Libido for the Ugly

Miscellaneous General
1

“Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.” - H.L. Mencken (Libido for the Ugly: from Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927)

http://www.bizbag.com/mencken/menklibid.htm

Mencken describes the Pittsburgh area in this essay. I grew up around here and yes it is ugly in parts, no doubt. I heard a story from my family in which when the mills were up in running, if you had on a white shirt by noon you might have wanted to change it cause it was all black from the soot in the air. There’s no doubt about jobs were here and they were very well paid jobs. This isn’t about that. But the idea of beauty and it’s application seemed to be glossed over. Sometimes I thought it was due to pace. Get the job done as quick as possible and churn out as many products as possible.

This was actually a debate between Japanese cars and American cars, from memory so with age I can only account for these following years, in the late 80’s and 90’s. The debate had to do with quality. Japanese cars were of a better quality than American cars. They lasted longer and thus you could build up the mileage and their condition would sustain. I’m sure there were American cars that did at one time or sporadically since then churned out a good quality car. But during these years the quality of a Japanese car was either out competing American cars in advertising as having such a quality, but it was a normal discussion during the time. American cars even changed their appearance to compete in the quality of the car, not just in endurance of condition but also in the aesthetic look. Yet a Toyota was still advertised by word of mouth as lasting past 200,000 miles and people would say, now that’s a good quality car. Style was also competing too. Not only does a quality vehicle mean it drives a long time without having to be maintained in the repair shop often, but it also meant the beauty of the car, the style was competing and American cars had to become more stylish. I’m sure there might be some different perspectives on this. I don’t have the details but this was a popular debate during those years. By popular I’m not trying to show facts or what really was going on. I’m talking about popular opinion at the time.

Now I have passed through some very beautiful towns in the U.S., so, it’s not all so hum-glub. Some of the towns in the Adirondack Mountains in upper state New York are magnificent. Whoever started out building those particular towns was inspired by the mountains surrounding the differing towns. They didn’t try to just slap up a few boards and be done with it. They seemed to be enhanced and took notice of the beauty and these towns are all the better for it. When I walked and passed through those towns I didn’t feel like I was trapped in a town detached from the mountains, but rather it felt like I was in the mountains still with the beauty of the human spirit in it’s creative blossoming not shunning but included those large rocky green bumps in the earth. I’ve seen others even in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina, Michigan, and Minnesota, etc… yet maybe for me it was these towns didn’t try to stick out like a sore thumb detached from their natural surroundings but rather allowed the beautiful surroundings to be included in their designs. The appeal to want to stop and shop is definitely much different than wanting to travel concrete, upon concrete, upon concrete with a few trees here and there to get to some generic mall that looks like any other mall in America. At these beautiful small towns I find myself browsing more, having this feeling that I’m going to find something unique that can’t be found anywhere else. It has a local appeal that stirs my curiosity about the local history. For some reason I find myself talking to the store owners and employees in a way that is much different than at your run of the mill mall or shopping center. I feel this sense that I’m getting to know the place and at the same time, instead of leaving with just a product, I leave with some products that will stir a memory about a beautiful place too.

Anybody else know what I mean? Doesn’t matter what country or continent you are from. Are there ugly sides to Europe for instance or Australia, etc…? And how so? And what is beautiful about the cultures including how they not only make money and produce, but the cultural attraction that might go along with these economic necessities? With the rise of the European Union has the cultural attraction become an increasing way for the particular countries to attract business, people moving there to live, etc…?

2

I think so. A lot of it has to do with filtering out all of the noise. Your stress and anxiety level is lower, there is less stimulus so you are able to relax and take it in. You’re probably trained to hyperventilate when you see a McDonalds or some other franchise chain.

I don’t thnk anxiety and curiousity go together. Your curiousity could be related directly to your level of comfort, which could have a lot to do with recognizing the quality and simplicity around you.

3

I’ve seen some ‘pretty’ McDonalds (though very few) and other franchise chain places, Olive Garden comes to mind. Simplicity might be the word, but as much as I like the lone cabin in the woods or the farm field full of horses, cows, or wheat, I find some cities to be glorious in their beauty. For instance, Charleston, South Carolina is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to and it is house snug up tight against house in many places. Yet the cultural uniqueness provides it with an attraction. It’s why does a tourist visit this place compared to another place kind of idea. I’ve been to New York City and some parts of it is very interesting with all the open markets on the sidewalks and some of the architecture. And yet I’ve seen some small towns that look just like the next small town with the buildings and houses in each one looking like they’ve come out of some factory for how else do many of these small towns look so alike I wonder. Some of the houses look so alike and the inhabitants don’t even dress them up to show much individuality.

I’m sure some Americans and other people in different countries when they go on vacation might visit the same places they can visit back home. I ask why go away if your only going to go to the same type of places you see back home? It’s that kind of beauty or attraction I’m talking about. I know if I cross the border to another state I’ll see gift shops that advertise a local or state theme. I’ve stopped at some of those before and find it interesting to browse around. I really feel like I’m somewhere else and I’m not going to buy something there that I can find back home (unless I really need it and it’s cheap). But I might try something different, whether it’s the local food or visit a little tiny shop on main street cause it looks so different and seems to promise something unique I can buy. So simplicity might be the word, but here’s some pictures of Charleston which I’ve strolled down these streets and sensed a beauty that I might find in any particular walk in the woods. And yet it’s a lot of concrete and brick, but the color and the way the architecture is molded this city offers much that isn’t run of the mill, cookie-cuttered, and stamped with uniformity… the creativity abounds:

http://z.about.com/d/gosoutheast/1/0/T/E/-/-/1_St__Philips_Episcopal_chcvb.jpg

http://z.about.com/d/gosoutheast/1/0/O/U/-/-/2_RainbowHouses_500b.jpg

http://z.about.com/d/gosoutheast/1/0/N/E/-/-/7_Charleston_Area_1890_chvb.jpg

http://z.about.com/d/gosoutheast/1/0/R/E/-/-/11_New_Cooper_Bridge2a.JPG

http://z.about.com/d/gosoutheast/1/0/Y/E/-/-/6_calhounclose_500.jpg

There’s other cities that come to my mind in the U.S. too.

4

There are some godawful places in Europe, complete with McDonald’s. But there are also quite nice McDonald’s.

As with everything it’s a matter of who brings the money. If it was built by the state or by central bankers, it’s shit. If it was built by people with their own money, it’s good.

5

Are you saying that some McDonald’s are State induced? This seemed like a blanket generality.

6

No.

7

ok

8

Here’s a bit more on what Mencken maybe was trying to drive home in his essay for I’ve seen this brought up in other writings before:

Could it be surmised that entrepreneurs, though crafty and creative, may produce less quality products due to an increasingly heavy State applying pressure upon their business? Thus in order for an entrepreneur to keep afloat, then the place to cut corners is in the quality of the product especially if the business is able to mass produce the items? I think of boom towns that go up real quick, but then once the party is over they become ghost towns or are torn right down. I hear a lot of older people say, "Yeah they don’t make 'em like they used to, or “These things were built to last.” Are two common expressions I’ve heard and admittedly agree with some of the things they are talking about for they are lasting and seemed to be built with a better hammer so to speak. Isn’t drabness and thus ugliness quite possibly a sign that quality was sacrificed for more immediate concerns due to a overbearing State? This can happen to the individuals in the State as well, in which their morale drops, spirit sinks, life becomes more dismal, and gloomy. I knew for me something was wrong, I sensed it, but couldn’t put my finger exactly on it. There was a value and thus quality missing from life that could be traced to numerous issues. Yet is it not eventually traceable back to the huge fat elephant in the room called the State, the entity draining and sucking this quality that if this lid was lifted a rush of fresh and wholesome freedom would be the very invigoration people are looking for. It’s the increased quality of our lives that is deduced to arise by ridding an immoral and corrupt monster called the State. I don’t know of anybody that wants to do this cause it will make our individual lives worse!

So make all kinds of things while the times are good, but don’t get too concerned about the quality of the product or else the job becomes too slow. Anymore it seems businesses have to do a ton of jobs to make the necessary money. I’m thinking of contractors. To get either a plumber, dry wall contractor, or an electrician sometimes it’s difficult cause they load their schedule. This also shows an open market, but people via the public school system are veered into other places. It’s the same when going to a doctor’s office (which actually is one of Wal-marts selling points on their clinics which is the doctor has the time to talk to you, plus, it’s cheaper yet obviously Wal-mart can afford the time to let the doctors relate more care to the patients). I think there is something to this when it comes to some American towns and cities and maybe other places around the world. The expense is so high due to State pressure and regulation that cutting corners on quality happens. I’m not talking about window dressing, the State is good at that, making it all seem so pretty superficially, but when you look under the hood of the State car, to use a metaphor, you find out it’s all a bubble fantasy and the car’s shot and the engine is a load of crap just barely able to make it. This is what’s amazing about entrepreneurs under a heavy State presence. Those that find a way to keep the raw material turned to production at point A ---- to ---- point B onto the shelf for the consumer. With more efficiency that business is going to be able to handle the States pressure better. Yet when times get rough I would say when the State becomes more overbearing, then it’s quality that goes first and quantity has to take over to pay the bills. Maybe this is why mass production takes over at times and the mom and pop stores though with good products go under. They can’t compete due to increased State pressure and regulation. I know on the large scale of investment firms this happens obviously. We’ve all seen how these bailouts and more to come it looks like keep these large firms afloat and they gobble up the smaller firms and some of the smaller firms simply disappear as the costs won’t drop cause we know Keynesians don’t like wages to fall and prices to fall. So that quality is cut out more and more.

Maybe?

9

Wilderness,

There are utterly terrible places in the UK. City planners seemingly looked to the soviet union in the 1950s and created suburbs full of monolithic grey slabs, and housing that resembled glorified shacks. A study was even conducted that linked crime in those government housing estates to the oppressive nature of the environment people inhabited, where everything was cheap, grey and dilapidated. I once remember Margaret Thatcher commenting that a hundred years or more from now, people will look back and see what socialism and statism wrought in europe – primarily in the form of featureless rows of soviet apartment blocks and a nihilist attitude to culture – superseding the previous generations of architecture that celebrated the human spirit and a culture worth caring about.

Your assessment of the decline of quality is spot on. A combination of credit card (buy now pay later) culture, monetary inflation, tariffs, regulations and institutionalized incompetence are greatly responsible for companies and entrepreneurs using cheaper and less durable materials. Take Coca Cola’s experience, for example. It used to put real sugar (from cane) into their soda. This sugar was supplied from the Caribbean. However, American sugar growers in Florida and so on co-opted Washington into raising sugar tariffs. The result therefore led Coca Cola to replace cane sugar for cheaper artificial alternatives (which are usually made from the byproducts of industrial processes) and that were arguably harmful to human health.

That example alone puts things into perspective I think.

10

Yeah AndrewR, another low quality is what I brought up earlier. The Japanese car versus the American. The movie “Gung Ho” with Micheal Keaton was therefore the popular spin on this popular debate as to why Japanese cars were so attractive. They were well-built and it was difficult for Americans to accept their competition. Of course there are other good American cars, but the why’s on how the Japanese competed and now looks like to the popular eye out-competed American cars had something to do with quality. Of course the Chinese are promoting cars that are promising to be very cheap. But the way economies are strained a cheap car, like a cheap hamburger at McDonald’s, is what may out-compete quality.

The house I live in now. It’s small but old. I’ve done a lot of work on it myself with dry wall, painting, etc… and the wood used for the structure of this house would never be used today. It’s thick and very strong. When I try to apply pressure to the wood using my hands I get a stronger resistance to a lot of the lumber used on houses today. This house will last a long time. It’s almost 100 years old and will last for some time to come. I’ve had some contractors come in and do some installations and their quality in some instances was terrible. Had to call them numerous times to come back and finish up their work. Sometimes it was necessary work that needed finished, and sometimes it was a half-ass job in finishing up the appearance work - they would only do half of it and leave.

I was lucky to find this older man that did dry wall on the side during his retirement in some parts of the house. He was very deliberate, careful, and did an excellent job. I worry not that his work will lead to maintenance in the near future. The quality of his work still shows after all these years. I’m already seeing some areas that do need maintenance with those other workers that came in here. Stuff, thankfully, I can fix myself so far. That older man that did some of the dry wall work complained a lot to me about how people today don’t take the time to apply care to their work to provide a good quality finish. I think it’s more prevalent and has something to do with the economy over the decades. The whole State creating a fantasy and hiding the mess under the carpet they brush away while people are looking and if you are looking it doesn’t matter they hold the power of the agenda. So the economy, yeah, you know probably, parents more and more working a job each. Working as many hours as possible, as I mentioned in the skilled labor contract field for one, to make sure their meeting the demands to pay their bills and workers. Rush, rush, rush, and the competition to get their youth into as many extra-circular activities as possible to build up their resume for a university and what they value as a good job. Drop in the value of the dollar has something to do with this, etc, etc,… stuff we’re aware of. I think quality is being sacrificed.

11

This, absolutely.

12

I finally thought of something I could offer to this thread that was more meaningful than indigestion from sighting the golden arches.

I live near these landmarks.

13

They sure know how to sell the place.

14

Detroit is a corrupt cesspool that has been destroyed by graft, socialism and the state (or do I repeat myself).

It still has a little of its amazing architecture left. It’s probably the world’s foremost urban-industrial graveyard, in that the ghosts of the past have no future, and yet they never quite succumbed to creative destruction.

15

Don’t kid yourself. That stuff wasn’t imported from the Soviet Union, it was exported to the Soviet Union. The housing slabs were local, homegrown socialism.

Soviet planning was actually somewhat traditional, although really kitsch. But in the West some places didn’t even wait for ruins from Luftwaffe bombs to stop smouldering to rebuild in the modern style.

16

Ah, that’s interesting. Perhaps I generalized a bit too much, but the point remains that socialism likes grey boxes over everything else. In Britain’s case this led to Victorian cityscapes being over-saturated with tower blocks, and a forty year gap before the authorities painfully admitted ‘By gosh, these buildings are hideous’. Their remedy was to demolish most of the towers and create smaller isolated suburban ghettos where the problems self-perpetuate, aside from the time people were able to outright own their ‘council houses’.

17

Well where the supposed beacons of democracy and republics, such as the U.S. and other countries find a stirring opposition (every 4 years in the U.S.) the pressure valve is released. The violent revolution is diverted by the facade of the State is allowing its leaders to be voted in and to use an Obamanite “Change Can Happen”.

I found this in wiki on that link you gave Stranger:

“On June 17, 1953 the Stalinallee became the focus of a worker uprising which endangered the young state’s existence. Builders and construction workers demonstrated against the communist government, leading to a national uprising. The rebellion was quashed with Soviet tanks and troops, resulting in the loss of at least 125 lives.”

Didn’t take long for the workers to rise up against “the workers” (the communist party), but the State set-up the line not to cross and distinguished itself very early it appears, 1953. That boulevard, named after Karl Marx, has seen a revival:

“The boulevard later found favour with postmodernists, with Philip Johnson describing it as ‘true city planning on the grand scale’, while Aldo Rossi called it ‘Europe’s last great street.’”

(quotes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee )

Tanks and military soldiers paraded down that street in the East Germany days I’m guessing those parades would have been like the old Soviet pictures I’d see on TV with the ‘might’ of the Soviet military showing off their bombs and tanks marching down Moscow.

U.S. doesn’t need to do the parade thing. It’s involved in a war every year somewhere around the world. So its military is on display in real-time experimenting with new bombs and missiles such as seen on the news in the U.S. constantly showing how the new guided missiles in the gray colored screen that the pilot sees can pin-point strike a chimney. When reporters go to Iraq they are seated in these TV rooms usually, that “if they’re lucky” they get an opportunity to watch a live military event while they are waiting to speak to personnel for an interview or something.

18

“Nonetheless a substantial part of the UK population still lives in council housing.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house )

AndrewR, or anybody else that may know, I noticed this sentence when I was reading what “council houses” are. I noticed Thatcher came up with the “Right To Buy” Bill so people could start to buy these council houses since the socialized method just wasn’t working. It said Blair put more restrictions on people being able to buy their own houses, but it’s still possible. How much approximately is “substantial”? Is this suggesting that not many people own their own houses in the UK?

I also noticed an article that said this back in 2007: “A UNION leader is calling for more council houses to be built to tackle problems caused by homelessness and rising mortgage payments.” ( http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-184456675.html )

It said Gordon Brown might consider it. I wonder if it happened or since the Housing Bubble burst they don’t find the need to do this anymore. Yet State leaders are propping up the bubble as much as possible now and as anybody may have seen in California they are tearing houses down, so the reverse. Of course this does nothing for the homeless or poor as the houses are being torn down or propping up of bubbles continues.

19

To the social-democrats architecture was part of their method of revolution. They thought that if they changed how people lived, they would change the people. They succeeded but not how they had hoped! An argument can be made that American suburbia was also part of this revolutionary method, and it was the outcome of the same socialist mindset. Americans today are not the same people they were when New York City or Chicago were synonymous with America.

In Russia Stalin’s preferences were classical and resulted in the usual state-worship super-gigantic style that people like Albert Speer had used to glorify power. There is some of it in Asia as, such as Tiananmen Square or this.

20

I finally got around to reading, instead of looking at the pictures, of these links. Is this area that depressed that what stands as something near any quality at all are these ruins that have been closed up for decades and in need of renovation sometimes to the cost of $7 million? Has socialism in that area buried some pinnacles of a stronger free market this far into the past? Has the quality been nearly wiped off the map around that place that in order to find it ruins of closed up buildings are all that remains? If such a lack of quality exists in that area, then that surely is depressing.