Thursday, August 31, 2006

Nazi Appeasement

Photos from Salt Lake City's very own Prague Spring.

The location: City hall.













Our mayor, bringing the vitriol.













Scenes from the protest.
















































No protest would be complete without an unhinged counter-protest.

























And, of course, the fuzz. Grand America is currently fortified like some drug lords compound.


Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The laws have changed.

Las Vegas. It was a little under a year since we had all seen each other after graduation. I would have liked to think that in the meantime I had matured (not really), or at least embarked on some noticeable and profound post-collegiate path (not really). Discouragingly, however, all my friends could fixate on were my newly acquired jeans.

Corduroys had been a sort of uniform for me throughout college. Little did I know how intimately people associated this fabric with my identity. It was like they had crystalized their earliest impressions of me and any deviation from this core nucleus of perceptions was promptly condemned. Denim was thus an affront on their conception of my authentic self.

Not that I am any less guilty of committing the same crimes.

One of my dearest friends started college as an Adbuster-reading Midwestern whose wardrobe consisted of clothes he probably found in his grandfathers attic. The first time I saw him return from a shopping trip to the Gap, a little piece of me died.

Do we reluctantly accept change in others?

As you have heard me bemoan countless time on the blog, the past year has been one of loss. Lacking any direction, I decided to rebuild my life from the ground up.

Take a poll of my friends and ask them what they think of my dietary and exercise habits; I am sure their responses would not be flattering.

If you were to go back in time a few years, catch past-Logan by means of some ether-drenched Blur t-shirt and dissect his stomach, the contents spilling out of his digestional system would probably have a uniformly beige color. Nowadays I am eating healthier. While in Chicago, I cooked myself strictly vegetarian meals, and my plates have become infinitely more colorful with the addition of fruits and vegetables to my diet.

I have even started to run again. When I was younger, I was a sprinter (it may surprise some to know that I once earned a silver medal in the Utah Summer Games) but I was never a long-distance runner because I did not have the endurance for longer races. Catching pneumonia certainly did not help my lung capacity. As such, I was sick with apprehension when I laced up my running shoes this summer. My performance was embarrassing at first, but now I am proudly running a couple of miles every day -- unexceptional for most, but an accomplishment in my mind.

Last month while I was in New York, Jeremy, Dave and I began our day by running along the Long Island beach. Dave and Jeremy are ultimate frisbee players and running is a large part of their athletic lives (or at least one of those nuclei of identity that I associate with them). It would have been easy for them both to cynically trash my awkward attempts at getting into shape; comments which would have been damaging to my fragile exercise esteem. But instead, they were nothing but supportive. As we were jogging, Dave turned to me and said, "I am running along the beach with Logan. This is awesome." They allowed me to change. And it meant the world to me.

In June 2007, Ian Lindsay and I are going to run the Salt Lake City half-marathon. It is an ambitious goal, something I could have never dreamed of doing at any other point in my life.

I think that is reason alone to do it.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Remind me to talk about the Japanese restaurant and the really hot waitress...

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Jesus Towel: Electronic! Towel!

In honor of the seven year anniversary of Crazy Morty.






















------------------------------------

From: Logan Wright
To: Ruben Bolling
Date: March 24, 2001 1:53:24 AM MST
Subject: Crazy Morty

The day Crazy Morty returned was the happiest day of my life. It all went down hill from there... now Robert Downey Jr. won't even return my phone calls.

------------------------------------

From: Ruben Bolling
To: Logan Wright
Date: March 27, 2001 1:25:03 PM MST
Subject: RE: Crazy Morty

Robert Downey Jr. asked me to tell you that he's been very busy. He'll call soon.
Helpfully,
rb

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Get Myself Into It

According to Metacritic Upcoming CD releases:

12 Sep Tuesday

Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
DJ Shadow - The Outsider
Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye
Magnolia Electric Co. - Fading Trails
The Rapture - Pieces Of The People We Love
Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds
TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain
Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

Is this even real. An artist's rendition of Logan's wallet on Sept. 13.

Inexplicably, The Rapture's Pieces Of The People We Love has yet to leak (at least to my knowledge). To give you some perspective, the new TV On The Radio, which has the same domestic release date, was on the internet NINE months ago. The Rapture's new website has five samples to tease us with -- and they all sound ace. [A bonus 5,000 points to the first person to find my photo in the montage.]

Can we also talk about Johnny Marr joining Modest Mouse?

2006 is shaping up.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

LOGANMIX002: The Widening Gyre

My newest mix for you is low on tracks, but high on concept.

Loosely based off Yeats's conic conception of history in The Second Coming, the mixtape was built around a basic rule: the song length would increase with each successive track. Starting with the catastrophic warning alarms of "Red Alert" and eventually decelerating into telomeric decay and the uncertain resurrection of "Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts", the track-list reflects Yeats's apprehension of the [Western] world spiraling helplessly out of control.

Really though, the elaborate conceit is just a convenient excuse to string together eight amazing songs -- from the James Bond baiting "History Repeating" featuring 60s cabaret vocalist Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads [what happened to those guys?] to Kevin Shield's apocalyptic re-imagining of Primal Scream's "If They Move Kill 'Em" (and which just may be the greatest song of the decade).

If you believe the western sun is falling down on everyone:

1. Red Alert - Basement Jaxx [The Singles] (3:37)
2. History Repeating - Propellerheads [decksanddrumsandrockandroll] (4:02)
3. Right Here, Right Now - Fatboy Slim [Right Here, Right Now Single] (5:03)
4. MBV Arkestra (If They Move Kill 'Em) - Primal Scream [XTRMNTR] (6:41)
5. Out of Control - The Chemical Brothers [Surrender] (7:17)
6. Narayan - The Prodigy [Fat of the Land] (9:06)
7. Your Blood In Mine - Serena Maneesh [Serena Maneesh] (12:09)
8. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts - M83 [Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts Vinyl] (17:42)

My CD club disbanded, so if you drop me a line I would be more than happy to make you a copy. Or don't.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Scary/funny

So Cindy Shehan was invited by Mayor Ross “Rocky” Anderson to join a planned protest of George W. Bush during his upcoming Salt Lake City visit.

Naturally, this is blasphemy in ultraconservative Utah. But don’t take my word for it... take the often hilarious back-and-forth comments from the news website of the LDS church-owned KSL. (I wonder what some of these people’s AOL searches look like?)

Some highlights:

“Finally, someone on here that isn't just following the leader. Now if only the rest of you can break away from your whitebread and learn something!”

“If he does go to church, he certainly doesn't follow its teachings unless it's one of those Christless churches created for the sake of making some feel they're going to church without really trying.” (Hmm... I wonder which religion he’s talking about ☺)

About Jimmy Carter: “Jennifer, I don't know about you, but any man who presided over the nation while the laws changed to allow 40 million innocent babies to be killed is not any kind of a God-lover in my book. Check your Bible and your history honey.”

“. . .that we have not had another 9/11 incident; Afghanistan has been liberated from the terrorists; Iraq has been liberated from the oppressive conditions of Sadam; Osama is now hiding in some rat hole with his tail between his legs.

By the way, even with a basic understanding of supply and demand you would understand the price of oil has nothing to do with our President and everything to do with the world's increased consumption. And the fact that because of strict environmental laws pushed down our throats by the tree-hugging liberals we don't have enough refineries to bring more fuel to our market. There has not been a new refinery built in the United States for the past 40 years.”

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Confessions

I can usually tell the complexity of my reaction by how difficult it is for me to find the right descriptive word.

[For instance, five years ago an acquaintance rushed the stage at a Moby concert. Her family thought it was the greatest thing ever. I couldn’t quite figure out how to describe it. My first thought was that it was “sleazy.” A word I almost immediately felt didn’t quite fit. I don’t think I was able to accurately describe my disdain for the whole thing that day. (Eventually I did realize that, yes, “sleazy” was absolutely the right word for her, and for the lameness of rushing the stage AT A MOBY CONCERT! But that’s another story.)]

At first I was saying, “crazy.” Then, “unexpected.” Rachel said “weird.”

Either way, it seemed like something that was too good to be true. The long unsolved JonBenet Ramsey case had finally been solved. With a full confession from a seemingly guilty man. He had some spurious connection to the family. Could have possibly been in the area. And he seemed, well, weird. Weird like the kind of person who could do something that horrible to a little girl.

Of course, all of those details now seem not so clear. “Vague,” is CNN’s word. It isn’t too shocking I guess. From what I understand, confessing to crimes one has not committed is fairly common. (Like most abnormal behavior, I’d guess it’s an exaggeration of a somewhat respected social act. I imagine it gives you the kind of high you get when you, say, take the blame for a loved one’s small social misstep –– but on completely crazy level, of course.)

Looking at it now, there were the obvious pieces that make him not fit the crime. The tucked in shirt and the too high pants. A sure sign of some sort of abnormal psychological condition, but not necessarily sociopathy. (And that may sound like a joke, but I actually do have a theory about missing basic social and fashion cues being a link to abnormal psychological states. I can make up statistics to back myself up if you need me to.)

But anyway, I confess. I wanted to believe it. It seemed nice for the Ramseys to finally have the closure they deserve with the ten-year-old murder case.

Judging by the media response, I suppose we’re all a little guilty of that.

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Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Ghosts of Glasnost

What you may know: At the beginning of August, AOL released the search history data from 658,000 of its subscribers. While individual names or user IDs were not linked to specific searches, privacy advocacy groups worried that the data could be used to identify and target AOL customers. Under heavy criticism, AOL removed the search logs from public access.

What you may not know: Before AOL could censor the data, numerous websites and torrents mirrored the search query logs, allowing anyone access to the information.

The only thing more disturbing than AOL's cavalier breach of privacy are the actual queries.

Organized solely by the loose author function of a unique user ID, phantasmagoric narratives begin to emerge from the data.

I won't repeat them here (in case you are having a particularly pleasant day), but for those who want a glimpse into the unsettling private lives of AOL users, take a look at the 'funny' and 'popular' users on AOLStalker.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I'm in The New Yorker

Two Photographs:

The first, from the August 21, 2006 issue of The New Yorker.

A house on Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward; January, 2006. Photograph by Robert Polidori.

(Forgive the terrible image quality and inverted view. It's a photograph of the magazine using my built-in iSight. I was due a free printer/scanner combo from Apple with the new MacBook, but I got jewed out of it).



The second, from my hard drive.

A house on Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward; January, 2006. Photograph by Sam Goldsmith.



Using the logic coined by Walt Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, if I feel like I could have done it, then I did it. The only difference between my photo and Polidori's is he had time to set up a nice shot. I took mine out the window of the moving minivan I was driving.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Angelina Jolie, Bono, and Stephon Marbury


Last year's "most reviled athlete in New York" is hoping for an image boost with the release of his new sneaker, the Starbury. Seen as something of a brat among Knicks fans, a new shoe is an unlikely source of redemption.

Unless that shoe costs $14.98.

Marbury is entering the uber-profitable world of basketball shoes as a humanitarian. His aim is to make a hot, high quality shoe, one he promises to wear on the court, that everyone can afford. (Everyone but the Pakistani kid who made it). At face value, this is quite admirable. Steph doesn’t like the way kids have to hustle their parents (or whomever) to afford $150 Jordan's, LeBron's, Kobe's, or Goldsmith's. So Steph teamed up with discount retailer Steve and Barry's to exclusively manufacture and sell the shoes.

How do I know this? I spent the day with Steph.

After dinner and lots of drinks with my uncle Mark--reporter and sometimes host of ESPN's Outside the Lines, he invited me to join him on the job today, covering the Starbury shoe story.

The first stop was a Boys and Girls Club in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The Club had a contest for the kids to design a Starbury T-shirt, and the kid with the best design won $500. So Steph and two corporate dudes from Steve and Barry's staged a little press event to award the winning kid an oversized check. Steph grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn and spent every day playing hoops in the Boys and Girls Club gym. This new shoe, he says, was made for the kids who attend these low-income programs.

(Great side story: Mark's producer, Art Weinberg was with us all day. When Steph starts talking about what it was like to be a poor kid in Coney Island, Art turns to me and says, "whenever Steph talks about Coney Island, all I can think about is that part in Annie Hall when they flash back to Alvy's childhood growing up under the roller coaster in Coney Island. There is that guy, Joey Nichols, who shows young Alvy his cuff links and a tie pin, which are made from nickels, and say 'You see, nickels! You can always remember my name, just think of Joey five cents!' Then Alvy turns to walk away and says, 'what an asshole!'" I laugh and say, "you know, Art, I think you're the only person in this room [which is full of 100 black kids] who hears Coney Island and thinks about Annie Hall.")

Our next stop is the Steve and Barry's store in the Manhattan Mall on 34th street. I never heard of Steve and Barry's until today, but it's a pretty big operation. They have almost 200 stores accross the country, and their shtick is nothing in the store costs more than $9.98, bar the new Starbury shoes. So we get to the mall and the president of the company meets us and walks us around the store. The place is as big as an Old Navy, and he shows us the merchandise and tells us how they make it so cheap. It not that it's low quality stuff, he says, it's that they know the tricks to get the lowest cost manufacturing and distributing. He told us one story about these $9.89 letterman jackets. They are vinyl, not leather, which makes them cheaper in two ways. The obvious way is plastic is cheaper than leather, but the other way is much more tricky. It turns out that clothing retailers have to pay tariffs per item when the goods come from manufactures overseas. The per item tariffs on clothing are much higher than other goods, like plastic. So if the jacket is at least 51% vinyl, it can be counted as plastic rather than clothing, which brings the cost down even more. Clever. The clothing in the store is kind of dumpy, but I can understand the appeal. It's the same quality as Gap et al, but waaay less money. Personally I only wear Dulce and Gabanana, but I'm a Goldsmith. After the tour, we went to the board room where Steph was waiting to be interviewed. He's a pretty nice guy. No Karl Malone, though. And a bad hand shake. No firm grip. No eye contact.

If you want to catch Mark's piece, it will be on Outside the Lines next week-ish. I'll post the run times when I know them for sure. If you want the shoes, you'll have to email me. Steve and Barry havent hit Oregon or Utah yet, but I'm happy to send you some kicks in the mail.

But yall aint poor. So I charge more.


ps-- check out this bullshit.

Is it just a game in my mind, Sharona?

I was disappointed to discover yesterday that that lyrics to The Knack's "My Sharona" are not full of made up compound words such as 'eyesharona' or 'thighsharona' but are in fact ordinary sentences split up by breathless commas.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

severance

A year ago today, I threw the urn into the Seine river.

For an onlooker, it must have been a curious, if unmistakable sight. A stranger extricating himself from some powerful fetish. A lover's talisman, perhaps. The ashes of a deceased relation. Sacred writings never to be spoken.

The vessel, denoting now an entire world of meaning, was all these. Possibly more.

It was supposed to have been a gift of a high symbolic order: a representation of the internal ironies of our relationship. She the remorseless being of the eternal present. I the wretch that would bleed to death on the lacerations of the past. As such, it required an equally symbolic act. A measure with such conviction could mean only irreparable severance.

It wasn't enough.

In the Marquesas, they speak of tribes which, without means of the necessary totems, tattoo their history on the eldest child -- a procedure some do not survive. I, too, was without need of a historical relic of some past idolization, the memories permanently scarred across my psyche.

Every night I uncoil the threads of events past, like Penelope unweaving the shroud of Laertes; a process born less of nostalgia than a masochistic ritual of remembrance. Yearning for moments never to return.

I dropped the urn in the Seine, but somehow, a year later, I still haven't let go.

Friday, August 11, 2006

To "answer" your question, thus.

My phone has been ringing off the hook.

The cable news networks have been looking for sound bites on Bush's recent declaration that the U.S. is at war with "Islamic fascists."

It is true.

Fascists are, heuristically speaking [with the marginal caveat that we encounter at the ends of every categorical phenomenon certain parabolic discrepancies (for, of course, lack of a better term -- see Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or better yet, on the limits of representation, Blanchot's L'Ecriture Du Desastre {in the French please, if possible}) that distort and quite inevitably destroy the actual being-as-is-for-itself and create in its place that desultory object-from-not-within-itself], those who "will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom."

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Oceanic Flight 815




Itchiness is a skin complaint...

An obvious observation.

It was on the same day. Somewhere in the anonymous analogue of the Internet... one article about how too much sun is causing skin cancer. Another about how too much fear of skin cancer is causing not enough sun and vitamin D deficiencies.

Maybe so. The stories don’t conflict, but they don’t actually agree either. Much like modern discourse, political or otherwise.

Ergo... all stupid arguments will now be referred to as itchy.

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Monday, August 07, 2006

Check, please.

Fifteen at the table.

Don't ask me how the restaurant managed to fit us all during lunch rush hour.

Our waitress is surprisingly good-humored despite the gauntlet of caffeine-rattled adolescent cousins that make up one formidable side of our table.

Artlessly she inquires into our table relations.

At center is my grandmother, the slightly-senile catholic matriarch of the family. Flanking her are my aunt and uncle, the high-strung pathologist and the foul-mouthed obstetrician respectively.

Opposite us are my cousins; Matthew and his girlfriend sit close and are in love as only high-school kids can be. They are both going to separate colleges next year. The adults secretly talk about how it will not last.

And then there is me. The mistake of the group. Six years too old and twenty years too young, among other things.

The waitress begins taking orders. One side of the table, the kid side, orders a menagerie of elaborate alcoholic-free cocktails.

Lava Flows. Monkey Wrenches. Blue Hawaiis.

For teenagers and younger, they have a disturbingly precocious knowledge of the world of mixed drinks.

The queue finally comes to me.

Feeling decadent and listening to that old adage, I order a Piña Colada. With rum.

The waitress eyes me.

"You didn't look like a virgin."

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Greetings from North Oahu

Technically, I have been to a beach.

There was sand. And waves. Even topless women, once.

Yet, at the same time, I have never actually been to the beach.

Hawaiian beaches must exist on some entirely different semantic plane; like a Platonic ideal form you always knew existed that reduces all other experience to cypher and shadow.

While dipping my feet in the amniotic ebb and flow of the ocean tide, a coconut washed ashore.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The rEd...

July and August. When Salt Lake City melts.

The streets are liquid. They flow down the hills, so it’s hard to walk. They stick to your feet and hold you.

You watch the sun stand still in the sky. The mountains swell from the heat. Taller everyday until they hit the ceiling and fall inward, vanishing. The tree grow faces and silently whistle at you, hoping for you attention.

It isn’t so much repetition as redundancy. There is a difference between 100 degrees and 101 perhaps.

When it finally rains. The world becomes solid. Things stop moving so they begin to happen. You wonder what’s next.

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Artabanus on the Beach

I have published below a truncated excerpt of my undergraduate academic writing.

Unsolicited, yes.

Still, fin-de-siècle Europe was, as still is, such an important part of my life, I felt it would be a shame not to share it with you. Oddly, it will be as new to my former COL colleagues as it will be to some of my closest friends.

It is longer than I wanted, but you can always can skim (or skip) it.

Speaking of academic loves -- a recent dalliance rekindled my passion for all things Classical Greek. I am looking forward to re-reading Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as this new discovery.

In case you didn't know, the Greco-Persian War is the greatest event in World history (and the whipping of the Hellespont, the silliest).

The Violet Hour

“What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal”

from The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot (1922)

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is a forsaken world in desperate need of spiritual salvation. Like the Sibyl of Cumea, its inhabitants are hopelessly stretched beyond their means. Souls walk aimlessly around undead cities with their eyes fixed before their feet, uttering short and infrequent sighs. The poem aches with desire for rejuvenating rain, but old fertility rites have been corrupted and the only means of communication with the gods is through charlatans and clairvoyants. Yet, even Madam Sosototris cannot find the hooded man, the one who would give salvation. Instead, he glides around like a specter - an apparition whose seeming presence only reminds us of his painfully conspicuous absence. The poem is a shattered narrative, collecting fragments of cultural memory and mythology. Like an individual recalling all of her memories on her death bed, so too it seemed that Western Civilization was remembering and reliving all of its history in the violet hour before its own terrible demise.

In his notes to the poem, Eliot linked the above quotation from the Wasteland to a small pamphlet Hermann Hesse scribed a few years earlier in which he argued that Dostoyevsky had prophesized the Downfall of Europe in his novel The Brothers Karamazoff. Humanity, Hesse contended, was full of instincts which, while neither good nor bad, every civilization needed to categorize in a moral order by selecting those that were allowed and deemed ‘Good’ and others which were forbidden and termed ‘Evil.’ When a culture began to decay, individuals emerged – represented by the Karamazoffs in Dostoyevsky’s novel – who rejected the arbitrary categories of Good and Evil and dismissed the law of the old order.

In the greater cultural context of modern Europe, Hesse believed that the new ‘Russian man,’ typified by the Karamazovs, was the harbinger of the end of Western Civilization. Dostoyevsky’s novel and the ‘Chaos’ of Eastern Europe revealed a tired culture reeling into the abyss, the vortex and deliquescence of all values, only to be recreated and reborn again. “The ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic, and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul. That is what I mean by the downfall of Europe. This downfall is a return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to the "Faüstischen Muttern" and will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth.”

Returning to the passage from The Wasteland in light of Hesse’s essay, some of the contours of Eliot’s obscure poetry are illuminated. The ‘murmur of maternal lamentation’ high in the air was a foreboding whisper of a culture wishing to return to Asia, its mother, to be dissolved and reborn. The faceless ‘hooded hordes’ conjured the ‘Russian men’ whose nihilistic disregard for all norms threatened the stability of the old European order. Yet, most ominous was the city over the mountains in the violet air – the moment of twilight as the cultural and spiritual centers of Europe seemed to crack and burst, manifesting their true essence: spectral, illusory – unreal.

Eliot’s and Hesse’s depictions of the sterility of Western Civilization and their foreboding premonitions of the downfall of Europe were not isolated. In 1922, the same year Eliot published The Wasteland, the cantankerous and misanthropic German Oswald Spengler released the second volume of his opus The Decline of the West. Like Hesse, Spengler conceived of history as the succession of cultures; he even acknowledged Dostoyevsky as a veritable haruspex. According to Spengler, every culture unfolded through various states following an organic logic – passing through ‘youth,’ ‘growth,’ ‘maturity,’ and then falling into ‘decay.’

Although professional historians decried his work as superficial and un-scientific, Spengler found a substantial and sympathetic audience in the intellectual milieu of interwar Europe. The poet William Butler Yeats saw in The Decline of the West “a correspondence too great for coincidence” of the visualization of history in his own poetry. Indeed a large reading population found The Decline of the West to be satisfying, or at least intriguing – by 1927, 100,000 copies had been sold. Spengler, Eliot, and Hesse all tapped into a larger cultural premonition that Western Civilization had gone adrift. In contrast to the Enlightenment which propounded the great progress of European culture or the Hegelian dialectic which ensured the realization of freedom as the goal of history, many intellectuals were convinced that Europe had fallen into twilight.

This reaction against eighteenth century Enlightenment thought was particularly engaged in a revolt against positivism – a rather loose synecdoche like most categorical representations of movements, but generally defined as a tendency to reduce intellectual inquiry into scientific terms and methodologies. Positivist historiography strove to be mimetic and objective, and at its root was an unfailing optimism that history could truly be understood for what it was through scientific measures.

Spengler was explicit in his disdain for positivist methodology. In response to Condorcet and the Enlightenment, he proclaimed, “‘Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids.” Cultures simply rose and fell; there was no overall trajectory to human history. Furthermore, Spengler was not interested in isolated events, but repetitions and patterns. A historical moment did not derive importance from its spatial and temporal positioning, but instead from what it signified through analogy to other cultures. Unfolding in an organic logic, every culture followed the template or archetype established by the ‘metaphysical structure of historic humanity’ which underlie history. Spengler was not searching for the ‘mathematical laws’ that governed history, but instead for ‘analogies’ that compared repetitions in civilizations and uprooted the hidden organic life-cycles which all cultures must undergo. While science seemed to impose illusory laws on reality and shackle it in dry formula, Spengler thought his methodology could unveil hidden organic truths and provide events with metaphysical meaning.

Frederich Nietzsche, one of the two people to whom Spengler acknowledged his debt in The Decline of the West, was one of positivism’s first and harshest critics. In Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, positivist history was portrayed as merely an intellectual exercise - it provided people with a torrent of meaningless information, linking together isolated events through causal acrobatics. Nietzsche did not advocate an abandonment of history - it was required for life and action. But it needed be in the service of life, not as a servant of science. Under the precept of science, history destroyed illusions – what he termed myths – and the creative instinct. When myth crept into the realm of historical reality it was mercilessly systematized and eviscerated of its artful portrayal of profound meaning. Science recklessly disrobed/unveiled the world unwitting of the fact that knowledge killed action, for action required the veil of illusion. Myth portrayed the absurdity and horror of existence, but in an artful manner that comforted and soothed. The genuine historian would therefore cloak his truth much like the playwright of myths – hidden and ambiguous, enigmatic and artful.

In the revolt against positivism, the term ‘myth’ enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of usage. Myth was an illusive and ill-defined concept, but its vague connotations as archaic and irrational provided an appealing semantic hue. It evaded positivist systematization and intellectualization, was fundamentally ahistorical and pessimistic, provided an anti-individualistic union with the eternal, and facilitated action and virility in an absurd world. Yet, the ‘myth’ that would be utilized in the intellectual discourse in the 1920s and 30s would be seared off of its Nietzschean roots as an art form and grafted onto a political axis.

The intellectual revolt against positivism was not merely confined to a rejection of Enlightenment thought, but also its political derivatives. Consequently, socialism and liberalism, the two great political ideologies of the nineteenth century, were indicted as vague forms of positivism. Only a revolution which rejected the intellectual, political, and social structures rooted in Enlightenment and positivist thought could save Western Civilization from decadence. From the crisis of Marxism and a faltering belief in liberal democracy, a new political form of vitalistic nationalism emerged which proclaimed a total revolution to regenerate and reinvigorate European society. One of the Italian leaders of this movement proclaimed it was a reaction against the “materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century.” Fascism developed from this synthesis of the fin-de-siècle desire to renew a decadent culture and an anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary populist nationalism.

Roger Griffin defined this ‘fascist minimum’ as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism.” Although each of the terms could operate independently, when the two were synthesized they delimited each other to create a precise political concept – fascism. The palingenetic portion of the equation – a rather archaic word etymologically deriving from palin (again) and genesis (birth), thus connoting a myth of renewal – hints at the coercive appeal of fascism to intellectuals. Intellectuals who prophesized that they were living in the violet hour of Western Civilization had a propensity to be drawn into fascism since it adopted fin-de-siècle ideology and ostensibly claimed to resolve the decadent crisis through populist ultra-nationalism. Fascism assimilated and politicized the terms of counterenlightenment thought in the ideological discourse; thus, when socialism and liberal democracy did not appear to be sufficient vehicles to rejuvenate Western culture, many intellectuals fell into fascism’s ideological orbit. Belief in the eschatological crisis of Western culture was a central component of the fascist equation.