Why am I Saving Culture...?
It's complicated...
2020 draws to a close: surely one of the most significant years in living memory and one that was very much a mixed blessing, for me personally. On New Year’s Eve 2019, I wrote a long Facebook post looking back at the previous decade, which in my personal life was marked by a lot of failure and falling apart. Oddly, for a year that saw a global pandemic up-end almost every aspect of our lives, 2020 for me was a putting back together. Which in itself is why I’m at a point where I can begin taking steps to use my voice, for what it’s worth, to connect, challenge, entertain and engage with my old friends and hopefully, soon, some new ones.
That’s all the good news I have, I’m afraid. Because of course 2020 was an abomination of a year, for reasons I do not need to list.
So why Saving Culture? 2020 was the culmination of a long process of political and intellectual disengagement from the values, beliefs and opinions of my past. If you knew me at 20, or 25, or 30 you might be surprised (possibly horrified) by how I view the world at 45. 2020 has, on the surface, changed my political views, though what it really did was bring me back into alignment with who I was before my social programming kicked in, before my teen years when i made a choice to align with the radical chic, hipster-leftie milieu, which is where all the cool kids who had the best parties were. And I’m not knocking that — it was fun, it was youth, it was understandable. I’ve just grown out of it.
At my core, I’m not one for fads — whether it be in clothes, music or ideas. I’m actually deeply old-fashioned and incapable of going along with the crowd. In fact, I hate crowds. I hate parades. I hate concerts. I really hate demonstrations, even if I believe in the cause. I find them all slightly mortifying. I present as an extrovert but I have strong introvert tendencies.
When I was in my 20’s and spent a lot of my time in bars, I was a few times compared to Dorothy Parker — I like to think it was because of my witty banter and sophisticated air, but it was also probably the alcohol and wisecracks about my amorous misadventures. I was always flattered, but also a bit concerned that I came across as an entertaining lush when, deep down, I was an old-fashioned girl who wanted to get married and have couple of kids. But it did give me a peek into an element of my social capital, or how I was perceived by others, and that perception was that I was entertaining. I hope to bring some of Dorothy Parker’s entertainment value to Saving Culture, which is a reason you should subscribe.
Another reason you should subscribe? Culture needs saving. I’m particularly well-placed to make this case. Not because I’m famous or have a PhD in it or I’m some special genius. I’ve just seen, and lived, and experienced, and read, and worked, and failed and had many different lives, started over and rebuilt and done it all over again, and that’s given me perspective, and wisdom. And that wisdom tells me we are witnessing the rotting away of an old, corrupted system no longer fit for the purpose of communal enlightenment and togetherness, which is what culture should do for its people. Now, we, the people, are browbeaten and guilt-tripped and mislead and mischaracterised by a Hunger Games-like elite which holds the levers of cultural production in a clammy death-grip. No longer do the high and low classes revel together in the drama of Shakespeare, or all enjoy a frisson of excitement watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show or even mope about with our hair in front of our spotty faces listening to the Smiths or the Cure. No. Now all is in submission to whatever is the moral mandate of the day. Teen fervour has been coopted and weaponised: whether into climate extinction hysteria, or huge controversy over eyebrow influencers, or race and gender politics — it’s no longer allowed to be spent worshipping naughty rock stars and rebelling, which is a pity. High culture too must ostentatiously demonstrate its fealty and virtue to whatever the new world order seems to be.
I want this orthodoxy to go away. In the words of the great George Carlin, “it’s stupid bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.”
Another reason my thoughts on culture are worth the time I spend writing them, and worth your time reading them, is because I have straddled many different cultures and cultural subsets, across four decades of huge cultural change. Very few have grown up with my specific set of cultural influences, influences that range from New York City in the ’70’s and ’80’s, West Belfast during the Troubles, and ancient Italian village life; I attended private schools in Rome with children of diplomats and aristocrats and Brooklyn public schools with roaches and blocked toilets and an elite Christian school in Northern Ireland where a biology teacher told us AIDS was a curse from God on homosexuals; my work life has encompassed The New York Times and running a small ramen restaurant in Belfast and being an artists model in Dublin. I have been a perpetual outsider and that has taught me to observe as though everything depended on it — because everything did. I have never had the luxury of being safely ensconced in the warm embrace of conventionality, and so what I have to say is, if nothing else, unique.
So join me in a spirit of openness and good faith. And we can save culture, together. I miss being together!