vv2

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> >What is the art that the SICK Crew produces< was exactly the question which
> kept me from posting this earlier.
> One is the song of being born and dying and the war. Not the worst topics of
> songs and novels.

Right, you are correct, I'm Thick As A Brick sometimes, but
maybe War, where Fathers die, brothers go away, little kids
cry, while it may be a perfectly good topic for Roger Waters
is not an appropriate topic for Dewey Gland (always reminds
me of that cartoon character "El Cahbong" also said to be,
Quick-Draw McGraw).  Reminds me of the Penelope/Hansel and
Gretel chapter of GR where a  far more insidious conspiracy
of the "present dispensation" of the "culture of death", the
WAR,  conditions fathers to die and form a conspiracy on
both sides of the grave, thus leaving their children alone
in the forest. 

> Being "the exact opposite of Dewey's Classical extrapolation" is very good.
> But Dewey's first chapter is a complaint about the "museum character" of
> "fine arts" in the 19th and early 20th century too. This is 1934:
> 
> "The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things
> he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the
> comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of love-nests, murders,
> and exploits of bandits." (6)
> 
> Meanwhile we've learned to take all this for art, but the problem remains:
> 
> "(...) defining the nature of the problem: that of recovering the continuity
> of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." (10)

For Dewey, the problem is always "defining the nature of the
problem." It's kinda like the first step in the scientific
method. Dewey is only one part Sophist (the most liberating
and American part, his Creative principle), but he is three
parts Aristotelian, and defining the nature of the problem
for the Pragmatic American is step one. Of course by
defining "esthetic experience",  Dewey needs theory of
Experience itself. At the very heart of Dewey is the belief
that individual experiences must be of high quality. This
seems so obvious and simple but as Dewey says, "to discover
the easy and the simple and to act upon that discovery is an
exceedingly difficult task." And,  for Dewey,  Quality
experiences, be they aesthetic, educational, scientific,
"live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences."
What the Sick Crew, and many other characters as well, 
produce, is poor quality, it also what they consume and are
becoming.   

> According to Dewey there are two possible worlds where art would not appear,
> "a world of mere flux" and "a world that is finished" (16-17). 

Dewey rejects the world of pure flux (the Sophist's world,
BTW) and he rejects the conception of the world which he
claims reigned for two thousand years, a conception of the
world that is based on the assumption of the superiority of
the fixed and final. Dewey was highly influenced by Darwin.
He rejected the idea that all was MERE flux and he rejected
the notion that Change must imply defect. In doing so, Dewey
rejects the  so called Classical conception-- complete,
finished, perfect. 



Can we see
> Profane and Stencil as representatives of this two worlds, in technical
> terms entropy versus paranoia. In the entropic world "change would not be
> cumulative," in the paranoid concept "conditions could not even be struggled
> with." (17)
> 
> just a thought
> 
> Otto


Lost me here,