A bespoke publication Quilette recently claimed that young women are so radicalized that a hitherto unseen aggressive streak of behaviour is emerging rapidly. I am wondering if this means that if one displeases a young woman with some oral critique and she will not just give you a blow but may even beat the shit out of you. If you are a man this is ‘shiver me timbers ‘ time for you. As for the rest of us who are watchers of cultural shifts this cannot be swept under the carpet. Not a pearl clutching time either.
The bespoke Cannes Film Festival ready to hypnotize us yearly last month had banned nudity from the red carpet! It seems of late nudity has been the buzz word for designers with entertainers baring all they can leaving nothing to the imagination. Here a bout of ‘touch me ‘ and ‘touch me not’ has spread like a virus confusing the purveyors of news print or digital media. So this leads to the speculation that culture shifts in proportion to social politics.
Bludgeoned by the extremes of ‘Woke” which insisted that everything flies and has to be accepted or there will be public denouncement ,women now tackle very little of value but get noticed any way? .This is our new culture at least in North America and that’s that! I consider boredom to be a fate worse than death so I am in favour of big changes,. I saw a magnificent video recently of two stunning well groomed men in conventional formal dark dress suits dancing the tango. Naturally, being partial to this highly sexualized Argentinian dance i simply swooned. So I wonder is this innovation and exploration or was it always this way? Tango culture swoops and dips in ways which were previously unthinkable. Then on further research I found out that it was men who danced the tango together as women were not available.
A brilliant publisher while discussing the debut work of a novelist he had just released, stated that sexual themes were not well handled in literature by canadian novelists and sent me the book in the hope that i would review it. The deftness and unabashed sexual ardor with which the author of black mixed ancestry harpooned in guileless sentences made me hot around the collar. Each desire and actual physical emanation tore away the jargon of contrived sexuality. A new culture which made one reminiscent of the works of D.H.Lawrence who had done the same in his notorious ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ hammering at the floodgates of literary memory . Yet despite calling this a new culture i am now convinced that there is a general state of fatigue over the almost nude gala dressing and the yearning for ‘real’ is hiding in the wings. There is great hope that cultural shifts. will blossom dandelion like, in the green grass of manicured Literature. ,
I write letters on French stationary i have used for decades. The ink i am partial to is the called ‘Rouge Grenat’. It is the colour of prunes. It lies in the belly of my three fountain pens. I was told recently that the G.Lalo french notepaper will no longer be imported to Canada. All this as Canada does not have a tariff war with France!. As shockwaves and a new sorrow mar my countenance , the store manager whispered we have a new deal with a Belgium stationer and it is similar.
“Who writes letters anymore” he mocks me gently.
Clutching 2 writing tablets and two packages of envelopes i remind him it is not just me . It cannot be. I shall defect from France to Belgium grudgingly but this particular culture of writing letters by hand will endure. My thank you letters are part of my personality. During a recent Post Office hurly burly i telephones a friend and inquired if he had received my note.
“Yes. It it has just been added to the others i have from you. I am keeping them safe.”
“Really”?
“Yes you are an author and you could get really famous one day.”
BOOM!
Now we have AI which is assisting all the retards to write better. That is the cultural shift. It is fraught with excitement . When used for Science i am enthralled but if it chooses words to replace and alter your personal quirks and dynamics of expression and homogenize them into pompous speeches then don’t play this game.
Think of what all the Montessori teachers of preschoolers will have to say. My two montessori kids could read phonetically before they were four and churn out an equally heroic effort of writing. Perhaps the thrills and chills of the rapidly spreading AI facility will spawn generations of school children who will not read write or even learn. i saw some stunning brain pictures of where the AI users are unaware that the brain is showing the stunting drafts. Yet this is the new culture and willy-nilly all the kids will follow the Pied Piper of technology and happily fall into the sea.
The explosion of Tik Tok videos are not confined to the narcissistic world of juvenile entertainers. They are like Instagram a vital component of dissembling news across the globe. As most of us are instinctively drawn to the visual before print. Then here is a new intelligence marker in which sight will soon become the most stimulated and dominant of the senses. This is a cultural shift indeed and i wonder if hearing will become less important? Is there a brave new world out there already throbbing with sensation. The protective lenses flooding Amazon sites to offer protection from the possible ravages of over used sight replace the groovy shades we wear to hide, beguile or impress? Yet we have watchers and record keepers everywhere. My IPhone tells exactly how many hours i spend online. It is quite disgraceful as I am writing my new book.
Culture is not simply dress and ritual it has become the right of most individuals to exercise choice in mundane matters. Are we still enamoured by the war preparations of Masai or indigenous people and become doubly respectful of the pagaentry.?
Yet the crowds of masked and hijab wearing men and women who are doing the Gaza protests worldwide are all muslims or simply adopting ptotest culture? Just as a tuxedo and evening gown are the necessary saratorial choices for the the formal entertainment sector but once in a while a rebel beaks through ? The punshment in social terms is swift and draconian. No invitation the next year as in the revered Met Gala? There are people who hold the strings of Fashion culture tight.
Then there is the joker who prostrates himself in the narrow aisle of a plane hell bent on offering the muslim prayer . His disruption of airline crew and other passengers who will not reach the toilet are all held hostage to the culture of religion. Nobody really dares utter a curse word or grapple the supplicant. I shall write a letter to the airline on my treasured note paper and present a solution. This is my culture and what is yours?