``It's a matter of taste. I'd simply warn against the danger of confusing your entertainment for your politics. Some (most?) of the best entertainment (and literature, and art, and music, etc.) is irredeemably right-wing, I tend to think.'' Joseph Catron
---------------
While I agree there is the danger of confusing entertainment with politics, I still disagree with the rest of the sentence.
Part of that disagreement has to do with the potential social function of the arts. Part of that function is celebration and the other is critique. Then it is also a material fact that the arts are supported by the bourgeoisie and they definitely prefer the celebratory part and seriously dislike of the critical edge.
There are all kinds of currents in art history that can be more or less be honed down to one or the other, celebration or critique. Many of the 19thC English novels were essentially celebrations of the English bourgeois order. Maybe that was the reason I got sick of reading English (and American) literature and turned to the French and Russians, then some of the modern Germans. Sicko old Europe as Rumsfeld mentioned. I watched exactly two programs of Dallas and always found something else when my kid as over here, even a stupid crime drama would do, like Miami Vice which was its own form of celebrating the Miami rich.
By the 1980s I yearned for the hours of a misspent youth watching The Honeymooners, one of these days Alice... We used to live in apartments in LA that looked like that set...except we had paintings on the wall, books, records... I didn't have tv on that side of the family until I was 12 and frankly it was already too late.
When the teen dance shows started up with Dick Clark, it was not long before a black version came on one of the off-beat local channels in LA and you could hear almost real music with Johnny Otis, Nat Cole, and the black musicians and singers. Crazy Little Richard...
How do you explain these American arts have the almost silent potential of left radicalism? I don't know how it works, but it certainly did work with me...and I couldn't dance, except that stiff knee stuff...I guess a case of white-knee and stiff shoulder. Just a couple of weeks ago it came up again at my son's tenth wedding anniversary. Our table demanded some Salsa, which the reluctant DJ put on and my buddy Dennis and his girlfriend who have been taking lessons, got up and showed off. Arturo, my daughter-in-law's brother came over to our table, and just said wow. Two gringos with nice steps... Not said, but there.
And then of course I love Fred Astair. Somehow his absolute grace denies the cruddy shit of the rich dressed the same way. It's a little like Ellington's ploy of putting on the classy, Harlem Nocture, or Black and Tan Fantasy. Here is a rare Ellington singing Harlem Nocture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BSaRl-NqDs
I didn't first hear that. It was this, a temporary top ten as a teenager, my favorite in 1960. You just knew this was important. It got that darkness inside of America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=qfWbRWTfKFg
Well, here's is Dextor Gordon, one of my other favorites back in the day:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1c7ha_dexter-gordon-night-in-tunisia_music
Where is the radical? It's the sensibility itself, given form, that pre-loads almost the entire civil rights movement in less than ten minutes. You understand the human condition of oppression and it doesn't go away, it continues to formulate answers, demands, objectives, goals.
Sorry Joe C. I wanted to give the other side.
CG