Sunday, January 04, 2004
Pop Culture Critic Philip Kennicott comments on
What Will Last
"In popular culture, it is expected that a hit song may be at the top of the charts for weeks; that a book may stay on the bestseller list for months; that a successful sitcom may hang on for years. But all of these things return, in some form or other, indefinitely. Books return as movies, which use 20-year-old songs to establish the atmosphere of the past, in which the actors are wearing clothes perhaps not so different from the ones young people are wearing today because they're enjoying a new vogue. In popular culture, one doesn't fret about the passing of things, because although most everything is ephemeral by one standard, it is also endlessly recycled.
" ... what endures are not the epic moments beloved of traditional historians (though these can have powerful effects), but the larger elements of climate, landscape and language.
"In the so-called high arts, the past decades have brought a new understanding of how even things that fade can yet persist, healthy if marginal, in our society. Classical music is dead, yet it endures, on the margins, creatively moribund but still vibrant in a museum sort of way. Painting is dead, of course, but it's still very popular. The arts teach one to be very cautious about simple-minded gloom. They also inculcate a sense of succession and return, as styles go in and out of fashion, and recur (sometimes as farce) in a parade of neo-this and post-that. Locally, on the timeline, these changes provoke lamentation or rejoicing; but a walk through any decent city art museum is a lesson in calm forbearance, an understanding of the broader sweep and the inevitability of change.
"Look outside the strange fishbowl of political and social analysis, and American culture is far more comfortable with a complex, shifting, sophisticated, overlapping sense of time, a grasp of the past, present and future that takes waxing and waning in stride. We've become virtuosos at playing with the very perception of time. ...
"Why, then, given the vast cultural sophistication with which we understand history, time and the "periodicity" of life, are we so hamstrung by simple categories when it comes to making sense of the political and social zeitgeist (itself a fiction)? Why does "the death of . . . " have such hold on the imagination when everything else about American culture suggests an organism that preserves, evolves, recycles and goes in opposite directions simultaneously?
"... Trends may be actual, but more often, they're projections of desire.
"... At the beginning of a new year, let's remember the present, not as something pregnant with cataclysms or grand new possibilities, but as the ground of things that last and define us . . . for the time being."
¶ 1/04/2004 11:34:00 AM
What Will Last
"In popular culture, it is expected that a hit song may be at the top of the charts for weeks; that a book may stay on the bestseller list for months; that a successful sitcom may hang on for years. But all of these things return, in some form or other, indefinitely. Books return as movies, which use 20-year-old songs to establish the atmosphere of the past, in which the actors are wearing clothes perhaps not so different from the ones young people are wearing today because they're enjoying a new vogue. In popular culture, one doesn't fret about the passing of things, because although most everything is ephemeral by one standard, it is also endlessly recycled.
" ... what endures are not the epic moments beloved of traditional historians (though these can have powerful effects), but the larger elements of climate, landscape and language.
"In the so-called high arts, the past decades have brought a new understanding of how even things that fade can yet persist, healthy if marginal, in our society. Classical music is dead, yet it endures, on the margins, creatively moribund but still vibrant in a museum sort of way. Painting is dead, of course, but it's still very popular. The arts teach one to be very cautious about simple-minded gloom. They also inculcate a sense of succession and return, as styles go in and out of fashion, and recur (sometimes as farce) in a parade of neo-this and post-that. Locally, on the timeline, these changes provoke lamentation or rejoicing; but a walk through any decent city art museum is a lesson in calm forbearance, an understanding of the broader sweep and the inevitability of change.
"Look outside the strange fishbowl of political and social analysis, and American culture is far more comfortable with a complex, shifting, sophisticated, overlapping sense of time, a grasp of the past, present and future that takes waxing and waning in stride. We've become virtuosos at playing with the very perception of time. ...
"Why, then, given the vast cultural sophistication with which we understand history, time and the "periodicity" of life, are we so hamstrung by simple categories when it comes to making sense of the political and social zeitgeist (itself a fiction)? Why does "the death of . . . " have such hold on the imagination when everything else about American culture suggests an organism that preserves, evolves, recycles and goes in opposite directions simultaneously?
"... Trends may be actual, but more often, they're projections of desire.
"... At the beginning of a new year, let's remember the present, not as something pregnant with cataclysms or grand new possibilities, but as the ground of things that last and define us . . . for the time being."
¶ 1/04/2004 11:34:00 AM
