in some ways i could almost regard klf as the absurdist version of kierkegaard’s project with justified and ancient being their either/or.
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Steve Wright having to play Poing on the afternoon show. Good times man. Good times 
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Clearly, I’m out of touch with the kidz, too!
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you might not be missing much.
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I don’t know if there is or isn’t a counterculture anymore but I do suspect the author might be looking in some of the wrong places. Just a couple of things from it.
I mean, I don’t think I’d be looking in the very pipe and slippers in my leather bound library NYRB for that but the data they examine
Shows that the NYRB is unrecognisably diverse, has more new (less established) authors, a wider range of authors than it did in decades past. Like the exact opposite of his thesis here.
I was quite struck by this tweet too
comparing the homogeneity of a megaplex with the plethora of (rep chiefly) options in the past. So not comparing like with like for a start. Rep cinema is niche and the role is largely supplanted by streaming now. I’d love to go to the cinema to see loads of those old movies. But if I’d been around then I wouldn’t have been able to. It literally didn’t exist in my hometown. I’ve seen most of them now though and my access to art cinema is much greater than it would have been at any other time.
I think what that tweet might perhaps relate to is this:
The author writes about the great Kieslowski and just how big a deal he was back when I was a youngster. That kind of, what the author calls middlebrow but I’d prefer to just call serious cinema, is probably dead in that way or at least much less popular. But that was just a moment in time. Viewing cinema as art and studying the old and classic texts was a product of film schools, history, and business. We have a recency bias for mass produced chum, in fact in the past most films were utter bullshit Westerns that nobody wants to see any more. We remember the good stuff disproportionally. I doubt that the world has got stupider or there is less good art being made. I can’t know, and I do think that monopolies are dominating our consciousness but they are not, I think, supplanting counterculture but rather edging out the liberal democratic intellectual space of arthouse cinema and newspapers with real reporting.
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Yeah another piece of context missing from that comparison is that for a long period of our history most people had maybe half a dozen choices of what they could watch on TV at any given time depending on what the reception was like in their area.
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Like emo piñata I also caught a strong whiff of old man yelling at clouds.
Also, any discussion of this hinges on the definition of counterculture, and he dishonestly steers around that with something of a tautology-
But he doesn’t actually give a definition of “counterculture”! He…
…just defines it in terms of the arguments he wants to make.
It is now like it always has been. Whether one defines it simply as “outside the mainstream” or something more specific, the stuff is out there, but one is either the sort of person who seeks things out, or is content to go along with whatever is offered. While anything “countercultural” now doesn’t have some of the platforms it used to (and neither does anything else), it’s easier to come across than ever, all one needs is an internet connection and a healthy curiosity about the world.
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Huge parts of rural america just had 5 for a long time. We didn’t get cable out to where we lived in the Ozarks until the mid 90s. Before that we had an antenna that could pick up ABC, CBS, NBC, occasionally FOX, and PBS.
And about three to five low powered semi-active christian channels that bounced around the dial and were not full time and probably not FCC approved. And that was til about 30 years ago. Theres still plenty of spaces like this, more so now that the “digital conversion” happened and the signals got FAR weaker. It’s just that “divide” doesn’t get much press and they certainly aren’t “online.”
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