I'm afraid the Resistance is just regrouping and will come back fiercer than ever shortly. Trump shouldn't have given that whiny bish any traction, but he can't not react.
Talk about vibe shifts…the late 50s optimism was shared across generations. My dad’s first car purchased new: a 1957 Olds 4 door hardtop in two-tone gold and white. Our drive-in still had car hops on skates. Kisses sweeter than wine.
I don’t think we can glue things back together again. Someone left the cake out in the rain.
My father was born in 1940 and has great memories of the 50s. Dwight Eisenhower is still Dad's favorite president, even more beloved than Ronald Reagan. But Donald Trump is surpassing Ike in Dad's eyes.
Similarly Bob Dylan’s lavishly illustrated recent book “The Philosophy of Modern Song” is in large part an ode to the manufacturing boom of the 1950s: “the 50’s was a significant time in music history. Without postwar technology these songs may have dissipated and been overlooked. The recording process brought the right people to the top, the most innovative, the ones with the greatest talent.”
The peak music era, roughly 1965-1980, is thought of as the rock era by many but most of those great recordings share little with rock and roll aside from maybe the snare on the 2 and 4 and the kick on the 1 and 3. That era was actually defined by the full exploitation of electric instruments, and, more importantly, advances in recorded music production. We got magnetic tape as spoils from WWII and (I think?) Bing Crosby started a company (Ampex?). Initially it was just a higher fidelity method than lacquer disc but stereo led to multitrack recording in studios and pretty soon the nerds couldn't help themselves.
IMO the overwhelming majority of songs from that era would be unremarkable if they were only ever played live on acoustic instruments
Right. While the Dylan biopic gives Commie folk singers like Pete Seeger a hard time, how many 1965-1980 rock songs are sung around the campfire today? At the other end of the performing spectrum, there was an Unplugged fad in the 1990s (e.g., Cowboy Junkies' ethereal "Sweet Jane"), but the general effect of the 1965 Revolution was to make listeners more passive by making it harder for amateurs to reproduce the sound of their favorite songs.
I loved those MTV Unplugged shows, and, though probably not in agreement with his politics mostly, I love the Pete Seeger Carnegie Hall album. I don't know what his problem was with little houses that all look the same, but even that song is great fun.
I think the worst of cancel culture is behind us, so artists who deviate from the left’s political orthodoxy will have more space to operate. However, in terms of output we are still going to get a lot of ham fisted updates of classics/franchises plus tear jerkers about little Pedro the genius child of illegal immigrants who doesn’t get picked up from school one day because mom and dad got taken away by ICE, or something similar.
I am curious to see if ad agencies stick with commercials in which every family is headed by a white collar black guy with a white wife. I assume the NFL is not going to abandon its end zone messages or helmet slogans.
Moviemaking is the painting of moving pictures with cameras and film instead of paint and canvas. It provokes and evokes, like other art forms. And the film auteur has to be an HR manager, accountant and salesman in addition to the creative vision.
If it helps make the case there is a documentary called David Lynch: an art life in which many of his paintings are displayed so he was an artist in the old/traditional sense of the word too (but I think most people just know him for his movie directing!)
I saw "Wild at Heart" a year after it came out, got married, and dropped out of the American popular culture. I haven't seen a David Lynch film since. I know that Joe Sobran, the brilliant but erratic conservative writer, loved him and devoted a column to Lynch in his own newsletter after William F. Buckley fired him.
It is so long since I've seen a Bob's Big Boys. Bob's kind of faded away like Howard Johnson's.
I saw Blue Velvet when it first came out and haven't seen it since. It was good but disturbing in a way I don't want to experience again. Same with David Fincher's film, Se7en.
Twin Peaks was good but kind of unwound after a bit. It's worth watching just for Lynch's tribute to beautiful American women with dark brown hair.
I detect sadness in this post. We are losing Old, Weird America.
Earlier generations of Americans built something great. By the 1950s and 1960s (I assume from what I've read) the optimistic view was that the past had been hard but the utopian techno future will enable our beautiful children to kick back and relax and enjoy life, you know, let the robots take the wheel for a while.
Cool idea but does that tend to work out? We all kinda loathe the trust fund kids and assume they will become depressed heroin addicts (what, just me?). Family wealth tends not to last more than three generations. It's a sad fact of life that you can't just achieve something and rest and enjoy. If you don't strive forward, you slip backward. This was one of the themes of 'Interstellar'. They stopped trying to do cool shit like go to space and then had no ability to recover from a crop blight. From my own experience, if you have a weight problem, maintenance is impossible. If you try to maintain a weight you slowly drift upward.
So, as much as many commenters on this page would like to just enjoy and continue the country the way our ancestors built it, don't you see that if we lose our dynamism, we will inevitably regress? This is the only good argument I see for bringing in some number of hungry people from other countries--to replenish the spirit that built America (cue patriotic music--America, Fuck Yeah!)
But here's the thing about past immigration: lots of lebensraum, no "civil rights" laws for the immigrants to beat their hosts over the head with, and active, hands-on enforcement of the public charge doctrine (which is I believe still statutory law).
I agree with all your points except the idea that we might be running out of space here. Take a cross country drive. There is plenty. Now you might say that the problem is that immigrants don't want to live in the wide open spaces and they drive up housing costs in urban centers. True and bad, but hardly new.
Yes. I like my generous set-offs, my single-family housing, my fruited plains, and my forests arboreal. If I wanted to live in a human terrarium I'd move to Hong Kong or Manhattan Island.
Americans voted with their reproductive practices for population stability 120 million people ago.
This is the Matt Yglesias argument. Flyover country is empty of people and filled with so much land we could easily take in tens of millions of migrants a year.
Most Americans don’t want America turned into Singapore style density.
I agree. I don't want the current levels of immigration either, mostly because I like the American culture the way it was. I liked Pat Buchanan's statement back in the 90s that we've had a large amount of immigration and now we should stop and get them all Americanized.
I was merely contradicting the above argument that the difference between Immigration now and way back when is that we had lots of room back then and don't now.
There is a difference. Back then there were populated areas that increased in density and concentric like circles of that density moving outward from cities. Gross generalization but I believe true. I’d love to see a moving map of population increase and location.
Now we have calls for massive urbanization and destruction of suburbia. Every bit of open land must be claimed and built upon densely. America was always mostly open land with pockets of civilization (aka population centers). I want it to stay that way and I love the suburbs, single family housing that’s owner occupied and my car.
City folks have railed against suburbs for as long as they have existed and their bitching increased after their policies created white flight. They will have zero luck abolishing suburbs especially in an age of increasing remote work. Trapping the tax payers will require the cities to offer better quality of life and it's tough to see that unless crime is kept down and there are "good schools" (wink wink).
I know a successful artist with a modest public profile. He does media work for self promotion and also for pay of course.
Even though he’s a very basic liberal, he scrupulously avoids even hinting at his political opinions. I think he knows that he has no real expertise and could easily misstep and make himself sound very silly.
Your elegiac words about post-WWII Southern California remind me of James Q. Wilson's wonderful essay about that place and time, as reflected in the Reagan revolution of a few years later. It's worth a read for anyone whose memory lane goes back to then and there, or who wants to understand those of us whose does.
James Q. Wilson, A Guide to Reagan Country: The Political Culture of Southern California, Commentary magazine May 1967.
Forget about it being good for American art. It’s good for American sanity. We can’t have a country where acknowledging that the President is in office becomes grounds for unpersoning.
"In 2018, Lynch expressed some open-minded agnostic optimism about Donald Trump, for which the Establishment came down upon him like a ton of bricks.
Yet, if even David Lynch, who had a reasonable claim to be America’s Greatest Living Artist, isn’t allowed to express any off-message sentiments, you know your culture is in trouble."
2018 was the year that I started feeling like I couldn't relate to anyone anymore (or at least not the upper-middle-class white people who made up most of my peers). That feeling had been building since the 2014 Michael Brown Hoax and reached a breaking point. I remember at my job at the time I stopped going out to lunch and happy hour with co-workers, which I had done regularly for years.
By the summer of 2020 George Floyd mania I started to feel less alienated. Things had gotten so overtly crazy that more people were starting to notice and get at least a little bit skeptical.
Right before the 2022 midterms is when I felt the tide had turned. I remember seeing on the news that there had been a number of brazen crimes on the NYC Subway and the city was announcing a large increase in police presence. I said something like "Oh we love the police now! I thought they were racist and we were supposed to defund them." I also remember Columbus Day 2022 coming and going without any protests. I think the media was afraid the Republicans would win the midterms and started toning down a lot of the race and transgender stuff.
The vibe shift today is palpable.
If I wanted to speculate on root causes, I think the peak of the madness was between the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in August 2017 and the November 2018 midterm elections.
You had a public demonstration with a large number of young college-educated white men saying things like "Jews will not replace us." This was following years of discussions of genetic race differences and the Jewish Question spreading rapidly across the Internet and social media. And following the election of a president running on immigration restriction as a key issue, and similar political parties rising in Europe.
I think it really terrified the people who dominate the media and cultural establishment ("It's happening!"), and their hysteria affected the whole society. They wanted a complete repudiation of Trump and everything (in their minds) that he stood for. That's why there was so much pressuring of everyone, even David Lynch, to denounce Trump unequivocally.
They wanted the "blue wave" in the 2018 midterms, and didn't get it.
Interestingly, the elites seem to have calmed down despite the fact that the trends have continued. Trump, and the so-called far-right parties in Europe, are more popular than ever. More people are probably "red-pilled" on certain topics than ever (Steve is more mainstream than ever). And immigration restriction is happening in the U.S. right now.
Maybe they've become resigned to it, or their views have changed based on events. (Or my theory is just wrong.)
Love these stories that tie it all together. Thanks, Steve.
I'm afraid the Resistance is just regrouping and will come back fiercer than ever shortly. Trump shouldn't have given that whiny bish any traction, but he can't not react.
Talk about vibe shifts…the late 50s optimism was shared across generations. My dad’s first car purchased new: a 1957 Olds 4 door hardtop in two-tone gold and white. Our drive-in still had car hops on skates. Kisses sweeter than wine.
I don’t think we can glue things back together again. Someone left the cake out in the rain.
My father was born in 1940 and has great memories of the 50s. Dwight Eisenhower is still Dad's favorite president, even more beloved than Ronald Reagan. But Donald Trump is surpassing Ike in Dad's eyes.
Similarly Bob Dylan’s lavishly illustrated recent book “The Philosophy of Modern Song” is in large part an ode to the manufacturing boom of the 1950s: “the 50’s was a significant time in music history. Without postwar technology these songs may have dissipated and been overlooked. The recording process brought the right people to the top, the most innovative, the ones with the greatest talent.”
The peak music era, roughly 1965-1980, is thought of as the rock era by many but most of those great recordings share little with rock and roll aside from maybe the snare on the 2 and 4 and the kick on the 1 and 3. That era was actually defined by the full exploitation of electric instruments, and, more importantly, advances in recorded music production. We got magnetic tape as spoils from WWII and (I think?) Bing Crosby started a company (Ampex?). Initially it was just a higher fidelity method than lacquer disc but stereo led to multitrack recording in studios and pretty soon the nerds couldn't help themselves.
IMO the overwhelming majority of songs from that era would be unremarkable if they were only ever played live on acoustic instruments
Right. While the Dylan biopic gives Commie folk singers like Pete Seeger a hard time, how many 1965-1980 rock songs are sung around the campfire today? At the other end of the performing spectrum, there was an Unplugged fad in the 1990s (e.g., Cowboy Junkies' ethereal "Sweet Jane"), but the general effect of the 1965 Revolution was to make listeners more passive by making it harder for amateurs to reproduce the sound of their favorite songs.
I loved those MTV Unplugged shows, and, though probably not in agreement with his politics mostly, I love the Pete Seeger Carnegie Hall album. I don't know what his problem was with little houses that all look the same, but even that song is great fun.
Likewise jazz peaked in about 1961 just before multi-tracking was widespread.
The few rock songs that do work with a solo acoustic guitar, like Oasis’s “Wonderwall”, seem to get done to death.
I think the worst of cancel culture is behind us, so artists who deviate from the left’s political orthodoxy will have more space to operate. However, in terms of output we are still going to get a lot of ham fisted updates of classics/franchises plus tear jerkers about little Pedro the genius child of illegal immigrants who doesn’t get picked up from school one day because mom and dad got taken away by ICE, or something similar.
I am curious to see if ad agencies stick with commercials in which every family is headed by a white collar black guy with a white wife. I assume the NFL is not going to abandon its end zone messages or helmet slogans.
I have an awfully hard time regarding a moviemaker as an artiste; but, as you say, maybe that is my problem and not his. Not convinced though.
Moviemaking is the painting of moving pictures with cameras and film instead of paint and canvas. It provokes and evokes, like other art forms. And the film auteur has to be an HR manager, accountant and salesman in addition to the creative vision.
If it helps make the case there is a documentary called David Lynch: an art life in which many of his paintings are displayed so he was an artist in the old/traditional sense of the word too (but I think most people just know him for his movie directing!)
https://youtu.be/CbXEU_Kj3NI?feature=shared
I saw "Wild at Heart" a year after it came out, got married, and dropped out of the American popular culture. I haven't seen a David Lynch film since. I know that Joe Sobran, the brilliant but erratic conservative writer, loved him and devoted a column to Lynch in his own newsletter after William F. Buckley fired him.
It is so long since I've seen a Bob's Big Boys. Bob's kind of faded away like Howard Johnson's.
I saw Blue Velvet when it first came out and haven't seen it since. It was good but disturbing in a way I don't want to experience again. Same with David Fincher's film, Se7en.
Twin Peaks was good but kind of unwound after a bit. It's worth watching just for Lynch's tribute to beautiful American women with dark brown hair.
I detect sadness in this post. We are losing Old, Weird America.
I loved 'Blue Velvet'. Never saw 'Twin Peaks'.
"We are losing Old, Weird America."
Here's an idea: petition Gavin Newsom to release Richard Allen Davis. He should be receptive.
Earlier generations of Americans built something great. By the 1950s and 1960s (I assume from what I've read) the optimistic view was that the past had been hard but the utopian techno future will enable our beautiful children to kick back and relax and enjoy life, you know, let the robots take the wheel for a while.
Cool idea but does that tend to work out? We all kinda loathe the trust fund kids and assume they will become depressed heroin addicts (what, just me?). Family wealth tends not to last more than three generations. It's a sad fact of life that you can't just achieve something and rest and enjoy. If you don't strive forward, you slip backward. This was one of the themes of 'Interstellar'. They stopped trying to do cool shit like go to space and then had no ability to recover from a crop blight. From my own experience, if you have a weight problem, maintenance is impossible. If you try to maintain a weight you slowly drift upward.
So, as much as many commenters on this page would like to just enjoy and continue the country the way our ancestors built it, don't you see that if we lose our dynamism, we will inevitably regress? This is the only good argument I see for bringing in some number of hungry people from other countries--to replenish the spirit that built America (cue patriotic music--America, Fuck Yeah!)
But here's the thing about past immigration: lots of lebensraum, no "civil rights" laws for the immigrants to beat their hosts over the head with, and active, hands-on enforcement of the public charge doctrine (which is I believe still statutory law).
I agree with all your points except the idea that we might be running out of space here. Take a cross country drive. There is plenty. Now you might say that the problem is that immigrants don't want to live in the wide open spaces and they drive up housing costs in urban centers. True and bad, but hardly new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_New_York_City_rent_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_New_York_City_rent_strike
etc.
I'm not the type who drives through farmland and national and state parks and thinks wow, if only there were more strip malls here.
So you want living space but no one living there. Got it.
Yes. I like my generous set-offs, my single-family housing, my fruited plains, and my forests arboreal. If I wanted to live in a human terrarium I'd move to Hong Kong or Manhattan Island.
Americans voted with their reproductive practices for population stability 120 million people ago.
This is the Matt Yglesias argument. Flyover country is empty of people and filled with so much land we could easily take in tens of millions of migrants a year.
Most Americans don’t want America turned into Singapore style density.
I agree. I don't want the current levels of immigration either, mostly because I like the American culture the way it was. I liked Pat Buchanan's statement back in the 90s that we've had a large amount of immigration and now we should stop and get them all Americanized.
I was merely contradicting the above argument that the difference between Immigration now and way back when is that we had lots of room back then and don't now.
There is a difference. Back then there were populated areas that increased in density and concentric like circles of that density moving outward from cities. Gross generalization but I believe true. I’d love to see a moving map of population increase and location.
Now we have calls for massive urbanization and destruction of suburbia. Every bit of open land must be claimed and built upon densely. America was always mostly open land with pockets of civilization (aka population centers). I want it to stay that way and I love the suburbs, single family housing that’s owner occupied and my car.
City folks have railed against suburbs for as long as they have existed and their bitching increased after their policies created white flight. They will have zero luck abolishing suburbs especially in an age of increasing remote work. Trapping the tax payers will require the cities to offer better quality of life and it's tough to see that unless crime is kept down and there are "good schools" (wink wink).
I know a successful artist with a modest public profile. He does media work for self promotion and also for pay of course.
Even though he’s a very basic liberal, he scrupulously avoids even hinting at his political opinions. I think he knows that he has no real expertise and could easily misstep and make himself sound very silly.
Steve,
Your elegiac words about post-WWII Southern California remind me of James Q. Wilson's wonderful essay about that place and time, as reflected in the Reagan revolution of a few years later. It's worth a read for anyone whose memory lane goes back to then and there, or who wants to understand those of us whose does.
James Q. Wilson, A Guide to Reagan Country: The Political Culture of Southern California, Commentary magazine May 1967.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-wilson/a-guide-to-reagan-country-the-political-culture-of-southern-california/
Ken
Forget about it being good for American art. It’s good for American sanity. We can’t have a country where acknowledging that the President is in office becomes grounds for unpersoning.
It does kinda feel like, just maybe, it's morning in America again.
"In 2018, Lynch expressed some open-minded agnostic optimism about Donald Trump, for which the Establishment came down upon him like a ton of bricks.
Yet, if even David Lynch, who had a reasonable claim to be America’s Greatest Living Artist, isn’t allowed to express any off-message sentiments, you know your culture is in trouble."
2018 was the year that I started feeling like I couldn't relate to anyone anymore (or at least not the upper-middle-class white people who made up most of my peers). That feeling had been building since the 2014 Michael Brown Hoax and reached a breaking point. I remember at my job at the time I stopped going out to lunch and happy hour with co-workers, which I had done regularly for years.
By the summer of 2020 George Floyd mania I started to feel less alienated. Things had gotten so overtly crazy that more people were starting to notice and get at least a little bit skeptical.
Right before the 2022 midterms is when I felt the tide had turned. I remember seeing on the news that there had been a number of brazen crimes on the NYC Subway and the city was announcing a large increase in police presence. I said something like "Oh we love the police now! I thought they were racist and we were supposed to defund them." I also remember Columbus Day 2022 coming and going without any protests. I think the media was afraid the Republicans would win the midterms and started toning down a lot of the race and transgender stuff.
The vibe shift today is palpable.
If I wanted to speculate on root causes, I think the peak of the madness was between the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in August 2017 and the November 2018 midterm elections.
You had a public demonstration with a large number of young college-educated white men saying things like "Jews will not replace us." This was following years of discussions of genetic race differences and the Jewish Question spreading rapidly across the Internet and social media. And following the election of a president running on immigration restriction as a key issue, and similar political parties rising in Europe.
I think it really terrified the people who dominate the media and cultural establishment ("It's happening!"), and their hysteria affected the whole society. They wanted a complete repudiation of Trump and everything (in their minds) that he stood for. That's why there was so much pressuring of everyone, even David Lynch, to denounce Trump unequivocally.
They wanted the "blue wave" in the 2018 midterms, and didn't get it.
Interestingly, the elites seem to have calmed down despite the fact that the trends have continued. Trump, and the so-called far-right parties in Europe, are more popular than ever. More people are probably "red-pilled" on certain topics than ever (Steve is more mainstream than ever). And immigration restriction is happening in the U.S. right now.
Maybe they've become resigned to it, or their views have changed based on events. (Or my theory is just wrong.)