{"id":13716,"date":"2012-06-02T19:29:03","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T23:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=13716"},"modified":"2012-06-02T22:32:34","modified_gmt":"2012-06-03T02:32:34","slug":"im-serious-about-this-post-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/im-serious-about-this-post-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m Serious About This Post\u2026 Seriously!"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZJLDjYRfx3g?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Many of you know me as RTH&#8217;s Minister of Fun and Games &#8212; and I do take a small degree of pride in being the primary inventor of most of the shallowest, most trivial time-wasting activities on offer here. But the reason I continue to hang around in the Hall of Rock is because much smarter people than me really put some honest effort into posts that provoke thoughtful, chin-scratching discussion of things that ought to concern us all. I frequently feel bad about my basic laziness in this area.<\/p>\n<p>In an effort to make up for my seriousness deficit &#8212; while still preserving my laziness point total &#8212; I&#8217;m sharing something a Facebook friend posted on their wall today. It concerns his trip last night to see the <strong>Dandy Warhols<\/strong>, and it&#8217;s as well-written as it is thought-provoking.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how old the author, <strong>Giles Kotcher<\/strong>, is &#8212; but I believe he is in his late 50s or 60s. (This, as you&#8217;ll see, is relevant information.) In any case, I invite you to read and comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>(I was) treated to the Warhol Dandies &amp; 2 younger bands last night &amp; faced my age &amp; the 5 or 6+ decades passed since &#8220;rock&#8221; originated. The sounds hit me like debris sucked off Japan by the tsunami and floated across the Pacific to crash on Western shores. Time is the ocean &amp; the music dislodged wreckage. &#8220;They&#8217;re like The Velvet Underground.&#8221; No, they&#8217;re not. The audience &#8212;- including several in their 40&#8217;s, 50&#8217;s &amp; 60&#8217;s [ I was likely the oldest person in the room &#8212;- in the world ?] &#8212;-had heard the songs before on cd &amp; could rehearse mentally what the numbing volume of live performance made unintelligible. Jerking zombies hungry &amp; starving on imitated, wanna-be charisma, schtick poses &amp; licks.<\/p>\n<p>This scene in miniscule epitomizes what we see &amp; hear everywhere in a very &#8220;late&#8221; stage of culture: the Age of Sequels. Sequels of movies, Postmodern architecture, alt country, Mad Men, Mid-Century Modern decor: tweaked recreations, simulacra empty of all else but style. We live AFTER a century in which an avant garde of creative artists, pioneers in science &amp; clairvoyant inventors of redefined liberty, equality &amp; justice enjoyed a historical privilege to discover the New.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m often embarrassed here to post so many &#8220;old&#8221; &#8220;nostalgic&#8221; bits of the cultural past. I do not want to live in a &#8220;period piece&#8221; version of the 20th C, but the contrast I see and hear between the present and the 20th C Modernism I was educated to admire&#8212; or stumbled onto dancing through youth&#8212; deafens me on the edges of the Warhol Dandies. Huge goals remain in the fight to find practical comfort in liberty, equality and justice, but&#8212;- no longer so floated by the new&#8212;-we continue the fight in a largely exhausted American culture, surviving mainly as commodity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of you know me as RTH&#8217;s Minister of Fun and Games &#8212; and I do take a small degree of pride in being the primary inventor of most of the shallowest, most trivial time-wasting activities on offer here. But the reason I continue to hang around in the Hall of Rock is because much <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/im-serious-about-this-post-seriously\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[7,269],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}