Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Somafm.com has streamed an inventive radio channel pioneered by Rusty Hodge featuring, as they called it “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls.” The service was recently discontinued until October Halloween season, which to the Gothic-Ambient-Industrial music crowd signifies the end of an era. Following is a sample of sounds from the dark side.
An exhibition by artist Cristóbal Valecillos in Los Angeles invoked the Dancing Devils of Yare, a 400-year old Venezuelan tradition celebrating life, the triumph of good over evil, and renewal. His provocative interpretation of the diablo masks, hand-sculpted from repurposed waste materials, takes aim at culture and consumption in the US, a plea for overcoming.
Serge Halimi writes on how the Right-Wing has used an elite billionaire to channel fake-anti-elitism into anti-intellectualism, to make people resent the smugness of ‘cultural elites’ [read:Liberals]. Now the financial elites control everything and everyone else can go to hell.
Psychonaut ethnobotanist Terence McKenna captures the journey along a ghostly trail into the Colombian Amazon Forest, the descent of the Rio Putumayo, and his stumbling upon the “starborn magic mushroom,” activated by psilocybin. Watch Peter Bergmann’s experimental documentary.
Do today’s elite lack the patience and culture for classical music? Or is it a matter of cultural dominance of the popular, the fame producing, and capital revenue streams which have sacrificed painstaking complex creation? John Halle opines.
This awful cult of talentless hipsters has its Mecca in Los Angeles, according to Will Self. He asserts his generation took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism’s blitzkrieg. What to make of the commodification and democratization of culture, and where to go from here?
On the Plaza of American Life, where does 26-foot Marilyn stand? For now, she’s straddling Palm Springs tourists. Is she this years’ ceramic pink flamingo replacement, soon to be on everyone’s front lawn? Let’s hope so. America’s new moral umbrella is Monroe’s revenge. Oow, some do like it hot.