No country for sissies or nihilists (but scammers...)

One of the more surprising items in the ongoing climate war (now raging in theatres everywhere) is a surprise-attack on the cultural front. Not content with merely blitzing the field with armies of statistics and shooting off enough assertions of causality to make Aristotle's compost spin at 12,000 rpm in his grave...

Why high culture is always counterculture, but not vice versa

Tucked inconspicuously in the back of The Mencken Chrestomathy, in a section titled...

We need culture... WHY exactly?

Dedicated readers of this blog (I'm joking of course) may recall, a few posts ago, my sneering at the almighty dollar-standard that bestrides the arts, my snorting at the media coverage that treats culture as just another economic activity, needing continued growth, providing important jobs, yadda yadda, etc.

Obviously my sarcasm needs to be cranked up a notch or four because, lo and behold, here is more of the same in the Globe and Mail Sept. 4 under the headline "Canada must refuel for cultural creativity."

Yep, you could recycle this cliche endlessly, and you do... you do...

Short note to Russian Visitors and/or Porn Freaks

As I noted on Facebook, one of the charms of the Culture Monitor blog is that Google supplies data on visitors to the site. Admittedly my blatherpatch has a nearly nonexistent readership, as befits an inconsequential clown like myself, but a few visitors do drift by, and the question nagging me is--WHY?

   An easy default answer is that they are topic-hunting, and something in their search-terms directs them to my "labels" as Google Blogger calls them. Moreover, such an explanation strokes the ego, because it tells me people are actually interested in my ideas about art,conservatism, culture, Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, Mr. Ignatieff and his striking resemblance to Shemp Stooge, or whatever.

   Alas, the statistics seem to undercut this. For one thing, no one ever leaves a comment, good, bad or indifferent, and that's a rather dismaying statistic. For another, most of my visitors seem to be... Russian? Yep. The U.S. has been ahead occasionally in the numbers game, but Russia is never far behind (my fellow Canadians are always a distant third) and for the last week or so Russkies have have been out-visiting the Yanks about 2:1.

   A pleasant, idealistic theory would be that the Russians are interested in my review of the film Danton since, really, there is nothing else hereabouts of any special interest to them. No Pushkin. No Pussy Riot. But the Danton review hasn't popped up in the statistics, and the blog-leading Dylan-Shakespeare items are only getting one or two visits per day. What are the other four or five Russians per day looking at?? (actually, a burst of 11 or 12 today).

  A disturbing possibility reared its head when I finally decided to investigate my Blogger listings of "Traffic Sources" that seem to be mysteriously directing people my way. Clicking on the main one, which seems to be generating 90% of all my traffic, and whose name suggests something film-related, I was shocked to discover (luckily I don't have a heart condition!) it is a hardcore porn site! Whaaaat?!

Further investigation revealed that this film site nestles here in two versions: the short version which is some sort of legitimate film-selling site, and a long version with the word "redirect" in it, leading to the porn site. To make a long story short, my fragile ego must now contend with the possibility that 90% of my tiny trickle of traffic is merely landing here at the Monitor accidentally, as a side effect of, um, shaky-handed uni-coital button-clicking.

What is worse, the CSIS agents watching me (hey, I'm a paranoiac, I assume such things) have probably concluded I'm a hardcore perv myself. After all, I clicked on that porn site a second time, just to make sure my first hit hadn't been accidental. Roll over, Pete Townshend.

Postscript (August 27)
Was rather surprised to see that this post disappeared from the blog for a few days. Somehow, tweaking it a little after first posting it, I saved it as a "draft" and thereby withdrew it from circulation. Didn't even notice this disappearance until I did a further investigation on the mysterious sites that direct visitors here, including one that is now providing as many vict... er, customers as the porn site. What might this NEW burgeoning provider be? As it turns out, a multi-site which "breaks down" into both a cooking-recipe site and a dating site: and a third site billed as:

Find Top Girl Sites

Looking for Girl? Search for it with Findiest!

YOU tell me what it is, I'm scared to look.

This Is Still the Culture Monitor! Really!!

Spruced up the blog (first time in years) and being the cyber-retard I am, seem to have quite obliterated the "Culture Monitor" title... beyond resurrection? How do I manage to do these things?! Damn!
   Anyway, the title may return eventually. Or maybe not. In the meantime, you can also thrill to my whining and bellyaching on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/frameofmind

Oh, and did I mention that Prince Hamlet is a vicious schmuck? And Shakespeare deliberately constructed him that way? Yep, put THAT in your monarchist pipe and smoke it! =]

Hey, are we immigrants great or what?

Ah!--now here is the June 2011 Walrus with a treatise on nouveau Canadians, adorned with a truly cute headline: "Arrival of the Fittest." Whoa!
   You can almost hear the right-flappers screeching, "You wouldn't DARE say Europeans are the fittest, would you? Would you?! You'd have a freaking CONNIPTION if we boosted western values, wouldn't you?!" Etc.
   Heck, les editors de Walrus may even have placed the allusive cherry atop the article with the mischievous intention of thus stirring up the animals. Such things do happn when the ideological undergarmets begin to knot...

A late gun for culture

Does anyone read blogs? If a journal falls in the cyberforest, is the bear Catholic? Hm. The only blog I've ever read (once, partly) was by a guy from Firesign Theatre who was writing a weird detective story with a bird (yes, a bird) as the shamus. I don't cruise the web much at all, to tell the truth. Old-fashioned and print-centred--that's your correspondent.

In fact, like most Firesign, the blog was wonderful, but at the risk of sending thee rapidly to a better site (More Sugar I seem to recall) let me leave my endorsement at that. The rest is Jens-promotion. Anything to get my durned projects hatched!

What projects, you ask? (as I stuff the rhetorical question into your mouth).Well, how about the newsletter that's been in the back of my mind forever and a week: the Northern Culture Monitor. Although cultural studies seems to be a hot fad these days, and a great many scribblers practition it like recycled, wafer-thin sociology, I don't notice that we are much wiser or our culture much richer. Maybe what we need is less boosterism and more satire? Yeah, that's the ticket.

And what would Megacrotchety write about? Hm. The Ronnie Hawkins review I couldn't sell. The obscenity case that is almost the reverse of the Sharpe case and sheds a nice sidelight on current (wacky) legal definitions,(unlike Sharpe too, it got almost zero media attention). A Globe and Mail rant against science in arts matters. The alleged anti-semitism of H. L. Mencken. The lavish reissues of the Lovin' Spoonful's old records. Shakespeare for healing Iraq. A possible anthology of newspaper columnists. Cultural policemen and their weapons.

But it's late. The kids must be tucked in and all that. Bye till next Tuesday.

PS: Anyone want to see a picture of my 2001 "Stalkwell" Hallowe'en costume? Anyone hereabouts have their own culture story they figger the media mangled, missed or over/underplayed? Anyone out there at all? Testing, testing. Testing for intellectual life... July 19, 2005