Yes There’s Such a Thing as American Culture
It’s a shame so many bigots, billionaires, and talent-free bastards have worked so hard ruining it
I think a lot about art and creativity. Now that I’m working with AI, it’s pushing me to think in ways I haven’t before. I like that, and I hope others can share the exhilaration of making something new.
There were great books in the 20th century, books that said something profound about our world and people, providing an American perspective, using American language. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
There were gifted artists in the 20th century that reflected America, from Andy Warhol’s pop art to Edward Hopper’s lonely cityscapes to Andrew Wyeth’s evocative, yearning landscapes.
American music was great in the 1960s and 70s. Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Beach Boys.
The Golden Age of American film and television was probably the 50s and 60s, with a few notable film exceptions in the 70s.
Ever since I decided to start writing again in the mid-1990s, something has felt “off.” None of the artists, writers, or musicians I mentioned could be remotely described as “sell-outs” or people aiming only at a top-40, bestseller, cover of TIME Magazine, or big box office status.
But I can’t think of more than a handful of living writers that aren’t complete sell-outs to power, money, and the dominant venal, disturbed, sad, soulless imperative under which we seem to be living.
Bruce said the other day to our friends who were commenting that I looked and acted so young for my age, “She’s like a little girl inside. That’s why I love her.”
Little girls don’t waste their imagination thinking what award they could get or how much money they could make. They don’t spend their time thinking up sequels and remakes and superhero tales.
They are too busy cutting out paper shapes and making dolls. Or in my case, operating on their Barbies to find out how they’re made.
Most of us know something about some of the most popular and accomplished writers, artists, and musicians of the 20th century. Maybe we even know about the lives of great dancers like Gene Kelly, who not only starred in An American in Paris, he choreographed it, including its 17-minute ballet. Gershwin’s music in this film will be played forever as long as music is able to be played.
Every culture, every nation not only deserves to have something as beautiful, meaningful, and timeless as An American in Paris, they do have artworks, films, books, and music that are as beautiful and compelling.
But there are always ups and downs. And if the 1950s and early 60s were the “Golden Age” of American film musicals — the trend has reversed. We’re in the “Dark Ages” now for US film in general, not just musicals. Other musical film traditions continue and not just Bollywood, also French and Chinese films.
I heard this morning that US worker productivity has risen by nearly 70% since the 1970s. Ironically, or perhaps because of this increasing emphasis on paying work, also since the 70s, every US art form I can think of began to bifurcate into “Lifestyles and Tastes of the Rich and Famous” along with the hypercommodified dark slurge that seems to overwhelm our screens and lives. And, as I know people will point out, any arts programs have been ruthlessly cut from schools.
But of course the rich can always afford to send their children to private schools or to pay for art education, thus resulting in negative ROI we have today in terms of most of the arts.
Let’s take television for example. I was always told coming up as a writer that “short fiction that made people think [i.e. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”] died because television came along and filled the same public taste”. I just looked at network TV’s schedule for tonight and 80% of all shows are cop dramas, crime dramas, private eye or spy dramas, fire & rescue dramas, medical shows, quasi-military shows. NBC’s fall lineup has no comedies.
Now all services and studios are streaming, screaming, scrambling for ad dollars. After a lackluster movie year and an Academy Awards where a film about the making of a weapon that could destroy every living thing on the planet except cockroaches, rats, and billionaires won nearly every award —
It’s not a good time.
And it’s all happened, all during my life, because of the shift toward the tastes and interest of the worst among us rather than the aspirations of the best of us and hopes and dreams of the majority of us.
I’m far from the only person who has merely asked, “Give me an opportunity to show what I can do.”
Even more than four decades of adulthood in a culture that’s designed to tell me I am nobody, nothing, by now “old and ugly,” and that I have nothing to offer or say — a culture that would ask me to work for decades for free for the privilege of making a few dollars on the rare occasion — I still imagine, I still dream, I still work.
It’s like our entire nation, all of America, went into this bizarre rabbit hole of sameness, badness, rushing for the lowest common denominator, selling anything and everything that’s expressly unreal. Desperately, insanely seeking any way to put every authentic creator down, to starve them, degrade them, and force more and more unoriginal, derivative, sad, depressing slurge masquerading as creativity —
Did anyone need another Willy Wonka movie?
How can you say you live in a “free” country when 98% of all performers use their public platforms to talk only about certain current politicians and praise them? Where and when are we living — 17th century Spain? Even Velasquez found his way around the Inquisition —
The aspirations of the “Golden Age” of creativity in America were simple in many ways, complex in others. There are always going to be gifted dancers and choreographers, but they are going to make dance for their time. No one will ever capture the magic of An American in Paris quite the same way again.
Have you heard people say “There’s no such thing as white culture”? This is apparently meant to criticize bigoted people.
If you’re a real artist (and I include writer in this), you don’t talk that way. You don’t think that way. You are concerned with your relationship with the world and with others. You are concerned with your relationship with your work.
In my world, listening is important. So I listen to others and I hear them. I feel them.
People are ready for a change. They’re tired of being presented with entertainment that’s only about separating them from their cash and only about funneling that cash upward to rich, evil people. They’re tired of food that doesn’t nourish, it just makes them crave more of it than they need to eat. They’re tired of all of it.
We were playing “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (Donovan, 1968) and I was like “This is a great song. It feels so good to play it.”
And it’s just one of the great songs of that time and yes, I know Donovan’s Irish. There are quite a few of us Irish expat descendants in the US.
Culture is about people’s relationships with each other and their world and one of the beautiful things about the best of 20th Century American culture is its inclusivity. Films like An American In Paris are popular because anyone, anywhere, can relate to them and appreciate them. They can inspire anyone, anywhere because they are inspirational and they contain universal human values and feelings.
People say American culture is exclusionary and it’s certainly that way today —
But there was a time when it was just creative and it wasn’t shutting out perspectives like Jimi Hendrix or Gene Kelly. It was including them on the basis of their power and originality and creativity.
I do hope that happens again. Because right now, American culture is at a low ebb and all of the bigots, elitists, and exploiters out there have a lot to answer for.
Yeah- other than the "Night Court" revival, NBC doesn't seem to like comedy as much as it used to.
That, and the fact that so many of the people who could do comedy right are gone...