Oh, sure. I get what you're talking about. Dramatic advertising is never too much to sell a counterfeit ideology. Be heavy on the image; the lighting, cool effects, and background environments are just as important as the product itself. It enhances the product greatly. The viewer’s eye must not be allowed to rest. Pack as much content as you can into the aesthetic.

More is more. Technology does not fix everything, but high end technology does. Reality should not hold back your need to project an image. Practical aesthetics alters reality to suit your vision, this practical aesthetic is powered by MeituPic's Smog Auto-correct, which has been freshly released for consumption. Let smog removal give you back your blue sky.

Reality is not efficient enough, but your smart APPs are.

So, what brand of beer did you buy at what brand of convenience store? 3.2 Beer? Really! It's not worth the calories, but there is still the brand on the can. At least that is 200 proof.

It is helpful to not think of these topics as new. They are old, but the jazzy jargon is different now that it was 15 minutes ago, or 50, 500, 2000, 5,000 years ago. Each of us is a POV, never too sure whether anybody else shares our keyhole view. The only way we can be slightly reassured that we are not alone is opening our membranes and flowing into each other (symbolically, one hopes -- certainly more tasteful than used neurotransmitter fluids oozing out all over the place).

Culture, hierarchy, symbols, language, storytelling around the fire, painting in deep caves: these are the membranes we open and reach through, hoping to test what might be reality.

Well, the convenience store was Amato's, whose deal is convenience store + authentic deli! I don't think Amato's exists outside of Northern New England, but I might be wrong. I personally hate Amato's (everything is marked up and I have no idea why. My brand of cigarettes is $2.00 more there than anywhere else in the city, besides a small shop in Portland's Old Port which everyone local avoids because they know it's designed to prey on tourists) but the next closest store adds another 15 minutes to the walk (I don't have a car.)

I got a sixpack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Classier than bud or pbr but nothing special.

But I want to get at something beyond the hierarchical classification of tastes and aesthetics. I guess what I'm really interested in is why and how a particular group (with its tastemaker-sanctified standard) changes or modifies its tastes.

The doxa rules the world, and literally sets its limits. How does the doxa change? Well, as the transcendental condition of the world it has no conditions, and so to modify the gospel of john 'the doxa blows where it pleases.' A change in opinion -- where you're told what new thing you're to think -- is a mystical experience for someone who believes the world is all there is, since it is world-shaping.

Here's a fun and cheesy song explaining the phenomenon, where the doxa is called 'the tune:'

Sometimes there's no tomorrow
Sometimes you hate the day
You feel there may be something
That intends to screw with fate

Take a look at what surrounds you
Each time you watch the news
Your mind gets set by someone's will
A template you can't choose

Love and desire, dry ice or fire
Don't you just want to flee their magic spell

No mercy for the nations
Two people are at war
Beliefs divide the dream they share
Of peace and harmony

Their eyes look up to heaven
Address our God in prayers
Their souls exposed
They may decease by emperor's decree

Look, how they're crying
There's no denying
Now change the channel
On your remote control

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear and you agree

We're all here for a reason
So we can't just hang around
There's so much left to see and learn
Make way for common ground

And those who head the wrong way
Will rate as minor class
As castaways they'll render fools
When the horsemen come to rule

Strike the last hour in their glass towers
Infinite lust has made the curtain fall

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear but you agree, you agree

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear but you agree

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who long to hear
And those freaks sense they're superior
We're hypnotized, you see
They wave and we agree

Even if the doxa blows where it pleases, it does so in a strange way. The type of movement you'd be itching to draw diagrams of, if you were a kabbalist. Imagine the New Yorker or The New York Times or Rolling Stone as a a kind of sphere, internally complex, linked, through subtle channels, to other spheres. The wind blows, but it has to be filtered to be registered. I don't think it's so contingent and arbitrary that there's nothing left to be said. Maybe the heart of it is pure arbitrarity. But get to know a group of aesthetes, watch how things change. There's a subtle logic at work. Maybe it's not worth looking into, but I'm curious.

I think you can understand it in a way, but not on the world's terms and so inevitably not on the terms of the aesthetes themselves.

Aesthetics eh? I've heard that there's no accounting for those.

Drawing the plumbing diagram of how taste, aesthetics, or "class", or opinion, or some paradigm gets promulgated, by whom, and how it is altered--all that--would be ridiculously complicated. It's like trying to diagram the flow of energy in a forest, accounting for everything from the energy transformations of bacteria, fluid flows, activity of plants, insects, animals, the sun, wind, etc. It all gets out of hand pretty quickly.

Take the font of the New Yorker or the New York Times. People who specialize in typography think that fonts are critical. They probably are. "The New York Times" rendered in Bradley Hand would be just stupid. See?



And the New York Times's font is just one small piece of the ecology of taste making. The New Yorkers's columns, covers, font, glossy paper, cartoons, advertising format, the weight of the magazine -- all that plus the actual content -- go into it. (I haven't explained anything -- I just listed a few elements in the ecology.)

Speaking of beer: You chose to get pale ale. I grew up in the midwest; there never used to be ale around here. It was beer, beer, beer. I encountered it in the late 1960s in Boston -- Ballantine Ale, I think it was. There was no ale around here in the 1970s, either -- as far as I can remember. It appeared in the 1980s and 90s. Now you can't walk into a liquor store without tripping over stacks of all kinds of ale.

Something -- someone -- some force altered the ecology of brewing and consumption. Christ; the Lutheran church across the street has a brewing club (it's a drinking church) -- they make ale and darker beers. Lighter, darker, stronger, weaker, hoppier, etc. Here's an e-mail message from yesterday:

Boy it has been a crazy whirlwind of a summer for all of us. Our Schwarzbier is now in the keg finishing up fermentation and will be final kegged/pressurized in a week or two.

This Sunday 6/26/16, Marcus and I will be brewing a small extract kit so that we have something for people who may not prefer a dark beer at Pastor Voight's going away party. Speaking of, that will be our next big event! We'll be serving the two brews at the going-away party in August...

Paul Fussell wrote an amusing book, Class (1992). Among other things, he notes that the higher one's class, the darker one's wooden floors. The Newly Arrived want floors that look new, fresh. So the house is full of shiny bright maple floors. Up the class scale, closer to the top, dark floors are preferred. They might have been shiny bright maple floors once upon a time, maybe back in great grandmother's day, but now they are dark. Old dirt darkens the floors, gives it a patina. New Persian rugs are out of order on these old dark floors: one wants an old Persian rug, a bit worse for wear, but still very Persian. One doesn't want any mid-century modern furniture or Danish Design in most of the upper class rooms, either. Old furniture, leather; comfortable, broken in. Dark.

Then there is us working class who cover the ugly sub flooring with foam rubber and monotone plastic fiber carpet. Stain resistant, easily cleaned, holds up pretty well --20 years, maybe longer. 360 shades of beige. (Or bright shag, god forbid, for total white trash.)

Like I said, aesthetics are as complicated as natural ecology.