To quote writer, essayist and commentator Adam Gopnik out of context from an almost-year-old interview in New Yorker magazine, “anything that obsesses you turns out to obsess at least several hundred other people. Transgendered Zen Buddhists with a taste for Proust and Dave Barry find others just like them to form a reading group.”
I love that! Although his point spoke to New York City, it gives hope that, no matter how truly off-the-wall the contents of one’s cultural cocoon, others are similarly afflicted. It’s no mean feat, however, considering that, if you subscribe to the notion that all living things are different than all other living things, diversity rules.
What are the odds a neurotic anarchist with an agave fetish and a passion for Rimbaud could hook up with others of a like mind? Actually, that outfit’s been together for a spell. Gopnik may well be right.
Is it possible cultural history is on the rebound and small clandestine clusters gather to expound on the inter-relationships between “Nude Descending a Staircase,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “The Sun Also Rises?”
Back in the day when ski bums manned the eclectic high ground, such discourse might well have taken place in most any randomly selected gondola cabin out at the Treasure Mountain Resort. The following cabin might well have concerned itself with “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Purple Haze,” and Quantum Mechanics.
These days, however, at least for the most part, interpretations of America’s intellectual and artistic life have proven too tedious for public consumption. In a town that recently showed its literary festival the door, it is no wonder that lower common denominators are all the rage.
Not that the community does not contain evangelists in the business of expanding the collective consciousness. It’s just that when one attends local concerts, films, gallery tours, theater, and the like without having any derivitive association with the art in question, one often misses the point – that which the artist is attempting to convey.
To be sure, this is all a sweeping generalization. There remain many in this once-quaint burg who do “get it.” And by that, it isn’t meant that knowledge, per se, is a key to this highway – by any stretch. Although it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of it along, it certainly isn’t a prerequisite to interacting with abstractions upon the landscape.
There will be those attending the Park City Film Series’ screenings of “La Vie En Rose” this weekend for example who don’t know Edith Piaf from a hole in the ground but, depending on the size of their heart, could easily come away from the experience with more understanding of “the sparrow” than one with more familiarity.
That’s really what it takes – to be able to be open to cultural experience, to “feel” the emotion in the art. And, of course, that usually comes when one is confronted by something completely out of their comfort zone. Who knows, you may find yourself joing a group of Edith Piaf enthusiasts with a penchant for Faulkner and frijoles.
Although this must all come across as “wistful thinking” for those most recent good old days, there was a time – and what a time it was – when the abstractly expressionistic among the population were drawn to this mountain valley by seductive sirens and muses alike.
Possibly it had to do with cultural history actually being taught in schools back then. Possibly not! I know I didn’t pay all that much attention to the novelists, painters, composers, choreographers and poets they went on and on about during those formative years. I was too busy manning the bridge of the good ship Hormonal Chaos.
But, for whatever reason, once freed from those chores, I moved in with Joyce, Nabokov, Bellow, Ellison, Roth, Heller, Vonnegut, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, Orozco, Satchmo, Bird, Ellington, Dylan, Balanchine, Graham, Aliey, Tharp, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, and Ferlinghetti – a somewhat crowded moveable feast if there ever was one. Not that they did anything for the hormonal chaos.
The best part of all this is, if you should choose to sit at this table, you don’t need to radically modify your lifestyle. If you’re a sports fan, the poetry and mechanics of motion will just become somewhat more exalted. And if your are a habitué of the barstool, a more cultured classroom would be hard to fathom.
Oh the stories you could tell. Like the night Brendan Behan hung a pubmate upside down from the balcony by his ankles until they both passed out. And don’t forget, just because the aforementioned aesthetic types were gifted, doesn’t mean any of them were ever released for good behavior.
From the here and now, however, it does appear, when moseying about town, that recent voids in what might be referred to as the “well-rounded pursuits” have left many a culturally-challenged pilgrim in their wake.
Not that I miss the tweed-jacketed pipe-smokin’ set standing in line for Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” It should always be remembered that one can’t tell the “bookish” by their covers either.
It’s just that once one allows culture, and, for that matter, cultural history, into one’s life, existence in general begins to make more sense. It releases a torrent of “butterfly effects,” any one of which could be the epiphany that brings light into play.
At one time or another, of course, all of us, like Marcel Duchamp’s nude, have descended the staircase from the cultural to the social. It should be remembered, however, that it never hurts to re-ascend. In fact, continually making tracks up and down that staircase could serve us all well.