A beautiful conversation
our chat w/ camillepawglia
Back in 2021, @camillepawglia (formerly known as @bodylessorgans, also known as Stanley Bast on Substack) came on the pod to discuss Madonna’s “Justify My Love” music video, Paglia’s critique of Gaga, the future of social media, and the state of contemporary art.
Most of you didn’t listen to the end. But many of those who did remarked how striking our exchange about finding hope in our fk’ed up world was (1:00:30-1:05:30). Here’s the transcript:
POMO: Considering how chaotic and frenetic postmodern culture is, where do you find authentic beauty [in it]?
BO: I would say that I'm still caught up in just a critique part. I would say that as I am right now I'm very much still stuck in the whole loop of self-awareness and that nothing is beautiful…yet everything is simultaneously beautiful. It's an impasse, you know. And I would say it is in part due to this boomer thing…there's a something about the creative and social and technological apparatuses being controlled by the most regressive types of shit that we see nowadays. But yeah it's just a word salad essentially is what I'm doing…I'm trying to intellectualize. There is no emotion present. It's just pure intellectual abstraction. And I am still stuck in that. There is no way out. It's very fatalistic and unfortunately I perpetrate it in my attempts to escape it because I've been trying to see what I'm doing…just word salad, pretty much that. Just intellectual abstractions. There's no substance at all.
POMO: I think the fact of being stuck in this tension and recognizing it—that itself is substantial, I would dare to say.
BO: What happens when you can't escape it?
POMO: You affirm it and you communicate it…because otherwise we either wallow in it, we ignore it, we blind ourselves, but to say ‘yes this is where I am, what I'm experiencing.’ And then you communicate it. I think that is itself an extremely substantial place to be in.
BO: But what about you? Where do you find it—true beauty?
POMO: I need to see that all these intuitions about…like when I see something….whether it's a music video by Madonna or Gaga or the song itself, like when I see something that provokes me on the level of the soul, like on this deeper ontological level. I want to see that I can share that experience of being provoked with other people and that when someone can affirm this…when someone can be like ‘yes, I affirm this to be true,’ I recognize this connection, that encounter sparks something even bigger because it's now a shared intuition. It's the opening of some greater discovery. So I think it comes down to, like, I don't want to discover these things in isolation. I want to share them with people so that it opens me up to the possibility of seeing more—even if I don't know what that ‘more’ is…even if I don't know if it exist. Like the fact that now there's this link, there's a possibility.
BO: Which is like communal escape I guess…reliant on a community through which you can express yourself and have that community expressed or running through you I guess
POMO: Yeah but it's like, I do experience it not only as an escape but as the opening of something that I did not foresee. I just see that something new comes into play when now it is shared with someone else and there's the possibility of more than what I calculate to be possible so…
BO: That's beautiful.
POMO: This is why I’m not in despair. Like, yes I’m frustrated. I rip my hair out some days. But I am not in despair right now.
BO: Well that’s the worst thing you could do…is to succumb to it.
POMO: That's why I think, yes, let’s talk about it…let's generate these conversations…