{"id":2478,"date":"2004-12-10T10:15:26","date_gmt":"2004-12-10T15:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/10\/2478.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:28","slug":"purity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/10\/purity\/","title":{"rendered":"Purity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over at the Position of Ignorance, Dan calls me on the use of ‘pure’ as a general positive<\/a>. No, it’s not actually All About Your Humble Blogger, but since the word shows up five times in my last post, I’ll go ahead and call it a response. Anyway, he’s totally right. He points out that rather than referring to purity, he’d rather refer to “hybrid vigor and genetic diversity, steel alloys, impurities that give gems their color, translation and multilingualism, healthy difference of opinion, baking powder, Italian tomato sauce, variegated yarn, and so forth.”\n

As it happens, I was talking about (talk about talk about) Pop Music; talking about the purity of pop is like talking about the aridity of the ocean. Pop music is (and has always been) a hybrid; the pop music John Scalzi is talking about is a mutt. African rhythms adulterated by the North American slave experience adulterated further by the urban industrial experience on one side of the family, European instruments adulterated by Eurasian and Gypsy design and the needs of jazz, and then electrified on the other. There are fruitful dalliances with Western Swing (Yee-hah!), Disco (hoo-ah), and funk (hah!) in its past; it’s a wise genre that knows who its father is. What could be a better symbol of glorious impurity than that bastard the Electric Guitar? So, yes, point taken.\n

But I’m still being too literal for his real point. He says “I think I'd rather have to work out some kind of disagreement with someone who values even superficial experience in multiple cultures -- as annoying as that can be -- than with someone dedicated to their purity as a paragon of their culture.” I think this is where some of us get caught in the hyphens; one the one side, the outrage at “hyphenated Americans” who refuse to drop their own culture and become part of the mall, and on the other the insularity and defensiveness that makes people insist on those hyphens. I’m sympathetic to both, but what I really like is the mix. I go down to Chinatown not because I think I’m getting food as I would get it in Szechuan, but because I’m getting Chinese food<\/I>, a thing which never existed before the friction between immigrants rubbed off sparks. Is egg foo young to be despised because it’s inauthentic? But it is authentic, it’s authentically American, just like pizza, corned beef and cabbage, and the Rueben. It’s the friction between cultures that rubs off art and innovation and modernity and chopsocky movies and ska and zoot suits and gumbo and the Demoiselles of Avignon.\n

I think I’ll have to find a way to add that value to the tastes that I think of as city tastes (and which I only with difficulty refrain from calling blue tastes). I had been calling it variety and novelty, and while this taste satisfies, in a way, both of those, this is something different: a taste for mixture, a taste for alloy, a taste for fusion, a taste for combination and amalgamation and conglomeration. Maybe variety, novelty and salmagundi?\n

I do think, however, that it is more of a taste, rather than a moral value. Like all my tastes, I can and often do defend them on moral grounds, but those are not the reasons I like ’em. And, of course, although it is a taste I have, that doesn’t mean that I like everything that is aimed at it; my taste in jazz is for Big Band and Jive, rather than fusion. The mistake is to think that fusion jazz is more of a fusion than Big Band, or to think that Pad Thai is more genuine than a hot dog. Often, what that taste means is just that I focus on the aspects of alloy rather than those of purity, which, after all, is what Dan’s on about.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the Position of Ignorance, Dan calls me on the use of \u2018pure\u2019 as a general positive. No, it\u2019s not actually All About Your Humble Blogger, but since the word shows up five times in my last post, I\u2019ll…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17227,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions\/17227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}