The Wave

As I posted earlier, I have been venturing into Japanese flower arranging.  The pull of the Japanese minimalist aesthetic is very powerful for me, and I was first introduced to it in college when I took a survey course on Japanese art.  I have thought about it a lot, and I decided to write my professor a thank-you note about it – thirty years late.  It took a bit of doing to locate her – her name has changed – and in searching, I came across a talk she gave about this famous print by Hokusai, “The Great Wave.”  [Complete talk  here:  Totebags, Teeshirts, and Tableware: The Domestication of Hokusai's Great Wave.]

In her talk, she addresses issues of the commercialization of art, mass reproduction of images and commoditization for the consumer economy, cultural appropriation of icons, and the history of japonisme in Western art.  The latter has been known for a century among art scholars as an important influence on Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and other trends, but it was brought to the fore in the public mind with one of Thomas Hoving’s first “blockbuster” exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Among the ironies Professor Guth points out is that in Japan in the 1970s, Hokusai, and the Ukiyo-e genre in which he worked, was not exactly a universally lauded high point of Japanese culture.  Indeed, he was considered a practioner of a rather disreputable art form, and not a member of the high-art pantheon, not the least  because he worked in woodblock prints, a medium intended for popular mass consumption.  Ukiyo-e, the floating world, is the culture of the pleasure district, if not the red light district, and one of his more kinky essays in that direction is shown here:

Imagine this on display in a high-profile exhibit of loan works from Japan during its heyday as the International Bogeyman of the American economy!

Guth takes a broad minded view of the inevitable mixing of art and commerce, tracing the ways in which museums aided the transformation of The Great Wave into one of the most recognizable images of Japanese art today.  She dismisses the attitude of one critic whom she quotes early on as saying that museums must hold the line between art and mass-consumption, accepting the situation of today.  After all, anytime you put a person in front of art, you never know what kind of experience they will have.  An opposing view, whether from the right or the left of the political spectrum, decries the degeneration of cultural capital in favor of profit, spectacle, kitsch…etc., sharing a remarkably similar lack of confidence in the power of ordinary people to evolve imaginative responses of their own to art works.

I became aware of the ubiquity (highlighted at this blog) of the Hokusai print myself when I noticed the logo of a clothing line with which my son was obsessed during his skateboarding phase.  I don’t think I have seen another example of the appropriation of the image through such abstraction.

Everywhere at home??

One of these days, I’m going to visit the strange Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo, Italy. If I go, will I be greeted and led to the Hell’s Mouth by a sultry nymph with delightful long legs like this one?  Will my wife, and all my family obligations and history melt away, my middle age fly off to leave me youthful and desirable, my heightened emotions and vigor to be quenched in a unique, bizarre, erotic embrace within some weird grotto?

Not likely…This renaissance (Mannerist) oddity is nicely photographed and discussed in this fine book which I own.  I’ve known about the park for a very long time, but it seems that it was forgotten by Europe for centuries, until being rediscovered and somewhat restored by the efforts of Salvidor Dali and Mario Praz.  Popularity followed, and now it’s a “family destination” for tourists.

The image is from a catalog for Schneider’s of Austria, a clothing manufacturer, that was all shot in the garden.  What is going on here?  Their slogan is “Everywhere at home.”  This reminds me of the classic formulations of kitsch consciousness, i.e., that everywhere kitsch-man goes, everywhere he looks, he seems himself.  Thus, he is never open to new, genuine, experience.  Do I believe this?  Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

Fashion advertisement, and in this case, a pretty high-end, classy example of it, trades on all sorts of moods, half-understood cultural allusions, snobbisms, innovations, cultural quotes, etc. to endow the product, the look, with a feeling, a cachet.  Moody, hip, sophisticated, mannered, mysterious, cultured, refined and esoteric, sooo European…These are a few of the things this catalog has to say about Schneider’s clothes.  And you know what?  I buy it, all of it!  I want that raincoat I saw in Century 21!!  I’m a pretty unremarkable dresser, and I don’t think my appearance turns any heads, but I look at other people’s looks a lot.  Sometimes I become fixated on a woman’s coat, a man’s shoes, a purse, a pair of glasses…okay, it’s probably 80/20 when it comes to the time I spend on women/men – it’s not just fashion that catches my eye.

I’ve never been able to figure out or come to terms with exactly what is going on here.  It feels dreadfully superficial, even childish or stupid in a way.  On the other hand, it feels totally human and natural.  Does there have to be a moral evaluation involved?

I told my wife once about an incident when I was twenty years old, and I saw a Panama hat in a window of a shop in Europe during my summer travels there.  The “vision” of that hat stayed with me for days.  On the long train ride, I imagined myself wearing it in all sorts of situations – how it would make me feel all sorts of ways just by being on my head.  (Hats – the mediator of the man-sky interface.) She rolled her eyes.  That’s one reason I married her.  She keeps me somewhat tethered to reality.

Bring on La Maniera. Hail to La dolce vita!

Kitsch Police

I just purchased this resin figurine of the mysterious bird-postman in The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymous Bosch.  It came very nicely packaged with minature folding reproduction of the complete triptych, inside and out! 

The Kitsch-mavens, e.g., Gillo Dorfles etc., say that all transposition of art from medium to medium is inherently kistch, or at least risks it mightily.  Mona Lisas on bath towels, Venus de Milos in plaster replicas with ashtrays, collectible procelaine minature versions of scenes from the Old Masters…all kitsch.

Ich bin ein kitschmench?  Is there anything inherently kitsch in my enjoyment of this tchotchke ?  I think not.  I study art history, and I like it! There is no confusion in my mind about the relationship of this figure to ART and the works of H. Bosch.  I just think it’s really cool!

Check out the others avaialble at Parastone.

Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

When I am old, I shall write criticism; that will console me, for I often choke with suppressed opinions.

-Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand, 1868

I am a kitsch-man! Thirty years on, and it’s time to finally wrestle with the demon.  Sorry in advance, but those of you with an interest in kitsch are used to long-winded posts, I’m sure.

As an undergraduate, I wrote my thesis on “Kitsch in the Age of Mechanical Mass Production.”  My advisor loved it; my second reader said “I should just go and be angry,” and that it wasn’t enough of an art history thesis.  The chairman, following protocol when thesis reviewers disagreed strongly, knowing I was a refugee from the philosophy department, and trying to be helpful, gave it to the only philosopher in that coven of Anglo-American Empiricists who was interested in aesthetics, and he said it wasn’t enough of a philosophy thesis.  So much for inter-disciplinary thinking.  Well, I’m embarrassed to read it now anyway…

My interest in this topic was spurred by my encounter with the English version of this book by Gillo Dorfles while in high school.  It’s an anthology of materials on the topic of kitsch – I was fascinated to find that the stuff had a name!  I was particularly taken by the weighty Germanic metaphysical arguments of Herman Broch, especially when he posited kitsch as the anti-system to art.  I love rhetorical absolutes!  Seeing junk as part of an apocalyptic metaphysical wave, “vomiting over the entire world,” as one writer put it, I recall, appealed to my love of abstruse analytical reasoning and over-the-top ranting.  I adopted this point of view with gusto in my thesis, arguing that kitsch was not just a consequence of mass production society, but embodied its inner metaphysical principle.  Marx, Benjamin (obviously), Hegel, Adorno, Marcuse, Hauser, etc. etc…all grist for the mill.

At one point, I toyed with the idea of making the entire piece a philosophical meditation on the archetypal souvenir, the snow globe.  As Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man wrote…apropos of the falling snow…  Why do those things fascinate so?  The wonder of the miniature – a world in a world – a mini stage – the God-like perspective they confer on us – the urge to collect them?  What is it!

The dominant position on kitsch for much of the intelligentsia was for a long time Clement Greenburg’s essay, Kitsch and the Avante Garde.  He did soften his position against Academic Art in the end, but only a little.  (Academic art, art of the establishment against which the avante garde, e.g. the Impressionists, rebelled was often referred to as l’art pompier, or pompier art.  A pompier is a fireman, the late 19th century equivalent of our contemporary American Joe Sixpack, or the Hardhats of the 1970’s  I guess.)

Greenburg’s position is about as absolute as they come: He knows art, and so he knows what kitsch is. It’s the opposite of art.  Why did he get to decide on what is art?  Tom Wolfe asked the same question in The Painted Word written during the 70’s.  It’s a silly book, and Wolfe seems to think that whatever Greenburg wouldn’t have liked must be great art – a sort of anti-avante-gardism – so it really doesn’t clarify things.  Greenburg’s view leads to conceptualism in many ways, although he was foreshadowed by Marcel Duchamp who uttered the remark in the early 20th century that “retinal art” was on the way out.  (Was it he who said that the history of art was that of postage stamps?)

Sure, craft is important, I think, but that doesn’t mean that  someone who can draw well is a great artist anymore than a calligrapher is a great author.  Which leads me to my point, sort of…Why argue about what is ART and what isn’t?  Let’s just agree that art is what artists make, and artists are those whom society regards as makers of art.  Nicely circular – we’re not talking mathematics here.  The question to ask is, “Is this art interesting in any way?”  Thus, when I hear people in museums guffaw in front of stark white canvases and say, “This is art?” I think, “Yes, dear people, it is art, but it is very, very, boring art and I don’t blame you a bit for not wasting another second on it…”

Which leads us back to kitsch, which would never evoke that response.  It always seems to be art.  I would say, it is art, but not very good art.  Why seek to cast it from the select club of Art – is it insecurity about the membership of those things we secretly admire?  (This is what some call “guilty pleasures” , I think.)  The critics of mass-cult from the 50’s and 60’s, e.g. Dwight McDonald seem to be simultaneously elitist snobs, weak-kneed inhabitants of the citadel of culture under siege by barbarians, and fanatic partisans issuing a frantic call to arms.  To agree with them is to feel a member of a noble but doomed fighting band of brothers, bound to go down fighting the armies kitsch.

Of course, this sort of highfalutin criticism pertains only to work that is shown in fancy galleries and museums. Nobody seems to entertain much doubt about works like this  masterpiece on velvet.  We all love to sneer at them.  Of course, if your seven year old child said he or she wanted it in their room would you tell them, “No, no, dear, nice people don’t have such things on their walls!”  “But Daddy,  I LIKE it..! “  (Ah yes, “doesn’t know much about art, but knows what she likes”…Why is that taken as the acme of philistinism?  Isn’t the first step in appreciating art to know what you like?)  Another course would be to sigh and say yes, and hope that eventually the child’s tastes will develop and change.  And if they don’t, is there a moral stigma associated with it?  For avante-gardists, there is always.

This moralism in aesthetics of the anti-kitsch avante garde comes through in many ways.  Often it is deeply connected to sociological ideologies, such as the Marxist “false consciousness.”  How does one have false consciousness?  Isn’t one simply conscious…we hope?  One can be in error, but false consciousness implies a sort of drugged state of deception in which simple-minded people or superficially educated ones are lulled into averting their eyes from the nasty realities of economic exploitation by cultural manipulation.  There IS exploitation to be sure, but I’m not sure that people have a false consciousness about it as opposed to simply feeling that they can’t change it and therefore have no interest in the question…The highbrow avante-garde point of view is actually a variant on the eternal conspiracy theory mode of explanation, otherwise, of course, wouldn’t everyone just agree with us critics who see through it all?

And really, it’s hard for me to look at these classic pieces of kitsch and get all worked up about capitalist hegemony, culture of the dominant discourse, and the society of the spectacle.

I mean, it’s pretty harmless, and stupid at bottom, isn’t it?  And do we really care how people decorate their living rooms?  Must the personal always be political?  Maybe David Hume was right, taste is just a matter of experience and education.  We don’t have to pretend it doesn’t exist; we don’t have to surrender and say that everyone’s opinion is equal, but it is all relative in the end.  People who just don’t care about aesthetic sophistication just don’t care – let them like what they like and let’s not get snooty about it.  The world won’t end!

As for this sort of academic art,  this piece by the curator of the Dahesh museum in NYC quite nicely   punctures the pretensions of the oh-so-pure critics of academic kitsch.  The discourse of kitsch critics is filled with assertions that kitsch does not present “real ideas,” or “genuine sentiments,” and that it is false, sentimental, too easy, too eager to please, too dependent on consumerism or the market, etc.  These vague criticisms simply reveal the prejudices of the writers and just about all of them could be leveled against revered works of art in all or part.  We paint with a pretty broad brush when we take this approach.

With the wall between art and mass-culture reduced to rubble long before the Berlin Wall, some people took umbrage against the puritan intellectualism, the cult of art, preached by the Greenburg-ites and his crew at The Partisan Review. Susan Sontag is among them, and her Notes on Camp was one of the early salvos in the internecine culture war of the intellectuals.  She has been followed by the avalance of material culture studies. Let me go on the record:  I dislike Sontag, and I think her Notes is a piece of self-indulgent drivel.  There, I said it.  I am a snob as well as a kitschman!

Having trouble figuring out what I really think?  This kitsch business opens up so many cans of worms!  Let state it simply:

• I believe we create rational hierarchies of values based on our ideas of value, but these hierarchies are relative.  If you reject my values, you reject my judgments.
• There is no way around this.  The problem of taste and value is, at bottom, one variant on the question, “What is knowledge.”  I do not believe that absolute definitions exist, but neither do I think astrology is as good as astronomy!
• The only way forward is to discuss, exchange ideas, argue, and test our ideas against one another’s.  To say, “Well, that’s just my taste,” is to end the discussion.  To assert that there is no way to build a bridge of common values between two differing critical systems.  Most of the time, this is just bunk.  On the other hand, in extreme cases, it may be just so.
• Cross-genre judgments are hazardous.  Arguing that Goya is brilliant while Batman is junk is just stupid.  The aesthetic arenas within which these two exist are different.  First try and agree on whether or not Goya is a good painter, and Batman is a good comic.  Then evaluate the aims of comics vs. Romantic painting.  You may find out that it is pointless to try and compare the two.
• Intellectuals and normal people should be open minded enough to enjoy “good” work from all sorts of genres.  Some call this “no-brow.”  To me it’s just the mark of an educated and liberal-minded person.

My rant is done…for now.

Art by the numbers…

Today, in the New York Times, there was an article about an economist who has reordered the canon of art history by using market statistics and counts of the appearance of works in standard texts.  After his quantitative ranking is done, what will know about art?  That is, will it deepen or alter our appreciation of the works?  I think not, though it may have some interest as cultural history.  As Arthur Danto pointed out succinctly,

“I don’t see the method as anything except circular. The frequency of an illustration doesn’t seem to me to really explain what makes an idea good.

“Somewhere along the line you’ve got to find answers to why it’s so interesting.”

If you’re interested in art, that is…

Unmentioned in this article, is the fact that it seems to reverse Marx’s comment on history playing out twice:  first as tragedy, then as farce.  This economist is engaging in a travesty of thought, a tragedy of …well, maybe it’s just farce all around, but the farce certainly came before him.  Has he not heard of Komar & Melamid?  These two tricksters did extensive polling – market research – to discover what art people want and then they gave it to them!  That’s art by the numbers!!

Into the Vortex…

As I was walking back to my office during lunch, I passed a framing shop with a lot of junk in the window – “sexy” pictures, sports images, that sort of thing – and a four-panel image of a smiling child’s face done a la Warhol, like the image here. Who’d'a thunk it, but it is a popular thing – creating a Warhol image of your favorite photo, like putting your kid’s face on your T-shirt. You can do it here!

What got me going was the dizzying irony of it all. The utterly unbearable weight of all the self-referentiality. Warhol runs The Factory where he makes ‘art’ by churning out prints of ‘found’ images. He ‘ironizes’ art, or so the critics said. Did he care, or did he just have fun made lots of money too? His images become so famous that they are “popular” in the truest sense. Now people, wanting to add creative cachet to their pics dress them up in Warhol’s ’style’ to make them seem cool and artsy. Anyway, it’s so decorative.

Of course, Andy understood decorative – that’s all he cared about. He didn’t give a fig for art, so it’s funny that he is the Artist that so many think of now. Art rejecting art and pretending to be life so that years later life can embrace this antithesis of itself and call it art. Truly, we are in the fun-house of images and culture…

…but has it ever been any different? Isn’t that how visual and literary culture change? It just happens faster now. And there is less barrier between the haute culture and everyday culture. It has always been a dreamscape of images and references.

We Were Slaves in Egypt…

 
   

 

When I was a boy, I loved The Ten Commandments. I must have gone to see it three or four times in the theatre, and it wasn’t because I was transfixed by the holiness and religious import of the Passover story. No, I had a crush on Anne Baxter.

In the film, she plays pharaoh’s sister, Nefertiti, who of course, is also, or will be his wife…but it’s Moses she loves. Visiting his slave quarters where he lives with his devoted wife after he has shirked court and high life, she tries once more to win him back before he’s off on the Exodus. “Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses…!” Can you imagine writing that?  Unfortunately, I didn’t find a still of that scene, she in a stunning silver lame dress and lustrous black hair, enviously surveying the slave hut, a society girl who is risking all for her last chance at true love and happiness and hating the humble slave who has won a place besides Moses. Well, she needn’t be too envious: it’s obvious that Moses loves only his Calling now.

Personally, I think the influence of Art Deco is very clear in this film’s costuming.

 

Living Green

With the recent death of Charleton Heston, I took myself to the local library to check out the DVD of the last of his dystopian trilogy that I had not seen, Soylent Green. The other two are The Planet of the Apes, and The Omega Man. These movies have been commented on so much by so many fans and detractors that I don’t have much to add – I just wanted to see Soylent becuase I’d heard about it for so long…yes, I knew the secret before I watched. (Oh, yes, for those of you not in on it, the stuff that everyone eats, Soylent Green, it’s made out of dead people. If this surprises you, you haven’t seen or read much sci-fi.)

Heston was a remarkable actor – extremely limited and generally totally unconvincing, I think – but one of kind. Who else could teeter on the edge of camp in total seriousness? This film plods along as a police procedural after making a great start during the opening sequence simply by using a rapid montage of still photographs of life from 1900 to the date of the story, 2040. In a series of images, we watch the environment and civilization going to hell through pollution and overpopulation – there’s even mention of the Greenhouse Effect. E.G. Robinson, in his last role, does add some emotional heft to the story, but for the most part, it’s like a TV movie.

Omega Man, if you can take it, is even worse. The opening scene of Heston tooling around a depopulated LA in a 70’s gas guzzler is a good one, but that’s about the last cinematic plus this film has to offer. You might find the film of interest for its wacky, but also daring treatment of race – Heston has a sexual affair with a big-afro black woman. No question, that was pushing it a bit in the early 70s.

Jesus came to complete the Old Law, so after being Moses, it makes sense that Heston would be Christ too. He dies for his role in the apocalyptic sins of humanity (he developed the bacillus that kills everyone) but as he destroys with science, he saves with his science, and his blood. The final scene shows him being embraced in a pose taken from hundreds of Depositions, after dieing in a cruciform position and having his side pierced by a lance from the deformed zombies he is constantly battling. The saving serum for humanity is made from his blood itself.

Then there is Apes, which in itself, with its sequels, has become a cultural touchstone of sorts. How strange, I think, that the movie reverses the logic of the Pierre Boule original book.  (Boule seems virtually unkown in the Anglophone world, despite his large impact on pop culture in the 60s and 70s.)  In that story, Heston’s character escapes from the Ape planet and returns to Earth. When he steps out onto the tarmac, he is greeted by apes. Sledgehammer irony, but pretty good anyway!

Stranger still to think about the other blockbuster adaptation of a Boule novel, the Bridge on the River Kwai. In that novel, a British commander is so proud of and obsessed with the accomplishments of his men who have been forced to build an important bridge for their Japanese captors – the enemy, in case you weren’t around for WWII – that he kills a British commando sent out to destroy the structure. That dark irony was too much for Hollywood, so in the movie, he realizes his ghastly mistake and sets the charges to destroy the bridge himself just in time.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Raise your hand if you have seen this film – come on, I want to know who you are! Send me a comment! I saw this extradordinary work as a college student in the 70s – just that once – and I remembered it vividly. I just bought it from the Criterion Collection of DVDs, and, to my delight, it is just as amazing as I recalled it from 30 years ago!

Directed by Dusan Makavejev in 1971, it earned him – his words – “a one-way ticket out of Yugoslavia.” Remember-this is long before the Fall of Communism! The film was banned in the East Block for years of course, and it is not widely seen or heard of in the West. I posted about it briefy early in this blog. What is it?

I provide a brief outline with images of the film here. It is an attempt to convey the visually and intellectually dazzling experience it provides. For an excellent and lengthy description of the myriad ideas that crisscross throughout the film, visit this post on another blog.

The film begins as an investigation into the life of Wilhelm Reich, focusing on his later years in America. Reich was a member of Freud’s circle, but he was deeply interested in contemporary politics, appropriately terrified by the rise of fascism, and a Communist. Of course, with his belief in the connection between sexual repression and political movements, he couldn’t be a favorite son of The Party, and the Nazis reviled him as a perverted Jewish subversive. Reich linked the repression of the sexual drive with the appeal of fascism for the masses and he was an advocate for free and open sexual education of youth.

Opening credits – still image of WR – shot of his Orgone Accumulator

NYC waste incinerator – Reich on the way to prison – NYC streets 1970

In his later days, Reich went rather mad. He developed crackpot theories about cosmic orgone energy, which he believed was chanelled by humans during sex. The Orgone Accumulator was a box he “invented” to capture and focus this blue energy for therapeutic purposes. His books were banned, burned in New York, and he was tried and imprisoned through actions by the US FDA. Meanwhile, in the grungy NYC of the 1970s, some strange bohemian types roam about and don clothing and paraphernalia of urban guerillas.

Title pages of works by and about Reich – WR memorial in the USA

Local folks reminisce about the eccentric Mr. Reich – Cloud buster apparatus to manipulate
atmospheric cosmic orgone energy – Archival clip of the arrival of scientists arriving to meet with WR

The film provides some background on the earlier career of WR, but focuses on his deranged later period. How much more deranged than the rest of us was he? Was his insistence on the primacy of sexual force in human life nutty, or just common sense? He was certainly a fish out of water in the USA, despite his conversion to conservative politics. He voted for Eisenhower. Isn’t America filled with loonies like WR, setting up communes, founding Utopias, peddling revelation?

Milena’s story – Milena – Relaxing with a cigar and Karl Marx

Milena’s appeal – Sexual polemic for proletariat – Comarade Stalin

The fictional narrative of the film begins to be intercut with the documentary strand at this point. The satire, parody, visual and verbal irony are relentless. The language and artistic cliches of orthodox state communism are hilariously skewered, while the psychological documentary side of the tale is pursued with segments of primal-scream therapy and New York Reichian therapists discussing the role of body language, “body armor” to Reich, in repressing sexuality.

Milena, the Yugoslavian heroine is devoted to the ideals of revolution in the personal and political realm. She is a communist-feminist advocate of freedom, in love and work, but she has yet to find the right man with whom to build her personal sexual-socialist paradise. Leaving her cramped apartment so her voluptuous roomate can have her romp with her latest boyfriend, she goes to the terrace to address the assembled workers on the need for sexual joy in communist revolution. An annoying worker, who fancies himself eligible to be her lover, appears yet again. Archival propaganda films of Father Stalin (played by a look-alike) are intercut, the monumental socialist-realist kitsch providing a bizarre and hilarious counterpoint to the action.

Meanwhile, back in NYC – At last, a love interest! – Milena smitten

Back in NYC, the crazy guerilla wonders the streets, menacing with his M-16 to which he appears to have an overly passionate relationship. Milena goes to an ice spectacular with friends and, lo! she finds the man of her dreams! He is a god, and she is in love, at last! The show is an absurd and showy concoction of kitsch – part Vegas, part Moscow – to the choral accompaniment of childish songs of praise to The Party.

Soviet Man, Soviet Hero, Soviet Hunk

Milena approaches the lead skater – Vladimir Ilyich, like V. I. Lenin – and of course, he responds to her – she’s gorgeous, and so serious! After his makeup is off, he comes home with her to have some milk and cookies. The two women fawn over him, so handsome! as he talks on, sonorous, serious stupidities falling from his tongue as if rehearsed. Seeing a poster of Manhattan he says, of course, they have performed “miracles of production,” but they are unhappy, without our socialist souls.

What is that picture! - Communism means “in common” – Breakthrough?

The working class is the subject of history – Death to Male Fascism! – Free Love!

Vladimir notices a picture on the wall of Adolf Hitler sitting in the midst of a huge circle of admiring, adoring young women. What is a beautiful young communist doing with that on the wall? Milena explains that it is to illustrate how thoroughly the beautiful erotic impulse can be distorted and manipulated to frustrate the workers and to subjugate women to tyrannical rule of fascist males. The portraits of Reich and Freud look down from the wall. Do they approve?

Milena’s roomate – she left her clothes somewhere – brings the refreshments. Let’s share, we are all communists! Vladimir explains that a communist must be incisive, sharp, like a scalpel…The wall breaks, someone is coming through! It’s that drunken worker again, so unlike the Adonis-Vladimir. He sings and makes as if to march with his pickaxe and locks Vladimir in the armoire. Cut to Milena: She’s the only person in the frame…she’s holding the frame…she addresses US!

Releasing the Soviet Hero – Granny, Look! – It’s Stalin!

Bohemian “artist” molding a penis – Stalin speaks!

Milena frees her love from the closet – cut to a Soviet propaganda film: all eyes turn to Comarade Stalin! Then back again to weirdo NYC where we watch an artist do a plaster cast of a man’s erect penis so as to make a wax or plastic model of it. Turned out pretty well! Back to Stalin!!

Last stand for fascist architecture? – Primal scream – Reach for the heights!

Our weirdo urban guerilla continues his maneuvers. How fitting that he ends up in Lincoln Center, surely not an accident. The style is reminiscent of Mussolini’s projects – totalitarian kitsch is a different kind of International Style. (Philip Johnson, who had a hand in the project, was quite sympathetic to the Nazis for a while…) We learn more about Reichian therapy and watch numerous women come into ecstatic contact with their inner-orgone, or at least breathe very heavily. And finally, our urban warrior finds release with his beloved M-16 and sends off some celebratory rounds skywards.

Cloud busters – He thinks only of THE REVOLUTION – Is he blind!

“Your people are so interesting,” he says. “And the women?” she asks.

Back at Rancho Orgone, the cloudbusters are manned by the intrepid cosmic seekers. They look an awful lot like anti-aircraft guns, but they are designed to bring energy down to the earth, not to send destructive explosions up into the sky. Milena and Vladimir take a romantic walk by the not so romantic riverside. She tries, but he has eyes, ears, thoughts, only for the great revolution. “To die for love is wasteful, romantic, bourgeois. Brutally zoologic!” He lives only for his art in service to the glorious workers state! Does he not see the palpitating beauty right in front of his nose, aching for him to take her into his arms and bring them both to a revolutionary, socialist, common, fruitful consumation?!!! Is he blind?! Alas, she realizes sadly, he may be just that.

She makes one last try…and, STALIN!

She will try once more, desperately, without inhibition, to break through his emotional, intellectual, sensual armor and to let him know what she wants, what she needs, in no uncertain terms. She reaches for him and…he SLAPS her! And we see…Comarade Stalin! (How interesting – could this be a deliberate echo of the movie, Fail Safe?) Stalin looks on coldly, with world-historical understanding (the choir music swells!) The woman brings a supplication – he considers, will he grant it? The world on his shoulders!

Enlightenment – Anger – Telling it like it is!

She sees the truth now, the cosmic light energy of understanding is shed on her, through her. She will set the record straight and she is terrifying in her righteous, socialist, revolutionary, feminist, truth-telling. She lets that snivelling stuffed-shirt of the revolution have it with hits, verbal pummeling, and slaps. She knocks his stupid hat off!

“You want the revolution, but heaven forbid it should touch you!” She really gives it to him! “What’s a baby? For a man, a second, then it’s the woman’s job!” You want revolutionary violence, I’ll give it to you! She denounces him, his party, the revolution, and the entire kitsch spectacle of his socialist art extravaganzas.

At last, on his knees, he understands, she forgives and finds love…

…But in the end, the energy released is too much for this repressed agent of the people’s revolution. The male principle must reassert itself, achieve dominance and control of all impulses. He cannot allow himself to run free. The communist road must be followed! The champion skater, tumbled low by love, uses his skate to decapitate Milena with one terrific blow. Her head, examined in the morgue, begins to talk, to tell of her tragic experience with this “genuine Red fascist”. Meanwhile, Vladimir lets loose with a song of his sorrow. Her story will go on, and his.

The Masses are Revolting

“Sire, come quickly! The peasants are revolting!!” You know that old joke.

Carlyle, my constant companion these days, writes of the black, sulphorous mass beneath all society, slowly rising up, for good or ill. The masses, with their red Phrygian caps of liberty, planting liberty trees everywhere, staging revolutionary spectacles on the Champs de Mars that mix royal pomp, medieval papistry, and carnival.

Gillray pilloried James Fox, yet again, by showing him as a scruffy, farting, bloodied sans cullote (in fact without [knee] breeches, not without pants, but Gillray can’t let such a chance go) shouting Ca Ira!, [It will go well!] loosely translated here:

We’ll string up the aristocrats!
Despotism will die,
Liberty will triumph
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”

And we will no longer have nobles or priests
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”"
Equality will reign throughout the land

And the Austrian slave will follow it.
“We will win, we will win, we will win,”

And here is Gillray showing the zenith of the glorious revolution, speaking of stringing up people on the Lanterne as Carlyle refers to the lampost cum lynching post.

Was this the true birth of mass society? The rule of the mass-mob-demos-and consumer? Carlyle devotes a chapter to journalism of the day – it was everywhere:

One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is Journalism. The voice of the People being the voice of God, shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of France… Constant, illuminative, as the nightly lamplighter, issues the useful Moniteur, for it is now become diurnal: with facts and few commentaries; official, safe in the middle…

A daily newspaper! The Moniteur. Faithfully reporting the news so that I, centuries later, sunk in my collegiate ennui, deep down in the third sub-basement of the library, can happen upon its collected numbers, bound, gilt-edged, in tattered leather covers, and turn hopefully to the news of January 21, 1793, and read of the execution by guillotine of Louis Capet. (Where did I put that photocopy?)

And news for all!

Nor esteem it small what those Bill-stickers had to do in Paris: above Three Score of them: all with their crosspoles, haversacks, pastepots; nay with leaden badges, for the Municipality licenses them. A Sacred College, properly of World-rulers’ Heralds, though not respected as such, in an Era still incipient and raw. Such is Journalism, hawked, pasted, spoken. How changed…since the first Venetian News-sheet was sold for a gazza, or farthing, and named Gazette! We live in a fertile world.

Mass journalism, for anyone with half a penny. Posters, placards, propaganda on parade. The satirical prints of the day were more scatalogical than Gillray’s by far! The revolution sought to manage information, to create its record consciously.

And what of Ortega y Gasset, author of The Revolt of the Masses? He despised the mass-man, but like Flaubert, did not identify him with an economic strata, but as a type. (Flaubert: I despise the bourgeois in a worker’s smock as well as the one in a top hat!) Could it be that Ortega is writing about the genesis of kitschman?

He felt that history was moved by aristocrats, the Nietzchean supermen, the special ones, but why did he feel that? Because the movement of history was marked by the “progress” in things he valued. What about movement for its own sake? What if history just moves, never progresses? No theory, no subject class, just one darn thing after another. And the mass-men, the sans cullottes, Carlyle’s hero-men, they all play their part.

Middle-brow on risk…

I have noticed ads for this risk management outfit on my daily commute, and I think they are a good example of what cranky cultural critics of a certain age refer to as middle-brow degradation of culture. The ads have simple black and white images with quotations that will seem familiar to readers with some education. The fun comes when you think about what some of them actually mean…

My favorite shows a close-up of a woman in an image similar to the one here, with the words, “To risk, perchance to dream…” Oh, wow, an allusion to Shakespeare, Hamlet no less! By associating part of the cultural canon with their pitch, they give it tone and credibility. This sort of thing is rampant in magazines and newspapers now, as copywriters struggle to make each headline a catchy allusion to some part of the great subconscious cultural reservoir. The Village Voice was a pioneer in this, I believe, and even the NY Times, particularly the Sunday Times, has adopted it.

Oh well, too bad that when the Melancholy Dane was saying these words, “To sleep, perchance to dream..,” he was weighing not the advantages and risks of an afternoon nap, but the relative merits of committing suicide as a solution to his problems.

Sometimes being picky is fun.

Dominant Discourse – Cranky Rant

Time for my occasional rant. It’s things like this that make me feel like an utter crank, but what can I do but try to keep a little bit of a sense of humor?

The Academy Awards: I rarely watch them, that is, hardly at all, but last night I dipped in for a few minutes with my children and wife. The awards are the epitome of the Dominant Discourse in our consumer pop culture, are they not? (I’m waiting to hear from you dissenters!) Seems to me that they represent the entertainment-industrial complex’s elite, and the overwhelming air of self-congratulation is a bit, well, repulsive. Not too bad since they are all so good looking, and there is a lot of real talent there, but they lay it on a bit thick. Tom Hanks, backstage, camping it up a bit by exclaiming to some fawning set-up, “Yes, more fun to come!” seems to have his irony deflated and co-opted by virtue of being part of this industrial orgy of self-congratulation.

This is what an erstwhile anarcho-snob friend of mine used to call “la recuperation,” the ability of the Dominant Discourse to absorb and control even the elements of culture that try, or claim to try, to be against it. Who tries?? The Dominant Discourse, after all, it’s not what is right, it’s just what everyone is talking…about, even me. Remember, there is NO bad publicity.

And just what is it? Preoccupation with celebrity, which is nothing more than being in the news, i.e., talked about. Glamour, that heightened sexual allure, beauty, and charisma that comes from natural gifts helped along by a lot of skilled handlers, photographers, tailors and dressmakers, etc. How odd to see the craftsmen in this business, like the woman who won for best costumes – they seem quaint. They just want to do what they love doing, and they are good at it, and they work very hard. She spoke of Kubrick as her Master – how old fashioned!! I suppose the glamour magnets, the ones with any brains, and I suppose they are as numerous as in any other field, are the same way – they didn’t make the business, but what a business!

Yes, the business: it aims to be glamorous, and it is, but why does it so frequently seem so lame, which adds to the air of childish, faintly repugnant atmosphere of narcissism? The patter often makes no sense at all, like the journalistic hackwork in tabloids – it simply tries to sound as if it might be witty, but who’s really listening? Oh dear, I am ranting…

Well, I thought Ms. Diaz’s dress was rather striking, though I see it rated a Worst Dressed award on one web site. I liked the flower petal motif as a hem. But she herself appears to be turning into some material other than human flesh. (At least on TV she does.) It’s a strange element of getting older in this culture that I can watch celebrities age, as opposed to just seeing pictures of the ones who made it before I was around, and turn into plastic, celluose, or whatever preservatives they use:

And this dress was striking too – that color! But the movie, what little I saw of it was incredibly boring. You may say that Ms. Blunt is very beautiful, and she is pretty, but this dress would make any slim woman look like a goddess, don’t you think? Isn’t that the whole point of haute-couture?

Well, I refuse to be drawn into a debate over fashion, there are more serious fish to fry! I try to take the long view on such cultural ephemera, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Here is a Cruikshank print from 1812 showing “Dandies and Dandyzettes,” of the day, the extreme fashionistas of the time.

Oh yes, the serious stuff, here it is, Mr. Albert Gore winning the Academy Award for best documentary. Well, I guess he didn’t actually win, but the film was about him and his point of view on global warming. I have not seen the film, but I have read his book of the same name which I believe is pretty much word-for-word the film on paper. It pains me to have to say it – I like Gore, sort of, and I heartily wish he were president instead of the disaster we have – but the book is lamentably weak. The arguments and ‘evidence’ it presents are questionable, wrong, illogical, distorted, i.e. totally lacking credibility. He gives the environmental movement a bad name. You couldn’t make a worse case for the “global warming” advocacy block, I think. To me, it is very sad that this book/film/Powerpoint presentation is taken as a strong scientific argument for the “warming” point of view. The book is simply a polemic, frequently substituting religiosity for scientific method, and I believe it is quite dishonest in its presentation of some of the issues.

The most glaring example of his loose way with the truth is the question of what can be done if all the models and predictions are correct, and what will be the result? Gore finesses this question in the back of the book where he addresses frequently made objections, asserting that to take the position that it’s too late to do anything is simply to give up – No we must keep the faith (never mind the facts). In fact, all the models he champions indicate that it is too late to stop the alleged warming: the most we can do is hope to stop, slow, maybe reverse it generations from now. That’s a worthy goal, but let’s be honest and stop implying that the actions he urges on us will fix the problem now, which he often does say.

I could write a page by page critique of his book, but that would just put me in the camp of the Holocaust Deniers according to a lot of people. Or at least into the camp of the Petro-Industry hacks. Nobody is really interested in the details, which, of course, is where the Devil is. This is what is meant by the Dominant Discourse.