Shackademia

In my previous blog post I wandered.  I wandered like an aberrant shepherd looking for the newly born baby Jesus.  I was hoping to find enlightenment in my rambling, and yet I found only a condemnation of digital piracy.  The millennial culture was built with shortcuts.  Modern films employing millennial directors suffer from lack of camera vision.  They are limited by shortcuts, camera angles that never have been studied or developed into a concept to provide a vehicle for the film.  What?  You mean the camera cannot just aimlessly roam around looking up people's noses?  Not in traditional cinema.  Traditional American cinema has a lineage and a history rich with intelligence, artistry, and expression.  It meant to convey something, not just earn money.  To convey something, an idea say, one needs more that what the pop arts are offering today.  There is a bit of stripping down of technique today, and possibly at one time that may have worked.  The entire discipline of the Avant Garde in essence is a dramatization and simplification of its predecessor.  It worked and still today stands as the most recent chapter of art history.  The Avant Garde is effective.  Ask Jackson Pollack.  Ask Ornette Coleman.  I love the Avant Garde, but I always didn't because I didn't understand it.  I didn't understand that if you, the artist, had the message, the intent, the understanding, and the technique it doesn't take a lot to get your point across.  Mark Rothco and other modern artists did it with Abstract Expressionism.  Composers set the same goals during the 1920's.  I love Modernism.  I wish I had lived during the 1920's in America.  One only has to watch the movie Rhapsody in Blue to feel the visceral energy in the air musically during this decade.  There are such things as concepts.  Concepts are effective, because they ensure you will achieve your goal as an artist.  You must know what you are doing.  Millennial film and television directors have taken the shortcut.  They have not lived long enough to have studied film history.  They feel as if the hand held camera is free to roam whimsically, like an epileptic filming hat could be beautiful moments.  Why must the camera shake?  It makes me feel like I have Parkinson's.  Rather I would like to view the scene from the stability of a sane person with no angst.  Let the camera sit.  I have wandered again, and although I am suggesting that a thorough study of the Humanities is necessary for integrity, my premise of this blog entry was to criticize academia.  (and not with sour grapes)  Premise:  Ash Carter is a noted academic and scholar.  Ash Carter was the most recent Secretary of Defense.  Who is the better choice for America's Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, a noted academic and scholar, or a tough-as-nails military officer?  I say the latter.  After reviewing the Obama years it occurred to me that academic has become a problem in America.  Not only is it now a dinosaur, it has it fingers in the pie, America's pie.  Academia has become so powerful through tenure, and so weak because there are no jobs, it is gobbling up huge amounts of America's pie.  Obama went to some Ivy League schools.  This ensured him enough clout to enter the American political system, like most systems in America, is controlled by influence.  Influence cannot and has not run a country.  That is why Donald Trump is president.