"Hard to Be" - David Bazan
(The post title is not a comment on the song, which I quite like and was intrigued to see was filmed in the living room of someone in my hometown.)
I am finding it difficult to comment much more of the dynamics of the Republican race until such time as we get a clearer indication that the Gingrich phenomenon is genuine. If so (and it appears to be), it will violate so much of the conventional wisdom -- especially the need for a good "ground game" to win in Iowa.
In the meantime, I found this article by Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair to be really interesting. In it, Andersen ponders the seeming lack of aesthetic change -- in terms of fashion, music, art, architecture, and literature -- over the last twenty years, noting how anomalous that really is. He asks you to think about for example differences in dress and style if you went from 1912 to 1932 to 1952 to 1972 to 1992. I think we would all agree that the clothes, hair styles, cars, buildings, movies, novels, and music between say 1952, 1972, and 1992 were all markedly different. I tend to agree with Andersen that you would not notice all that much difference with respect to any of these things between now and 1992.
It used to be that twenty years was a huge amount of time in many matters cultural and aesthetic -- here are the top musical LPs of 1958 -- they were followed nine years later by Sgt. Pepper's, which in turn was followed nine years later by Never Mind the Bollocks. In 1992, Nirvana released Nevermind and Dr. Dre released The Chronic, neither of which would sound dated today. Or look at the American films of the late 1950s say versus those of the early 1970s. It was like several coats of paint were removed from the country's surface during those years. Again, I don't see the same kind of change between the films of 1992 and the present.
Andersen posits a few theories for this, although I think it is a really difficult question to answer. He notes that the main changes between the present and twenty years ago are largely technological rather than artistic -- that is, there was no internet then, no blogs, no ipods, no youtube, no twitter. But this represents a change in media rather than a change in aesthetics -- we communicate and consume differently, but it does not seem that we create all that much differently.
What do you think? Do you agree with Andersen's premise? If so, do you have any persuasive reasons for why this is so?
Add anything else that's on your mind.
