Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz? A serious question

["Ralph Dumain" <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

OK, I'll butt out, but before I do, I must re-iterate one point from my last
post.

-----Original Message-----
From: L Spencer <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, May 06, 1999 11:28 AM
Subject: Ernst Bloch on Jazz? A serious question

>Jazz is such a huge and varied phenomena that it has lent its name to
>the very decades in which Bloch was most active in developing his
>critical ideas. What we think of as Weimar Culture, the age of
>Expressionism giving way to the New Objectivity (sometimes referred
>to as the New Sobriety) was in the USA the jazz-age. And if one reads
>any really good writings about - such as the essay on THE JAZZ AGE by
>Scott Fitzgerald - one is immediately struck by the many parallels
>with all the diffuse and contradictory impulses of the 60s, as
>another explosion of "youth culture".
>
>[Exploited by the culture industies, Fred van Gelder, but surely not simply
>produced by them alone...]


Note the unpsoken presumption here: all that is to be considered is what the
jazz age meant to white people, to official society.  To read Fitzgerald,
God help us.  For a different take, you might try Ishmael Reed's MUMBO
JUMBO, not that Reed is my hero, only that his frame of reference
(ideologically loaded in its own way) undermines the sort of assumptions
that govern the lives of people like Carl Van Vechten or F. Snott Fitzgerald
or some Weimar souse peeing his pants after losing consciousness.

Ralph Dumain
send replies to: rdumain@xxxxxxx