As Ipostedearlier, 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.
My apologies to Dr. Seuss, but surely he wouldn’t have objected to being confused with Geoffrey Chaucer. I’m thinking of Hop on Pop’s line, “three fish in a tree?” The Merchant’s Tale involves exactly that, in a tree. Sex, that is.
I haven’t read Chaucer since college, but I picked up a copy of The Canterbury Tales in a bookstore, and was enthralled. The Middle English takes a while to get used to, you can’t get every word, and I don’t know how to pronounce it, but the rhythm of it carries you along nevertheless. The edition I bought has the most obscure words glossed in the margin, and the hardest phrases explained at the page’s foot so you don’t have to be flipping to a glossary in the back all the time. The link above is to an interlinear translation, but I find that annoying to read.
Oh yeah, back to the sex, er…the story. The pilgrims tell stories to pass the time on the way to Canterbury. The merchant tells one about a rich old man, January, who finally decides to get married. Of course, he is set on marrying a young and pretty woman, and he takes the time to find just the right one, named May. She consents – that’s the way things worked in those days. It’s not all that clear just how well the old guy performs in bed with his well formed young wife.
Things being what they were, and are, she and a young man in the household develop some feeling for one another. The old man goes blind, but he keeps up his favorite custom of making love to his wife al fresco in his walled garden with a gate. Nobody there but the two of them,
And May his wyf, and no wight but they two;
And thynges whiche that were nat doon abedde,
He in the gardyn parfourned hem and spedde.
and they did things there that they didn’t do in bed.
The girl and her lover get a copy of the key to the garden, and the next time she goes there with the old man, the young one is waiting in the tree’s branches. The tree is a fruit tree, a pear tree. January, May. A walled garden with a fruit tree, Eden and the apple (or was it a pear) tree? A blind man, without knowledge of his wife’s adultery. But they will eat of the tree.
The girl says she absolutely must have some pears, and the old man curses the absence of his servants to fetch her some. She has an idea – he bends down and she steps on his back and climbs up into the branches to get the fruit. Yes, she gets the fruit all right. Up in the tree, her love is waiting, and he
Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.
In case you missed it, throng is the past participle of thrust. Once again, the tree of knowledge has brought its bitter fruit to bear on man. I wonder also if this is an allusion to a famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions in which he recounts his youthful sin of stealing pears from a neighbors orchard. And the image of a woman stepping on an old man’s back calls to mind another medieval image of man humiliated by woman.
Meanwhile, Pluto and Prosperine are observing the entire business from a corner of the garden. Pluto vows that if May cheats on January, he will give the old man his sight back. He wants men to be able to see the evil things woman do to them. Prosperine, his wife, scoffs at his male chauvinist drivel, and sticks up for women. If Pluto gives him his sight back, she will make sure that May can talk her way out the impasse.
January gets his sight – the scales drop from his eyes? – and he is infuriated. May is ready with an answer. You didn’t see what you think you saw. After being blind for so long, it takes a while to get used to sight again. You’re confused. Really, you should thank me for being up here wrestling with this man – that’s what cured you! I was told that is the way to restore your sight!
Nothing doing, cries January!
He swyved thee; I saugh it with myne yen,
And elles be I hanged by the hals!” [He screwed thee; I saw it with my eyes
And else may I be hanged by the neck!]
May is a quick-witted girl. She replies that if this is what he saw, then her cure wasn’t as good as she had thought. Obviously, he still has vision problems.
So there we have it. A little sex farce set in a modern (for then) Eden. Woman tempts man again, the tree of kowledge brings sight, but having knowledge isn’t such a great thing all the time. Or do we really have the knowledge we think we do?
Lots of commentaries on Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, make much of the fact that it contains many allusions to Dante. Is this surprising, that an Italian artist should do this? No more than that an English speaking writer would quote Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
A long film, a rich film, a simple story. A man searching for…a way out of the shallowness, ennui, and spiritual desolation of his life. A beautiful woman loves him, but maybe she’s the wrong one for him. She needs a little more sophistication to wrestle him to the ground, so he grinds her up and spits her out. He is disgusted by his “friends,” but who else does he have? The man he seems to admire commits a grisly suicide. His father? He hardly knows him, and genuine article that he is, he has a few of his own illusions to deal with. Maybe Marcello is just too handsome for his own good.
At the end, he encounters again the beautiful young girl from a little cafe he met earlier. A profile like an angel. She beckons to him, but he can’t hear her across the waves. He goes back to his degenerate orgiasts who are leaving the beach where they were gawking at an enormous “sea monster” the fishermen brought in. Might there be a shred of hope left for him?
The most famous sequence features Anita Ekberg and the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Another beckoning blonde, but his is no angel from an Umbrian frescoe. It’s a Swedish-American pagan goddessoffering erotic transcendence. At least until the municipal authorities turn off the fountain’s water supply…
“He entered and took a seat in the pit, crowded between two unconscionably stout abbati; but luckily he was quite near the stage…Suddenly a whirlwind of applause greeted the appearance of the prima donna. She came forward coquettishly to the footlights and curtsied to the audience with infinite grace. The brilliant light, the enthusiasm of a vast multitude, the illusion of the stage, the glamor of a costume which was most attractive for the time, all conspired in that woman’s favor. Sarrasine cried aloud with pleasure. He saw before him at that moment the ideal beauty whose perfections he had hitherto sought here and there in nature, taking from one model, often of humble rank, the rounded outline of a shapely leg, from another the contour of the breast; from another her white shoulders; stealing the neck of that young girl, the hands of this woman, and the polished knees of yonder child, but never able to find beneath the cold skies of Paris the rich and satisfying creations of ancient Greece. La Zambinella displayed in her single person, intensely alive and delicate beyond words, all those exquisite proportions of the female form which he had so ardently longed to behold, and of which a sculptor is the most severe and at the same time the most passionate judge. She had an expressive mouth, eyes instinct with love, flesh of dazzling whiteness. And add to these details, which would have filled a painter’s soul with rapture, all the marvelous charms of the Venuses worshiped and copied by the chisel of the Greeks. The artist did not tire of admiring the inimitable grace with which the arms were attached to the body, the wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves described by the eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the face, the purity of its clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick, drooping lashes which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was more than a woman; she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation there was love enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties calculated to satisfy the most exacting critic.
“Sarrasine devoured with his eyes what seemed to him Pygmalion’s statue descended from its pedestal. When La Zambinella sang, he was beside himself.
Ex-Assemblyman Duvall says resignation not an admission of affairs
Former Assemblyman Mike Duvall officially gave up his seat Thursday as a recording of him describing graphic details of sexual trysts with two women continued to send shock waves through the Capitol. But the married champion of family values insisted late Wednesday that his resignation is “no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs.”
“My offense was engaging in inappropriate story-telling, and I regret my language and choice of words,” he said in a statement posted to his campaign Web site Wednesday night. “The resulting media coverage was proving to be an unneeded distraction to my colleagues, and I resigned in the hope that my decision would allow them to return to the business of the state.”
Duvall’s decision to step down came shortly after two Southern California news outlets broadcast a tape of the Orange County Republican bragging to fellow Assemblyman Jeff Miller, R-Corona, about having sexual affairs with two women. The remarks were recorded by a microphone left on during a break in a July committee hearing.
Miller, who lets out an occasional laugh during the recorded conversation, said Thursday that he “wasn’t really paying attention” as Duvall boasted about his lover’s “eye-patch underwear” and his penchant for spanking her during sex.
So reads the news. What more could I possilby add?
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin – He was the author of the great anti-utopian novel, We. Orwell admired it, and he thought Huxley had been influenced by (copied?) it. He died in exile, after his letter to Stalin gained him permission to emigrate rather than remain the USSR without the permission to write. Considering the contents of his 1923 essay, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, it’s a wonder he wasn’t just taken out and shot.
Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool.
The novel, We, is a memoir written by a prominent engineer in the glorious future One State in which human life is totally regulated. Mathematics has trumped all poetry. Individuals rejoice in their state as ciphers. Sex is proscribed to limited “private hours” regulated by the Book of Hours, and access to sex partners is free, and regulated with a system of recorded pink chits. The book is a little heavy with literary experimentation as it seeks to evoke the mentality of the future man who revels in his routine and lack of spontaneity, but it is prescient of so many things, in culture, in politics, and especially in the entire future of science fiction, that it amazes. It also has a very sharp and dark humor.
They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of secrecy, hiding like thieves … Why would all this mystery be necessary? Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe even criminal rites. For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of: we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly. I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor – and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE” …And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks: at any momen, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step – and save the One State from them.
Need I add that the “hero” is undone by love, by sex, by a femme fatale ? At their trysts outside the glass wall of the city, in the museum of the Ancient House, she wears a yellow silk dress. Her teeth are like daggers. She scorns the One State, respects nothing. She is irrestible to him, the engineer of the great spaceship Integral, the vessel that will bring the happiness of tyranny to other planets. She drives him crazy…makes him…human?
This film came to my attention on reading the obituary of Karl Malden – it got his career off on its very long run. Elia Kazan directed, Carol Baker and Eli Wallach starred as well. Tennessee Williams provided the story of corruption, repressed, seething sexuality, vengeance, race relations, and a whole lotta other stuff.
Some discuss this film as a comedy, a campy masterpiece, but I see it as much more than that. It’s a finely wrought drama about three strong, conflicting characters in a moral quagmire. It has humor, but it’s kind of sad.
Archie Lee is married to Baby Doll – her daddy wanted to provide for her as he was dying. She wasn’t ready for marriage, so he extracted a promise from Archie not to touch her until her twentieth birthday. She sleeps in the nursery, in her old crib, in a broken down plantation mansion that Archie Lee bought to convince her daddy he was coming up in the world.
Archie’s plans to expand his business and restore the house fall victim to Mr. Vacarro, a recent arrival who bought up some old farms and cottin gin mills and cornered all the local business, including Archie’s. He’s not well liked, but he is respected for his business acumen. During a party he throws for the community to try and smooth over hard feelings, Archie, the only local planter not attending, torches his mill.
Vacarro vows to get his own justice. He contracts with Archie to gin his cotton, and then moves in on his “wife.” Does he want to sexually possess her, or just get her support for a legal action against Archie? In the end, he does both, but he doesn’t “touch” her either. He knows she’s “just a child” and he has some decency – but there is, as he admits to Archie when insisting that he “took nothing else from her,” an attraction between them.
All the actors do a wonderful job, but Carol Baker, in her first big role, is remarkable. Malden is great, and a figure of pathetic fun, but she and Wallach are amazing in their sexual pas de deux. Much of the humor in their exhanges comes from her ridiculous affectations of proprietry, despite her obvious, wilting fascination with Mr. Vacarro. When he offers her a pecan nut he cracked with his teeth, she demurs, “Oh, Mr. Vacarro. I could never accept a nut that had been in a man’s mouth.” He replies, “You’ve got many refinements.”
Baker’s career was rocky, and she eventually left Hollywood for Italy. Before she left, her second husband fashioned her into blonde bombshell sex symbol, and she starred as Jean Harlow.
Some clips of my favorite scenes are linked below:
One of my favorite novels, and certainly at the top of my Balzac list, is this story of a titanic battle over a family fortune in the provincial town of Issoudun. The French title can be translated as The Fisherwoman, and that is how Flore Brazier, the character is known in town. More precisely, la rabouilleuse means a girl who assists a fisherman by using a stick to disturb the water in a stream so that the fish flee right into the nets. This is how the young Flore was employed by her guardian when she enters the story.
I don’t know why the book is called The Black Sheep in English. It leaves open the question of just who is the black sheep: Phillipe Brideau – the brutal, callous, murderous, thieving, totally dishonorable former soldier of the Imperial Guard; or his brother, Joseph Brideau – a sincere, talented, hardworking, but impoverished artist living in a crassly materialistic milieu that considers painting a career for failures, no matter how brilliant the practitioner. Flore, on the other hand, is the point about which much of the action revolves.
A child of stunning beauty, even in the abject rags of rural poverty in which she lives, Flore is ‘rescued’ from her fate by Old Rouget who happens upon her on a ride. His intentions in bringing her to his house are anything but honorable, but Balzac, as always, is tactful in his Olympian manner. He sees all, but needn’t tell all. The old man dies, and the girl, grown to a fabulously beautiful young woman proceeds to dominate his imbecile of a son. He is totally in thrall to her sexual power, and she sets up a comfy menage a trois by bringing Maxence, a local reprobrate of a magnitude to equal Phillipe, as her live-in lover. Together, they scheme to get the dolt of a son to sign over his enormous fortune, accumulated by his hard nosed miser dad, to them. Sex is the lubricant that keeps their machinations going.
Well, the field of battle is set for the confrontation between Flore-Maxence and Phillipe. It turns out that Phillipe’s mother is the dolt’s aunt, so she has an interest in the family stash, although her brother, the dead Rouget, always claimed, without evidence, that she was illegitimate, and he didn’t speak to her for the thirty years she lived in Paris. Money, family, sex, city vs. country…everything!
Phillipe turns hero as he comes to Issoudoun to find a way to eliminate the influence of Flore and Maxence over his rich and stupid uncle. The town isn’t big enough for the two villainous rascals. One will have to go, and it will have to be in a box. And so it happens…
The suspense is great, the absolutely devilish brilliance with which Phillipe outwits and crushes the gold digger crew, and his subsequent destruction as he pursues his true corrupt nature, now with piles of cash to back him, is amazing. The mother is without a clue, nearly to the end, believing Phillipe to be her “good” son, and Joseph to be an ineffectual, if loyal boy, even as Phillipe robs her blind. The action and grasping morality of the characters is breathtaking in its brutality.
From Balzac’s History of the Thirteen, we have this novel about a coquette noblewoman who goes a bit too far. She revels in teasing men and making them think she will be theirs, only to dump them and watch them squirm. She meets her match in the smoldering General Montriveau, an idealized self-portrait of the author.
Once the General realizes that she is only playing with him, he concocts a scheme to teach her a thing or two – he has his men, initiates to the cabal of The Thirteen, abduct her and prepare to scorch her brow with a hot brand. Talk about scarlet letters! There is much knotting and unbinding of wrists and ankles as she is led here and there, blindfolded, to undisclosed locations before being deposited back at her party from which she was snatched. Her footmen are all drunk – part of the plot no doubt.
The General scorns rape as undignified – she falls in love with him, truly, after being totally in his power, power which he disdains to exercise over her. (He drops the branding idea when she instantaneously, under the influence of her helplessness, goes from ice-queen coquette to passionate adorer of him.)
Balzac is always very discreet, but the overtones of sadism, misogyny, kinky sexual passions, and brutal sexual warfare are quite strong. My apologies to J. A. D. Ingres for defacing his masterpiece, Madame Contesse D’Hausonville, now hanging in the Frick Collection in New York, one of my favorite museums.
La Torpille is the nickname of Esther Gobseck, the principal whore of A Harlot High & Low (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) by Balzac. Translated, it’s The Torpedo, an example of which – it’s a fish – you can see at the left above. Touch it, and you get an electric shock.
Later, naval mines were called torpedoes – touch them, and you are blown up! (Now torpedoes are self-propelled.) In the case of Esther, any man who saw her, let alone touched her! was stunned, knocked out, and totally in thrall to her. The elderly, ultra-rich, super-cynical banker, Nucingen, sees her by chance out for a walk alone in a Paris wood and is totally felled by love. He who loves only bank accounts!
What might these women have looked like? These images of fashionable, but respectable women from the 1820s give us a hint.
This is Gerald Amirault, victim of the child care sex abuse hysteria that swept the nation in the 1980s and 90s. Have you forgotten it? Did you think that witch hunts were a thing of the past, or a just a sharp metaphorical way of speaking about people who don’t like dissent? No. This was a real witch hunt. Child care workers were accused of all sorts of bizarre behaviors – animal sacrifice, flying, using children in Satanic rituals, orgiastic sexual abuse in underground caverns – and more. No evidence was ever found. Children were made to overcome their initial reluctance to accuse their teachers with the help of experts who led them to “recover” memories. Judicial norms were set aside in the interest of the children – “believe the children” was the slogan – and some lives were ruined before it all wound down. Amirault, was in prison until 2004, steadfastly refusing to confess – “impudence” as one justice put it – although all the other cases led to nothing but blasted lives and wasted money. The unanimous recommendation that his sentence be commuted in 2000 was rejected by then-governor Swift for political reasons.
How did it happen?
For parents so educated, it was possible to be convinced by social service workers, the prosecutors’ abuse investigators and other counselors that their children had daily suffered unspeakable atrocities–whose effects they themselves simply lacked expertise to see. It became possible to believe that their children had been tortured sexually, been forced to watch animal mutilation and to ingest urine, and been threatened with death for two years–and that the children could continue, nonetheless, to go to the school happily every morning and show no fear of their alleged torturers. Just after the first allegations against Fells Acres became public, the papers were filled with quotes from parents telling of their children’s love of the school and worry that they wouldn’t be able to attend anymore.
We really do have to watch ourselves closely – it is so easy to stumble into primal madness, the insanity of the spooked herd animals. Refusing to listen to rational contrary arguments and insisting that some tremendous moral issue is at risk if we even consent to doubt for a moment is one thing to avoid.
I like to post now and then about how silly our notions of ourselves are, the comforting thought that we are sensible and reasonable, but reading about this case makes me want to run screaming into the night.
My recollection of these events was stimulated by reading John Demos’ new book, The Enemy Within. Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer for coverage of this case – read some of her materialhere.
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
