Religions > Bible > Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!!
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31 Aug 2005 07:31:50 AM |
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Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters,
Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!!
Discuss at http://jollywogerwest.com !
Join the Renaissance: http://jollyroger.com !
Robert McKee writes:
Yet, while the ever-expanding reach of the media now gives us the
opportunity to send stories beyond borders and languages to hundreds of
millions, the overall quality of storytelling is eroding. On occasion
we read or see works of excellence, but for the most part we weary of
searching newspaper ads, video shops, and TV listings for something of
quality, of putting down novels half-read, of slipping out of plays at
the intermission, of walking out of films soothing our disappointment
with "But it was beautifully photographed . . ."
The art of story is in decay, and as Aristotle observed twenty-three
hundred years ago, when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence.
Flawed and false storytelling is forced to substitute spectacle for
substance, trickery for truth. Weak stories, desperate to hold audience
attention, degenerate into multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle demo
reels. In Hollywood imagery becomes more and more extravagant, in
Europe more and more decorative. The behavior of actors becomes more
and more histrionic, more and more lewd, more and more violent. Music
and sound effects become increasingly tumultuous. The total effect
transudes into the grotesque. A culture cannot evolve without honest,
powerful storytelling. When society repeatedly experiences glossy,
hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and
tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy
corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, ". .
.. the centre can not hold."
Each year, Hollywood produces and/or distributes four hundred to five
hundred films, virtually a film per day. A few are excellent, but the
majority are mediocre or worse. The temptation is to blame this glut of
banality on the Babbitt-like figures who approve productions. But
recall a moment from THE PLAYER: Tim Robbins's young Hollywood
executive explains that he has many enemies because each year his
studio accepts over twenty thousand story submissions but only makes
twelve films. This is accurate dialogue. The story departments of the
major studios pore through thousands upon thousands of scripts,
treatments, novels, and plays searching for a great screen story. Or,
more likely, something halfway to good that they could develop to
better-than-average.
Discuss at http://jollywogerwest.com !
Join the Renaissance: http://jollyroger.com !
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| User: "Bret Cahill" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
03 Sep 2005 08:52:23 AM |
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By definition conservatives don't produce intellectual property.
Bret Cahill
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| User: "D.B. Calhoun efrankvalliAThotRE-MOVEmail.com" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
18 Sep 2005 06:09:28 AM |
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"Bret Cahill" <BretCahill@aol.com> wrote in news:1125755543.441145.171040
@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
By definition conservatives don't produce intellectual property.
Bret Cahill
"Intellectual" must be a pretty loaded word.
-David
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| User: "Bret Cahill" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
18 Sep 2005 09:43:15 AM |
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<> By definition conservatives don't produce intellectual property.
< "Intellectual" must be a pretty loaded word.
Intellectual PROPERTY, i. e., patents, copyrights, etc., is only
generated by those who want change.
A conservative wants to conserve or preserve the status quo so he
therefore has no need of intellectual property.
For example, take the "tough on crime" rhetoric of the GOP. That
worked fine for years and years on racists and other GOP bottom feeders
even though crime actually increased by double digits every year the
Gipster was in office. No new campaign material was necessary.
Suddenly Clinton appears and the crime rate plumets by double digits
every year he's in office. Republicans quickly realize that "tough on
crime" rhetoric isn't going to work any more for their tax cuts.
At this point Republicans are no longer satisfied with the status quo
which is a decreasing crime rate, Generating intellectual property,
maybe a "tough on terror" rhetoric campaign or a "democratize the
Mideast" quagmire, becomes necessary. At that point, however,
Republicans are no longer conservative, per se.
Maybe they aren't "liberal" in any conventional sense of the word.
Maybe they have no interest in democratizing the Mideast or controlling
the borders to keep terrorists out. Maybe Cheney will blow up the
planet.
But they are no longer conservatives.
Bret Cahill
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| User: "Captain Ranger McCoy" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
25 Sep 2005 06:52:13 AM |
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http://drakeraft.com
http://jollyrogerwest.com
As a cultural flagship of the greater society, and with a rich
scholarly heritage and great gothic architecture haunted by reputable
ghosts including those of Fitzgerald, Einstein, Feynman, Joseph Henry,
"T.S. Eliot", "Salinger," and Madison, Princeton provided an ideal
setting for such a novel. A major battle in the revolutionary war had
been fought just down the road from the main campus, and an American
canon ball is lodged in the stone walls of Nassau Hall--it was fired by
the rebel troops when the Redcoats had temporarily occupied the
building during the battle of Princeton, just like the postmodernists
are now temporarily occupying it. Couple the rich heritage with the
pristine campus and all the majestic spires and sinister gargoyles, and
Princeton becomes the ideal stage for a contemporary tragedy, as
tragedy must always have a most noble backdrop.
To personify the murder of the Great Books, the character of Uncle Walt
was brought in. Uncle Walt is based upon a distinguished, traditional
scholar who was ousted while we were at Princeton--he was more of a
soldier than a philosopher, and Princeton's postmodernists defeated him
and his noble vision via their typical underhanded demagoguery, aided
by their anonymous accomplices in the liberal press. In the novel, the
Nobel-prize winning, villainous Elizabeth Sycorax has murdered Uncle
Walt and replaced him at the helm of Princeton's English department,
which she has transformed into the Cultural Studies and Creative
Writing department. My character, Drake Raft, is a senior at Princeton,
and he is called upon by Uncle Walt's ghost to avenge his murder.
Knowing that the Princeton establishment would be watching my every
move, I feigned suicide and set up a website, drakeraft.com, while
contemplating the method and motivation of my vengeance. This is the
simple premise that lights the blazing glory of the book, and Elliot's
tome proceeds to encompass the center and circumference of the eternal
verities in the language of our generation-- a generation which the
boomer marketing elite have branded generation-x and generation-y or
whatever, but which I prefer to call the renaissance generation.
It would be difficult to compose a classic within the ever-shifting
context offered by the popular culture which is relentlessly
dumbed-down, idolaterized, and commodified by the dominant postmodern
media and academic institutions. All the fleeting brands trumpeted by
the "savvy" postmodern lawyers, accountants, vulture capitalists, and
marketing executives would already be long gone by the time the book
was published--at least ten blockbuster movies would have been raved
about and forgotten by the time it made it into print. Thus Elliot took
care to root The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com in the eternal context that
we are today building at jollyroger.com. This deeper context, defined
by the likes of Shakespeare, Jefferson, Moses, Salinger, and Twain,
shall always form the popular culture of the community of eternal
souls, and those who wish to join it must begin by honoring it. As a
dead poet myself, I have overheard a few truths spoken in this
heretofore undiscovered country--those poets who honor the Greats shall
in turn be honored by them, and those who forget the Greats shall be
forgotten.
As jollyroger.com's noble context naturally alienated the aging
literary elite who momentarily benefited in the wake of the Great's
desecration and deconstruction, we are fortunate to have the internet.
For without the WWW, it would have taken a much longer time to
circumnavigate the postmodern literati's waterlogged fleet so as to
sign aboard a vast, global audience. Even now, the elites' postmodern
disciples of opinionated mediocrity, who received their basic training
in the debilitating creative writing workshops, are blindly rushing
forth to become the officers aboard the sinking publishing houses and
within the government ministries of literature. And they would rather
continue sinking into the void of their vapid popular-porn-culture
while publishing their own profitless, meaningless, esoteric literature
than honestly profit by publishing and promoting our exalting
words--for the postmodernist truly believes that God is dead, and that
there are no higher laws, and that all is politics, and thus that their
nihilism can be equal to classical literature, just as long as they
party with the appropriate critics. But as Huckleberry Finn once said,
you can't pray a lie.
Because they saw no beauty in Shakespeare, because they were blind to
God's greater glory, it was easy for them to adopt their pseudo-
scientific view that literature is a political and economic entity
rather than an aesthetic one. In their debased, vitiated arena, where
they prophesized that all is politics and that words could hold no
intrinsic meaning, it became true for their own literature. And thus
there is no reason for us, nor for our children, to read their fading
fads. Instead, from this day forth, we shall take care to point the
kids towards Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn.
As an artistic rendering of contemporary truths, The Tragedy of
Drakeraft.com pays full homage to the wild romance of lighting a fire
in postmodernism's infinite night. It's been an awesome rush launching
jollyroger.com and building the Classicals Cafes, while Windy and her
friends in architecture school up at MIT decorate them with all the
cool nautical stuff--personally I'm more into literature than
furniture. But just when it's getting dark out in the mountains on
these late November evenings, and I'm left alone with some old copies
of Shakespeare and Aristotle and Plato and some makeshift tables and
second-hand lamps in this run-down mountain mill, all of a sudden all
the old, mismatched furniture and rusty anchors and frayed ropes
transform themselves into classical antiques, and I find myself within
a castle. We just got our first shipment of coffee, and the aroma has
enhanced the late-night, lonely mystique, which haunts these words as I
set them down on my laptop, my fingers numb from the lack of heat. As
the shop is yet to open, she now exists in the perfect silent splendor
of a dream. This is the quiet before the show, and I almost fear to
touch it, but touch it we must. For we fall into love--we never rise
into it. If ye would like to run a Classicals Caf=E9 of yer own, drop me
a line at drake@jollyroger.com! We have been called upon to avenge the
deaths of our proverbial fathers embodied by the Great Books, and our
most wicked vengeance shall be a renaissance.
But as is often the case, for a fire to be lit, the match itself must
be spent. History hath shown that a cultural renaissance is never born
without revolutionary thinkers, and revolutionaries run great risks as
they go up against the aging power structure which cares nothing for
right nor wrong, but only for power itself. And thus there's the darker
side to all our lofty pursuits, but the most sublime romance hath
always been tinged with inherent danger. And that's why I, Drake Raft,
must meet my death within The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com. For I had set
out following those ultimate truths which lie somewhere beyond the
entrepreneur's commerce and the soldier's duty. I had set out for the
White Whale.=20
http://drakeraft.com
http://jollyrogerwest.com
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| User: "Captain Ranger McCoy" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
03 Sep 2005 05:44:54 AM |
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Discuss at http://jollywogerwest.com !
Join the Renaissance: http://jollyroger.com !
Thomas Jefferson's original ideal conception of the University of
Virginia consisted of an institution where attendance would not be
taken, where there would be no formal classes, and where scholars and
students would be free to come and go during a perpetual conversation
centered about the Greats. His ideal assumed a noble view of man's
natural intellectual inclinations, and we share Jefferson's fundamental
philosophy. We believe men are taught far more effectively by
inspiration than by coercion, and that the greatest teachers are not
those who proselytize, but rather those who write the Great Books, or
humbly point us in their direction. We believe that although the idea
of the Truth is often scorned, castigated, ridiculed, and
sanctimoniously regarded as an unwieldy, unnecessary burden in the
postmodern, politicized world of academia, the Truth is that which is
ultimately valued more than anything else by all men, as without it,
the deeper meaning cannot be known, for the vital significance of
one's eternal soul is lost.
President McCosh of Princeton once stated, "Agnosticism has no answer
to it, and I know that many a heart in consequence is crushed with
anguish till feelings more bitter than tears are wrung from it." In a
sense modern liberalism, like many aging ideologies, favors the less
perceptive, less querulous mind. For such minds cannot formulate the
more fundamental moral questions. Because they do not ask, the answers
are unnecessary. Because they do not seek, the darkness satiates.
Because they are blind, the decline is not perceived. If only given a
salary and an academic title, they are content. MTV values and daycare
shall raise their children, and thus their children shall not mind that
dad is off with his girlfriend, or something. It's all relative,
until a child is born who naturally feels their soul's immortality,
and then seeks to awaken the sentiment within others. For although some
might say that the superficial and insensitive are the happy, it is
difficult to believe that a rock or a tree knows more about happiness
than Socrates, who reminds us,
"Those, then, who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with
gluttony and sensuality and fornication, go down and up again as far as
the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but
they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look,
nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with
true being, nor do they taste of pure and abiding pleasure. Like
cattle, with their eyes always looking down and their heads stooping to
the earth, that is, to the dining-table, they fatten and feed and
breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and
butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; and
they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust. For they fill
themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of
themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent."
With a tacit sense of triumph matched by a humble respect for all who
have thought deeply before us, we continue to voyage forth along one of
the profoundest opportunities afforded by the recent advances in
information technology: the creation of a global culture founded upon
what T.S. Eliot deemed the Permanent Things. So many aspects of the
contemporary culture are temporal in nature, from jobs to husbands to
wives to boyfriends to girlfriends to promises to college curriculums
to the meaning of words to Columbia House's sensuality CD of the
month. We live in a disposable culture, and as of late too many have
been throwing out the baby along with the bath water, often in a most
literal sense. Change is not always a bad thing, and progress is often
good, but change is not always progress. In the same way that Holden
Caufield found himself drawn to the New York Museum of History, where
the exhibits never change even while one's innocence wanes, so too do
we find ourselves drawn towards our eclipsed spiritual heritage, formed
by the immutable words of the Greats. My generation needs a permanent
beacon in the midst of this postmodern fog, and the will to provide one
is the driving spirit behind all of our endeavors on the WWW. Come back
to Western Canon University in a year, or ten years, or a hundred
years, or a thousand, and not much will have changed, for we shall
still value knowledge, virtue, prudence, and Truth over all else.
By what authority were the Greats eliminated from the modern campus?
Many people believe that Nietzsche's value relativism was the seed of
the postmodern sea change, but we perceive this seed to have a seed.
Nietzsche said, "God is dead, but it was not so much a declaration of
Nietzsche's as it was an observation-he perceived that his
contemporaries faith in God had waned, but what, might we ask, had
caused this erosion of faith amongst aspiring academics?" Long before
the first feminist scholar theorized that Shakespeare's works and the
Bible were no better than her dissertation, Woodrow Wilson possessed
insight into the cause of this general cultural decline, as he stated,
"I am much mistaken if the scientific spirit of the age is not doing us
a great disservice, working in us a certain great degeneracy."
President Wilson later elaborated, "We believe in the present and in
the future more than in the past, and deem the newest theory of society
the likeliest. This is the disservice scientific study has done us; it
has given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy, scientific
anarchism in the field of all politics. It has made the legislator
confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God cannot.
Past experience is discredited and the laws of matter are supposed to
apply to spirit and the makeup of society."
The misapplication of the scientific method to the study of the human
soul has contributed vastly to the degradation of literature. For this
reason the reductionist scientific method has been favored by
intellectual socialists and Marxists over the years, as it bestows the
envied glories of science upon the intellectually mediocre humanists
(in a strictly superficial manner) while simultaneously tearing down
the Greats, which once reminded them of their mediocrity. They enjoy
commandeering Nietzsche so they can consider themselves one of the
elite supramen-the manipulators of the "masses", the
understanders of psychology. The supposedly scientific Freudian view
allows them to assimilate traditional morality with repression, and
thus amorality and the disintegration of the traditional family is
progress, as it liberates people from the mythical agents of tradition,
like religion. By deconstructing the authority of the Greats, they are
able to exalt the omnipotent, whimsical bureaucracy, and too, they are
able to make vast amounts of money off of marketing crass temptations
to children. Because science says nothing about literary aesthetics,
the ambitious scholar concludes that literary aesthetics cannot exist.
It is as if a fisherman, after a day of fishing with a net possessing a
four-inch mesh, concludes that there are no fish smaller than four
inches within the sea. Because science can make no moral judgements, it
follows that God's absolute morality must not exist. Politics is all,
they theorize, and then they make it that way. There is no physical
scale for weighing good and bad, no formula by which we might determine
Shakespeare's brilliance. Thus literature must be nothing more than a
wild dream, an illusion, a fable, just like God; a private delusion and
social construct of each man's arbitrary choosing or conditioning. All
the words in the Bible-nay, all the words in the Western Heritage,
must be founded upon nothing more than a fairy's wing. And so it is
that literature comes to be written to serve the political aims of the
state, rather than God and the people.
Ideas have consequences, and while the aspiring postmodernists could
not blast the rock of ages with deconstructionism, they were able to
demolish the Greats and then bury the rock of ages beneath the rubble
of nihilism, feminism, and multiculturalism. In a sense this inspired
our classic pirate motif, as it is our mission to unbury these
treasures and resurrect the deeper context. Postmodernism is a
destructive ideology. It preys upon order, and it cannot exist where
men have not first of all labored to erect a noble culture. It requires
the pre-existence of traditional institutions which it can gut. It
temporarily empowers the leaders along the culture's downward spiral,
as the selfish, rudderless commodores disregard the future as much as
they scorn the past. Postmodernism has provided a habitat for the
element of society that at one time or another found themselves
laughing at things that weren't funny or believing things that
weren't true, and now, they have their revenge. Like communism, it is a
bitter philosophy, as it recruits the scorned, pulls everyone else down
to their subservient level, and empowers shameless, morally indifferent
kings who promise absolute equality en route to gaining absolute rule
over other men. Postmodernism dislikes the individual, and it finds it
too burdensome to coexist with a fixed set of absolute standards.
The leveling postmodern worldview is highly seductive for people whose
talents are shadowed by their ambitions, and it is no mystery that
Nietzsche's postmodernism walks hand-in-hand with communism and
fascism, as both philosophies favor the razing of individual
characteristics, achievements, liberties, and independence. When words
mean nothing character cannot matter, for character cannot be defined.
Nor can prudence, virtue, justice, equality, nor art. Without words to
anchor their rational thoughts, men find themselves ruled more by
pleasure and pain than by logic and reason, and they are more easily
manipulated with shallow, superficial gestures and spurious shows of
sincerity. For a time the cultural boomers coasted along on borrowed
moral capital, supposing that morality descended from the divine
compassion of liberal bureaucrats, believing that children can raise
themselves, and convinced that the institutions which were
painstakingly erected by prior generations, which were designed to
enhance life, bestow liberty, and allow the pursuit of sober happiness,
could be replaced with secular forums, new-age self-help books,
divorce, daycare, talk-shows, welfare, lollapalooza, shrinks, lawyers,
astrologers, and Prozac.
It is little wonder that one often hears of promises failing to endure
in this postmodern age where the words by which they are made have been
declared to be meaningless. It is not surprising that relationships are
capricious in this Freudian era where we have cast aside society's
traditional, divine institutions while embracing and exercising our
baser inclinations. Administrators have convinced us that there is
little more to be known than administration, as courses on the Great
Books subside, while classes on administration abound, as if Man was
created to administrate administration. And all the while the leading
economic indicators mysteriously fail to characterize the rising demand
for traditional families and words that mean things. 'Tis why although
the economy is soaring, there is little inflation, for the products
that are most in demand, the Permanent Things, can never cost more, for
they are priceless. Value, like values, is ultimately rooted in
meaning, and the ultimate meaning derives not from money, but from God.
In spite of all this the Darwinian experts, economists, and dismal
scientists have declared that there is no more to life than the
production and accumulation of material possessions, that prosperity
should be measured by charts and tables and graphs, and that popular
entertainment should register only within our hearts and never in our
minds. But here upon the pristine campus of Western Canon University,
things are not so. Here we acknowledge that unfathomable, ungraspable
phantom of life. We acknowledge our immortal souls.
Discuss at http://jollywogerwest.com !
Join the Renaissance: http://jollyroger.com !
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| User: "Bret Cahill" |
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| Title: Re: Calling Conservative Artists, Authors, Screenwriters, Intellectuals--Tell Tomorrow's Stories!! The Renaissance is Yours!! |
03 Sep 2005 08:49:44 AM |
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Well? When are we going to start discussing the "celebrated
Montesquieu" who wrote freedom and taxation are correlative?
Bret Cahill
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