “Yeah, it was like $10. a person.”
His response was. “Why’d you waste that money?”
? (Out of the mouths of babes!)
9 Likes
What Matters
One of my ewes produced two ewe lambs last week (hooraaaay!!!). One was very small and weak, and I’m bottle feeding her. She gonna make it. And it’s a delightful burden caring for her.
Because her sire, a registered St Croix ram, got too much petted by someone (not me!!!) I’m cooking one of his shoulders as I write. (He got aggressive to people when he needed to somewhat fear people. Don’t pet bull calves, ram lambs, or buck goat kids—otherwise you’ll have to kill them or be eventually hospitalized or interred. Just sayin.)
The chicks that hatched out have become a few hens and some of the most beautiful hybrid roosters imaginable (Production Red x Speckled Sussex or Australorp). Amazing colorations. But too many for the hens.
Reality check. All but one are for the canning jar. Tough call for a softie like me.
Reality tonic is what the nation and the world needs now. If it will sustain life, it has value. If not, that’s why there’s a dust bin of history.
Cheers.
5 Likes