"Kids today"

I learned at another blog that young-30-somethings are already bitching about "kids today." This is fascinating. I was into my 40s before I did this; in my 30s, many of my generation, particularly young faculty at universities, were joining the kids instead of bitching about them. The sixties, you know. At any rate, maybe this is another area in which culture accelerates, the bitching of one generation about the next one. It's part of the natural cycle of aging, it seems, to bitch about the younger generation. Then later you learn that your parents were right after all: that's a major revelation!

All of this generation stuff is emphasized in a culture filled with Homo Consumerus because pop culture, always driven by the young, rings up so many cash registers. There is much to be said for avoiding pop culture as much as possible. Indeed, there is much to be said for reading only dead authors! Maybe all writers should be civil servants who write only for an archive to be read by future generations, a kind of employment for a time capsule. "Here's what life in 2006 was really like." Of course, today consumerism in the arts is much, much more powerful a force than when I was coming up because all the institutions of art have been bought up by corporate conglomerates that have a bottom line mentality.

What if everyone boycotted the purchase of art/literature and only read, saw and listened to artistic endeavors that they downloaded free off the net? Of course, this begs the question of how an artist can make a living -- but what if this were some kind of transition phase, boycott the purchase of art/lit/music until all the corporate conglomerates dealing with such went bankrupt? Make them redefine themselves in response to a different model than "the star system" in place now.

As for making a living, I guess I'm still a commie at heart because the most sensible option to me seems to be to accept artists as civil servants, put them on the government payroll, and understand their work is for the good of the culture. A book, a movie, an opera, is like a park, someplace to wander into and reflect on the beauty of existence and/or to see and deal with echoes about your own life. This experience is subsidized so it is free to the public. Free libraries. Free bookstores. Free music stories -- or maybe, more practically, you just download everything. Everything is free. We pay the artists for the same reason we pay police and firemen: they provide a necessary service without which human life is put to great risk.

Dream on, dream on.