Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 64th Edition. Things authentic and important.
Why there?
On Saturday, March 30, Pro Hamas protestors interrupted the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
Why St. Patrick's?
For the same reason, most likely, that LGBTQ+ figures had a protesting funeral there recently. People are drawn to Catholic places, as they're real, and therefore attention is paid to them.
Why her?
Courtney Love, in an interview with Standard, stated; "Taylor is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist."
This followed Billie Eilish criticizing, sort of anonymously, "wasteful artists" who put out multiple vinyl editions, an apparent softball for sustainability. She later said her comments weren't directed at Swift.
Hmmm. . .
Why are these chanteuses dissing Taylor?
I don't really know, but I will note that Love commenting on who is important and interesting in laughable. Is Love "important" or "interesting"? If she is, she might be interesting as she's the late wife of the tragic Curt Cobane, whom I don't find to have been particularly important, but certainly tragic. And for Eilish, she's sort of a teenage train wreck who probably needs to get over her weird diet and flipping between hiding her form and flaunting it.
Taylor is interesting because she's a musical success. I don't like her music, which I find to be juvenile, but I will note that appearance wise she's a throwback almost to the 1940s, and appears to have gained success while being basically normal in every fashion.
Culturally, therefore, she might be sort of important in a way.
Love, and Eilish, on the other hand, might be fairly unimportant in every sense. Musically, right now, it's hard to see what actually is important. Whoever they are, they aren't in pop music.
Indeed, much of society seems to be grasping for the authentic and important right now, without much out there in the culture offering it.
Appearances
Back in November, I posted this item:
What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.
Since that time, this trend locally has noticeably increased. It's really remarkable.
For whatever reason, I'm a student of people, so I take notice of what they wear. I'm probably in a minority of sorts that way. What people wear at Mass is a common topic in Cyber Catholic circles, but the recent turn towards the conservative amongst young, white, female Catholic parishioners is really remarkable. It's a real rejection of the cultural norm of our era.
Indeed, very recently, even amongst those young women who were part of this group, there's suddenly a change. One young woman who is routinely at Mass with her family on Sundays, and who typically showed a lot of shoulder (no, there's no problem with that) is now covering up hugely. Something's changed. It doesn't, however, carry over to Hispanic or Native American young women, both of whom continue to dress the way they have. Hispanics have always dressed very conservatively at Mass, but not in a trad fashion. They're keeping on keeping on with that.
News, real news but in a rumor fashion, leaked out recently that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Byzantine Church is looking at putting in a mission in Casper, which would be a mission of a mission. I don't know how many Ukrainian Catholics there may be in town, but I'll bet it's a tiny number. I also bet that the mission church that's thinking of establishing a mission here, which is out of Cody, serves a mostly non-Eastern Rite community.
Something is going on there too. At a time at which some in the Latin Rite seem focused on a topic that's frankly jumped the shark, by and large, and which is really a matter of European culture, not biology, the young and rank and file in the pews seem to be moving on.
Becoming a parody of yourself
One of the risks of taking the long reach for something is that you can end up actually becoming unauthentic in your quest for authenticity.
I'm reminded of Courtney Love again.
On her Wikipedia page, there's a picture of Love wearing a kokoshnik, a stiff hat associated with Russian women. Russian women don't wear them anymore, and I'm sure they haven't for eons. She's wearing it with a miniskirt. It looked absurd, but was probably meant to make a statement. Or here's another example:
The kind of dumb stuff you say when you actually really care about "your 'basic' fashion sense".
I don't know who Japanese Breakfast is (or for that matter what an actual Japanese breakfast is) but they've showed up on this Twitter headline:
Japanese Breakfast is too busy returning to Coachella and making 'music for bottoms' to care about your 'basic' fashion senseOh, bull. That's the exact thing you say when you've tuned your fashion sense to look like you don't have a fashion sense, so you can appear to stay edgy for Coachella.
M'eh.
Exactly.
I note this as in the pews are a young couple, they're not married but perhaps engaged, whose family I somewhat know. From a very conservative background, they're trying to affect the disaffected but conservative look to the max. Unwashed hair and, for the young man, probably third or fourth hand overcoats from the 1970s with huge hounds tooth pattern. The young woman wears, of course, a chapel veil but also is affecting plain to the maximum extent possible, which is detracting a bit from her appearance. I do love her very round, plain glasses, however.
Anyhow, when going for something crosses over into sort of a parody, you've gone too far.
Lost
Anyhow, I think this trend has been going on for a while. It explains the entire Hipster look that's still with us, and was much in force several years ago.
Some days, when I leave the office, there's a young woman coming in. She's either a Native American or a Hispanic from somewhere south of the border. She's always dressed very conservatively, with dresses that remind me of what Latin American women traditionally wear. She always has a big smile when you see and acknowledge her.
She's authentic.
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