tongues against the grain

i went out to dinner with aurelia the other night, between bouts at the bar. i had missed all the intelligent conversations we get in, that with some people it is easy to talk, that there is still a spark of intelligence left that is willing to be exercised when so often it is just the recounting of the daily hijinks and work and bullshit like there's nothing more important to talk about in this world. i rue this daily. i am also shy, but that's my own problem. over thai tofu salad she lamented that no one is willing to really talk anymore, that here we are in this city (this world) which professes to be on some advance edge but we are not even willing to critique ourselves much less critique the main society that we are embedded in and constantly struggling against. i didn't get to raise the point that counterculture is dead, that any sense of struggle gets co-opted, that people would rather try and be happy or sated for the day than face all the frustrations and unsurities that comes from opening that can of worms. what are we to do about this world? where do we even begin talking about it? certainly not in a blaring bar, though centuries worth of artists and revolutionaries found their greatest conversations over a glass of vino in smoky backrooms.

for my own sake, and i've said this before in so many ways, i often feel i am living in an aesthetic void, an age in which the meaningful, the epic, the search for Truth and Beauty, are no longer relevant. youtube is. snakes on a plane is. the yeah yeah yeahs and poems about getting beaten as a child. i'm reaching a point where i almost no longer care, and will go about doing what i feel it is important for me to do and say, except that i don't live in a vacuum. any writing i would want to do, any stirring song, comes from this world and reaches the ears of someone in this world. but maybe only a few who will actually listen. that art music literature have reached a relative null-point is telling of some deeper lack of meaning or view in our culture. that "the da vinci code" was a bestseller. that i can count on one hand those few people who inspire me, whose work i actually admire, and even then only occasionally. that as this year passes i hear more and more people make passing jokes like "lets burn all the great works of art," "let's murder all the bad pop stars," "let's ship andy warhol's bones back to new york where he belongs," as if the only thing we have holding us back from whatever turning point in creativity, in life, is the cultural drift of the past, the dead heavy hand of these artifacts that we can say everything has been done, everything has been said... why bother to add to it anymore? let's just get high and see what's on tv.

i've said before as well, what's the alternative? a return to the folk, the ultra personal where the art is only being done for one's self and closest friends, recounting personal experience (as the best art has to) but out of any context of the centuries of culture to which we are heir. we live in an age where anyone can write about their day, and if it is compelling enough, the whole world can listen. where anyone can record their fourtrack pop song and post it on myspace. but who's actually listening? with such an influx of information you can't possibly sift through it all, and the signal to noise ratio approaches a blind static panic. like the hordes of fashionable hipsters who i'm sure are all interesting enough people in their individual but subsume it all to the latest trends of cowboy shirts and tulled skirts and indie pop much less the "masses" in their tshirts and reality tv. we are all stars, and every star wants to shine, if it weren't for the uniform illumination of the streetlamps. what's the alternative? certainly not a silent acceptance of the everyday and the status quo.