Discussion Main / WickedCultured

Quick inquiry into the nature of what constitutes cultured.

Would you consider someone well versed in Rock N' Roll history, as well as a record and high end guitar aficionado to be, "Wicked Cultured", within the prescribed definition? Like say he knew what value a 1960 Gold Top Les Paul was worth, and that a left handed version was exceedingly rare.

Thank you.

Hide / Show Replies

Removed this:

Real Life

• Arnold Rothstein, ruthless gangster and trailblazer of bootlegging during Prohibition, was a highly intelligent and classly fellow who recruited young hoodlums for his gang (he, himself, was not much older) and "showed them how to have style"; as Lucky Luciano put it, "he taught me how to dress". He transformed organized crime from petty thuggery into petty thuggery with manners and a fashion sense.
• Al Capone too. To quote from The Other Wiki, Capone led a luxurious lifestyle of custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink (his preferred liquor was Templeton Rye from Iowa), jewelry, and female companionship. His headquarters was also the high-class Lexington Hotel.
• Those Wacky Nazis:
  • Adolf Hitler. See also Mad Artist. Because biographies of the man tend to focus almost exclusively on his political career many tend to forget this fact, making it one of his still least generally-known but most prominent areas of interest, to the point of absolutely refusing to shut down German cultural centers such as operas even as late as the Fall of 1944. Much of his racist dogma actually revolved around the notion that only "Aryans" could create culture, and were thus the only hope of mankind. He also continued to describe and regard himself as an artist "forced into politics" for the latter part of his life. He could allegedly quote Schopenhauer at length from memory, read Shakespeare, was an avid Wagner fan who encouraged his staff to attend the opera on a regular basis, and was a reasonably talented painter. Judge for yourself. He was fairly good at buildings and landscapes, but downright horrible at drawing people. The art schools where he applied always gave him the same advice: his talents would be better applied in architecture rather than art, something he steadfastly refused to acknowledge. It was a common rumor for a while that he was very uptight and deplored nudity. In truth though, his own paintings included several nudes. He also spent a lot of time with Albert Speer discussing architecture (specifically, grand, fantastical designs for the new capital Germania, a rebuilt Berlin). It should be noted that as far as his reading goes he did so only to reinforce his own biased opinions and rarely read something that he disagreed with or didn't think he'd like, unless it proved useful to him. He never read critically and even attacked that way of reading, instead espousing an utterly anti-intellectual method of memorising large chunks of a piece and perverting their meaning to back up your arguments. He was good enough at that to fool genuine intellectuals. His taste in art was pretty two-dimensional as well; basically he was cultured, but it was his own very narrow and shallow version of culture. He absolutely despised all cultural activities that weren't to his specific taste, and many unfortunate artists quickly found themselves thrown into concentration camps. Many others simply emigrated the country during the 1930s, all but sterilizing if not outright destroying the German cultural scene.
  • Alfred Rosenberg studied art and architecture at university, and had a wide knowledge of "scientific" racism. He was one of the very few official ideologues of National Socialism. He was also the one who created the ideological bases of racial laws and, as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, organized the deportation of countless Jews, Communists and Slavs. Ironically enough, his writings - especially The Myth of the 20th Century, his magnum opus - were regarded near-universally as absolute garbage, and that opinion includes most high-ranking Nazis. Hitler himself even called it "plagiarized, pasted together nonsense". And that coming from the man who wrote the virtually unreadable Mein Kampf.
• Josef Stalin was also a poet, and apparently a very good one (in Georgian, anyway). He was also a botanist as a hobby and despite rampant censorship a keen literary critic (his notes were once shown to some professional critics- they were impressed) who appreciated a lot of the stuff he felt compelled to outlaw. He wined and dined with the finest artists, authors and directors in Soviet Russia (who weren't in the Gulag) and again both sides seemed to know what they were talking about. He was also called, by one recent biographer, "the most well-read Russian leader since Catherine the Great, including Lenin", on account of his volumouness library, with hundreds of books on near on every subject, filled to the brim with his scribbled thoughts no less, just to show hes thinking while hes reading.
• Saddam Hussein is many things. One you will not expect is that he wrote poetry, as one of his favorite pasttimes.

Eh, there's just too much risk for flamewars present in the real-life section.

Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows. Hide / Show Replies