Memorial Day with Cesar
Luca Deon - Youth house, Meggen, 2008.
Somewhere
I started writing this post a couple weeks ago, after reading Spencer Tweedy’s Lana Del Rey & The Fake Game and then the Spin article that inspired it, Deconstructing Lana Del Rey. I’m intrigued by Lana Del Rey, but she was just my way into trying to write something about authenticity, and this notion of the authentic, which I think about too much, and have been, for at least four years.
I couldn’t finish it. I started writing an argumentative essay, but I ended up not knowing what to argue. The question I ran up against is whether, or why, we care about Lana Del Rey’s authenticity, or the authenticity of any art. This is not a new question. Plato even answered it, reductively: all art is representation, as opposed to truth (philosophy)—authenticity is impossible. I disagree. At least, everything is approximate. Even philosophy is a castle of words.
Rejecting out of hand the representative, casting it as the opposite of truth, is clever theory, but little more. Of course, there are more thousands of pages on this subject. But we must have invented the idea of truth, too. Perhaps we’ve thought ourselves in circles. A reductive conclusion? Sure, but what more do we know? It seems to me like we’ve merely invented ever more complex and arcane ways of disagreeing with ourselves. Talk about the narcissism of small differences. And it’s perpetual.
What does this have to do with Lana Del Rey? Well, Spencer’s post and the Spin article are insightful and compelling, but at some level they’re both replying to a challenge of Del Rey’s authenticity. And I’m wondering, why is her authenticity even suspect? What difference does it make? Do we know what’s authentic, or true, in art, or existence? Or do we only imagine we might know?
Surprise: I don’t have an answer. Earlier tonight, I read a post by Meagan Fisher that brought back into focus an idea that’s been percolating lately. In her words:
Writing is hard because it means we must think deeply, take risks, and get comfortable with asking questions instead of having all the answers.
And so, I’m trying to ask more questions. Starting here.
Art and space and time and memory.
One of those expansive, everything is beautiful nights.
Jeffrey Frank in the New Yorker:
In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy … if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” Ten months before the general election, the increasingly angry, suspicious, and divided party of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry seems ever more immersed in its current orthodoxies. None of the candidates, though, seem the least bit interested in even addressing how they, or their party, might actually govern the “whole people” of a fractious nation.
“The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”John Steinbeck (Letters of Note)
17th St at Cole
3 December 2011
“It’s the difference between something that makes sense, and something that makes you fall in love.”
John Gruber, The Talk Show 66
Top of his game, right here.
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