Urban Tide: 2011

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Andy Warhol, advertising and consumerism

In Grant Wood's pamphlet Revolt Against the City, published in Iowa City, 1935, he asserts that American artists and buyers of art were no longer looking to Parisian culture for subject matter and style. Wood wrote that Regional artists interpret physiography, industry, and psychology of their hometown, and that the competition of these preceding elements creates American culture. He wrote that the lure of the city was gone, and hopes that art of the widely diffused "whole people" would prevail. He cites Thomas Jefferson's characterization of cities as "ulcers on the body politic."

Chuck Middlekauff, artwork of the American Southwest

Hispanic Heritage Year?

Hispanic Heritage Month covers the month between September 15 and October 15. It is meant to commemorate the many contributions of Latino and Hispanic peoples in both the United States of America and more generally in North America.

I wonder if we really need the federal government to tell Southern California to celebrate Latin American culture. I feel like a lot of our lives our spent under the influence of this cultural vibrancy, whether in our architecture, our food or our history.

While Hispanic as an ethnicity projects an image of minority-status, the growing prevalence of Latino peoples in Southern California and more broadly the Southwestern United States is unmistakably significant. It is all around us. So do we really need to celebrate something that is so common and accessible?

If the goal is greater understanding, then maybe there is purpose in celebration. But that should be made clear. Celebrating for the sake of celebrating doesn't make much sense.

I Will Follow You Into the Dark With Lyrics

Muse Blackout with lyrics

Muse-Blackout

Muse - Blackout

Living in the Shadows

Here I am. The sun shines here nearly every day of the year and yet I'm living in the shadows. 1 out of every 24 minutes in my day is spent driving either to or from school. The story is much the same for most of my friends. We spend our lives learning about American history, European history, American government and so on. How are we connected to "American" history?

Well, we live in America. But what does that mean today? I'm almost closer to the Mexican border right now than Barack Obama is to the Lincoln Memorial. I live at the extreme end of America (well, maybe Alaska has that on me, but you never hear much from them). My communal history is informed by the Spanish explorers who first found this place and the Catholic missions they set up on this coast. My family history is deeply divided between contentedness with what was and thirst for more. Opposite faces of the American coin. And yet here, I feel lost.

I am living in the shadows. People, in my family and around us, try to replicate the culture that they had in other places and times. Baseball as the American past-time is the one example that comes screaming into my head. It doesn't pass well to my generation. The community we know is big houses getting bigger, strip malls tied together like excessive urban putty-string, and each dreamer hitching their hopes to the star of the "upper class".

What has been recreated here is a shadow. A shadow of what was in some other place real. It lacks authenticity in a way that leads me to question whether culture will ever originate here, rather than serving as the ending point in fading line of American divergence.