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At what point do we enter culture? Always from an oblique personal angle that many other people may have some familiarity with but which they can never know entirely — it is a personal creation. This is not to say that there is not such a thing as good and bad — that is the argument of people who have no idea (I don\’t care what you say).
The first thing I read was the bible — we had them in the house, though no one was vaguely religious (actually vaguely religious is probably the best description (a lapsed catholic and an ex-choirboy)). Every story ever written is in the bible and at 5 I read it cover to cover, so I\’d downloaded most of the important shit I needed from an early age. All that time since has been a slow unzipping of that compressed data.
Where high meets low culture and the brained head meets the brain-dead I tend to find myself. Being a kid in a media age and then getting educated tends to queer the pitch and push your head in all directions. if you don\’t end up opening up after that then you have to be living close to death. How many zombies paths are charted by charts alone? I read pulp sci-fi, the beats, the classics, watched the films, listened to as much music as I could find, and I still do — once the foundation\’s there you naturally build on it. I\’ll be a skyscraper by the time I die and will just need a hand up into the heaven of actualisation — every time I read, listen, watch, I am standing on the shoulders of giants.
Anonymous
July 2, 2006 at 12:59 amA highly intelligent debate of our times.There are just too many people from the intelligent classes who claim to know facts that can neither be deduced by the normal public. Just what are we going to do? Science (ahem an extension of philosophy) has been rendered into mumbo-jumbo that it is beyond the reach of mere mortals. And things are just scratching the surface of humanistic subjects.I read a book by Francis Wheen who was literally lamblasting noted authorities such as John Pilger for ‘skulking’ over the affairs of East Timor and then when the UN had arrived, Wheen then writes how Pilger had then moaned about the militarilistic might of a multi-nation force that didn’t get its act together in the first place. Well didn’t Pilger have a point…wasn’t this seasoned war journalist simply reitterating his frustration over the Rawanda issue which wouldn’t simply buried under the mat. Other nonchalent pieces of drivel argues that Keanes system of the free market was a failure. Yes maybe so, but where was the meticulous reasoning needed for snotty know it alls to assert their points. A lot of what we read is mere tid bits reinforced by the media moghuls of our age. Tainted by conglomerates of people who funnel the facts and transmute them into a shoddy political message. What the hell are we going to face next McNews? All of our space is being invaded by others. We are being branded badly and even our culture is not replete with brands….our cultures embrace them, become the Nikes. Even our memes have trademarks on them. We are rehashing thoughts ‘Made in China’.- a miffed culture jammer who needed to get it out of his/her system.