Yesterday--A Belated Review of the Film

 Full of spoilers, but you've already seen the movie, haven't you?

https://youtu.be/0ONU_H0EjIg?si=bHoc2FBtFEY8fAIe

On the Future of Art

 

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The Imperative of Art

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Why the Arts Suck These Days

 

The arts in general have been moribund since the mid-seventies. If you ever wondered why, the answer is simple. They declined as “political correctness” rose, now metastasized as “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

The imagination must be free. It cannot judge or play politics. It must seek truth. But since the mid-seventies or so, everyone has had to walk on eggshells, think carefully before saying anything. Truth is dangerous.

It becomes too dangerous to say anything new. You cannot predict who might take offense at what; and end your career, take away your livelihood. The safe thing is to do only what has been done before. And so the arts become bland and monotonous. Mere mindless entertainment, at best. One song sounds like another. One film looks like another. One novel reads like another.

But even this is not enough, either. The Overton window is a moving; one must then add something to virtue signal, to be truly safe—throw in a trans character, make the hero black, and so on. And make sure they are entirely admirable, without human flaws. Condemn the groups you are currently supposed to condemn: the Jews, Southern whites, the religious, men. Making the product even more shallow and predictable.

And unethical; just as good art must insist on truth, it must also insist on morality. Yet these current productions are obviously small-minded and cynical. You feel dirty watching, or reading, or listening.

 Artists must do this, editors must do this, producers must do this, gallery owners and art critics must do this. Or have no career.

Any good art must be suppressed immediately as dangerous.

Suppressed not only by the galleries, the publishers, the theatres; also on the Internet, where independent producers might otherwise shine through.

Humour is perhaps the most obvious example. Any good joke requires a surprise, a reversal of expectations. That becomes too dangerous in the atmosphere of political correctness. It is safest not to try to be funny.

And everyone can see the result. Whatever happened to Mad magazine, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, Monty Python?

That was the Sixties, and the early Seventies, when almost all the arts were blossoming.

 Blossoming because there was an atmosphere of anything being permitted. This was, notably, just as the old pornography codes had been lifted, on movies and TV; and the Supreme Court had struck down much other censorship. Moreover, the speech codes of the McCarthy era had just been discredited.

Result: a great flowering of the arts.

You can trace similar periods throughout history.

We need another burst of freedom. We are overdue. And I feel it is about to happen. People are chafing at the absurdities of wokeism. Major figures are bucking it, and seem to be starting to break through rather than being ruined.

Such eras of repression are mostly sustained by general cowardice. As Solzhenitsyn once said of the old Soviet Union, if any one person had resolved to get up one morning and only speak the truth, the whole structure would have collapsed. An exaggeration, but it is generally true that evil by itself is powerless: what is needed for it to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If it falls, when it falls, it will collapse quickly, and there will be a great flowering of the arts. I hope soon; I hope I live to see it.

The Way We Were

 

This cover from 1971 shows us how far the arts and letters have fallen since the 1960s. Look who was writing then. And in the popular press!

Last Sunday's Gospel: The Kingdom of Heaven

Parable of the treasure in the field. Possibly Rembrandt.

The gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass was a string of short parables describing the Kingdom of Heaven. An essential subject, yet, as usual with parables, it is hard to make out what is really being said. 

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Parable of the pearl. Mironov.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some fish of every kind, which, when it was filled, fishermen drew up on the beach. They sat down and gathered the good into containers, but the bad they threw away. So it will be in the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked from among the righteous, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things?”

They answered him, “Yes, Lord.”

This seems intentionally funny. Really? Was that all so understandable to you?

He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things.”

Matthew 13: 44-52, WEB

Therefore? How does this statement follow from what has come before? Why are we even talking about scribes?

Now let’s back up. Start with the treasure in the field. An obvious contradiction here. Why, having discovered the treasure, doesn’t the man just take it? Why rebury it, then buy the field?

And the pearl. Is it obvious that a merchant is better off having sold his entire inventory for one pearl? Is there any reason to suppose he would get a bigger profit out of it than out of another pearl, simply because it is more expensive?

For that matter, who fishes with a dragnet from the beach? How do you drag a net from a stationary position on the beach?

These seem to be a series of riddles. Let’s try to solve them.

The field that must be bought in order to yield its treasure must have an inexhaustible yield. The pearl that is more profitable than all other pearls combined must have an inexhaustible value. The sea that yields abundant fish even standing and casting at the shoreline must be inexhaustible.

And the scribe?

The scribe, that is, the writer, genuinely does, in his regular profession, have an inexhaustible resource. He draws on imagination and memory: “new and old things.” There is no end to the treasures the mind can produce.

Jesus suggests the situation of the scribe sums up the other examples. That is, the kingdom of heaven is most justly comparable to—or is—the memory and the imagination. These are our experience of the spiritual world.

Accordingly, the association of the prior examples seems dreamlike, an association if image motifs, rather than making some rational point: a treasure in a field, then a treasure from the sea, then good and bad things emerging from the sea, then good and bad people burning in a furnace.

Together, it sounds like the imagination, like a reverie.

One implication, since this is so, is that every scribe, every writer, every artist, is a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. It is essentially a spiritual office.

One might mistakenly thing this statement weak: that the Kingdom of Heaven is “only imaginary”; “made up”; “a fiction.” Jesus denies this by his reference to the burning of souls by the angels. This world of the imagination is, he says, more consequential, more meaningful, than the world we only sense with our vegetative senses. It is where the truth is revealed, and the real values of all things.

We ignore or trivialize it at our ultimate peril.

Now, perhaps, we see it only at a distance, and indistinctly, as through a glass darkly. But one day we will see it face to face.

A Plea for the CBC

Founded by the Tories under RB Bennett.

Non-Canadians can stop reading now.

Canadian conservatives tend to be anti-culture, anti-arts. This is a dreadful mistake. Shelley was right in saying that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; the pen really is mightier than the sword. The culture wars will, inevitably, be won in the culture. All politicians are ever able to do, unless they are themselves, like Ronald Reagan, artists, is rush to the front of the mob and pretend they are leading. Leave the culture on the other side, and the right will always lose.

Nor is there any unwritten rule that artists are always going to be leftists. They are not. In the early years of the twentieth century, the finest English poetic voices were on the right: TS Eliot and WB Yeats. Jack Kerouac was a Taft Republican. Even supposedly counter-cultural figures from the Sixties have revealed that they merely felt obliged to keep to themselves essentially right-wing views: Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, and so forth.

So we should all shut up about shutting up the CBC. We need the CBC. We need it desperately in a country like Canada, not so much because we are threatened with assimilation by American culture, but because we are threatened, by a challenging geography, with regional, centrifugal forces. We need a megaphone to speak for Canada united.

On top of that, there is the issue of international branding. People outside France buy French products largely because “France” means something as a brand. So does “Japan,” or “Germany.” Canada too means something as a brand, but it is just good sense to advertise. A CBC concentrated entirely on Canadian culture and focused outward as well as inward, with the new fora of international cable and the Internet out there, would do this. It would also project “soft power” that might stand us in good stead in case of international conflict.

Wince all you want about exempting the arts from the free market. It works; and the arts have rarely, anywhere, been part of the free market. This is an exception to the general rule. We have seen government tinkering work in the remarkable growth of the Canadian popular music industry, unfairly subsidized, no doubt, in market terms, by Cancon rules. CBC radio, which unlike TV is all Canadian content, has also genuinely done a lot for Canadian culture.

Nor would this cost much—less and less with the growth of technology. The French auteurs used to talk of the ideal of a “camera-stylo”—a cinema that could be as intimate and personal as a writer’s pen. We have that now: everybody carries a video camera in their pocket, complete with means of instant transmission.

Foreign content.

The trick is to require that CBC broadcast only Canadian content, with a clear mandate for national unity and promotion of the Canadian brand. No shows from the US or Britain. Besides serving no national interest, such shows put the CBC in direct and unfair competition with private broadcasters. Bureaucratic bloat could be avoided by enforcing a budget requirement that limited percentages available for anything off-air.

And no money for anything the least bit “multicultural.” Canadian culture must belong to all Canadians.

Non-Canadians can now resume reading.

Popular Music and Politics

Memorial to John Lennon, Central Park, New York.

I think everyone assumes that the world of popular music, like Hollywood, is a leftist redoubt. One thinks, once again, of Joni Mitchell, of Neil Young's “anti-war” album, of Bob Dylan and the tradition of “protest songs,” of John Lennon's “Imagine,” and on and on. More generally, there is a hostility on the right towards the arts.

I think this is a big mistake.

To begin with, the arts by their nature are not political. Artists in general, including popular musicians and songwriters, are politically naive, perhaps more naive than the average person. But political organizations, by their nature, are eager to co-opt when they can. It seems to me that it is the left that has co-opted art, and it is a mistake for the right to allow them this ground. Because, while artists are mostly apolitical by nature—free spirits cannot function within a political organization—what they create can be immensely influential politically.

Dylan is the classic case in point. The truth is, nobody can really pin down Dylan's religion or politics. And this seems to be very deliberate on his part. Back in his “protest” days, he was given an award by a leftist organization, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He took the occasion of the award presentation to announce publicly that he was not interested in politics.

Protesting the World Bank. CDs available.

“You people should be at the beach....There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan was wise enough to realize that politics is a trap for artists. On the one hand, political groups are desperate to claim a fairly prominent artist on their own; they are soon knocking at any successful artist's door persistent as Mormon missionaries. At the same time, becoming connected with a movement gives an artist a ready-made distribution channel, enabling his art. WB Yeats says he got the advice, early in his political career, that to make it in Ireland as an artist, you had to have either the Catholic Church or the Independence movement behind you. As a Protestant, he could not hope for the Catholic Church. So he chose to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Hence Yeats's politics; which everyone else since has taken so seriously.

The danger of this approach, though, is that then the artist has a harness on, which rarely rests easily on an artist's shoulders. When he must always look over his shoulder at the possible political repercussions of what he sings, paints, or writes, this can lead to second-rate, insincere art. And politics is fickle: become publicly identified with a cause, and once the cause goes away, often, so do you. Yet, once you have become identified with a movement or a cause, it is very difficult and dangerous to get away. Not only will you have lost your audience; they will turn on you and hate you as a traitor. Dylan has risked this several times. Few members of Sinn Fein have a good word to say about Yeats today.

John Train in his early years.

Phil Ochs is a perfect counter-example of the danger Dylan sidestepped here. He got bought and sold as an anti-war advocate. The war ended. He was passe. He seems to have realized he had been tricked and trapped; in his last days, he re-imagined himself as a new person, “John Train,” who was systematically opposed to Phil Och's politics. Then he hanged himself.

Currently, there is also obviously tremendous pressure within the arts community to at least pretend you are leftist in order to get along. You have to be pretty big before you dare challenge your peers on such a matter—pretty big, and pretty politically aware. Andy Warhol once commented that he was for lower taxes, and really should be a Republican. “But artists aren't allowed to be Republicans, are they?”

Somebody should set up a refugee program for artists, welcoming them, getting the word out, trying to help them with a new audience when they flee the left-wing cult of the arts. It would have to be done delicately, though; the way Catholics do missionary work. No point in fleeing a leftist cult only to get caught up in a rightist one.

In the meantime, those on the right can at least be understanding, and not jerk their knees at a Joni Mitchell, a Neil Young, or a Keith Richards. They are leftists in the same sense that fish ride bicycles.