Keeping Good Company

Jim Kalb's website Turnabout has a link called "Other Trads" which is a short list of bloggers who write about traditional issues. I have made that (undeserved) shortlist with other bloggers like Bruce Charlton, Mark Richardson, Laura Wood and the team at What's Wrong With the World.

Mr. Kalb recently sent me an email, commenting on my post on the actress Helen Mirren "Elimination of Beauty" where I wrote:

Ugliness rules. In clothing, in films, in art and even in our "representatives" of beauty. I don't think it is a lack of knowledge about beauty. We've developed standards and often unanimous agreement about what constitutes the beautiful. So I'm not going to into the beauty-hater's argument that beauty is relative; beauty can be objectively measured. What's going on is that people are hating beauty. It is a form of envy. If I cannot be beautiful, then why is she beautiful? It is like wealth, or intelligence, or a sense of entitlement to live anywhere one pleases. Spread the wealth, accept I.Q.ers of 91 into Harvard, let everyone from every corner of the world come into the prosperous West. Or youth. Why cannot I be as young (and attractive) as any fifteen-year-old, at my ripe old age of seventy? Such are the mantra of the equal-opportunity narcissists.

Helen Mirren in forty years of photos. From the "English Rose"
of the 1970s to the disheveled senior citizen in 2011.
From Camera Lucida blog post "Elimination of Beauty"

Here is what Mr. Mr. Kalb emailed me:

Dear Kidist,

For some reason I hadn't been a regular reader of yours, but I subscribed just recently and wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your blogging.

Your comments on Helen Mirren (who I had never heard of) are very much to the point. She's evidently clued into the fashion world, and youth substitutes for class and beauty there today. So that's what she aspires to.

I agree that indifference to aesthetic and cultural issues is a major weakness on the right. There's not much interest in the big picture, which is one reason the right keeps losing.

All the best,

Jim Kalb

There are moments when I go into into pure politics, mostly on my "Islam" blog Our Changing Landscape. But my efforts at Camera Lucida have always been to record and analyze how our aesthetics are being influenced by our politics, and that often art (or the corruption or the dissolution of art) is an early indicator of where our culture is headed.