The Problem’s Not Political
Though I may be a bit more sensitive to it than others, I imagine I’m not the only one who feels a certain looming doom creeping over the land like a summer thunderstorm. After all, it’s 2009 now, and although the shit’s been really hitting the fan these last couple years, it’s been in steady deterioration for quite some time. It seems as though our race never really had any kind of plan after the turn of the millennium, as far as long reaching aspirations go, and have since been living soully off of the creative fat leftover from the technology boom (as well as leftover cans of spaghettios from the Y2K stock piles).
But now that the internet can stream video at buffer-free rate, and cell phones are as small and obnoxious as they’re ever going to get, we’ve run completely out of direction in creative innovation. It also doesn’t help that, in a time of necessary resourcefulness and creative input, we’re stuck smack dab in the middle of a follow-the-leader societal mood, which discourages individuality and personal standards in favor of blind acceptance and political correctness.
It’s like we’re currently in the physical realization of Atlas Shrugged, only the genius of the world isn’t intentionally brushing us off, they simply don’t exist, or get the recognition and appreciation they deserve, thanks to the current anti-artist social climate. True genius should be self evident…a simple spark that reveals something that has been present the entire time, only hidden behind thin preconceptions. It is for this reason that I believe that there is absolutely nothing on the table right now that will solve any of the nation’s problems. The stimulus might keep the nation’s economy afloat for a little while, but as far as the long-term goals of it, like the plans to invest in wind turbines, solar energy and bio-fuels, come on…those goals are already realized in concept, and are therefore too short sighted and too boring to ever acquire their own gravity and momentum. Screw cars all together, Obama, and let’s invest in teleportation technology, or winged rocket packs, or something with a little more guts and excitement! That buddhist rapper said it best; “you don’t need eyes to see, you need vision.”
If I see one more ad of five year old children with flying V 80s guitars, playing off of their dimwit parent’s nostalgia trip, with a similarly nostalgic slogan along the lines of "let your kids ROCK!" I’m just going to snap (actually, I said that to myself a moment before writing this, and then saw such an ad. Welcome to "snap"). The entire 80s concept of "lets ROCK" blows my mind, for no other reason than the fact that celebrating just for the sake of celebrating is not only pointless, but impossible. There’s no need to cut loose and live it up if you’ve done nothing to earn it (and I’m not just being preachy here, it’s biologically and chemically impossible to achieve satisfaction without sacrifice), and while the aging hippies can look back at their teenage years with a sense of pride for what they tried to organize and accomplish, the aging punk rockers did jack and shit, which in turn is setting the example for their children that doing jack and shit should be celebrated. I often get critiqued for favoring the counter culture movement of the 60s, but despite the specifics, at a root level, they carried a sense of purpose and significance that is utterly lost on the in between generations…for even though I think that it brought in the destruction of the family, the abandonment of personal responsibility, and the beginning of social selfishness, I admire the integrity of far-reaching goals, as "world peace" is about as far reaching as one can hope for.
Currently, art has something of a bad name, in my opinion, largely because the only ones permitted to utilize it tend to be the scrawny California style liberal fags with thick lisps, political correctness cow-towing, niche subject matter, and unrelatable forms of expression (I’m actually surprised that normal homosexuals don’t resent the fact that these fairies give the rest of them a bad image). It’s in the obscure and confusing format of expression that I take the greatest issue, for if an artist can not communicate with everyone in a universal language, he or she has failed…not in the act of selfish creation, but in the vastly more important act of selflessly sharing that creation with the world at large.
The greats aren’t admired for their clever and condescending representation of the proverbial minority brown-noser, but rather for their grit, conviction, honesty, and balls. Johnny Cash shoots a man in Reno just to watch him die, Leonard Cohen gets head on an unmade bed from Janis Joplin, Van Gogh chops his own ear off just to prove his love for a woman, and what do we get? Miley Cyrus, Bright Eyes clones, and uninspired CGI bullshit films like Underworld. Whoopty-fuckin-do.
*Not that there haven’t been at least a -few- creative innovations or pieces of art; the particle collider, some movies/music, various other things I tragically haven’t discovered yet, etc.
ley Cyrus, Bright Eyes clones, and uninspired CGI bullshit films like Underworld. Whoopty-fuckin-do.