Life During Culture Wartime

We saw the re-release of Stop Making Sense on an IMAX screen tonight, and it reminded me of a way I used to feel pretty often but rarely feel anymore. You should see it.

Very mild spoiler alert for this, but David Byrne walks out, alone, onto an empty stage — I mean an empty stage, stripped to the cinderblocks at the back of the theater with some ladders and scaffolding against the wall. He starts to play, just him on a bare stage, to the sound of a tape player and his guitar, and then the crew starts building the set behind him, and then Tina Weymouth walks out and starts playing alongside him, and then the set construction goes on behind them, and another member of the band walks out and starts playing, and….

The sense of something being built in front of you, growing to a frantic and joyful crescendo, is extraordinary. A certain teenager was looking around the theater during the movie, and said afterward that she’d never seen a bunch of old people looking so happy.

For two hours, I felt like I was watching pure creativity, people making something that grew and deepened, and kept growing and deepening.

I saw a lot of that, and felt a lot of that, in a cultural window roughly thirty to thirty-five years ago, listening to cassettes in a Volkswagen.

Now, to compare, the novelist Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her own new novel from publication this year, because she realized she had done something disgusting and unforgivable that made the book shameful: she set it in Russia.

I mean, what kind of monster sets a novel in Russia? I can’t think of a single other writer who has ever dared to commit such a grotesque act of depravity, can you? She must be for Putin, like a Nazi!

Or to take the problem from a different angle, the musical artist behind the hit song “Wet-Ass Pussy” recently threw her microphone at a fan who had thrown a cup of water at her during a performance in Las Vegas:

….after which, curiously, her voice, and the rest of the music, continued without interruption, even though she no longer had a microphone and was no longer singing.

The relentless joylessness of a culture that weaves inauthenticity and commodification with constant scolding and fingerwagging is miserable. It’s destructive, it sharply limits creativity, and it’s so incredibly boring. An up-and-coming young Chinese communist once held a series of talks to explain that the only legitimate function of art is to serve the revolution, and we’ve somehow captured the same feeling of creative freedom that young man once offered to the Chinese — but with “Wet-Ass Pussy” as the result, joining the tone of a political commissariat to the message of Pornhub. Quite an accomplishment, but remarkably dull to watch and read and listen to.

As I’ve written before, “you can time travel. You can reach back.” You can find creativity in other, earlier, better moments. I tried a little of that tonight, and it was really good.

And then maybe at some point we’ll all allow ourselves a little bit of creativity again. I mean, as long as it’s culturally appropriate and it doesn’t upset anyone and doesn’t mention Russia and takes the right stance on the trans question and doesn’t upset the factcheckers and the disinformation experts. But for now, you can just watch this: