Tarquinn posted:

They're clearly too busy making their wealth trickle down on us.



... hey, why does it smell like pee??

Asterite34 posted:

Man, rich people used to at least patronize the arts, commission paintings and sculptures and poo poo. And it's not like rich people were nicer in Renaissance Italy, it was the Medicis and Borgias and other fuckers who were constantly poisoning each other and throwing orgies in the Vatican. But back then they sponsored the likes of Michelangelo and Raphael and other Ninja Turtles. Nowadays they throw their fortunes at Ben loving Shapiro to make whiny-voiced internet videos.

quote:

Thus the radical oversimplification is that, when times get desperate, those in power pour money into art, architecture, grandeur, even science, because such things can provide legitimacy and thus aid stability. Intimidating palaces, grand oratory, epics about the great deeds of a conqueror, expensive tutors so the prince and princess have rare skills like Greek and music, even a chemical treatise whose dedication praises the Duke of Such-and-such, these were all investments in legitimacy, not fruits of peace but symptoms of a desperate time. In an era when a book cost as much as a house (it really did!), and Florence’s Laurenziana library cost a bigger percentage of their GDP than the Moon Landing cost in US GDP, you don’t get that level of investment unless elites think they’re going to get something out of it. Just as today giant corporations fund charities or space tech because they get something out of it, publicity raising their stock prices, so a mighty merchant family might repair a church or build a grand public square and put their coat of arms on it, drawing investment and intimidating rivals.

Culture is a form of political competition—if war is politics by other means, culture is too, but lower risk. This too happened throughout the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance was ever-so-much-more-so in comparison, and whenever you get a combination of (A) increasing wealth and (B) increasing instability, that’s a recipe for (C) increasing art and innovation, not because people are at peace and have the leisure to do art, but because they’re desperate after three consecutive civil wars and hope they can avoid a fourth one if they can shore up the regime with a display of cultural grandeur. The fruits fill our museums and libraries, but they aren’t relics of an age of prosperous peace, they’re relics of a lived experience which was, as I said, terrible but great.

syntaxfunction posted:

My old housemate was *very* into poetry. He read out one of his poems at once stage, started wringing his wrists (literally, like who does that?) and said he felt it was too pretentious and not sincere enough. Apparently "yeah, it is way too pretentious" is the wrong answer cause he got huffy and told me he's been published in local zines.

Milo and POTUS posted:

What is wringing his wrists

Dick Fontaine posted:

goatface posted:

I wrote you a poem about a frenulum instead of working:

Frenulum, frenulum
Shredded by our love
Her lips so sweet
Her tongue so lithe
Her piercings lock up and I'm trapped between

A bestial screeching
Her head yanks away
Member so stiff
Now torn and slack
She spits blood and tissue, rejects human cuisine

Her soft and teasing hands
Through such blood and pain
She applies pressure
I get hard again
Blood flow increases and consciousness departs

I wake in the E.R.
They found me out cold
Soaked with dick blood
She left a note
Asking me to pay for replacing her piercings

goatface posted:

I wrote you a poem about a frenulum instead of working:

Frenulum, frenulum
Shredded by our love
Her lips so sweet
Her tongue so lithe
Her piercings lock up and I'm trapped between

A bestial screeching
Her head yanks away
Member so stiff
Now torn and slack
She spits blood and tissue, rejects human cuisine

Her soft and teasing hands
Through such blood and pain
She applies pressure
I get hard again
Blood flow increases and consciousness departs

I wake in the E.R.
They found me out cold
Soaked with dick blood
She left a note
Asking me to pay for replacing her piercings