Transcendant Culture

More than flavor. More than mimetic.

It’s getting to the point at which identifying the windmills of my mind is becoming a multidimensional puzzle, but I no longer like the idea that those puzzle pieces are discrete or that their attributes have a particularly objective provenance. It’s more a chemical transformation, maybe even alchemical. So while I’m on the cusp of this moment, let this be the last time I say that:

I am half black nationalist, half catholic, half jewish and half japanese.

I really think so.

These days I’m feeling more Japanese than a year ago, and the subtle things that turned me more are ironically Old School. It is the success of the Neo-Soul of Toshiki Soejima, in addition to the extraordinary technique of Kent Nishimura. It’s the remake of Shogun and the deep appreciation I have for Japanese aesthetics. It’s the wonder of the virtues of the characters in Godzilla Minus One, and the ramblings of my old favorite Gaijin Otousan. It’s the retro respect I recall from Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer and Johnny Sokko. The enduring echoes of Otomo’s Akira, of Kurosawa himself and the short stories of Yukio Mishima. It’s the dazzling piano of Hiromi and the robot walk of World Order. It’s the nostalgia from my first Seo Nage, my first Unagi, my first time driving a 1981 Celica Supra, my first listen to Yellow Magic Orchestra, my first Japanese friend, Freddy. Of course my dedication and love for Suzuki motorcycles above all others, not incidentally for their philosophy as well as the daring design of the first Katana 1000. But as I mentioned recently, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was the best book I read last year.

Fall 1979. Everybody’s rock band cover.

I don’t know that they play much football in Japan, nor that they have produced many Olympic BMX racers, but they surely play electric bass and saxophone. And while live jazz performance, as Rick Beato laments, is suffocating in Atlanta, they have 400 seat jazz clubs that are packed with young people in Tokyo. I have been thinking a lot about how we are saving Japanese culture and Japanese are saving American culture, but there is that discrete provenance again. It’s mine, it’s yours, it’s ours. All we need to do is attend to it.

I remember, as an aside, the horrid feeling I had when we over here had no serious music critics who took hiphop as a useful source. In its infancy, it couldn’t transcend its race, indeed very few Americans wanted it to. So it fell into infamy that robbed it of its class, of its female practitioners and its successful fusion with jazz that were all in its roots. Do you remember the Wild Style when it was funky fresh? I think the last gasp of that died with Cibo Matto’s Birthday Cake. Shouts out to the Jet Set Radio Future that never came. My kids had you for a sweet moment.

My definition of that which is culture and that which is not hinges on its ability to persist in multigenerational multinational forms. Other than that, in this computer mediated communication world, it’s only marketing and flavor. Creative to be sure, but just commercial arts and crafts subject to postmodern disdain for its principles over its mimetic virality. JSRF was wonderful flavor, but there is no longer a culture of rollerblading. There are just hipsters that do it. Surfing is something else entirely even though there are probably more inline skaters than longboarders.

My vocabulary for anthropology is weak. I’m not sure I will gain that anytime soon, but I appreciate its gestalt. People say we’re going to have to stay on our toes in order not to be seduced by the flippant generations and subtle seductions of AI generated media creations. I suppose the same thing could have been said for the invention of CNN’s 24/7 news cycle and its design for immediacy, accessibility and constant engagement. We’re still not all the way to WarTV, but it feels like we’re almost there.

Transcendent culture exists beyond commercial attention capture. It is the glue that binds societies at a deeper and more permanent level than the transactional flavor of the month, or even best picture of the year.

The Stoic Summary
The emphasis for me is what I’ve demonstrated in the matter of the discipline of the self. What disembodied and non-mammalian intelligences do serve no discipline of the individual self. In that regard, they are soulless. They are transactional and ephemeral even though they can carry significant meaning and impact. We need to be not so ‘humanist’ as a liberal ideology, but attuned to those cultural artifacts that inculcate and discipline attention on a virtuous, aspirational self. It is that thing that implicitly demands us to curate ourselves that is critical and necessary. We will always be challenged to defy fallacies and hallucinations simply to survive in this world - we must be reconciled to reality, but the commitment to edification towards the transcendent rather than the simple needs of the moment, this is the essential requirement.

You’ve heard me say so in the podcast.

May the habits of discipline and fortitude give you the courage to take the rising path.

Otherwise, you will be disposable in this world. Your simple existence and possession of a soul, in the monotheistic paradigm is actually insufficient. Your easiest way to identify what is sufficient is to see where else in the world such individual disciplines which sustain cultural patterns emerge and remain over generations.