Posts by Paul Litterick
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Ben, I quite agree with you about contemporary dance. It gets a raw deal, both here and in Britain, while ballet companies soak up the budget.
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I was prompted by Sacha's link, "for a local creative life probably deprived of the 'best' concertos, ballet and oil paintings." I don't want kids to be deprived of such art forms; even ballet, which I loathe.
One of the reasons I want Concert FM to remain untouched is that people can discover classical music on the radio, free of charge and unmediated by the demands of advertisers. Certainly people who already know about music and have money can go to record shops or find music online, but people who don't have those advantages need places where they can learn.
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Now hold on, chaps. I don't doubt that a lot of graffiti is done by white folks: I know some of them; quite a few went to Elam. But that was not my point. My concern is that brown kids are ghettoized by middle-class people in the sense that the various forms of Hip Hop are prescribed as their only cultural activity.
I did not claim this to be racist because middle-class brown people do it as much as white folks. I do think it limiting. Kids should have access to culture broadly, and not be constrained by what is thought by others to be "relevant" and "accessible."
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No, the middle-class people think it a suitable creative activity for brown kids - the don't enjoy it in the sense that they would have it in their homes or neighbourhoods. And they don't care if the kids do not have access to broader culture, to the sort of art which middle-class people can afford to buy.
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K, you called me elitist and you are right. But at least I am not patronising, not in this context at least. I find the sight of middle-class folk praising the suburban poor for their hip-hop culture to be just a little unsettling. Look at the brown kids, being creative with their culture [which, of course, has been imported wholesale from the USofA]. It is all so street. Of course, if they spray-painted their culture in our suburbs that would be an entirely different battle. But, so long as they do the sort of things we expect of Third World people - bright, colourful pattern-making done as a group activity, they don't have to be accepted as complete human beings.
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For a local creative life probably deprived of the 'best' concertos, ballet and oil paintings...
Call me elitist if you like, but I don't think you are doing your argument any good. Painting lettering in derivative forms hardly amounts to much of an art movement.
Jonathan Fa'afetai Lemalu., on the other hand, has talent and has not been constrained by others' expectations of what a Samoan boy should be.
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Oh, that Scottish Thread.
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I don't recall the Scottish thread; was it like the Scottish Play?
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South Park reference: Token Black, the token black, had a bass guitar in his basement, although he did not know it. He also found he could play it, thereby confirming Cartman's stereotypes.
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Though I have to say it would seem more "radically egalitarian" if the "great culture" made available to everyone actually reflected.. everyone
Or do you mean a reflection of a stereotype of what everyone should be, a model village where the brown folk sit on their porches strumming guitars and ukuleles, while their kids get down to the hip hop, the Asians listen to their haunting traditional music and the black kid has a bass guitar in his basement?