When people in this country talk about “culture,” it usually has something to do with “behavior,” religion or things they think they don’t need to be bothered with thinking about. For example, former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya—who got that job because of “liberal” politics—became another white female “journalist” from a “liberal” network who has made known her right-wing beliefs. With typical right-wing hypocrisy, she is insisting that history that white people don’t like feeling “guilty” about (i.e. those things that have to do with learning from the past and not repeating them) is a “cultural” problem against whites. After first airing her views to general consternation on “The View” this past fall, she repeated them yesterday to (who else?) Tucker Carlson.
Tafoya’s and others complaints about “critical race theory” only confirms the issues CRT talks about; Tafoya falsely claimed that CRT is “responsible” for her son no longer being “friends” with a black and Korean. But believe me it, this happens all the time in this “culture”: being “friends” with a person of another color or “ethnicity” is a “step down” on the society ladder for many white kids who believe they should mingle with the “right people” for their own advancement—meaning of course other white people. It doesn’t take that long to learn the “cultural” realities of this society. On the other hand, it doesn’t help that today’s “popular culture" tends to exacerbate differences and divisions; you think Philly soul of the 70s sent the same “message” to white kids then as does most rap “music” does today? And the need for “scapegoats” isn’t always just a “white” problem.
This brings us to what Europeans mean when they talk about “culture”—particularly their “superior” brand of it. “Culture” is about “art”: literature, paintings, music and even films, and indeed most of the films I have posted about are European. When you listen to popular music today of European origin, you still hear the influence of times past, since there is little market for “music” like rap and hip-hop. In this country, it has become increasingly clear that what Europeans consider “culture” is of little interest to today’s generation of Americans. They are too self-absorbed with the ease of receiving current “culture” on their cell phones to have time to read books or be interested in what their predecessors watched or listened to.
For me, “culture” is mostly about movies and music. I am one of those serious collectors of disc-based media who is interested in having a physical copy of a film that I don’t have to worry about the vagaries of streaming videos (the Russian pirate website Ok.ru has virtually any film you could think of, except that many of them have a Russian audio track over the English track), but I want the best quality product and something I can physically hold in my hands that some streaming service can’t take away from me, or is no longer available because they lost the license for it. What good is disposable “culture” if most people don’t even care if they can’t even see it when they want to?
The “experts” boast of how streaming services have made CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray media “obsolete,” but I just laugh at those people or sneer at their lack of true cultural awareness. Even digital downloads are not really “yours” because DRM restrictions make them accessible only with proprietary software (like Amazon Prime’s or iTune’s), and HD and 4k are nowhere near the quality or adaptability of physical media.
But the thing is, for a true cultural connoisseur such as myself at my age, movies and music (and to a lesser extent these days, books) are what still makes life worth living, and I can even write about them here (Ken Russell’s Lisztomania I’ll be looking at in a week or two). I can’t really say how many video discs I have in my collection, but since my income increased somewhat dramatically in the past five years because of the increase of the local minimum wage laws, my Amazon order pages from 2017 extend 230 pages at ten orders per page, and I haven’t made video purchases from Amazon exclusively.
I have a medium-sized U-Haul storage unit that is filled 90 percent with containers of video discs, which most of them I copied to about 50 1-2 terabyte USB hard drives. I have an unhealthy tendency to give-up searching for an old purchase I know I have somewhere but didn’t copy, and just buy another one. Of course many of them were “impulse” buys, R-rated or “unrated” B-type movies that actually have the content you expect to see in movies with those ratings—and which I’ll probably end-up never watching anyways, but are better to purchase at list price now before they go OOP and outrageous prices are demanded by third-party sellers for used copies.
So on my off days I might hit “play all” from an old television show like “Lost in Space”—not that that crappy Netflix remake—during the afternoon and wonder why the crew doesn’t just keep Dr. Smith locked up in his room 24 hours a day or “forget” that he was left behind on one of those desolate planets that all look the same...
...and then settle in for a few major studio back catalogue titles. It’s “amazing,” but when I watch something like Red Dust starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, I don’t even think of the fact that this film is 90 years old and was made way before my time; films like this are just a reminder of how bereft films and television are today of new ideas and charismatic stars.
Anyways, that is what I consider to be “culture.” Those people who define “culture” by societal prejudices and stereotypes and not by artistic legacy or even knowledge of it just bore the hell out of me. I’d rather just watch a good movie because, to quote Christy in Playboy of the Western World, “to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome it’s worse, maybe, to go mixing with the fools of the earth.”
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