It seems like you’re looking for more out of right-wing America than they could ever muster. The GOP and the right more broadly have become a purely reactionary movement. They don’t exist to “innovate” or to encourage creativity. There will never be a moment of artistic efflorescence rooted in reactionary feeling. The goal of a reactionary political & economic leadership is to make normal folks impoverished and subservient for the aggrandizement of the leader and his small gang of sycophants. The impulse of reactionary followers is seek permission from the leadership to be the worst version of themselves; the ugliness of this impulse and the catastrophe it always portends is disguised by a fantasy version of a past that the movement’s adherents love to talk about, but will never achieve. Any rationalization, however incoherent, is better than having to take responsibility for yourself. Reactionary movements are stupid and aesthetically malignant. The MAGA movement that has taken over our politics is especially stupid and aesthetically malignant.
If you want something aesthetically and culturally new and interesting and forward-looking, all you should want from politics is a basic defense of liberalism in government institutions and in the political economy. For the rest of it, you have the blank page of your life stretching before you and it’s up to you to fill it. Socially, maybe you’ll get a chance to share it with others who understand. For myself, I don’t know about anybody else, but that’s what I’m up to.
What I want is a political coalition that seeks power but has an eye for beauty. The artists I know have broadly given up on seeking power and changing anything. By contrast the only people under 40 genuinely seeking power are the MAGA right.
I, for one, want power—or else I can’t fix what needs fixing.
My frustration is that the reactionaries of the 20th century _did_ have drip. That’s why I bring up the Futurists. They could have even made an effort to resurrect old art—much of it is good!
If you want to reform the electric grid, then, yes, you need leverage within institutions to affect policy initiatives that bring about changes within and an expansion of the country’s electric systems. If you want to be an artist, you might want an audience, sure, but political power is about as useful to artistic achievement as a rake is to a walrus. The artist has a different social role than the businessman or the politician or the market analyst.
If you take modernist poetry, a medium and period that I know well, we actually have an example of a major poet who was a bonafide fascist: Ezra Pound. His work is probably the weakest and most unreadable of all of the important poets of his era. By the 1930s and 40s, after he been in Italy for some time and become absorbed in Mussolini’s movement, he became increasingly insane and his writing more and more crabbed and insipid. He contributed more to poetry by helping out other authors, like Frost, in the 1910s and early 1920s, than anything he wrote himself. This is about the best you can expect from a poet with actual talent and a truly reactionary psychology. Pound was a cultural touchstone only to the extent that some things he did were not part of his reactionary psychosis.
Of course, some of the other great poets from that era were fairly conservative. For example, Stevens was an insurance executive and a prig, whose writings explore a post-religious landscape marked by disappointment, doubt and darkness. But he is also his generation’s best advocate for the importance of the imagination for transcending mundane social realities, and there is no major artist I can imagine who would be less impressed with a passion for “social change".
If we move to the present: contemporary poetry is more consistently and extensively bad than in previous eras and it often contains a lot of woke pablum. But the antidote is to strike off in a new direction, not just to perform resentment about not being powerful and famous.
I recognize this split in my own life. By day, I help build PV and ESS projects and volunteer on energy reform initiatives in NH. Money and policy make everything happen in these endeavors. By night, I write poetry and work on completely out there ideas about how the world is, and I expect no payment and no social leverage over anything or anyone; an audience would be nice, but is not obligatory. This is as it should be.
Coming back to this (I need to read your poetry in more depth)
Art doesn’t need politics, but politics sure needs art—at least propaganda. And the contemporary tech right seems broadly uninterested in paying for good art. I bring up Passage Press and Man’s World as exceptions because a Trumpy right that cared about art would have commissioned more where that came from.
I know a lot of guys in the DC Trumpworld. They talk a lot about seeking better elites and reviving Heritage American culture. And then they have wack art taste.
Culture needs art, not just politics. Per Williams: "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
I’ve had 0% expectation for the last decade that this reactionary movement would produce anything other than kitsch. Part of the reason could be that I’m older than you. The first election I voted in was just after the Clinton impeachment. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 represented the worst bloviating assholes taking final control of the GOP after at least two decades of their party promoting non-stop policy fuck-ups and I struggle to imagine a world where they had anything positive to contribute to contemporary aesthetics.
Happy to talk more about poetry if you’re interested.
Lots of websites load their own .woff or .ttf files. We’re in the age of fatass node.js multimedia webpages; a new typeface is small potatoes by contrast
Server-side rendering still costs $$$ (especially with Vercel becoming less generous)
.woff and .such are often incorrectly implemented (loaded too early instead of text or more critical elements as a common example) and affect CRP (especially if you have images on the page), particularly on mobile devices, and mobile devices have an incredible variety of internet access and speed.
It’s not a knock on custom fonts, it’s just that if you really want an edge on performance, modern stacks using preinstalled fonts are the way to go.
It is possible to design websites that are beautiful _and_ fast. And outside of webpages, hardtech/#Reindustrialize/Based Right organizations have a lot of leeway with graphics
For sure and it requires skill but skilled developers like artists will design as their hearts with and what wets their lust (for design)
If you want to look for something more for speed (and better examples of design to inspire devs to abandon Helvetica), you might want to look at JP sites, which has a lot of the Swiss style, but they also do *more* with it and experiment a *lot* more
Everyone keeps talking about how old or out of date Japanese websites are, but that’s just wrong. Japanese web is filled to the brim with sick and unique designs, it’s just a matter on how we can get US and whatnot designers and devs to adopt them
It seems like you’re looking for more out of right-wing America than they could ever muster. The GOP and the right more broadly have become a purely reactionary movement. They don’t exist to “innovate” or to encourage creativity. There will never be a moment of artistic efflorescence rooted in reactionary feeling. The goal of a reactionary political & economic leadership is to make normal folks impoverished and subservient for the aggrandizement of the leader and his small gang of sycophants. The impulse of reactionary followers is seek permission from the leadership to be the worst version of themselves; the ugliness of this impulse and the catastrophe it always portends is disguised by a fantasy version of a past that the movement’s adherents love to talk about, but will never achieve. Any rationalization, however incoherent, is better than having to take responsibility for yourself. Reactionary movements are stupid and aesthetically malignant. The MAGA movement that has taken over our politics is especially stupid and aesthetically malignant.
If you want something aesthetically and culturally new and interesting and forward-looking, all you should want from politics is a basic defense of liberalism in government institutions and in the political economy. For the rest of it, you have the blank page of your life stretching before you and it’s up to you to fill it. Socially, maybe you’ll get a chance to share it with others who understand. For myself, I don’t know about anybody else, but that’s what I’m up to.
What I want is a political coalition that seeks power but has an eye for beauty. The artists I know have broadly given up on seeking power and changing anything. By contrast the only people under 40 genuinely seeking power are the MAGA right.
I, for one, want power—or else I can’t fix what needs fixing.
My frustration is that the reactionaries of the 20th century _did_ have drip. That’s why I bring up the Futurists. They could have even made an effort to resurrect old art—much of it is good!
The aesthetic failures were NOT inevitable.
If you want to reform the electric grid, then, yes, you need leverage within institutions to affect policy initiatives that bring about changes within and an expansion of the country’s electric systems. If you want to be an artist, you might want an audience, sure, but political power is about as useful to artistic achievement as a rake is to a walrus. The artist has a different social role than the businessman or the politician or the market analyst.
If you take modernist poetry, a medium and period that I know well, we actually have an example of a major poet who was a bonafide fascist: Ezra Pound. His work is probably the weakest and most unreadable of all of the important poets of his era. By the 1930s and 40s, after he been in Italy for some time and become absorbed in Mussolini’s movement, he became increasingly insane and his writing more and more crabbed and insipid. He contributed more to poetry by helping out other authors, like Frost, in the 1910s and early 1920s, than anything he wrote himself. This is about the best you can expect from a poet with actual talent and a truly reactionary psychology. Pound was a cultural touchstone only to the extent that some things he did were not part of his reactionary psychosis.
Of course, some of the other great poets from that era were fairly conservative. For example, Stevens was an insurance executive and a prig, whose writings explore a post-religious landscape marked by disappointment, doubt and darkness. But he is also his generation’s best advocate for the importance of the imagination for transcending mundane social realities, and there is no major artist I can imagine who would be less impressed with a passion for “social change".
If we move to the present: contemporary poetry is more consistently and extensively bad than in previous eras and it often contains a lot of woke pablum. But the antidote is to strike off in a new direction, not just to perform resentment about not being powerful and famous.
I recognize this split in my own life. By day, I help build PV and ESS projects and volunteer on energy reform initiatives in NH. Money and policy make everything happen in these endeavors. By night, I write poetry and work on completely out there ideas about how the world is, and I expect no payment and no social leverage over anything or anyone; an audience would be nice, but is not obligatory. This is as it should be.
Coming back to this (I need to read your poetry in more depth)
Art doesn’t need politics, but politics sure needs art—at least propaganda. And the contemporary tech right seems broadly uninterested in paying for good art. I bring up Passage Press and Man’s World as exceptions because a Trumpy right that cared about art would have commissioned more where that came from.
I know a lot of guys in the DC Trumpworld. They talk a lot about seeking better elites and reviving Heritage American culture. And then they have wack art taste.
It offends me.
Culture needs art, not just politics. Per Williams: "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
I’ve had 0% expectation for the last decade that this reactionary movement would produce anything other than kitsch. Part of the reason could be that I’m older than you. The first election I voted in was just after the Clinton impeachment. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 represented the worst bloviating assholes taking final control of the GOP after at least two decades of their party promoting non-stop policy fuck-ups and I struggle to imagine a world where they had anything positive to contribute to contemporary aesthetics.
Happy to talk more about poetry if you’re interested.
no, for a very practical reason.
custom fonts takes up too much space to load, and Helevtica and it’s derivatives are often preinstalled
that said, there is a lot of system fonts and font stacks
https://modernfontstacks.com/
Lots of websites load their own .woff or .ttf files. We’re in the age of fatass node.js multimedia webpages; a new typeface is small potatoes by contrast
A lot of websites also have performance problems.
Server-side rendering still costs $$$ (especially with Vercel becoming less generous)
.woff and .such are often incorrectly implemented (loaded too early instead of text or more critical elements as a common example) and affect CRP (especially if you have images on the page), particularly on mobile devices, and mobile devices have an incredible variety of internet access and speed.
It’s not a knock on custom fonts, it’s just that if you really want an edge on performance, modern stacks using preinstalled fonts are the way to go.
It is possible to design websites that are beautiful _and_ fast. And outside of webpages, hardtech/#Reindustrialize/Based Right organizations have a lot of leeway with graphics
And yet they borrow Swiss-Style Modernism anyway.
For sure and it requires skill but skilled developers like artists will design as their hearts with and what wets their lust (for design)
If you want to look for something more for speed (and better examples of design to inspire devs to abandon Helvetica), you might want to look at JP sites, which has a lot of the Swiss style, but they also do *more* with it and experiment a *lot* more
https://sustainable.botanistofficial.com/
This website looks _sick_
It is!
Everyone keeps talking about how old or out of date Japanese websites are, but that’s just wrong. Japanese web is filled to the brim with sick and unique designs, it’s just a matter on how we can get US and whatnot designers and devs to adopt them