More on Morgan Meis

Yesterday, I had posted about the absolutely disconnected "essay" Mr. Meis wrote about farmers; telling the people who grow his food:

My general feeling about farmers is that they can go fuck themselves.

He never backed up anything he said, quoted Nietzsche (and spelling it 'Nietszche') and generally rambled. Considering that this was a Drexel University publication, I assumed that Mr. Meis was a freshman student there. Imagine my surprise to find out that he is a 'respected member' of the New York Art Scene and one of the founders of the 'flux factory'. (I thought that 'whatever' factories were Warhol's shtick and died out when he did.) Anyway, here is a photo of the ever so lucid Morgan Meis from the flux factory web page: (Sorry for image quality but this is what they had on the About page for him.) A man of great cultural sensitivity -- from 3Quarks Daily:

Morgan Meis forcibly ejected from Vietnam

And the heart of the matter:

Recently, Morgan and Tom Bissell were commissioned by the Virginia Quarterly Review to travel to Vietnam to cover the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the reunification of North and South Vietnam (the fall of Saigon), along with a photographer. They left a week ago, and Morgan posted this at The Old Town Review Chronicles four days ago:

I spoke with the young Vietnamese about the American War. "I've heard about this war," a young woman said, "it seems like it was very terrible." "Yes," said another, "there was a documentary about it a few days ago. Those must have been difficult times."

So much for presuppositions. Perhaps the final and sweetest revenge is that they've moved on more than we have.

The next thing I heard was a hair-raising email that Stefany forwarded, in which he says:

It's a long story but we made it out of Vietnam. Because they were going to potentially detain us indefinitely and God knows what if we didn't get out right away we were forced to fly to Singapore under constant guard from the secret police. I am very mentally exhausted and was very scared for awhile. Now I'm in Singapore with no way to get home. I'm trying to figure things out from here.

The Vietnamese people want dearly to forget the stupidity of their involvement with the Communists and the eventual war first with France and then with the United States. They are not denying that it happened but they are not emphasizing it either so that the current generation of young people will not suffer under the stigmata of their parent's stupidity. And along comes Morgan and his merry band asking pointed questions -- the Vietnamese do not tolerate fools (which is why their economy is booming so greatly) so they shuffled his privileged ass out of the country. First rule of traveling Morgan -- you are a guest in that country; act accordingly... Finally Morgan's quote of Nietzsche was in the context of Musical Philosophy and Musicology. He said:

These are plodding thoughts at best. When I read them I think of Nietszche and his abandonment of Wagner in the name of Bizet. Nietszche said, �What is good is light; whatever is godly moves on tender feet.� The farmer crowd lumbers around on feet of clay. They make me want to spend a day with Andy Warhol drinking Coca-Cola and dreaming of a future when we�ll get all the sustenance we need from a small pill we swallow on the subway heading to a rendezvous with people beautiful and famous.

So he is a closet Warholite... Anyway, here is post that shows the weaknesses of Meis' position. It starts of with this and then proceeds along a wonderful and well documented ride -- worth reading if you are into classical Music at all...

Popular Bifurcation

"We like music that kicks butt!" - Beavis and Butthead.
ridendo dicere severum - Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche may not, on the basis of a first reading, be the most obvious philosopher to bring into the field of a discussion on popular music. After all, he is most closely associated with the debates surrounding the High Romantic music of Richard Wagner - notoriously and problematically shifting from a pro-Wagnerian position in his early work to an anti-Wagnerian position later on. Indeed, it will be this later writing which occupies most of our time here.

Moreover, Nietzsche's politics are often taken to be more than a touch anti-popular, couched as they are in assaults on what he was pleased to call das Gesindel - the `riffraff', or `rabble'. For example, in Der Fall Wagner (1888), Nietzsche repeatedly denigrates Wagner by associating him with the ostensibly non-musical art of drama on the one hand and `the rabble' on the other...

(ed. note: ridendo dicere severum = through what is laughable say what is somber) All in all, a what a self-centered self-indulgent maroon... I personally welcome the existence of New York City if only to keep these idiots away from being able to do anything real. A nice play-pen as it were...