Sorry for leaving this post until now, but it was intelligent and well argued, so I needed to treat it with some respect!
I believe I can answer your concerns by pointing out that “high/low brow” is not a value judgement, it is a category judgement. And I may well be a bit elitist about what I would fit into high brow, but no film would ever be in that category. And I used to subscribe to film four!
Ah, but the SDMB Slob Reform Club is busy at a meeting with the SDMB Procrasinator’s Club, learning new and improved ways to put off cleaning the curtains.
…If only the SDMB Weight Loss Club didn’t attract so many bulimic kittens, we’d be on top of it, really!
I don’t have any evidence; all I have is my opinion. I’m not really interested in whether anyone else believes it, but I’m right, you know it, and I know it. So enjoy the rest of your 30 days. Don’t pay the 15 bucks unless you’ve got a clean IP address, and then try not to get caught. See you around the Boards, until then.
Well, then, you’re using the term “high brow” in a very odd way, if, say, discussions of Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia or film adaptations of Shakespeare can’t count. Why don’t you tell us what you mean by “high brow” and we can go from there?
I will…tentatively…agree with this. There are definitions for lowbrow that are not demonstrably pejorative. But if you don’t tell us what you are working with we can’t know what you mean. All joking aside, Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky are undeniably low brow by any definition that isn’t meant as an insult. It is why I brought them up.
If it’s a discussion about the board, go ahead. Discuss.
Enlighten us as to what makes these threads low brow?
Or at least enlighten us as to why you are the arbiter of such things.
You come in, make a blanket assertion (emphasis on the “ass”), receive some good faith questions trying to get some sort of clarification, and then start melting down without addressing what the people who have responded to the OP have been asking.
Try responding to people other than the ones calling you a troll, and their claims will have less merit.
FWIW, I don’t think you’re a troll. Just an asshole. No offense intended, of course.
This isn’t unreasonable in itself; there are many concepts I grasp without being able to precisely formally define their boundaries. However, given that many of us apparently have a markedly different conception of the highbrow from yours, you may want to at least attempt to give some more clarification of your own conception. For example, going back to before, what is it that makes Lawrence of Arabia lowbrow?
First of all, there’s no such thing as “enough vagina jokes to satisfy a dirty old man”. Or, for that matter, “enough vagina jokes”. Or, for that matter, “enough vagina”.
Also, using folk melodies/motifs in classical music is quite common. Beethoven’s 9th has an oom-pa-pa town band section. Mahler’s 1st symphony has something that’s almost precisely “Frere Jacques”. And Dvorak’s New World Symphony has several folk melodies.
I am seriously impaired in describing clearly what I mean by lowbrow, but in general anything vaguely modern is lowbrow almost by definition. No films have yet matured enough to be highbrow (in that film as an art is still developing so quickly, although I’m sure this will hault shortly now that people are studying it!). Probably highbrow literature stops with 1984, if not before, for a similar reason (and there’s no great literature in that book, it’s good for its message, not its language).