Yet another effort, Citizens, if you would truly become [climate change] apocalyptic!

Thanks are due to President Obama for articulating the current End of Days scenario so clearly:

“The grim alternative… more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise,” 

He said it is our “job,” our “task” to avert it.  Duty, I guess.  For the children…of our children.  Sounds suspiciously like another prediction of which I am very fond:

We must arm ourselves with all the material and spiritual forces at our disposal … or else our culture is doomed to destruction. Extrapolation from our present condition … yields a vision of busting sewer mains and all waters of the world made as wormwood, unfit to drink. Mankind will be reduced to a primitive state of disunity, neighbor isolated from neighbor by vast surging cataracts of fluid, while the monument of our era’s accomplishments will gradually be submerged beneath festering pools of stagnant runoff. . . Men in their frenzy of despair and disbelief will turn the evil upon themselves, building houses at the bottom of hills, in marshes, and along oozing gulleys, while the Few Who Know will be the object of arrogant derision. And it is the folly of human inaction which will bring down on us this recapitulation of the Flood.*

*Hilton S. Korngold, “Toward an Interpretation of the Drainage,” Journal of Historicist Philosophy, 98 (October, 1972): 302 – 398.
Let’s see:

More severe storms… Not much evidence of that.  Climate scientists are very hesitant to say that a storm or set of storms can be attributed to climate changes, such as they are.  We might have more severe storms – that’s what many predict – but that remains to be seen.  Of course, it assumes that all their predictions are correct.

More famine…  We seem to have our hands full with famine today, and have for some years now.  Any scholar of famine will tell you that their causes have much more to do with politics and infrastructure than with weather.  Our record dealing with those two issues is rather poor.

More floods…   Another speculation.  It’s not as though we haven’t had a hard time with floods for a long time, and done precious little about it.  Are we supposed to think it’s a “real” problem because climate change supposedly is involved?  We report more floods now – everything is reported more – and there is more property loss because humans continue to build heavily in areas that have been and will continue to be flooded.  It could get worse, yes, but it’s bad now!

New waves of refugees…  You guessed it, the same response as above.  If we are not moved by the plight of refugees now, why is the notion of “climate refugees” more compelling?  Shouldn’t we address the problems we have now?  We might foreclose the possibility of worse ones later on.  For instance, if people had enough land to grow their own food on, they might actually plan for the inevitable bad years…  Just a thought.

Coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise…  Coastlines vanish, then reappear.  They just follow you inland if the sea rises.  It will be a different coastline, but that happens now, much to the dismay of the Army Corps of Engineers which spends billions of dollars trying to hold back the seas so that municipalities can make money on beach tourism and property taxes.  And just how much are those seas going to rise?  And how fast?  Must we take as gospel the most extreme projection, that assumes a “rapid ice-melt” of the Greenland ice sheet?  How likely is that?  Not very, given the recent data, but then, that’s just a bump on the road on the way to Armageddon.

Look, maybe the predictions are true, but if we are going to examine them rationally, they become less likely with each year.  Would you invest your life savings on the basis of a projection for 2050 that had been shown wrong for the period 2002 – 2013?

Dandy on the Bounty

Mutiny on the Bounty was released in 1962:  one of those monumental Hollywood debacles derailed by star-power, as with Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, and Cleopatra.  In this case, the failure was due to vast cost overruns caused by Marlon Brando’s mutiny on the set, and the coast of location shooting in the South Seas.  Still, who cares if the film made money?  It’s worth seeing for the spectacular set pieces and Brando’s remarkable and unusual performance.

There was a real mutiny on a ship called Bounty, and a film treatment from the 30s with Laughton and Gable, and the makers of this film wanted to set the record straight.  Instead of a simple good guy vs. evil guy plot, they wanted to show Captain Bly as he was, good and bad together.  Some thought that would make for a poor story that wouldn’t sell and anyway, Marlon Brando, the reigning supernova of cinema acting during the 1950s, hijacked the picture, effectively sacking a director and taking over himself, subjecting the script to endless rewrites, sometimes the night before shooting.

For those who are interested, there are plenty of insider memoir narrations to read, filled with Brando’s pouting, sulking, arrogance, narcissism, arbitrariness, and the reactions of the infuriated cast who had to deal with him.  It wasn’t pretty.  In the end, Bligh comes off as a man tormented by his lowly origins, constantly suffering slights, real and imagined, of his ‘betters’, driven to cruelty by insecurity and a lack of imagination, and sexually uptight to boot.

Brando’s portrayal of Fletcher Christian, Mr. Christian, is remarkable, surprising, and a bit odd.  We must assume that it was wholly a characterization of  his own:  no one else takes credit for it.  It is willful, and a bit perverse, but, in the end, brilliant.  As Stanley Crouch observed in this DVD review:

…Brando’s Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a character he interprets as a high-toned British fop who is more than mildly reluctant to face the sadistic inclinations of Trevor Howard’s finely drawn Capt. Bligh—a leader who mistakes sadism as a substitute for firm but inspirational command. Brando has a superb understanding of how much it takes for a witty, charming, and insubstantial man to stand up against the very order that guarantees his position in the world.

Indeed, our first view of Fletcher is of him climbing out of an ornate carriage, in the company of two elegant women.  He walks on board in a bright red cloak, and we see him only from the back, surrounded by the bustle of the grungy crew at work preparing to sail.

He introduces himself to the captain; all manners, grace, smiles, and suave superiority.  He glances around contemptuously at the miserable excuse for the ship he is to sail on, and uses his verbal facility to make clear to Bligh that though he is the captain, and he, Christian, will obey him, their relative worth as men is clearly the reverse of that hierarchy.

And there is that voice!  He speaks in what sounds at first like a parody of an upper-class-twit of the late 18th century.  Slightly nasal, a whiff of effeminacy.  That, in those days, was attractive to women of court:  it went with the clothes.  He is always decked out in pure white linen, and while in his cabin, he sits propped up by fluffy pillows.  He is a ladies man and a dandy.

Crouch’s remarks point to the political dilemma of Mr. Christian’s position:  he will not rock the boat if he can avoid it, despite his contempt for the vulgarian Bligh, a man who has no sense of how a gentleman should lead the common sort.  But he is a rebel in his soul, as are all the great dandies.  I wonder if Brando was familiar with Beau Brummel, and the critical writings about dandyism by Balzac and others:  if not, he instinctively grasped their essence.  Ultimately, Christian rebels against Bligh because he cannot stomach being commanded by such a brute:  it’s just too vulgar.  In the end, he tries to convince the men to return to England, face court-martial, and tell their story.  He’s convinced that they will be vindicated, but the men are not:  They burn the ship, and Christian dies of burns trying to put it out.  You have to wonder if he feels his exile on Pitcairn Island as a burden because he is cut off from society, forever branded as a criminal, or if he just cannot exist without an audience for his preening and witty repartee.

Some views:

Christian the gentleman, refuses to adjudicate between the word of a gardener and a seaman.  What’s the point?

Fabulous wide-screen shots of the Tahitians welcoming the Bounty, a complete replica of a ship of that day.

Captain Bligh is compelled to dance with the island princess to avoid offending the local chief.  He is humiliated at having his crew watch him attempt the feat.  Anglo Saxon commanders can’t dance.

Bligh won’t go ashore, and refers to the local women as sluts.  But he orders Christian to do his duty and make love to the chief’s daughter.  Brando makes the scene into a cruel and funny one:  mocking the captain’s sexual anxiety, mocking patriotism, mocking duty, and feigning resignation at what he must do.

Fletcher in love, or at least, satisfying his lust, as commanded by the Captian.  (The chief will be offended if the princess is spurned.)

The last straw with Bligh comes when he rations the water to feed the plants they are ferrying to Jamaica, where it is hoped they will provide a reliable food supply for the slaves toiling in the sugar plantations.

Bligh kicks the cup from Christians hand, and Christian strikes him, saying, “You’ll not put your foot on me again, you bastard!”

They say their goodbyes:  Bligh is set adrift in a boat with some supplies and loyal crew.  The film soft pedals the fact that Bligh executed a stunning feat of seamanship, piloting the boat over thousands of miles and losing only one man.  He returned to England quickly to report the mutiny.

Almost immediately, he starts to mull on what he has done.  Unlike the common sailors, he had a lot to lose, and now it’s gone.

He’s left with only common sailors and one officer to command, but he looks the part of captain.

The final scene, with Christian dying of his burns is tremendous.  We see the man, no longer able to face the world with the stance of a dandy, shocked at being told that he is dying.  There is nothing left.  He tries to sum up, but death cuts him off.

Baby Face

1933. Two versions:  before and after the cut for release.  Needless to say, watch the first one.

Barbara Stanwyck plays a working class urchin, Lily, grown up into a speakeasy prostitute, manged by her brutal dad.  He gets blown sky-high by his malfunctioning still, and after the funeral, Lily goes to see Cragg, one of the customers, but the only man who takes her seriously.  He’s a shoemaker who gets high on Nietzsche, and he fills her head with the idea of The Will to Power.  Her lack of drive disgusts him so he gives her  advice:  “Use men to get the things you want!”

Lily takes the advice and makes it to New York, sleeping with men all the way to get what she needs and wants.  She does quite well for herself.  Near the peak, she gets a set of books from Cragg, back in Erie, NY.  One of them gets her attention.

 

She takes her philosophy seriously, very seriously.  And she puts it into practice too!

The high point of the film comes when Lily is interrupted with her latest sugar daddy, the president of the bank where she was working.  Her former lover, the vice president, and the prospective son-in-law of the president, can’t stand not having Lily anymore after she jilts him for the big guy.  He knows he’s been replaced, but he doesn’t know by whom.  Look at that dress, one of many outrageous getups she wears!

 

He tells her to sit down, “I just like to look at you.”  And more, I bet.

He runs in, throws Lily aside, barges in, sees the old man…

…and plugs him.

Left behind in the main room, Lily calmly waits to see the outcome.  She hears the shots, then hears one final shot…

She goes to investigate.  She finds one man…but where’s the shooter?  The following sequence goes on for what seems like quite a while.  It’s silent, and very still.  She moves slowly through the rooms, looking, contemplating…

Pretty nice outfit for police work…but she hasn’t found him yet.  She moves on.

 

There he is…

Still silent, no words…nothing.  It’s eerie, and very powerful.

Slowly she opens the door wider to get a better look, while we just see her bare back, obscuring the view.  The sound gets louder here, as though the bathroom window is open and letting in traffic noise, but I don’t know if that’s intentional, or just a quirk of the old film material.

She shuts the door on the body…

…and we get a very, very long shot of her head, in profile, barely moving.

Finally, she calmly picks up the phone.  “There’s been an accident.  You’d better call the police.”

Welfare for the Wealthy?

Yesterday, I read a piece by Mark Bittman on the current state of The Farm Bill in Congress.  He notes that enormous sums are being directed to ‘support’ farmers (not all farmers) who are quite wealthy, and calls this “welfare for the wealthy.”  I agree with his analysis for the most part, only taking issue with his sarcastic references to “the food system,” and “industrial agriculture.”  Industrial ag, thanks to the Green Revolution, keeps a lot of the world’s population from starving to death, but that’s another discussion.  I am finding myself, however, very weary of the term “welfare for the wealthy”.

This term is used by liberal critics of government policies that favor the wealthy, those who clearly do not need our favoring.  It’s not just farmers:  the military-industrial complex is another target often tarred with this brush.  What bothers me so much about it these days is that it  sets up a false equivalency between the poor takers of welfare, and the rich takers of subsidies.  The point is, these policies must be bad:  they’re welfare!  But for the rich!!  We all know how bad welfare is.  That’s why we cheered when Bill Clinton ended it, at least as we knew it…

That’s all garbage.  Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), aka Welfare, goes mostly to children.  Mostly to white children, a fact that is lost on those who rant with Saint Ronnie about welfare queens driving Cadillacs and feasting on food stamps.  It was never more than a tiny part of government expenditures, and it did, and still does, what’s left of it, tremendous good.  I don’t see much in common between a program that gets food and income support to struggling families with one that is fine tuned by highly paid lobbyists to direct rivers of cash from Congress towards their clients for…not growing stuff?  Growing stuff where they shouldn’t grow stuff?  To pay insurance to the farmers when their ill advised crops fail, the ones they were subsidized for growing?  And so on…

The term welfare for the wealthy implies that the problem is welfare.  Welfare directs money towards those with the least resources and power in our society.  The problem is that those with the most resources and power have been increasingly successful in turning our economy, a collective enterprise, into their cash cow.  That’s their idea of farming.

Fórcola

The fórcola is the strange looking oarlock on the rear of a Venetian gondola.  One of those objects whose form reflects centuries of use and gradual design evolution. In a little shop selling toys and ornaments, I bought a 3-D puzzle of one from a friendly and talkative craftsman who told me that this particular design is a fórcola for a boat that is somewhat more sporty than a regular gondola.

For me, it’s the perfect souvenir.  It sits on my desk at the office, and I take it apart and reassemble it endlessly as I sit in my chair, barely listening to the droning voices during pointless teleconferences.

False-Front Fad

In architecture, the Renaissance was a bit of a fad.  Suddenly, the Gothic style represented barbarity and uncouth, crude, and deficient aesthetics.  Later on, John Ruskin would disagree, and deplore the wholesale abandonment of medieval styles and craftsmanship in favor of the reigning form of the classical temple front.

The changes in church facades show the faddish aspect of the Humanist wave in all its glory.

Here’s a church front in Padua:  simple brick, with the shape of a standard Roman Basilica – high central aisle with two lower sides aisles.

Here is a huge church in Venice with roughly the same form, but some gothic ornament added.

The Renaissance came, found facades of brick, and like Augustus and Rome, left them of marble.  Pagan temple facades abound, covering the brickwork of the Christian temples.  Architects worked for generations on novel combinations of columns, pediments, hiding the form of the basilica or reflecting it in the shape of the facade.  This example pretty much masks the side aisles with a nearly square front.

Eventually the thrill of imitating the ancients began to wear thin, and architects went in search of new excitement, including dynamic Baroque styling, and little ‘jokes’ that their sophisticated patrons would enjoy.  Notice the pediment over the main front door that is broken into three pieces, something that would have made Palladio vomit.

Ground-Truth

Bellagio is a beautiful place, set on a promontory between two arms of Lake Como, the Swiss Alps in the distance, lush vegetation all around, mild climate…no wonder Stendhal, Manzoni, and Virgil, to name a few, loved it.

Searching for the location of our hotel, after booking it online months ago, I saw this image on GoogleMaps.  A villa with a front lawn extending the width of the town?

Last week, I found myself there, walking that grassy avenue, the Vialone.  It was built by the owner of Villa Giulia, visible on the right, with formal gardens at the lakeside, so that he could have an unimpeded view of both arms of Lake Como.  It’s always a bit strange to find oneself walking terrain that one has previously only known from a map or aerial view.  Was someone watching me from above?

The Vialone terminates in a flight of steps down to the lake on the western side.

Walking the Vialone in the direction of Villa Guilia, facing east.

Rabbit Iconography

I noticed this image on the porch of San Zeno in Verona, a splendid Romanesque church.  Rabbits have a curious set of associations in our culture, don’t they?

• Cute and cuddly
• Pesky and destructive
• Fertile, too fertile
• Innocent
• Malign

Not sure what the Christian symbolism behind a rabbit being preyed upon is – I noted it on another facade in Venice, I believe.  One source implied that it alludes to the struggle of the human soul to elude Satan, but it is also true that rabbits sometimes represent souls in thrall to Satan.  There’s one in the lower portion of this detail from Bosch’s vision of Hell.

Strangers in Paradise

 

From Herman Melville’s Typee:

Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolators converted into NOMINAL Christians, that disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious, hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders, and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires, and cupolas arise, while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, and that too on the very site of the hut where he was born. The spontaneous fruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for the support of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon and appropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of the starving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which now touch at their shores.

When the famished wretches are cut off in this manner from their natural supplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows! But to no fine gentleman born to hereditary opulence, does this manual labour come more unkindly than to the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of heaven. Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself; and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminate his miserable existence.

But what matters all this? Behold the glorious result!—The abominations of Paganism have given way to the pure rites of the Christian worship,—the ignorant savage has been supplanted by the refined European! Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!—A community of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting orator! Nor has such an opportunity for a display of missionary rhetoric been allowed to pass by unimproved!—But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one half of their labours, why does their modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?—Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces, and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!