Kinky Friedman, 1.
Other ages of high thought, high art, and high religion have of course believed the same about themselves. Whatever time or place we find ourselves in, we want assurance that it’s all worthwhile, that this time and this place really is the best and brightest, so good and so bright that it will just go on and on (the Qing Dynasty; medieval scholasticism; the Edwardians), or will change things forever (apocalyptic Christianity; Marxism; late 20th century Capitalism). How in the world is it possible to know if we inhabit a culture of value, much less one of endurance, vastly less one of continuing self-renewal? May I suggest a criterion I’d like to call the flowering of hipness? For purposes of brief discussion, I throw up a thumbnail definition of hip as the ability to do clever riffs on cultural artifacts, a kind of intellectual or artistic or scientific or religious omphaloskepsis. Self-irony, if you will. Think Robin Williams before he sold out to Hollywood. Think Oscar Wilde before being devoured by English hypocrisy. Every age is hip to some degree, though some much less so than others. It depends on how far the net is cast and how wide the mesh. For example, the medieval scholastics had a tiny net, with wide mesh, thrown near to shore. The Renaissance net was much bigger, with a finer mesh, and was thrown much farther. The catch was correspondingly richer and more varied, more stimulating. But even that net eventually proved boring, with repeated similar hauls, leading to the excesses of mannerism, the baroque, and the rococo. Now we have a planet-wide net operating 24 hours a day. Good. With, in many places, a pretty fine mesh. Good. But the casting is slow and at times interrupted. Bad. The catch varies wildly in quality. Good and bad. 2. If a writer such as Kinky Friedman appeared in an earlier age, I’d jump at the chance to say: Aha! Look at the incredible degree of hip, how he effortlessly mixes humor and despair while juggling 10,000 balls, filling his prose with glances references ranging from country music to Spinoza to Borneo to self-deprecating weenie-waving to layered scatology (he’s always off to the bathroom to take a Nixon) to drug-crazed chiliasm to Waldenesque simplicity. Truly a virtuoso performance, astonishingly maintained over a series of books and a number of years. But. It now no longer wears well. Because Kinky, for all his skill and talent, is apparently working (as most do) in a closed universe. It just happens to be a very large universe (a big net, in the earlier metaphor). But he has now pretty well explored and exploited its various jolting combinations and re-combinations of cultural references. Lately, alas, Kinky has begun repeating himself. A sure sign of creative exhaustion, and, because of his importance, in an earlier age it would have been a sign of an end to an era. There of course would be other signs. Think of Mozart. Glenn Gould once remarked that the tragedy of Mozart’s life was not that he died too soon but that he died too late. He outlived (and, being Mozart, outworked) his age. Think of Beethoven: what a mishmash the late quartets are. It’s as if he were straining to hear the future (to grasp and use a different, vaster net)—and actually at times, in a few bars here and there, succeeded. My point is: the in-pouring of new cultural stimuli, new sources of reference and regeneration, is with the Internet now an on-going (and, tritely, global) phenomenon. In the past, while Europe slept in the Dark Ages, China blossomed. Now, it’s all-"x" all the time, where x can be just about any factor from the past that you want to focus on or any new factor that your imagination can come up with. So these days you don’t sit in your study at Cambridge for years jotting insights into the calculus, the motion of bodies, and the alchemical mystery of transformation. You cast those insights out on a web page. Where Kinky—or I, or the next Newton, or anyone with a living curiosity—seeking renewal and growth can find them, assimilate them, and make glorious transmutations of them into art, philosophy, why yes, even, into new science. Permanent cultural fission/fusion? Could be. Want more info?
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Replicating