1972

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Culture is a Vulture

Richard Meltzer • 1972

ARichard Meltzer, Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America (1649-1993), 1972

Asset — Gulcher on archive.org

CModern man lives in an artificial environment constructed by himself. He calls the totality of this environment 'culture'. Culture is not only the content of libraries and museums or other intellectual merchandise; but culture is also the toothbrush, tool, and apartment.

— Abraham Moles, Ulm

GYou do not want to become an eagle, Little Man, and that is why you get eaten by the vultures. You are afraid of the eagles, and so you live together in great herds, and are being eaten up in big herds. For some of your chickens have hatched the eggs of vultures. And the vultures have become your Fuhrers against the eagles, the eagles who wanted to lead you into farther, better distances. The vulture taught you to eat carrion and to be content with just a few grains of wheat. In addition, they taught you to yell, ‘Hail, Hail, Great Vulture!’ Now you starve and die, in great masses, and you still are afraid of the eagles who hatch your chickens.

— Wilhelm Reich, Listen Little Man!, 1945

IYou cannot impose a culture from the top — it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy of life, of their joy in work, and if this does not exist, the culture will not exist.

— Herbert Read, To Hell With Culture, 1963

A Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yogurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain, cherry vanilla, pineapple orange, cranberry orange, mandarin orange, coffee, apricot, raspberry, blueberry, boysenberry, prune). And speaking of vulture culture there's counter-culture and under-the-counter culture too. B But whether you call it kulture with a k or kulchur with a k C and a ch and without the e it's still the same thing and you can't disguise it with pretty frills and gallon of dogsweat. D

EPrometheus bound with an eagle picking out his liver, ca 555 BC, Greek

FBeyond a legacy of old books and old buildings still of some signifi­cance but destined to continual reduction and, more­ over, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed; and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.

— Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988

G It still has two syllables and TWO-SYLLABLE WORDS SUCK so you can just forget it, man. H It's no fun at all and even fun wouldn't be fun if it was called funjure or funion or funching. I

JThe vulture space visualized...

BClass and cultural differences. Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals, 1975

DHonoré Daumier, Prometheus and the Vulture, 1871

HThe culture industry perpetually cheats its customers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory; all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.

— Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception)