Mahendra Singh has posted a bunch of comments for our hatefest and various threads. They are so deliciously hateful that I wanted to preserve them all in one place: so here they are.
And let’s face it, “twee” is the closest that American pop-culture will ever get to simulating tragedy. Back to the 17th-century, that’s my Fascist motto … Après toi, Rubens, le déluge!
__________or perhaps … the only real tragedy of pop culture is its antithesis — the quotidian life of the average human being?
_________Here’s a hateful thought: North American eight-year olds may not be reading comics but they are making movies, recording music, drawing comics, writing fiction, producing TV shows … the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.
Hate week continues, Winston …
_________The problem with hating pop culture is that pop culture is based on hate … hate of thinking, hate of complexity, hate of adulthood.
But it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity: under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
___________When you look at too much crap, you draw crap. When you read too much crap, you write crap. When you listen to too much crap, you compose crap.
Years of mass-produced, ubiquitious pop culture has produced a bumper crop of stunted artists, writers, musicians and most important, audiences.
But enough of hate, let’s talk … rage. Let’s rage against the rage! Screw Orwell, gimme Petronius.
__________I think Domingos is being generous in his explanation of why mediocrity is OK in modern comix. As is Suat.
The underlying reason is that many artists/critics/audiences prefer it. Mediocrity is the essence of pop culture and pop culture is inescapable. It’s a vicious circle: feed young people with rubbish from birth and they’ll learn to prefer it, to praise it, to protect it. It’s cheaper & quicker to make crap and the profit margins are higher, thanks to volume.
People love crap which is why this particular Hate Week is so darn good. Let us drip our mordant venom upon the squirming flesh of the proles to the tune of a Boccherini fandago which would just make their ears bleed anyway.
__________The myth of a perpetual, socially-acceptable rebellion is the sweetest revenge yet of conservatism upon romanticism. I’m starting to like this Western Civilization after all …
________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Thanks, Noah. That’s a headline which my entire family will treasure long after I’m dead & gone …
When does the Unabomber contribute his piece? Travis Bickle? Rorschach? T.S. Eliot?
I once had an Armenian, Soviet-educated, neo-Marxist sociology professor who shouted at a 150-student survey course that we were the cause of the downfall of Western civilization. That was a fun class.
Good thing he was neo; real old-school Marxists would have just sent you to the Gulag.
Reminds me of the two dissident poets packed off to the gulag.
Says one: “Well, look at it this way: in Stalin’s time we’d have been shot.”
Sighs the other: “Yes…nobody cares about poetry these days…”
(Not so funny, I guess, to the Pussy Riot women.)
Heh. It’s funny because it’s true. Khruschev had some amazing rants against modern art; there’s one quote where he compares the pictures to sitting in a toilet and looking up as someone prepares to take a shit. Hard to imagine any American leader ever bothering to think up something like that, much less say it.
Well, Kennedy (one of your bugbears,Noah) faked his way on the other end of the spectrum, with help from Jacqueline– having Pablo Casals over for dinner,Robert Frost at the inauguration. Patrician fluff.
(BTW Jacqui Kennedy-Onassis has a discreet but key role in promulgating comics to the respectable: she was Larry Gonick’s editor for ‘The Cartoon History of the Universe’ — and, according to Gonick, an excellent editor, and a true champion of comics.
So here’s to you, Jacqui O!)
Mahendra Singh as a person is most definitely the *opposite* of Hateful. However, his dark, hilarious, acerbic wit is often reminiscent of the Satan of Mark Twain, or the devil of Ambrose Bierce.
I tend to view mass culture and, above all, mass culture owners as the devil and those who oppose it as the voice of reason. On the other hand it’s also true that the devil is often the voice of reason. I fear angels (of the unfallen kind), mostly…
Martin being too kind, as always. It might interest HU readers to know that Martin has a personal connection to Satan … it’s one of those back-end Hollywood deals, I think. And Domingos is correct, the devil has reasons of her own for making hell seem logical and inevitable.
Hell is other people’s drawings …
“When you look at too much crap, you draw crap. When you read too much crap, you write crap. When you listen to too much crap, you compose crap.
Years of mass-produced, ubiquitious pop culture has produced a bumper crop of stunted artists, writers, musicians and most important, audiences.”
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I have no problem with pop-culture as an idea, as some of it is enjoyable, and I think the best pop-art is the stuff that’s been informed by something greater than pop. It creates a smart, if simple, piece of art that’s easily digestible.
The problem starts when the people creating pop-art have no experience or knowledge of what came before or any influence outside of pop. A simplified take on something that was already simplified stops being smart and concise and ends up being dumb. That’s when we start getting the Rob Liefelds, the Michael Bays, and the Soulja Boys.
Joe H has put it very well … the real issue is the education and nurturing of children. Children need access to culture just as they need access to food and shelter (and love).
The underlying problem is the American contempt for culture and education, this obsessive, feral populism which pervades America’s soil, air and water.