Hidden Treasures

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica

Those who read The New Yorker know that the magazine offers weekly renderings of what’s going on in the cultural milieu of New York and its environs: theater, music (classical and pop), dance, art, et cetera.

And for more than a decade, the magazine’s listings indicate a devolution (or degradation) in the arts.

Music, classical and pop, have become poor examples of cultural progress. Hip-hop has replaced melodic structure and compositional refines, becoming utterings of the primitive lower classes, while classical works (opera and symphonic) have become compositional shadows of what once was brilliant creations using chromatic and diatonic techniques that composers today can’t muster or provide, resorting to noise and gimmicks to make what the refined elements of society accept as music.

Dance has become acrobatic exercises masquerading as gracious movement once exemplified in ballet and courtly gatherings.

But there’s something to harvest, and it’s this….

While devotees of UFOs get tired of reading about old flying saucer sightings and events, just as the upper crust crowd is bored with renderings of old classical pieces and moldy opera or studied ballet performances, there may be gold to be mined in elements of the cultural past, just as there might be opportunities to understand the UFO enigma in past sightings that haven’t been reduced to redundancy or hyperbolic overload.

I’ve added a few here recently, just as I’ve scoured music compositions and ballets that haven’t been exploited to death by organizational directors who unimaginatively present past art, music, dance, or opera to try and fill emptying halls or museums.

Scrounging around, like an archaeologist, among the dustbins of UFO accounts, one will surely find one or two fascinating episodes that out-rival recent sightings of lights or blips in the air, some assaulting the senses of U.S. Navy pilots.

The vapid music, art, and dance of today is not unlike the vapid sightings of things in the sky or waters around the globe, both (and all) trite and uninteresting, in every way imaginable.

So, don’t eschew past UFO accounts, those that remain esoteric in the literature, just as one shouldn’t dismiss the overly repeated music of Beethoven or the humdrum operas of Puccini or the art of the Renaissance.

There are treasures galore in everything if one digs deep enough to find them.

RR