Saturday, July 27, 2019

Entrance Through the Gift Shop

When it seemed like we'd all gotten our fill of exploring the plaza, which was curiously full of small trees now, I asked the question to K. and R., "would you mind if we walked over to where I used to work? It's just a couple blocks away."

Of course they had yes. They had already indicated they were open to anything, and this appeared to be the moment I could step forward and play tour guide. I didn't want to overwhelm them with info, especially personal stories, but it so happened that the things I would show them historically had some overlap with personal experience, so I could be both raconteur and curator of the city at the same time.

We headed up towards Broadway. As we traversed the plaza to leave the World Trade Center grounds (which were once an Armenian neighborhood), I pointed out the locations of other buildings,  ones still standing such as the Millennium Hotel, which was right across the street from the South Tower, as well as One Liberty Plaza over on Broadway, which on the day of the attack, was reported to be swaying and about to collapse. It turned out to be be a completely false report. The building was deemed fit for reoccupation within a short time

I also pointed World Trade Center 3, which was still standing after the day of the attack, but was later demolished, as well as World Trade Center 4 and 5, which were also torn down later.

The former building, number 4, had been a low high-rise that was the location of pre-employment screening incident for my first job in the City in 2000, and became the inspiration a long private email chain to some of my friends, which was the forerunning of all my blogging, including this one.

World Trade Center 5 was one of my favorite spots in the five boroughs. It was low rise, basically an adjunct building to indoor mall I mentioned, but it contained the Borders Bookstore with its beautiful multistory glass windows. Riding the escalator up to the second floor one could see out at St. Paul's Church across the street and towards Broadway. It felt like being in a fully immersive architectural museum.

"The thing about New York is that it truly is a museum that way. Anywhere you look you see slices of times, overlapping history of the recent and ancient. It's a pleasing effect. You can't get it in a city where all the buildings are brand new. You need different ages to be present."

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Deconstructing the New World Trade Center

Truth be told, I didn't like the memorial fountains much. They weren't to my taste. I could understand why people liked them, and they were indeed stirring to behold, but I found them dismal and downright depressing. The water simply cascaded down a giant sink hole. Lives down the drain, the drain of the slurry bathtub into the river?  Such a ghastly image.

Where was the rebirth, the meaning of the lives, the resurrection? In the new solitary tower? I found it to be gallant in appearance but only mildly interesting as a structure. For its all height it looked shrunken and ordinary against the skyline from Jersey City. It had none of offensive effrontery of the old twins, which came straight up out of the ground.

"I see two giant pumps, pumps of money," said Rick one day, half mockingly and half lovingly. He said in a voice imitating some Port Authority Bigwig like Robert Moses or some Jersey Governor, in the patois he acquired from growing up in the mountains up in Ringwood as the adopted son of cop.

The new tower looked like an shiny ornament---tasteful yet uncompelling.  It wasn't even the most interesting new structure in lower Manhattan, which is this building in nearby Tribeca.

I knew that the new tower and the fountains were what people wanted and somehow needed. They weren't for me, I knew. Just like the memorial museum.

But I didn't have anything against the new tower and the memorial either. I wanted not to become attached to any of the new. I wanted an excuse to stay disengaged from it, because I wanted to keep the aliveness of the version I knew, that existed only in my memory, to which I could retreat in my mind at will. The Oculus was perfect that way, because the old and new clashed so completely, and occupied different in my mind, and because Oculus was compact and accessible to my enfeebled ability to accept new things about the City, after having stuffed so many things about into me.

In that way, the underwhelmingness of the new tower was yet another relief from a burden, the burden of having to love the new, and make it a part of the things I loved about New York. So in fact it seems it was a complete success for me after all.




Men of Concord

At the top of the escalators from Oculus we came out into the plaza. It was sunny and bright, and people visiting the plaza and memorials. In the old days you would have no seen so many tourists hanging around what everyone took as a bland concrete plaza.

K., being the good host she was, had originally asked when we had arrived in New Jersey if we wanted to see the memorial museum, or go up to the top of the new tower, both of which and R. (Red's father) had already done.

I had said no. She had wanted to make sure, as at the time we could still get tickets, but I said specific I did not want to do either of those. I wanted to hang out at ground level. So I was relieved even when we saw the line for the memorial was very long. It can be a relief when certain options are lifted from you automatically.

We headed to the nearest memorial fountain that are in the footprints of the tower. Here I got disoriented. What I took to be the South Tower was actually the North Tower. I had fooled by the change in the whole plaza, and also by the location of the New Tower, which I realized to be on the north edge of the old side, probably outside the old slurry bathtub wall that kept the Hudson from flooding the PATH stations.

For a moment at the North Tower I went looking the name of someone I know who was killed in it. He was one of the people trapped above the floors of the initial fire and damage. He was the older brother of a guy I knew in my elementary class, and also from Church. It was a family of brothers. Their house felt like the 1950s to me. The sons wore flannel shirts like the Hardy Boys. Their father was the deacon who baptized me.

But there were too many people to search for names, and no apparent system. One could look it up online, but that was something to do in advance, not in the moment.

At the South Tower I told the story of the firehouse in Concord, Staten Island, that I would walk past, on the long walks I often took, often by riding the train a couple stops, and hoofing it around the nearby blocks in an exploratory fashion. Concord was about half-way to the ferry along the train line, at the base of the Serpentine Hills at that part of the island. I would walk there. past the firehouse, the classic two design in that part of the island, and the door would be open, and there would be guys hanging out, playing music, doing chores on the rig and on the station.

This was one of the companies that was called into the South Tower, which was the second one hit. Some many companies from Manhattan and Brooklyn had already responded to the North Tower, that they had to call in ones from the outer boroughs.

"The South Tower was the second one hit, but the first one to collapse," I said, as part of my modest tour. "Those guys at Concord never had a chance."


Sunday, July 21, 2019

The Oculus

There was no dingy mall anymore. The Astrodome was blown up. The great hall where the people mixed and emptied in to the plaza was gone.

In its place was a cathedral, brilliant and white, with arched ribbed walls that formed a nave and reached up in curved arcs to touch at the east-west crest. The ribs were close together, and through them one could see the city behind in brilliant blue sunlight, but only obliquely, never full on. Always part of the skyline was blocked by the spacing of the ribs, almost frustratingly, making you ache to see the whole thing, but that was physically impossible. Even glimpsing the entirety of the new tower was not a simple feat.

It was the just like it used to feel, when you stood between the towers. They seemed to arch right over you, with a gap in the top of the arch. It was an optical illusion from the fact that the towers both rise and straight shafts out of the ground, without any tampering all the way to the top.

Now inside this brilliant structure, the people were going there says to various places again, but on multiple levels, with stairs, and pleasant sunlit mall around the mezzanine level.  The entrances to various subways were in a wide side entrances with ample room to feed into the main room. To escalators to the PATH train were gone. Instead one descended a few pleasant stairs, going out of the sunlit hall into a ground floor where one picked among various ways to descend to the platforms.

I was so pleased at it all. It was so much better than I thought it would be. It made me ache for the beauty of it.

I would have stayed and lingered in there, appreciating the view through the ribs of the vault, but my group, two of whom had already seen this new structure, were pressing on. We found the escalators upward and soon we were out into the sunlight of the plaza.

That One Guy Going to Hoboken

In the old days you would come up from the 4 train at Courtland Street, up a couple plain flights of stairs with brown brick balls that could have been anywhere, and at the top of the stairs you came right out into the big inner hall, the indoor plaza that was like a plain-brown-wrapper shopping mall in muted colors in need of a renovation. There were businesses the edge for commuters, but a working class slant---discount shoes, for example, and others one might find a strip mall somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. The look and feel of it reminded me of the concessions level in the Astrodome. All of that made me love it dearly.

In the midst of all this would be hundreds of people going in the various canonical directions inside the hall, from one subway down towards one of the halls that fed out in various directions in plaza around the North Tower.

In those days I would always make my way through this stream in the same direction. Somehow no one ever collided, and there was no overt rage. People just did their thing, and went their directions, and you were all this together.

At the far end of the hall was the giant mouth of the entrance to the PATH trains, with a massive bank of escalators descending past a  sprawling advertising placard that spanned the mouth.  In the morning all of the escalators but one would be coming up, and I would need to find the single one that was going down, all while hoping to arrive in between the giant surges of people that came up the other escalators when the train arrived from New Jersey.

"Oh, you're that one guy going into Hoboken in the morning," Stacy once told me, when hearing me describe my commute.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

My Failure as a New York Writer

When we got to the Manhattan side, we got off the boat and walked along the basin into the lobby of the Winter Garden. It was there my sense of wanting to be a tour guide took over. I figured if anyone among us could give a decent walking tour of lower Manhattan and the financial district, it was surely yours truly.

Outside of my paying work, I get so rare opportunities to feel that I'm actually providing a gift of value to people around me, outside being around of a few people close to me. This at least was a situation I could be useful in an entertaining way. I resolved to be light in the frequency of my patter doing the tour, so as not to overwhelm people with too much, and to try to steer our footsteps in a gentle arc that would encompass both personal sites, for which I could furnish recollections from a era of New York that was now in the past, as well as from different history that had learned along the way from the books I'd read, and Wikipedia articles I'd written using my New York reference collection.

In the Winter Garden, I remarked how the glass in the ceiling had been broken during 9/11, from the falling parts of the North Tower across the street, but they had repaired it fairly quickly and it had actually become temporarily the locus of activity in that part of the island, because it had been relatively spared, and it also afforded a new ferry connection across to Jersey City to replace the ruptured train line.

K. seemed to appreciate this fact, and so I figured my walking tour would be appreciated and enjoyed, which turned out to be correct.

We ducked into a food court in the lobby of the Winter Garden where all the mini-restaurants had French names and served French food. Folks at the wine bar were watching the final of the Women's World Cup soccer match in. The U.S. was playing the Netherlands.  K. had wanted to watch it, and had seen a bit of it in the hotel room in Jersey City, but she didn't care about seeing the ending. When it was over, there was mild applause at the wine bar.

It was then I remembered that the last time I'd been in the Winter Garden was in 2002 when I came into the city to see a public exhibition there, of architectural designs proposed for the new World Trade Center to replace the destroyed towers. Some of them were very weird.  One looked like a wire trash can. The design they went with and built was among them, and was one of the simpler ones. I took a bunch of digital photographs with my Nikon Coolpix 990, which are still on a memory card somewhere, along with so many photos I took of the City back then.

I used to blog a lot back then too, about the City and my life there. Somewhere the archives of that blog are on a disk too. Thankfully the vast majority of my emails have disappeared into the ether, where they belong. Some communication was not meant to endure.

At one point, during my blogging, my friend Randy, who is a bonafide architect, arranged for me to meet up with a friend of his in the city, who was interested in starting a portal of architecture bloggers. I went into Manhattan to meet her. She was about ten or fifteen years older than me. We hit in off. I described my writing and interests about the city. She thought I'd be perfect as a regular contributor. I knew it wouldn't mean money, but it would be the precious coin of exposure.

Within a week, I'm composed a few pieces about the City, in the same style I'd been writing. It was a disaster. She was cold and unfriendly after that, as if I had wasted her time. It was a great humiliation to my ego to realize just how ridiculous some of my pretensions had been, regarding my own way of writing about the city. This is still true. I had no business being anywhere near a "mainstream" architectural publication or medium. I am still this way, and more conscious of it. It is no longer a source of humiliation that I am not that kind of person, who would be able to write like that.


The New New York

I had not been in Jersey City since I left NewYork in 2004. The waterfront had changed so thoroughly with new construction that it wad difficult to find a landmark I recognized. The Katyn statue was still there (for now, at least). Rick and I used to make fun of the ghastly design by throwing our arms back and making a death rattle. Thinking about that, I remembered how when he and Stacy lived down on Monmouth Avenue nearby, the four of us would go to a nice little Polish restaurant called Tania's, that had the best chicken and potatoes. It turns out it was still on the Google Maps.

But everything on the water was new, like I said, with new glass construction in that way that is unforgiving to any sentimentality one had about how it used to be. Our very hotel was a Hyatt that jutted out into the Hudson beside a block of new pier apartments. Red discovered that the three thousand dollars got one a two bedroom.

We played the game of "if one absolutely had to live city", and we both agreed that was about as close to Manhattan as I'd want to get. Definitely I wanted to be on the "America" side of the Hudson.  Most of my planning would be based on how quickly I could get out in the countryside. It was not always that way for me, though.

It a sunny, beautiful day. Blue sky with haze along the skyline as in most days. We'd gotten early checkin at the hotel, giving us plenty of time for trip in to the city. It was not even lunchtime yet.

As we walked over to the ferry terminal I tried to point where Henry Hudson had first dropped anchor in September 1609.  It had become impossible to find it, with all the new construction jutting out into the river. K. pointed to the shiny building on the Jersey City where he son-in-law worked, for one of the big investment banks. It was a building my ex-wife had once worked in, doing temp work for a different banking firm. The building was now flanked by taller ones that I didn't recognize. My experience of all it had shrunk and receded, with only my determined memory available to penetrate into the what-was-there-before.

We bought tickets and waited for the next boat across to the city. I remarked how odd it was to see these beautiful terminals for the boats, since the whole ferry service there had been started only after 9/11when the PATH line under the Hudson had been destroyed. I was happy to do so. I had always liked taking those little zippy boats across the massive flow of the Hudson, along that side of Manhattan, where it was called the North River in the olden days.

But the most phenomenal sight of course the giant tower across the river that had been built since I was last there. Of course I'd seen many pictures of it, but this was the first time in person. Like the old one, it is magnificently directly in front of you as you stand on the waterfront of that part of Jersey City. It was always the best view of the old towers.

How we used to hate those towers, and mocked them. But that's a whole different story.

During the few moments it took to cross to Manhattan, as the terminal on the other side by the Winter Garden and the Financial Center was closer and closer, I felt an overwhelming peace that I had not felt in my entire life.

It felt as if all the things had ever happened to me in New York had happened in a different life than my own, even though I knew from the continuity of memory-consciousness that it was all real and had happened to me. It was as if the City was brand new to me, yet for once in all my history of experience with it, even before I ever set eyes on it, but only heard about it, there was no aching yearning in me to make it my own. All of that had happened. All of it was paid for. I could behold the city with the detachment of the faculty of beauty alone, overflowing with a compassion for everyone there, living out that yearning I once had.

In that moment I loved everyone there, and everyone I had ever known. I looked on the sinful wretchedness of my life back then as if from beyond this earth. I thought about the people I would want to exchange forgiveness with, whom I can no longer see. Long ago I had repented of so much of that, but the ugliness of one's actions is not altered over time. But it was overwhelmed by the beauty that was before me, in all the people there, and all the new buildings in quirky shapes that had risen that irrepressible garden in the years since I'd been there.

Across the Mighty, Mighty Raritan

Whenever I travel I strive to be away of the rivers around me. The flow of travel is best organized by rivers. One should be aware of when one is going from one great watershed to another.

I felt in element again being back in New Jersey.  When I lived in Staten Island was fascinated by the hydrology of the intricate of the Hudson and the nearby rivers, such as the Raritan, which was nearby where we were staying, and drains central NewJersey into the Atlantic.

"In prehistoric times, the Raritan was the mouth of the Hudson," I told my companions.

It was a fact I'd picked up in 2002, during my hydrology obsession, from the book Heartbeats in the Muck, which is a very nice natural history of the extended New York Harbor. It's the best book I've found on the subject. If you're interested in that kind of thing, and you are living in the city or visiting the city, it gives a complete different take on everything, to focus on the water instead of the land.

"What's that bridge?" K. asked me, when we were on the pier in Jersey City near our hotel, at the end of the week during our overnight trip in the metropolis.

She was pointing down river.

"That's the Verrazano Narrows Bridge," I said. "It connects Brooklyn with Staten Island. It opened in 1964 and led to a huge housing boom in Staten Island, which was mostly very rural until then."

I explained that the water channel itself, the main one by which the mighty Hudson empties from the upper harbor into the lower harbor, and hence the open ocean, was historically called The Narrows. The name Verrazano was added to the bridge name by a campaign of Italian-Americans to commemorate the Italian navigator (flying under French flag) who was the first known European captain to enter the upper harbor.

Then I added. "At the end of the last ice age, Brooklyn and Staten Island were still connected, and the Hudson came down in a huge flow from melting glaciers. At the time it circled around into New Jersey to come out through the mouth of the Raritan.  Then at once point it just burst through and carved the Narrows."

"It was an event that probably witnessed by human beings," I added.

That last sentence is pretty much word-for-word from the book I mentioned above, that I read in 2002.

I love playing casual tour guide like this. The greatest feeling that comes from having such knowledge is sharing it with other folks, when the perfect opportunity arises to do it.

The Philadelphia Trump Story

Over the Fourth of July we flew up to Newark to spend a week with Red's father and his wife K.. We had seen them in February for our de facto annual trip to Sedona. It was nice to see them again, in a new setting, this time in their home, which is a house within a new-construction adult community in Somerset County, in otherwise pleasant rural areas. They had recently moved up from North Carolina to be near K.'s daughter and grandchildren.

Having spent a lot of time in New Jersey, it was not surprising to me to find it fairly rural out there, although with constant interruptions by civilization. But for Red it was a new experience, and it was pleasant to play introductory tour guide after having been the outsider years ago.

We spent a day in Princeton, which I hadn't visited since my birthday 2003. At the famous Labyrinth Bookstore, I went downstairs into the quiet used section and picked up a couple treasures, including  The Early Forges and Furnaces in New Jersey.  I absolutely the colonial history of this area, and have a mini-collection of books on early New Jersey industry, in the water-powered mill era. Among other things I learned from the book was the phenomenon of bog iron.

The day after the Fourth, we went down into Philadelphia. Red had never been to Philadelphia and got an eyeful of what real industrial decay looks like (and she's from Ohio).  To me there is a beauty in both living industrial areas (such as ports and refineries) and also in their decay and abandonment.

In Philadelphia we visited the Museum of the American Revolution, which was a first time for me It was very pleasant experience. Among other things, they did a magnificent job at balancing the need to pay homage to the principles of the Revolution, while also discussing how it was all terrible, racist, and genocidal at the same time. 

The curators of the museum have their hands full with this task, I could tell. One advantage they have is that the Oneida Tribe helped finance the museum in order to tell their story, which includes their pride at having been on the American side against the British, and thereby laying the claim as the most loyally American group of Indians throughout time since the founding of the Republic. There's a very stirring "Oneida Room" where one listens to debate among the sachems of the Iroquois on this issue.

My favorite part of the main walk through was the dynamic map of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton (which were actually part of the same extended battle. It was the kind of map where you pressed buttons and followed troop movements on the wall by different colored lights. I had gotten a little ahead our group in the exhibit, so by the time the rest showed up I had gone through the sequence of days several times until I understood the flow. The main takeaway is that Washington's victory at Trenton on Christmas Eve 1776 was not so surprising, since it was a sneak attack (across the Delaware River).

But that victory only brought down the attention of the main British force in central New Jersey, which then prepared a counterattack. The Americans had been so successful at Trenton, they barely knew what to do, and for a day or so, there was great confusion among the Americans about whether to stay on the New Jersey side of the river, or retreat back into Pennsylvania.

Washington was exposed, however, and there was no choice but to follow through.  At first it looked terrible for the Americans. They tried to hold Trenton, but were driven out, and were hunkering down outside of town on the far side of a creek, saved only by nightfall's arrival. The British expected in the morning that they could finish the Americans off for good.

It is at this moment that the Revolution was perhaps in its most perilous state. A successful counterattack by the British could have meant the end of the entire war, only six months after the Declaration of Independence.

Washington then did something extraordinary.  In the middle of night, he abandoned his position outside Trenton and pulled his forces back and sent them swiftly up into central New Jersey, to attack the main British reserves behind their lines. They met at Princeton. Washington's surprise triumph allowed his army to escape into the New Jersey highlands to wait out the winter. The Revolution was saved.

I had worked up a version of everything I just wrote by the time Red, her dad, and his wife arrived at the map and was able to give them a thirty-second narration with the colored lights. One drives right through the battlefield literally south of Princeton, and on the way down, Red's father had remarked off-handedly that he didn't know if the site was of any importance. Now we had all come up to speed on it (I had actually been to the battlefield before, so it was to my own discredit not to already have been aware of all this significance).

At the museum was a phenomenal temporary exhibit on the history of 13-star flags. I wanted to buy a Betty Ross flag at the gift shop, since it is now declared as politically incorrect and racist by the media, but everything bearing it was sold out (we could have gone to the nearby Betsy Ross House). We walked around a bit, had a cheesesteaks and local ice cream, and got back into our air conditioned car to avoid the heat.

I like Philadelphia. A lot of Trumps in the extended family here, and also on my mother's side. Feels like home in a weird way.

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

The Way Forward from Instagram

In the coming decades we are going to see a boom in religious orders. It will part of a greater trend towards religion and spirituality, one that will also include lots of new age and occult practices as well, and unfortunately some cults that follow their trajectories to the usual nasty endings.

But we are used to this last type of spiritual "awakening." The Sixties and Seventies were all about this type of personal and society transformation. The most uncool thing back then was Christianity, and the most uncool of uncool things was traditional Christianity.

Guess what is going to be at the forefront this time?

The trends will be Christianity over other religions. It will be towards Catholic over Protestant, and towards traditional expressions of Catholicism over the Novus Ordo, that is, the Catholicism since the reforms of the 1960s. This is the loose, friendly, semiformal, bright-color-banner guitar-sing-along Christianity which is embraced by older Catholics as a relief from the oppressive Catholicism of their childhoods, but which is increasingly rejected by the young, who have craving the refuge of stability amidst the broken-glass world into which they have been thrust.

This is all despite the fact that there is a massive brewing civil war within the Catholic Church right now, largely between traditionalists and modernists, once that will have an enormous showdown this fall in Brazil, where some are anticipating that the Church will endorse reforms that may liberalize it beyond even the magnitude of Vatican II.

In that case, it is almost certain that the Catholic Church would split in two, since the modernists are likely to advance changes that the traditionalist simply cannot abide. The traditionalists saw what happened after Vactican II, and there is absolutely no spirit of compromise in the name "accommodating the trends of society and the world and entering the modern era."

Ironically this is all playing out in the Catholic Church just at the hour when, after almost exactly 500 years), Protestantism is collapsing from dying membership in Europe and the Americas, having gone all-in into wokeness, with even many Evangelical churches embracing progressivism*.

In the end it will be moot to argue which side of the Catholic schism should win, because that will be decided entirely by the feet of youth when they walk into one of the traditional or modern progressive churches.

The growth in Catholic (and to a lesser extend Orthodox) religious orders will occur in both sexes. Some women will seek convents either to purify and heal after a life of brokenness and being passed around by bad boys (all while being told that to do so is to be "empowered," the cruelest concept that has been proffered to young women in recent decades).  Others, more perhaps, will opt to young convents in their youth, having seen the buzz-saw that awaits them being thrust into the world in order to serve out the agenda of other people for their lives.

Meanwhile many men will seek out lives as brothers in a community making wine or growing crops. So many young men are simply giving up on ever having a long-term girlfriend, let alone a wife and family. They have been stunted with little or no avenue of advancement in the masculine (all of which has now been placed on the shoulders of little girls).


* Among the forms of Protestantism that will thrive in the new era is the Amish community. I predict that soon they will have to address in a broad way the fact that many non-Amish will be seeking to marry into the community.


Tuesday, July 16, 2019

The End of Politics is Nigh

We are so accustomed to the idea that politics should be at the center of attention that we cannot imagine any other way. Nevertheless it is going to happen in the fairly near future, I predict.

The brokenness between people is at an extreme. Community is shattered. Everyone is looking for a home, a role, for fellowship, for relief from the madness of pain, apartness and meaninglessness.

We have reached the ultimate levels of mass media, and thus of Pop Culture.  Facebook was the penultimate phase, because for the first time in world history, all the women in the world (or as many who cared to participate) were plugged into together.

In any group of human beings, the women collectively define the mores of behavior. This is done by the mechanism of feminine consensus. The hierarchy of men exists to enforce these codes, but it is the women who decide what it is, any point in time, for a given group.

In any group setting, women will seek to find consensus on any important issue. This worked fairly well when we lived in small groups, but now because of social media, we have entered an unprecedented meta-state which is highly unstable, and the masses of plugged-together women grapple constantly with consensus over almost every possible issue imaginable, never reaching any stability, since it is impossible in this kind of over-plugged-in configuration. It will simply get worse, and it becomes more unstable, it will result in ever more increased demands to obey some consensus that doesn't actually exist. Nothing can hold in this type of environment.

Instagram is the omega phase, since it shifts from female-to-female verbal negotiation of consensus into a sheer mode of attention-getting, which is the basest of the feminine states of being. Our current edge of Pop Culture is exalting and rewarding the egregious of attention seeking in the feminine, just by raw imagery.

This is not only highly unstable but toxic beyond our imagination, as it exists (like the consensus seeking) on a scale unprecedented in human history. It is destroying entire cohorts within generations, as young women are intoxicated with the ego-power of attention they have over men (who are mostly road kill in all of this).

It is already destroying lives like a merciless forest fire. We seem helpless to stop it.

But it will end. It cannot go on much longer. How will end, and what will come after it? That is the question I ask myself a lot.



Monday, July 15, 2019

What is your Horizon of Interest?

Pop Culture is anything that comes from mass media.

Mass media as a concept can be arguably traced to Antiquity, but the modern manifestation, which was nurtured in coffee houses in the Enlightenment, came to fruition around 1850 in the form of middle class newspapers with reportage that was transmitted by telegraph. This allowed a greatly expanded horizon of interest for the consumers of the medium.

When mass media was manifest in print, it resulted in a certain type of society. The first mass media era was synonymous with the rise of Liberal politics in both Britain and the continent, with radical manifestations at times which were echoes of the French Revolution, in the form of romantic appeals to the masses and to the people.

The most skillful user of mass media in that era was arguably Abraham Lincoln.

The print-only mass media era came to the end with the introduction of audio-visual mass media, in the form of printed sheet music and the first wave of silent motion pictures. Sound recordings soon followed.

The Pop Culture that would come to dominate the Twentieth Century was born around 1927, with the introduction of nationwide radio networks. The Great Communicators of the mid Twentieth Century were those that thrived in this medium. Nationwide radio broadcasts elevated actors and athletes into the horizon of interest of people in a way unknown in western culture since Antiquity, outside of certain courts of Europe. It was experienced by its participants as generally democratic.

Nationwide black and white television broadcasts came in 1947. Television usurped radio in importance, although radio would have be important for the propagation of recorded music.

The national networks were fully colorized by 1965. Apparently this was among the most significant of evolutions, as it was accompanied by radical Pop Culture repudiation of previous era, during the years up to 1970. This epoch has been considered by at least one eminent historian of the Establishment as the birth of an entire new civilization, which we can identify as with the full emergence of Postmodernity.

The culture this produced (nationwide television broadcast of both drama and news, coupled with nationally radio-distributed Pop Music) is the American Pop Culture familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s.

In 1980s, America transitioned to a cable-television-based mass media, the first radical manifestation of which was MTV around 1981-1982, which resulted in the culture of the 1980s.

By the 1990s, cable television news broadcasts became the most important vector of Pop Culture transmission. This produced the Clinton Era.

The web came into public consciousness around 1995, but it was not until about 2005 that we entered an era in which the Internet as a whole was the dominant public vector of mass media, with all other forms of media subordinate to it. Since 2015, we have lived in the dominance of social media, it having usurped even television.

Much of the current strife in Pop Culture can be seen as a rearguard action by the certain segments of Pop Culture to retain their status amidst a declining position of influence overall.



The Pop Culture Hell War

Everybody's at each other throats right now, at least in the public arena, which is Pop Culture. The degree to which you are probably stressed out right now, independent of actual dire personal circumstance unique to you, is the degree to which you plugged in to Pop Culture.

The real culture war right now is between those who are mostly in Pop Culture, and those who are struggling to remain outside of it.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

The 2020s Ahead

Never in my life have I felt so disconnected from so many people. That is to say, I can think of so many people I once knew, as friends or intimates of acquaintance, with whom I am no longer in contact, and with whom I am estranged.

How this came to be this way is complicated, and that with each individual the story is different, yet I cannot help but see a commonality in the entire experience. On first glance, the commonality is me, yours truly, so of course I must look myself to see the reason for the brokenness.

Yet I also know I am far from alone in feeling this way, and that there is even an awareness among so many people of this disconnectedness with each other in a way that strikes many of us as unprecedented in recent human history.

We look around to assign blame for this situation, even as we acknowledge our own responsibility and collective.  Easy targets are found in the outside world. Ideologies are built to combat the forces of divisiveness with appeals to action within the realm of the world. We are perhaps living in the height of the era of this type of solution---politically-centered, if you will.

Everything passes, not only eras within politics, but so will the era of politics as being the battlefield in which the great battles of the soul are fought. I suspect soon the era of politics will be resolved, at least for the moment, the next phase will shift to the religious and directly spiritual.