Hello and welcome to my blog. I am interested in all culture and all mediums. As the Latinists say, in English because its late and I’m not checking, I am human and nothing human is alien to me. My key interests are culture, how that culture is represented and preserved and how it is used.
Culture is the human inheritance. It is what we receive from our parents and ancestors, it is what we pass to our children and descendants. I really dread in the future the 21st century being one of those periods of history where “nothing much really happened” or even worse “a dark age where much was lost”. It is imperative that we preserve and foster the best and give our children the best that we can.
Representation of culture can take many forms from cave art to the Bad Batch. I think that I have got to the point where I realise that the point of art is the ability of the artist to broadcast the best values and sentiments that our age has to offer. Having seen the footlers in galleries and given the technological superiority but moral bankruptcy of Nazi radio in the 1930s I see that the message is more important than the medium and that it is quite acceptable to shoot the messenger.
Finally I quote Alfred the Great when I fear a Dark Age. He wrote about how sad he was that such great learning had departed Britain with the advent of the Dark Ages. I know that the title of the Dark Ages is now contested and that the Anglo-Saxons were a civilisation of energy, skill and power but that doesn’t change the fact that a man was cut off from the classics because unlike his father, he couldn’t read Greek or Latin. The same is true today. My father can read Latin and I can not. We are slipping into the same kind of dark ages that plagued Alfred.
So this little blog of mine is going to be a little light shining in the dark age. Where I can celebrate Hunter doing his duty against the evil empire, where I can talk about Centerparcs and catch people doing good. Join me, join me now and lets scare away the dark.
Jack Russell 