Get With the Program : Context and Neo-Romanticism

As of 2014, the contextual situation around the Neo-Romanticism, the Philly Free School, and Aughts Philly is an intriguing story in itself. Of all the contingencies which could destabilize culture and cultural contexts, the Internet has to be one of the most contentious; if used properly, it can grant an unprecedented amount of freedom, autonomy, and expressive power to savvy cultural auteurs; yet, in doing so, it thwarts mainstream media outlets and their overseers, who desire a certain modicum of hegemonous power over the collective psyche of the American populace. Because the Internet has developed a good deal of upward momentum over mainstream media outlets, the national psyche, and the American cultural scene to accompany it, now subsist in a fractured, uncomfortable state of imbalance, exasperated and exacerbated by the deprivations of the recession. Innovations in methods/modes of dissemination of cultural data have no echo in possible innovations set in place by the mainstream media and their repositories. In short, the Internet has given us (and everyone) the opportunity to successfully, painstakingly and artfully go rogue/renegade. To the American press corps, PFS cannot be anything/anyone but rogues— our terrain, aesthetically and on socio-sexual levels, is unfamiliar and hostile to them, our methods/modes of dissemination not germane.

In fact, the media problems PFS faces are much more extensive than this; if there is a reason you won't find Abs (affixed to this post is her First Real Top) in Modern Painters or Art in America, it is because these publications are largely fraudulent fronts for conglomerate interests, using post-modern and other art instrumentally. The Internet era has pummeled these old-school art publications, and they generally cannot be found anywhere but at centralized urban Barnes and Nobles anyway. As we're on our way up, they'll be on their way down; as will cornball century XX staples like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the Nation, for whom the sublimity of Apparition Poems (and the Jazz Ode before it) is anathema, and the tininess of the pantheon of faux-entrenched American poets, in all their blatant and total inferiority, the kind of conglomerate-oriented commodity they want to push. These are all closed fortresses; and they are now largely Fortresses of Solitude. 

The light in the darkness PFS, and Neo-Romanticism in general, has to shine is intense, but also strange, uncanny, and warped towards a sense of mystery— how and why we did what we did is strange and uncanny, and odd fodder to set alongside not only the Reese Witherspoons of the world, but the C.D. Wrights and the Jeff Koons. We lived as captives of the depths— even our happiest moments of expansion had some depth in them— even our bacchanals. So, as we roll up on America's collective psyche, the context around/of this confrontation is bloody odd; perhaps the oddest single confrontation in American history. Philadelphia itself, under close long-term scrutiny, is extremely odd— and I consider it poetic justice, once Philadelphia is profoundly seen, for America, that this is where we're calling from.

*****accompanying image is The First Real Top by Abby Heller-Burnham******