Culture as Weather

'Everybody complains about culture' - ? What I said above was mainly trying to identify an impression I had, not to complain. Anyway, why shouldn't people complain about culture when they want to? They (we) are always celebrating it too.

'Nobody does a damned thing about it' - ?? I don't know where this remark is aimed. Personally I don't feel in a position to do much about culture at large (who does? Rupert Murdoch?), but that doesn't mean I never make my own contribution.

thoughts about the actual question, everything everywhere is always like this. or certainly america, as other us posters will hopefully confirm. the headlines never change. also: kate's post = very funny.

Sigh...

Kate S: I can't believe you're so culturally illiterate that you don't know the source of your own fantastically witty quotation.

Or are you disagreeing w.me, Tracer, but I'm too dumm (or vane) to see how this = possible?

I like what Tracer is saying. But I think he / she might just be overrating the badness / banality of the thing. I said it was banal, I know - but maybe lots of things look stupid from a distance?

Basically, though, Tracer - yes. It's this convergence of Life / Society / News / Culture / Turnover / Opinion / Public thing I was trying to get at. I don't know - it's like there's an element missing from how some (*some*) people think about how culture works - maybe it's the 'dynamic' element, the 'turnover' aspect?

The 'organic' sense too of culture as ecosystem, tide, weather or whatever. I think this goes somewhere. Perhaps it's already been.

That mountain-pass metaphor... cor.

Nobody mentioned Dawkins and meme theory, but perhaps nobody wants to go there (mountainous, stormy).

Is it a question of the commissioning editors just opening up their address books a bit? Like, I'm available to write 1000 words by Monday on the death of the NME, or the extinction of the Tory party. But actually, I'd rather do it here on ILM / ILE, because the brain rhythms are my own.

Here (or on my website) I write about something because I'm really thinking about it, really excited about it. The clouds roll in, the air heats up, electricity accumulates, lightning strikes. If I were commissioned by G2 or somebody I would be fitting into someone else's rhythms, someone else's passing interests: the editor's, or the public's. The great circular flow of ideas we call 'commentary', where the danger is that trends and enthusiasms are designed by committee and the buck stops nowhere.

I say this as a marginal member of the 'commentariat' (I write magazine articles for non-UK mags like Relax and Index). I feel the slope under my feet, and it's a slippery one.

Of course there were other external factors that wouldn't have been there had I been my own editor: specifically, the sub-editor was involved, not to alter my words or thoughts but to slightly change the order of those words and thoughts, something of which I'm excessively fetishistic. I'm possibly standing on the edge of joining the "commentariat", and thoughts are rushing through my mind on what effect it would have on me: what would happen to my brain rhythms and how would they be redirected? Would I ultimately think "Delia Derbyshire: she did the Dr Who theme, sad that she's gone" rather than "Delia Derbyshire: 'Pot au Feu' is rave '91 had it been born to post-war intellectualism rather than lumpen-prole functionalism / accidental genius"? Would I, in short, have my opinions influenced by What I Was Supposed To Think rather than what I think inside me, what I want to think, what I am driven to think?

Interested in any further comments.

Robin C asked: >>> Would I ultimately think "Delia Derbyshire: she did the Dr Who theme, sad that she's gone" rather than "Delia Derbyshire: 'Pot au Feu' is rave '91 had it been born to post-war intellectualism rather than lumpen-prole functionalism / accidental genius"?

I think I can safely say that the answer to that question is "no".

Cautionary Tale. At Wire in the early 90s, I used to send out PLEADING LETTERS to the contribs not to be afraid of wild ideas; strange connections; difft ways of writing abt things. Response I got = a teenyweeny bit above zero, from foax I was already totally on-wavelength with anyway. We did a discussion panel at the ICA once, abt hiphop and jazz, and got lots of flak from the floor abt being a white mag and by defn shut to black writers. I said — which is true — I'm the editor, and I promise I'm not turning ppl away. Call me: give me ideas. NONE OF THE FOAX ATTACKING ME FOR NOT PUBLISHING THEM EVAH CALLED, BEFORE OR AFTER. Two writers did turn up: one was a bit useless, the other pretty good. I was encouraging to both (I think): I said, come up with an idea for a piece and we'll go from there. I never heard from either of them again. This was ten years ago: I don't doubt the climate has shut a great deal since. There's things I write which wd never get into Wire now: not cuz I'm barred (which is the opposite of the case), but because their idea of who they are wd rule this stuff out. (Hence posting here so much, obviously...)

But I would still ask!! Passionate expertise is not to be sniffed.

= you get a repeat post warning when you post an exact subset of ANY PREVIOUS POST IN THE THREAD.

ps ethan re yr greenspun line-break prob: the line-ends in the answer box do add a space to certain items. if any html w/i "<" or ">" breaks at a line, it will probably add a space and wreck it. Just add your OWN spaces to push the whole unit over onto the next line...

zzzz sorry

[Faints]

The question is: is this "higher level" of opinion-forming still something that exists in reality, or is it just a lingering mental perception?

Oh and Pinefox, I liked your response to my musings :).

(thanks for the advice, mark)

The big difference between web publication and print publication is that print is far more of a 'push' medium. If The Wire was online, somebody wanting to read about Acid Mothers Temple could do so without ever even being aware of RC's Delia obit. However buying The Wire physically, our AMT fan has to consciously avoid and decide not to read the obit.

There is still an 'aura' to print journalism despite most of it being not very good - I know several web writers who consciously or unconsciously seem to see print as a higher calling (NB this is aside from the economics of it - print pays a lot more). As well as a sense of respectability there's also a feeling that print is somehow less impermanent (which is untrue of periodicals at least).

I think the commentariat reflects opinion more than it shapes it - I also wonder to what extent newspaper columnists (even big ones) think they do influence anyone. I have a monthly op-ed column in a print mag and find it laughable to imagine anyone even reading it let alone paying it much attention. Broadly speaking I'd prefer having a small but tangible influence on a small but select web audience than a completely negligible influence on a mass print audience.

Newspaper columnists, of course, have much less influence than they think they do, and most of them are prepared to fiddle with the facts to fit better into their own spin - the suspicious claims by the Rees- Mogg coterie of a rural majority in support of hunting come to mind. I cannot recall any columnist seriously altering my opinion on anything, though there have been marginal shifts within an opinion I'd already set myself influenced by reading newspaper articles. I'm certainly far more likely to have my mind changed by this forum these days than by reading anything in print.

(if you did like it before) Having Your Mind Changed About UK Garage By The Pinefox: Dud.

(whatever you thought before) Having Your Mind Changed *Entirely* By A Newspaper Article: Dud.

Brian Friel to Laurence Finnegan, 1986

Seemed like the thread for this young person:

As culture writers or people who work in the media industry broadly I do think we need to read the room and discard talking about an artists latest project when crimes against humanity are unfolding like this

— Jason Okundaye (@jasebyjason) February 12, 2024

i'm not sure what you mean by posting that, but it does seem to me that we're long past the hashtag-end-genocide point where any particular crime against humanity has been reduced to (or maybe subsumed into) a discursive unit that functions identically to the more mundane topics that circulate in the media ecosystem. and that the tools of journalists or "culture writes" are totally inadequate to "take a stand" and in fact mostly just reproduce the dominant ideology. so if the past twenty years has seen an endless succession of overlapping atrocities, that some people's less-than-human status turns out to mean more than others is a depressing reflection of something that's endemic to the regime of global capital, that is happily explained away as the cost of doing business, and which, yeah, our news media won't face directly because of how it's designed

I think you can talk about multiple things at once. We keep living even as the disaster happens around us, no?

Culture writing (and writing in general, at it's best) was where violence and atrocity could more than intrude, we should write and read it as a way to talk about the many disasters.

I guess it was the separation that I was reacting against.

I like how suggestive and potentially fertile the thread title is compared to how narrow and specific the OP and ensuing discussion were. Culture is far larger and more multifarious than

a slot on Newsnight, or a G2 cover story, or maybe even (if it's eg. the death of Diana) a special issue of a journal.

Culture surrounds us in all our social environment and we carry it with us even alone in the middle of a desert, yet it is made up of billions of tiny condensed particles and constantly shifts and changes its shape according to the vagaries of wind and chance, like a billowing cloud. To me that's one sweet metaphor just begging to be enlarged upon.