The Aesthetics of Knocking it Back

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value system–that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

- Walker Percy

Read the entire article here.

Hat Tip: remshot

This Administration Brought to You by Pepsi

Two days before the election, I spent the day in Washington D.C. with some friends, and I noticed something odd: At first, I assumed that the metro stations were just decorated for the upcoming inauguration. A number of the lighted pillar-things had a simple tri-coloured design on them that looked a little something like this:

And I thought “Hey, isn’t that they Obama campaign logo? Odd.” This opinion was bolstered by several posters that had the symbol and a single word or phrase “Hope”, “Change”, “Pop”. Wait: “pop”? Something wasn’ right (there was also one that said “soul”, which, honestly, why didn’t they just say “fried chicken”? I mean, good grief.):

Turns out, it was a pepsi add campaign, but the confusion was (and is) understandable and dare I say intentional:

To be fair, maybe the Obama camp stole Pepsi’s idea:

All of which sparked a memory of a propaganda poster I came across a few years ago:

Angel and Devil Wrestling over Fire

- by David Jones, c. 1924

For HS: Judging by Appearances

Contrary to popular opinion, appearances do not generally deceive. Instead, they are an indispensable feature of the way things are and serve as our first contact with the world. The world reveals itself first through the way it can be sensed and felt, by means of our eyes or ears or by touch or taste. Art helps us see, sense and feel the world in novel ways by revealing new angles and fresh perspectives.

- Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

More Cardus coming at you. Q & A with Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, aesthetic philosopher extrodinaire.

Water runs downhill because it is Bewitched

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country…

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales…Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales, because they find them romantic…

Nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 58-59.

The Death of Triangles

All the will-worshippers…always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite – Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…”Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will”…

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws or limits. Art is limitation…If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe…

Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation…The artist loves his limitations: They constitute the thing he is doing.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 45 – 46.

We are living in the Last Days

High-heeled CROCS.
Somebody call Tehran and tell them to get busy with those nukes.

We are Food Prudes

We Americans have always had a problem taking pleasure in eating. We certainly have gone to unusual lengths to avoid it…the sheer abundance of food in America has bred “a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.” To savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery…To the Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century, “The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion.”…Kellogg himself was outspoken in his hostility to the pleasures of eating: “The decline of a nation commences when gourmandizing begins.”
If that is so, America had little reason to worry.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 56 – 57.

In Which We Declare War on the Front Lawn

Condo-living has made this sort of a moot-point for me at this juncture, but architect Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates concept is such a good one that I must share now, and once we get the coveted place in the ‘burbs, we’ll let you know from experience how it goes.

The general idea is that front lawns are a waste of space and energy, of little aesthetic value, and can even have an isolating, anti-communal effect. They consume resources and time, and yet return no practical or social benefit (unless you count “having the best lawn” bragging rights).

Mr. Haeg has suggested that we get rid of our front lawns and replace them with productive gardens. His first prototype front-garden in Salinas, Kansas now produces everything from strawberries and peaches to Swiss chard and green chilis. And, according to the homeowners, “We probably met more of the people on the block, and had more interaction with them, because of the garden”. And while the owners say they spend about the same amount of time weeding and tending their garden as they did mowing and fertilizing the lawn, that time spent is much more rewarding and communal. After all, its much easier and pleasant to chat with family or passing neighbors as you harvest green beans than it is to holler over the roar of the lawn mower.

The front-garden not only makes useful a formerly useless space, but also changes for the better the life of a family and even to some extent the community at large, creating a nurturing, productive, aesthetically satisfying space that gives people the opportunity to reconnect to the seasonal rhythms of labor and harvest that our good God has given to us.

HT: MV

In Which We Desire Sidewalks in the New Heavens and New Earth

Moreover, we have every confidence that we will get them.

In Comment magazine’s June 2007 “Summer Reading” issue, a gentleman named Eric O. Jacobsen contributed a list of books on Christianity and Urbanism which you best pick up. I pass a few of them along with short excerpts from Mr. Jacobsen’s longer blurbs. Again, if you don’t subscribe to Comment, go sign up now.

Also, Jacobsen maintains a site called Sidewalks in the Kingdom: Resources for Christian New Urbanists which you should check out. I have added a permanent link on the sidebar under “Sidewalks”.

OK, the books:

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

I learned to love the city from Jacobs with her eyes to see “the ballet of street life” while trained experts could only comprehend the city as rationally organized blobs on a zoning map.

2. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Duany, Speck, and Zyberk.

These pioneers of the New Urbanist movement spent the last few decades leading a renegade group of architects and planners who in one way or another rejected the post-war suburban neighborhoods and urbanism…They possess the clarity of insight to ask whether the suburban experiment has delivered on its lofty promises, and whether its existence has really justified scrapping thousands of years of human wisdom embedded in traditional urban forms in favor of its seductive charms.

3. The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler.

Kunstler is both hilarious and spot-on accurate in his observations about contemporary North American Life…In The City in Mind, Kunstler…develops the notion that the ability to create quality urban environments is an important litmus test for any civilization. He does this with a series of eight case studies ranging from Atlanta, “this giant hairball of a thirteen-county demolition derby,” to Paris which embodies the difference between a “city worth caring about and one that is not.”

4. Great Streets by Allan B. Jacobs.

After about fifty years of slavishly accepting Le Corbusier’s rash dismissal of streets for anything but high-speed automobile traffic, we are once again recognizing that a requisite component for a truly great city is great streets. Some of the most significant public spaces ina city are to be found on its streets. Alan Jacobs’s treatment is a tribute to Great Streets, and a serious study of some of the best-loved streets in the world.

5. Global City Blues by Daniel Solomon

As a penitent formerly modernist architect, Daniel Solomon is the perfect guide to the waves of modernist hubris that nearly killed the city during the second half of the twentieth century…Most seasoned practitioners of the recent urban renaissance are self-avowed pragmatists and polemic apologists for the movement. Solomon may be more of a poet at heart and as such he may provide helpful inroads to the movement for a theological discussion of “creational norms.”

6. The Good City and the Good Life: Renewing the American Community by Daniel Kemmis.

Daniel Kemmis maintains that focusing our political attention exclusively on the national scene can only fall short of our expectations, and we will eventually become jaded. In the Good City and the Good Life, Kemmis recommends a return to the city as a context for human thriving and for rediscovering the dignity of political life.

7. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg.

The notion that we need a place to hang out that is not our workplace nor our home helps to explain the success of places like Starbucks and Barnes and Noble…Ray Oldenburg anticipated this phenomenon and coined the term “third place”…Oldenburg helps us place this phenomenon in a wider context and he helps us to better understand the significance of this rediscovered impulse to a sociability…We learn what is appropriate and inappropriate public behaviour by spending time in coffee shops and other public places where we receive instant feedback on our public behaviour.

8. Until Justice and Peace Embrace: the Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Wolterstorff understands that for most people, beauty in the city is found in the spaces between the buildings. From this perspective a beautiful city is a city in which the streets feel like outdoor hallways that invite us to explore.

In Which We Are Momentarially Intrigued by Vogue

The Above magazine arrived at my home as so many things do, and I remarked to my wife as I surreptitiously shifted it from the coffee table to the magazine rack “That is a terrible cover. Looks like King Kong.” Which indeed it does.

This thing is, aesthetically, a disaster. The photographer should be drawn and quartered, and the editor summarily sacked. And predictably, it has stirred up a bit of controversy over “racial stereotypes” and whatnot. Now I wouldn’t normally give this sort of thing a second thought, but that cover has stuck in my head over the last few days. Couldn’t figure out why, until Buddha connected the dots for me:

The cover also closely resembles this bit of United States recruitment propaganda from the Great War which I had shown to my ninth grade European history class just two weeks ago.

In Which Wisdom comes out your Speakers

The good folks at WRF” sent me the latest Think lecture, by the always wonderful Calvin Seerveld. It is entitled “Cities as a place for public artwork: a GLOCAL approach”, but the role of art in the public sphere is only the beginning. In the process of laying the foundations for his thoughts on public art, Dr. Seerveld outlines in broad strokes some of the moral underpinnings for a redemptive understanding of economics and community. You can (and should) download the lecture here (think #15). Don’t neglect to look at the urban artwork gallery (from the slide show which Dr. Seerveld used at the lecture, I assume).

This particular lecture is a part of the Stained Glass Urbanism project. In light of Revelation 21:10 – 22:5, this is something we all ought to be actively interested in, but I think will be particularly exciting and encouraging to those living in metropolitan areas. Listen, read, and then do.

In Which “Beauty” Is Meaningless

Using the term “beautiful” to signify that which is artistically or aesthetically pleasing/skillful/Good robs the term of all meaning if we also simultaneously attempt to reject the absolutizing of Greek philosophical ideals or the trite prettiness of kitsch.
For some reason we conservative Christians insist on using a term which, if we are to avoid these ditches, must be qualified extensively with each use because we reject every common or historical use. Using “beauty” as a meta-term is fundamentally inaccurate and causes nothing but confusion and missapprehension at best.
At worst, we follow the term into the assumptions of one of the previous historical uses, (usually some Christian syncretist bastardization of the ancient Greek philosophy).

To put it another way: Using “beauty” as a standard for art creates a number of problems in praxis, usually stemming from one of the following forms of confusion:

- If we use “beauty” in an historically, lexically legitimate manner, we end up with a myopic and unsatisfying, if not downright dishonest, art; for ultimately we are (as often as not) calling evil good and good evil (Not all “good” things are “beautiful”, nor all “beautiful” things “good”).

- If we recognize these flaws in the traditional use of the term, yet insist on using the term anyway, we are forced to qualify the word to the point of uselessness. For instance, “beautiful” can not really include, as one of its aspects, “ugly”. However, a well-crafted allusive object can (and usually does) include both.

Ironically, the conservative insistence on the use of “Beauty” as a standard for artistic and aesthetic judgments perpetuates our inability to come up with any sort of useful response to the current “whatever is right in my own eyes” artistic climate. That’s because, in many ways, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. And that is only a problem if Beauty has become an idol.