From: mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Ah, Fashion.
Date: 8 Oct 92 17:16:37 GMT
Article-I.D.: mcmelmon.mattm-081092095447
Followup-To: soc.motss
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.

In article <1992Oct8.145152.24482@macc.wisc.edu>, anderson@macc.wisc.edu
(Jess Anderson) wrote:
> 
> 
> In article <1992Oct8.080444.3464@reed.edu> nelson@reed.edu
> (Nelson Minar) writes:
> 
> >The point is, there's no reason to claim people are "uneducated"
> >because they don't have the same cultural vocabulary you do,
> >particularly when it is clear that what is going on is a generational
> >effect. 
> 
> Expatiate on that,

Yes.  *Do*

> 
> What I think may be different between generations is that
> older people have come to accept these limitations as
> ineluctable facts of life, whereas younger people have not,
> thinking as they do that there's a solution to ignorance.
> Believe me (I hope you can) that of all the world's
> solutions, few are as overestimated as that idea.

Perhaps what is different between the generations is that 'older
people' have grown too tired to keep on fighting, and so come 
to 'peace' with their surroundings.  And of course, the 'younger
people' shall grow old - and it happens all over again.

Perhaps, when aged and tired, the individual finds a need to 
latch on to something secure.  As it grows increasingly difficult
to relate to the surrounding world, memories of the past -
somewhat easily manipulated by said individual - become the burning
imagery of life.  In effect, it no longer becomes necessary to 
keep up with the world, because the world is no longer important.
Everything of worth has already been developed, and what one
sees in the present are merely pale reflections of a previous
golden age.


> >Icons fade from currency. However, they frequently retain
> >their historical interest.
> 
> This remark, you see, obscures as much as it says.  There's
> a lot more to it.  Everything takes place in a context, or
> rather a complex fabric of contexts, bringing to life in our
> own time aspects of the past, and in the course of that
> process, transformations of the iconography are endemic to
> the situation.  

This paragraph, you see, obscures more than it says.  Jezibel's
Tao of Culture.  Enter the student:  why, oh master, is the
sky blue?  Respond the master:  why is the sky blue?


> Importantly, that which is not recovered tends to be
> reinvented in more contemporary terms.  Madonna furnishes
> many examples.  It's the same impulse, though in a radically
> different context, that leads to spray-can graffiti.  The
> age creates its artifacts, drawing upon such symbols as it
> can find in its own experience, its own context.  At some
> point it ceases to be aware of how the symbols it picks up
> got there in the first place.

"That which is not recovered tends to be re-invented"
                                       -The Tao of Culture

And is, thereby, recovered - yes?  Madonna furnishes many examples,
yes.  Now - spray can graffiti.  Spray can graffiti and Madonna
spring from the same impulse, sayeth the sage.  No longer is graffiti
an expression by the disenfranchised of their failure to be made
integral to society.  Now, it is an appropriation of past images.

Inspired.

> One of the things that's remarkable (and you have provided
> some rewarding contrasts to it) about Matthew Melmon is the
> really startling degree to which he's unaware of what he
> says.  It's perfectly all right not to know something, but to
> think you do -- when obviously you don't -- on *his* kind of
> scale, well that takes the breath away.  As I mention to
> Steve, there's little one can do except roll your eyes,
> shake your head, and hope time fixes it.

Oh, time will fix it.  You may, of course, be dead.  But time will
fix it, and it will be my turn to set myself up as the pompous
sage without a fuck, and someone else's turn to wonder aloud when
the Lord will call a pitiful old man to his final rest.

Melmothra, ACC
Newsgroups: soc.motss