Driving into Oak Cliff, where i grew up; & which is
now largely Hispanic. Thinking about Low Riders, & how
their ethic is to drive slow where everybody else drives
as fast as they can get away with. Slowness as a space.
Nobody saw it as such before they took it over for their
own use. Laying claim to the despised signifier. How this
has long been a significant strategy for subcultures. Camp.
But now, just the other day, i saw a mainstream-publisher
book on how to decorate "Fifties style" (for those who can't
afford to buy the real thing). I remember when Fifties kitsch
was cheap because everyone thought it was terrible & stupid;
what they wanted was--oh, Art Deco. I remember when a few of
my friends started collecting it--& also the "easy listening"
music of that time (now immortalized by Re/Search's book on
Exotica)... i myself was (in the early Eighties) ambivalent: i liked
it, but i could bring myself to approve of it intellectually (this
changed). Where was the Irony in all this? Only in the sense of
reverse-valorization; the Whigs of that time never felt condescending
towards their found treasures so it wasn't "camp", nor did they
exactly seek the baddest of the bad, merely the most characteristic.
  Then Retro caught up with them, & it wasn't avant
anymore. (Say, ten years later.) --Later still, we are experiencing the
cultural white-noise of too many style-strategies going off at once,
like firecrackers. Are the Eighties "in"? The Seventies? The McKinley
Era??...When white noise becomes the given (=syncretism). The style
of Empire in a syncretic period appears almost random. To define itself,
Imperial aesthetes adopt what i have called Apodeictic Bogosity--but
compounded with Doublethink. Wrapping oneself in the flag despite the
intellectual bankruptcy of the gesture but so fucking what, we can do
what we want--& then being able to feel like this is a fine & noble gesture.
Look how Classic Rock--which originally was anti-war--is being fused
with "Let's Roll" (Apocalypse Now without the irony). I feel less & less
my commonality with the Boomers, when this is what happens when the
Boomers take control... In such a context, is Classical Music then the con-
trarian mode? (I think of A Clockwork Orange.) What is the new
meaning of contrarian, if one is to escape duality? --What we all have in common,
is less a culture than an infrastructure (Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, cellphones,
cable TV, traffic lights & gasomats). Does the infrastructure have a politics?
  Posthumous Poetics (neo-Alexandrianism): in an effort to trans-
cend the noise of the marketplace, one resorts to "writing English as if it were
a dead language" (as was said, perhaps unfairly, of Pater). This has been tried
before. Callimachus is only read by specialists, but his Roman disciple Catullus
is still esteemed; he benefitted from what might be called "hybrid vigor"--the
merging of the somewhat etiolated Greek traditions, with the turbulent up-&-coming
argot of Empire (often wielded best, by provincials: Catullus was a Celt). --I see
parallels in the phenomenon known as "Bollywood" (also, in a more circumscribed
way, in the mid-Nineties "shibuya-kei" music of Japan). Just as when Country met
Blues & produced Rock, when Indian pop culture demanded home-grown movie
spectacles on the plan of Hollywood musicals, something rich & strange resulted.
(Maybe too: scifi, from technophilia plus Pulps--).
  --Which leads to the poetics of Glimflash (one genre superimposed
on another). Glimflash as signifier...of the logical third?
  The poet at this juncture: a three-legged dog who likes to catch
frisbees.