hey horse et al,
yes i know whay you mean. i have just moved from brisbane to london. i lived
briefly here last year and am now reacquainting myself with the place.
fashion here is more uniform. the level to which the majority of the young
*conform* to what they are told to wear and do, by the telly and magazines,
is staggering. little intellectual value here.
this reminds me of bret easton ellis' last novel 'glamorama'. the book is a
surreal and hilarious paralleling of glamour - fashion, models,
superficiality - and terrorism. it took me a while to work out exactly why
the parallel was drawn but i have it now: glamour fashion etc and terrorism
are both tools which reinforce the insecurity of the masses and the
therefore the hegemony of the elite.
[ gilliam's 'brazil' is the best piece of contemporary art i have seen about
how terrorism is actually desired by the state; to the point, in the film,
of the state actually perpetrating terror against itself.]
london is on a precipice as far as i can tell. things here barely work and
things that do work badly. london relies on its immigrant workforce (a lot
being antipodean) and they come for the dough. if the uk's pound drops
(euro?) and people leave/stop coming over london (and the country) will
grind to a halt. of course this can only be a good thing, since life here is
hardly high quality.
which brings me to a central point that may explain a lot of the anomie on
this list: intuiting quality.
we may be able to neatly divide this list into those that get a feeling of
overwhelmingly low quality from our western culture and others who are
mainly satisfied with the quality they get from things as they are. both
groups are equally as necessary. it is the relative size and influence of
these groups that determines whether or not we have social change (eg
revolution).
but i have not quite hit it yet: it is an sq/DQ thing. the sense of low
quality i get is sometimes the sensing of low intellectual value (eg
irrelevancy of 'news'), but sometimes it is more 'romantic' - more aesthetic
than that. and this is the point i think i am getting at. it is an
*aesthetic thing* at bottom - like pirsig's spiral into madness in ZAMM.
maybe that is relevant to the split - the more rational/analytic vs the more
aesthetic/intuitive. ?
anyway just thoughts.
australia is better than london.
gav
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