@Womp womp Alackaday! Modern youth…so jaded, so self-absorbed, so uncritically amused, so uncool. Sir/Madam, would that you and I were back in the prestigious barrooms and ateliers of Montparnasse, edifying ourselves with the tasteful, discriminating, and not-at-all-flamboyant intelligensia. O, refined, thoughtful cultural critique! But, wait: Man Ray wants us to witness a debauched spectacle characteristic of the epoch. How trivial! How shameful! How tawdry!

Yet, do not despair. Let us set our sights on a more respectable era, that of Lautreamont, of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud. Exalt the sage creators of high art! Exalt their fortitude in refraining from nonintellectual pursuits! Indeed, it was a disciplined regard for norms of taste which inspired Les Fleurs du Mal (roughly translated as “The Flowers of Things Generally Deemed to Be of Historical, Cultural, or Aesthetic Significance.”) Ah, the righteousness of cultural superiority! Ah, the academic dedication! Ah, the decorous abstinence from popular fashions and trivial pursuits! Ah, the lack of penicillin to cure that nasty case of syphilis you contracted from that whore (or one of the others)! Wait. Whores? Cabarets? Absinthe? Operas (and wanton actresses)? Dandyism? The subtle pleasure of aimless, observational wandering amid blur of a society in flux? How loathsome that, in addition to intellectualism, they dared engage in easy pleasures and lowbrow popular culture! Worse still, that their Muses were no more than the ignoble circumstances of their lives and their society. Uncultured hedonists!

Well, my companion on this moral-cultural sojourn, let us return to our dorms this Thursday night to contemplate the failure of our peers to share our highly-cultivated entertainment tastes. How fortunate we are to understand the nuances of college education! True erudition comes from a rigid unwillingness to experience and understand the breadth of modern life, from a denial of immediate pleasures, and from a retreat into an intellectual utopia of Great Culture.