For a long time it was assumed by almost everyone, or so I assume, that the dominant images of the--the connections between cosmos and hearth, sacred and beautiful and moral--could only be received, could not be invented. Then great Italian Renaissance banking families created an image for themselves that stood at the intersection of their contemporary power structures and the structures of legitimacy. (This is all very vague but I'm about to get on a plane.) Every political movement since has done much the same thing. For the Neo-cons this is less about architecture and more about talking points. But there is in fact a cosmology behind their talking points--it just happens to be one that many of their top people don't buy. Or maybe they do literally buy it but they don't seem to believe it.
At any rate, corporations are certainly doing this very consciously and calling it branding. There's the Levi's stuff and the beautiful series of short films at the Hermes website. I want to write about Matt Portfield's "Putty Hill" when I get back.
And but so what I want to suggest is my intention to do the same thing. Make a kind of gallery somehow that represents my own sense of Beautiful, Good, True, Sacred. Maybe it's website or a novel, part album/part movie. Bound to be less vicious than the Tea Party's set of cultural images and have a shot at being more aesthetically alive than the Democratics' version of the same thing. I mean, good Lord.
What do you call this endeavor, V? On some level you're doing the same thing when you furnish and house to make it a functional dwelling, or when you plan a dinner party so that the people and the food are full and together and joyful. I'm just talking about making the connections between different movements of the body and spirit more explicit and palpable. In the way that religion is supposed to do and doesn't for most people anymore, or not effectively enough to serve us in the world of economics, resources, products, constant surveillance and propaganda, constant awareness of ones own smallness, of the lack of a workable form of sympathetic magic, one whose correspondences were intact and alive. What do they call this thing when they sit around in a board room and say, let's create us a worldview that we can conjure profit with? I was calling another version of this the Build-Yr-Own-America Kit. But now I want it to reach farther out and farther in, if only for me.
