What Culture Feels Like

Rising above the maggots in the mind of the universe

I have tasted the maggots
in the mind of the universe.
I was not offended.
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
— George Clinton

Just the other day I came across a phrase that set me on edge. I wish now that I could find it, but the gist of it was that [race] relations today were motivated by the need to reconcile a historical devaluation of [black] culture. What?

While I remained a bit perturbed about this statement, as usual, I entertained a conversation with myself about how easy it has been for me to enjoy whatever culture I get, with the understanding that everything that ain’t boring, might actually be interesting. But since I’m ever curious and something of a snob I have to deal with where I am in society, which is to say I’ve spent a lot of time expecting and getting good things from highbrow culture. The other side of that is, if I’m not playing nine ball, smoking Camel filter hard pack and drinking Red Stripe, I have absolutely no use for Eric B. & Rakim. I already lived that life and I can still recall the swell of her breasts as she leans over the corner pocket, eyes on me, eyes on the cue ball, eyes on me once again.

Dana Gioia is Ted’s brother. They both went to the same Hawthorne Public Library I went to when I was a kid. Dana went all the way out on the highbrow branch and I must say I’m starting to prefer those two to the Weinstein brothers. Dana has a kind of magnificent grip on so many extraordinary aesthetic concepts that I get dizzy just hearing his answers. And yet as he perfectly explains, he’s a blue-collar brain. There isn’t the slightest pretense. But it was Ted, the musical critic, who got into it with Rick Beato giving the backhand to the short songs. He talked about the problem with 3 minute songs. As I blur the brothers together, I think it was Dana, the blue-collar Catholic who said that shamans and ancient priests started a musical tradition that got congregations chanting with celebrants and these chants by nature went way longer than 3 minutes. Three was the magic threshold at which point, something about the music will get into your pants. This I know. Two exemplary cases in point would absolutely be:

• One Nation Under A Groove

• Got To Give It Up

If you don’t know, pour yourself a Mount Gay & Coke and dance in your sock feet until you feel it. If you got rheumatoids, put your gnarly hands on the radio. Funk not only moves it can remove. Welcome to one of the proper gateways. If you need a little bit more geetar, Bubba, then step on over to Eddie Hazel and shame on you if you don’t know Maggot Brain.

I listened to Turandot for the first time in my life today. I get it. It made me smile like an icy fire. Then I went to find the YouTube of Susan Boyle’s legendary rendition of I Dreamed A Dream. It still brings tears to me eyes. You see I’m ripping hundreds of CDs to FLAC for a private library my friends and I are curating. We don’t trust Spotify or any such streaming service to maintain a sufficient catalog for those of us over the age of 40. I’ve been told that Netflix has something on the order of 4 black & white films. That’s not enough trees for a culture monkey like me.

This evening, over a four protein poke bowl I watched Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. Both were dramatic, spicy and supremely satisfying. That’s what it feels like. Like a little window in your soul opens up because it has been rubbed open the right way. You get a taste of the artist’s accomplishment and it’s like that old saying: “Between me and my sister, we know everything. My sister is Martha Argerich.” As long as you keep her in your heart, you keep that confidence. That’s the responsibility of curation, of appreciation. You keep the window open. You consequently get to be more human than you thought you might ever be. Surely in that smoky bar in Charlotte Amalie, I didn’t need anything more than to follow her down to the beach. Rakim said I got soul. I was all the man I needed to be, which was just enough for her as well. But that was back in the 20th Century before I even knew who Martha was. I kept the window open, but I married that girl who looked me in the eye.

The Generation People
Somebody asked me why black people like gold chains. What he meant was why rappers wear fat gold ropes. I gave him a timeline that included John Travolta in 1977, Rick James in 1981, Mr T in 1982, Run DMC in 1984 and Eric B. & Rakim in 1988. John and Rick wore nothing that could be call fat, but Jam Master J set the fat precedent, and well, few have outdone the men in Gucci. They accelerated the Golden Age of rap. Of course the Generation People and the Alphabet People and the People with and without Color and the Red and the Blue People all think they deserve their own special explanations of culture. Why? Because they, like all of their rivals, are motivated by the need to reconcile their historical gripes of cultural devaluation. That’s the most polite way of saying they all have self-esteem problems.

It has been a while since I’ve enjoyed the petty brutalities of Reddit’s r/fightporn. Since my old UFC favorite Tony Ferguson (who sometimes fights like Soul Calibur’s Voldo) got choked out this past weekend by the genuinely barbaric and savage Nate Diaz, I took a nostalgic peek. I immediately got fed up seeing a recording of a brawl in a football stadium. Raider fans, as you might guess. There’s the opposite end of highbrow, the actual bloodsports, like dog fighting and bear baiting. You can imagine rubles being wagered in the cold forests north of Kiev this week where bitter frustration requires the meanest of victories to be extracted from the puny. Are we Americans low enough? Of course the line between good and evil runs through every heart. I suppose we’re just waiting for it to bankrolled, but that will take a bit more mass social devolution - the margins are already here.

Homecoming Queen
I attended a highschool that had no homecoming queen, but in my adolescent dreams I knew what she would look like. As you have doubtless heard before, that particular black woman had no mainstream equivalent. It would be another decade or so before Vanessa Williams and Suzette Charles fleshed out the various fantasies bankrolled by the pageant industry. I remember reading all of the news about them, especially that about Charles having been a breakthrough model for the JC Penney catalog, the first of her complexion. It was that deep in 1984. So I often put myself in the shoes of the black kid from the black highschool whose homecoming queen was ignored and anonymous in the greater world despite her obvious beauty and charm. I suffered the pain at that small imagined distance. Then again why would she need more love than the homecoming king might provide? Was that truth and beauty not its own reward? Never. Not in the context of the emotional requirements of a reconciliation of power, of a hunger for respect and a deep need for the revenge born of disrespect and disregard.

It is from every little corner of bitter frustration, from punk angst, from the second-hand smoke of discomfiture the sniffing noses of cultural power evoke and fuel their missions. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, which in turn is the universal dream of envy of those who got more. It is not improvement of the self that people fight for so much as victory over the Other. Thus the logic that defies Rodney King’s plea for a shared culture of civility. You needn’t be noble to understand as he did. As my grandmother used to say, some people just want to stay mad. Staying mad and getting even survive all progress and remain oblivious to it. Nobody cares about JC Penney catalog models any longer. The stakes aren’t high enough for the Generation People and their rival tribes. They cannot rise above it all, and they are drowning in their own shit.

Over here on the far side of midlife, with a few years left in the third quarter, the era of proving is done. I am a different sort of uncle, I think. I can remember first recognizing when I felt that I had nothing left to tell the world. Let it be, I said. But I’m a writer, and a writer writes. I’m compelled to write for posterity what I have not yet found that posterity has written for me. I never secured the kind of tenure that would cut me unleashed from the practicalities of life, so I had to be selective in my avocations. Yet I found myself compelled and attracted by a class of political and cultural questions that found me an audience. I could write about that. I did. At times it feels a little circular. Maybe I’m retelling in a boring way. Maybe that’s just me scribbling out my own conventional wisdom. And yet life continues to perplex. From telescope to microscope there’s always something overlooked, and these days I have the patience to reflect at any kaleidoscopic focal length, even if it’s backwards in time. To yesterday. To ancient times. To the never never. Culture flows through me. We are all vessels of spirit. I am privileged to evoke spirit.

I have recently uttered the deepity that rap is the last remaining tragic poetry of America. They say that MF Doom understood that. I only knew him as Zev Love X on the first KMD album. Once upon a time, in that golden age, I dreamed of writing an epic of hiphop flow. It was following my strange practice of reciting Derek Wolcott’s Omeros on the bus in rap-able rhythms. I was thinking that the flavor could flow in all directions. Contact with the actual rap factory destroyed the impact of that sentiment. The industry didn’t even have enough imagination for Monie Love. I didn’t have enough imagination to picture myself as gangsta or ghetto fabulous. Sucks to be poor me, but seriously props to Ice-T. Some of my lowercase writings in the 90s was that cyber-hiphop epic. It was not international enough. It didn’t reflect the Classics well enough. Now I call myself grownup. I’m simply more patient.

When I think about the Culture Wars, aside from it being a colossal waste of time and energy, I consider the actual existential value of the lived experience of those who seek recognition as members of their tribes in good standing. I know that it’s the squeaky activist wheels whose grating noise drowns out all but the virtue signaling of their cohort. Yet I must ask the rude question. What is it about these cultures that do not reward themselves? If you’re actually proud to be X, why isn’t your self-love more than enough? I conclude that it is envy. Envy, power acquisition and revenge. That’s why it’s a war and not a recital. That’s why it overflows into the political streets. That is why it’s not like the culture of sport or the ethics of sportsmanship (except for combative Raider fans). Even sport satisfies with zero-sum contests and culture is anything but that.

My culture feels good. It makes me grow. That is the satisfaction I get from it, even when it is the culinary culture which makes my belly grow in dimensions I’d rather it did not. I’m always getting more culture and calling it mine. It feels like addition. So let’s have another…