Cult Studs

[purejuice]

I have a brilliant friend, my Old Hell Freezes Over friend, who for reasons not entirely clear to anyone got sidetracked in her long and luxurious career as a professional grad student. Her thing is the chapel at Karlstejn, the 14th c. Gothic castle of the first Holy Roman Emporer, and it is a worthy opponent. You have to like learn Latin, Czech geology, and what a chapel for personal, private worship means to the first Christian hegemonist, and stuff, yummy.

At some point she zagged into cult studs, partly I think because the art history department at her huge suburban red brick university was trashed and turned into $omething trendier.

I remember at some point they unleashed this terrific discernment on Harlequin romance novels, in which she discerned that the actual place the heroine felt a throbbing was "my bottom" [sic]. This was the locus of some very chaste but throbbing events which led to marriage to the duke, who was always fiddling with "my bottom" but not actually, -- well, you know.

This was hilarious, and in the great scheme of things, making it okay for Suzy Creamcheese's "bottom" to throb, actually not a bad thing. If that's what she's reading and sex ed is what she's getting, it can't be all bad.

My question is, what is the purpose for grad students? I can see the purpose for reporters, getting a grip on the Zeitgeist for Zeitgeist stories, and I can see the political and dialectical purpose for Marxism of good analysis of majority culture, I can see the prophylactic and pedagogical purpose of teaching consumers of television and Harlequin romance novels and Hirohito's revenge video games et al how to talk back to the very derriere-garde and often fascist capitalist values embedded in the Aristotelian (still!) heroic unities, all that. Like they'd want to.

But I don't see the actual cult studs people making the larger picture. I see, instead, really really intelligent people analyzing media the form of whose actual dialogue and character is conferred by television commercials. Now as it happens, I studied television commercials back in the dawn of pre-history and learned two things. They are made by the best and brightest art school graduates, and they are formidably avant-garde -- or at least the best cherry-pickers of what's happening in the streets -- in Zeitgeist, music, camera work and, for lack of a better word, fashion. They do a far better job reporting on the culture than culture critics and reporters do. Their product, the commercials, is completely atavistic, however, in the purity of the Aristotelian narrative arc -- as easily seen in any screenplay you can think of -- toward any number of antediluvian values. Starting with a protagonist. And so on.

(I would like to emphasize an important nuance here. The best and brightest art school grads who make commercials are not the manufacturers of the culture. They get it from the streets. What they get from the streets is actual culture; the picture I have in my mind is of Karl Lagerfeld chickenhawking the trendy clubkids clothes.)

If the Zeitgeist really is, as it was said recently to be, somewhere, that young people don't believe in a personality anymore, or a psyche, or values, but rather trying different ones on, picking them up and laying them down, then cult studs can be seen to be another sort of cosplay game, I suppose, in which the relative values of a throbbing bottom are just as worthy of study -- without relating it to a larger and irrelevant world -- as, oh, let's say, the politics of famine.

I remember as a young woman reading Pauline Kael and thinking that it was crazy and elitist and just so totally French, disputatious and spurious, to take movies, their form being conferred basically by commodity fetishism, seriously.

I still do.

Comments

[ceciliaj.livejournal.com]

I love your writing.

In other news, I feel like this is a really important question -- how we come to our objects of study, how we analyze them once we're there, and how we communicate the analysis at various stages to various audiences. One of the best courses I've taken in grad school was a course on the literary legacies of lynching. On the first day of class, the professor informed us that not all scholarship on the topic was anti-lynching, which I thought was a fascinating claim. Actually, today I'm off to the library to pick up a copy of Jacqueline Goldsby's A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, which addresses precisely that. Especially with a phenomenon that was always infused with the nefarious use of popular culture forms, especially photographs, how can we commemorate the victims of lynching without perpetuating that logic? Anyway, interesting stuff.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

it is fascinating stuff, and the great thing about cult studs is the seriousness with which it approaches what i'm calling majority culture.
keep us posted.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

We seem to be in a period where remix is all that matters in terms of culture. This is not organic syncretism. It's self-aware and almost always either intentionally ironic or incongruous. The very, very best among our culture makers manage to do something that's actually new with that, but most don't and it allows a lot of hacks to get by. They can rip other people off, not particularly have to hide it, and still be considered creative. I've read that we're in the age of the collage and that's a useful way of thinking about it for one reason only. The vast majority of collages that I've ever seen are tacky and sort of paint by numbers in execution. The person who can make collage into real art is rare indeed.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

http://www.nga.gov/feature/bearden/tech3.shtm

some of the greatest collageurs are african american artists, who are, as well as putting stuff together, also cutting it apart. i think it's also related to the collageur african-american yard art (grey gundaker, qv) styles.

and, of course, it's no accident that "actual" culture is often afro american, co-opted nearly instantly by the ad people.

[ceciliaj.livejournal.com]

Your comment makes me think about James Weldon Johnson. I think everyone's life would be improved by reading more of his books.

[fj.livejournal.com]

That image alone was my revelation for today of what collage can be.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

romare bearden is incredibly fabulous. he was sort of on the margin of my consciousness until a big retrospective at the natl gallery of art in d.c., with space for the big mural size works as well as the more easel size stuff. i'll see if i can track down an image of my favorite.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

http://www.nga.gov/feature/bearden/170-142.htm

i stared at this for about 20 minutes, and when i realized there was a train in the upper right hand corner, and it was heading out to somewhere good, i nearly passed out.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

because there is no culture if there's no counterculture.

[orso-amoroso.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing something, maybe reading it, about how corporate marketers were infiltrating youth culture in order to ride the popular wave and to influence it. I don't think it was in N Klein's "No Logo" but I could be wrong, my brain is a little fuzzy today.

this might be interesting:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12669.htm

I think "cultural studies" in the context of the USA is interesting, because you can be cultureless here, depending on your background and upbringing. In which case you are very much a part of the corporate marketing culture -- which predefines your values for you; as opposed to society doing that or social structures anyway: like being German or Irish (and then religon etc)...

There is no culture if there is no counterculture to exploit.

It's truly bizarre how hiphop "culture" and the rap game has spawned, via marketing / exploitation, a global phenomema. And one with some troubling values and implications. It comes in all flavors, white, black, latino and is in most countries of the world.

I'm pretty sure the streets don't contain much actual culture anymore. Either it's past its sell by date or its prefab and manufactured, or both.