It’s been some time since we’ve had some content here. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to commit to making this the weekly post that I would like it to be as there’s always a thousand good reasons to be doing anything else, but some things do need to be done simply because they must be done. Five hundred to a thousand words is the least I can do to give you something to mull over breakfast.
Music of the Week: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams
I’m generally tone-deaf, if not possibly literally, so the music to accompany this post comes via my classically trained missus. She calls this exquisite, and with her synesthesia she sees big green fields and endless meadows. “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” was inspired by the 16th century English choral musician Thomas Tallis’ “Third Mode Melody” from his nine psalm chant tunes. The largely 20th century English composer Vaughan Williams broke with many of the musical conventions of the time with composing music that was largely inspired by the Renaissance, Tudor, and folk music compositions of England. He was, in a sense, a true English patriot in his music. Feel your heart achingly swell with visions of a land gone by as the work rolls towards its beautiful crescendo.
We think you will enjoy.
Some Kind of Heaven
There’s a new documentary out by Lance Oppenheim called Some Kind of Heaven, supposedly in an inside scoop slash insane narrative about the Baby Boomer retirement haven in Florida known as The Villages. The Daily Mail wrote a rather lengthy description of what is depicted within the documentary on this place. It’s very anxiety-inducing, a fake wonderland where the most benign expressions of a shattered culture begin to play out in what is essentially an adult amusement park. It’s described as a ‘utopian Disneyland with a seedy underbelly’ and calls to mind what Jean Baudrillard writes on Disneyland in Simulacra and Simulation:
“The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real…It’s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.”
From the description in the Daily Mail article, one might call The Villages the fulfillment of this. I’m generally hesitant about engaging in generational bashing. Christopher Lasch already wrote the best description of the generation in The Culture of Narcissism and he greatly saw them as a product of what the System had created. If one wanted to trace the chain of blame back you could go back to the Greatest Generation that raised, and probably further back than that. Trying to understand it is of little use though, as we are the same product just down the chain. All we can do is really understand the circumstances, poke a little fun, and try to pick up the pieces. I’m also hesitant to indulge in something like this given the last name of the director and the involvement of Darren Aronofsky. You can’t make fun of our Boomers; only we can do that.
I may watch it tonight, regardless.
Cultural disintegration is worth exploring but it’s extremely difficult to grasp your hands around as it quickly just becomes pointing and gawking at this continental mess. It’s easy to fall into resentment and rage. It’s easy to be mad at another generation. If the Boomers disappeared overnight, which on some level they one day will, the problems we have will largely be the same. If the Boomers had never existed, our problems would probably still be the same, albeit in different forms. The situation and the mountainous climb, almost Sisyphean, that will need to be done by those unhappy is to forge generational connections that endure and safeguard that wealth and capital in all forms that are being vacuumed up by pederast grifters and shapeshifting psychopaths.
The future requires families, intact as they can be. It requires people who can let righteous resentment for the smallest of things become better fury at the biggest of crimes. There is value in virtue in a nihilistic age, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
That’s all for this week. In the future I’d like to add more structure and more topics to these posts but this was done very late in the morning on the shortest notice. Church bells are ringing and the choir is calling. Sound and fury, fury and sound.
Keep an eye on Antelope Hill as they’ll soon be releasing my collection of old and new writings, Cultured Grugs.
Race Borz 