From: mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon)
Subject: Re: Culture (was Re: Ah, Fashion.)
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 19:44:25 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Followup-To: soc.motss

No finer example can be found of Cultural Elite bullshit than the
words of this prick -
 
In article <1av7r5INNd75@mizar.usc.edu>, adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
wrote:

> | >and just last year I saw a movie that she [Dietrich] was in without 
> | >realizing that it was she.  

A common failing, no doubt.  To which Dolphie replies:
 
> That's not really the point.

Bullshit.  Complete and utter bullshit!  Where do you come up with
this crap!?  Someone sees what you believe to be *an* *icon*, does
not know who the fuck she is (she has, after all, be a nobody for
God-knows how many decades), and you claim that "It's not the point."

One cannot be an icon if one is no longer known.

> 
> | >Oh, I suppose it's possible that I'd heard the name before a
> | >couple of years ago; but I wouldn't count on it, and if so it
> | >certainly wasn't a name that I considered important.
> 
> Again, that's not the point.  What Dietrich was is
> pervasive in our culture and informs, for better or
> worse, what we think of as glamorous, sexy, beautiful.
> For instance: *Every* woman who sucks in her cheeks,
> arches an eyebrow, and flares her nostrils in order to 
> look sexy is, whether she's aware of it or not, copying 
> Marlene Dietrich.

Absurd!  Women do not prance around like Marlene Dietrich anymore.
Campy faggots from West Hollywood prance around like Marlene 
Dietrich.  *Lesser* goddesses, the likes of Michelle and Melanie and
*Kathleen* and Sigourney and Julia do not arch their eyebrows, do
not suck in their cheeks, do not flare their nostrils to achieve 
what an aforementioned campy faggot would consider sexy.

Dietrich is no longer 'pervasive' in our culture.  


> | I am at a loss to understand what these testimonies mean, other than to
> | state the obvious: this knowledge isn't innate, and even a college education
> | isn't enough to guarantee a certain base of cultural literacy.  Arne's point
> | is that her apotheosis as an icon transcends individual familiarity as her
> | image is appropriated into mass images of culture.  

More crap. Knowledge of Marlene Dietrich now represents an understanding
of 'base cultural literacy.'  Perhaps fringe sub-culture literacy - but
a pack of aging, withered intellectuals with sagging asses standing around
in a room together *calling* something cultural legacy does not make it
such.  For the current incarnation of American culture, Dietrich is
irrelevant, and a lack knowledge about her is not tantamount to a failure
of the educational system.

> | That you haven't heard
> | of her or recognize her role may reflect sheer perversity, insularity
> | or simple disinterest, but it's not particularly relevant in any case.

Or that he is not as *old* as you are, or that he does not find it 
necessary to hang out in *old* movie theaters with creaky floors -
eyes glued to the ending credits to figure out which *old* movie stars -
long since passed from the current culture - were brought to the screen
using a rather *old* technology.

And as a member of that culture which exists in the present, his not
having heard of Marlene Dietrich is *certainly* relevant to whether or
not she is an icon - *today* 
 
> Bingo 

Melmothra, ACC
Newsgroups: soc.motss