Then and now

The sacrifice of men or animals on whom the burden of sin of the whole community is loaded is something quite different. We know of such acts from primitive cultures too.[...]They also have nothing to do with the materialistic and mechanistic thinking which seems so natural to us. That which distinguishes them from cult practices per se is an idea which must seem just as absurd to the scholarly mind of our day as all cultic matters do. This is the stupendous idea of redemption through a life which has taken upon itself the guilt of all.

This is a passage from Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Otto was a German writer, and I'm reading him in translation, of course. 

The book is primarily about the Greek god of harvest, winemaking, fruit, fertility, ritual madness...It's a long and entertaining list. Greek, but very likely adopted from peoples elsewhere in Eastern Europe or Asia Minor. 

Otto does not shy away from the fact that the Greeks, like most people of their era, did not just worship their gods in the temple but made sacrifices to them, including human sacrifice. From our present perspective the practice looks barbaric. And I certainly wouldn't advocate bringing it back. But they had an understanding of what they were doing and why they were doing it.

Funny ha-ha

Twenty or so years ago I remember a debate flaring up about whether women are funny. Jerry Lewis was quoted as saying there were no funny women comedians. Christopher Hitchens went into a whole evo-psych thing about how humor was just a male tool for finding a mate or something. New Atheists, man.

Complicating this argument is the fact that most women who think they're funny aren't. The same holds true for men who think they're funny. The sexes may differ in the various ways they're unfunny, but it's hardly an earthshaking difference. Even funny people aren't all the time. As in baseball, anyone hitting one third of the time is doing pretty well.

Mu see 'm

A couple of recent articles seem to resonate with each other for me. There's this one:

This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics. In our acquiescence in this, we can discern the influence of Thomas Hobbes in forming our spiritual horizon.

And then this one:

Instead, over the last 20 years the museums and galleries, universities, media, agencies, and foundations moved to shore themselves up as the rightful experts on art by asserting that an artwork is not a site of numerous meanings but that which contains a single blunt message. One receives such a message publicly, not in private. It is delivered with the expectation of being acquired whole, and of being understood quite as the artist intended. This is utilitarian art: Its value lies not in itself but in its moral or political content. The majority of artists supported and promoted by the private foundations and government agencies, universities, and galleries today produce work of this kind.

Our age, especially in the last couple of years, does seem to have been possessed by a Hobbesian gloom. A sense that the people must be guided by their betters, lest their minds be full of folly and their lives be nasty, brutish, and short. Hence the forced curtailing of social and commercial activities, the obsession with controlling information and labeling some of it "misinformation, etc.

Under these circumstances it's tempting to attempt to build a priestly class that can speak to an for the rest, especially if you could be in that class. Honestly it's no surprise at al art has fallen.

Dimensional

 

Marisol Escobar was a Venezuelan artist who also worked in France and the US. She was justly celebrated in the 1960s, faded from public view after that, and then was justly revived. She passed away about six years ago.

You might say that her sculptures were influenced by Picasso. Probably more accurate to say that she saw the liberty that was possible with modern art, and took full advantage of it. Her work has a healthy sense of play.

A report

 

This was kind of a surprise, and a pleasant one. Mainly because Eno has been involved in some way or another with all of U2's albums since 1985, and Bono has been very exhibitionistic about Ukraine. Which is probably a matter of chasing relevance as time goes on. 

Of course everyone very publicly and loudly agreeing on something without brooking any opposition isn't limited to one issue. It's gotten to be a norm in the past few years.

Rise and fall

Someone I know and ran into today had heard about the heat. I'd heard about it too, from a bank teller yesterday, who'd told me they were talking about it hitting 90. So the friend I met today was looking to get all their errands done before it got too hot. (Laundry was out. She didn't want to get caught in a laundromat if it would be subtropical outside.)

I don't know if it actually hit the nineties. It did get pretty hot, enough to make you get a little hazy, when I was coming home from grocery shopping. And now that we're well into night it feels a little more reasonable, which is a relief.

My parties have all the big names and I greet them with the widest smile

The subject of celebrity didn't used to interest me much, at least not within itself. It just seemed to be something that was there, not really worth questioning or celebrating.

If I think about it more, it's because things have changed all around. Given a wider array of platforms, famous people are sharing their opinions much more often on average than they used to. And to a creepy extent, they all seem to have the same opinions. You get the occasional outlier, like Evangeline Lilly supporting the Canadian truckers (a gutsy choice, and I wonder if the baffling amount of hate she and her character got when she starred on Lost helped prep her.) But by and large you hear the same things, often the same exact words.

Caitlin Johnstone has noticed this phenomenon as well, and some of the examples she cites are fairly appalling. She has a theory to explain it as well. There is, I'm sure, something to the idea that they've all basically been rewarded by the system, and so are happy to call for more of it. Some of it is simple conformity as well. Once your social circle has been narrowed down to a certain elite set it takes a certain strength of character to refrain from copying them.

It's shortsighted, though. What passes for leftism in the present basically amounts to "what if the Cultural Revolution but corporate-friendly." And when the peasantry is becoming more beset, you may live to regret declaring yourself a Bourbon.

Shallow world

 

The featured song was a big hit in 1981. It was also Blue Oyster Cult's last hit. I don't think you can blame the music. I mean, this is big, rousing stuff. 

No, the video helped make the song but hurt them. In the MTV era, metal and hard rock groups―which is certainly how BOC identified―got associated with a certain look. Androgynous with barely plausible deniability. Of course Ozzy Osbourne looked like the Midlands pub denizen he essentially was, but obscured that fact with leather and makeup. 

Anyway, Blue Oyster Cult had this Long Island housepainter thing going on and it just wouldn't do. Life is often unfair that way.

Saluting the emperor

You still see them here and there. People who still mask outside, when no one else is particularly close to them physically. Or while alone in their cars.

Many precautions either made no sense on their face at the beginning or were quickly debunked. But as a rule public health experts seem unwilling or perhaps unable to tell the public that the justification for a particular measure has passed. "Relax" is not in their vocabulary.

Hangin' with Herman

This has been a week for the books. When it started the radiator in my apartment was still on at least part of the time and it could be recommended that you wear a few layers when you go out. At the end of the week it's windows open and run the fan weather, and I was walking around today in a Hawaiian shirt and no jacket.

Maybe the earlier weather would have been more apt for reading Herman Melville's Piazza Tales. He is a somewhat autumnal author. But he contains multitudes.

Melville of course first became known as a writer of nautical adventure, although he didn't really see himself that way. The only nautical story I've read in this book is the eerie slave ship novella "Benito Cereno." Other tales do have their journeys, but they tend to be more internal.

Mistakes to learn from

Since I'd been enjoying the backlog of Monk I figured I'd check out another one of the USA Network's light entertainment shows now in Amazon's archives. Specifically I decided to watch the first episode of Psych, a show about a hustler with extremely sharp powers of observation who solves crimes and pretends to be a psychic. (Similar premise to The Mentalist, a CBS show from about the same time.)

Anyway, I don't think I lasted ten minutes. The hero was so annoying that when a bunch of humorless cops were threatening to send him to prison because they suspected he was the accomplice of some criminal or other, I was rooting for them.

The problem is personality, or the aspects of his personality that are being highlighted. The lead character being a Joe Cool with an "aren't I a scamp" attitude can get old really fast. Especially in detective fiction I think you need to find something else.

Partial review

It had been awhile since I'd borrowed a DVD from the library, but I did it again this week. Alas, it was brought home to me again that quality is a crapshoot. I mean quality of the DVD itself, not the movie or show on it. This week's movie wasn't a total loss in this respect, but certainly not a victory. Somewhere in the middle things started to freeze and audio dropped out, so that the very end comes without context.

The film was Cecil B. Demented, by the auteur John Waters. Melanie Griffith is a spoiled movie star attending a premiere in Baltimore when she's abducted by the title character played by Stephen Dorff, who aptly enough had also played Candy Darling in I Shot Andy Warhol. Cecil is a crazed filmmaker who leads a cult of cineastes, most of whom moonlight in a movie theater. He forces her to be in his movie, and while she's initially reluctant, she gradually gets so into the spirit of things she's willing to kill for him and the movie.

I took this movie out in part because I wanted to get that Baltimore feel, and you do see the city in this movie. There are some great comic moments and it takes a certain shameless bravery to do an ode to kidnapping and Stockholm syndrome when Patty Hearst is in the cast. As to how well the picture works as a whole I really can't say, because I didn't come close to seeing that.

Some of the unknowns in the cast went on to become big names. Michael Shannon is a huge deal now, but playing the set driver he looks like a grimy hillbilly working for rotgut and paint thinner. Perfect face for a John Waters flick, then.

Vicinity

The past few days I've been working a temp job. One I've worked before that pays pretty well, but that tends to make me grumpy because it has a tendency to take over your life for those few days. 

This morning I was going in early and took the bus. It took me close but the next street over parallel. So I had to walk through a side street. Now what I had forgotten if it had ever registered with me was the fact that the side street I was using houses a Planned Parenthood location. A group of men were walking by praying out loud. I walked past a bunch of graphic antiabortion posters.

In some circumstances a journalistic instinct or just plain curiosity might have made me chat with a few of these people or even accept a pamphlet from the guy trying to pass out literature. Not today, though.

Judging a book

I'm reading The Sleepwalker by Helen McCloy. McCloy, like a number of mystery writers who interest me (Stout, Christie, Dannay and Lee, etc.) started in the Golden Age and continued into the next era, sometimes called the Silver Age of Detective Fiction. Her signature character is Dr. Basil Willing, a psychiatrist sleuth and maybe the first fictional detective to model what we now call behavioral profiling.

Willing isn't in this book, a mystery thriller that came out in 1974. But the heroine, manager of a charity antique shop, is an interesting protagonist. She works with―in the words of the jacket copy―"Rebecca, who had the gentle self-effacing manner of a Nazi storm trooper." Really the Godwining is uncalled for, since in the book she's just an abrasive waif who's seen a lot of movies from the forties.

This copy is from the library's stacks and it's been through the wars. There are all sorts of pen and pencil doodles and scribbles on the pages. But hey, the text is still legible, so it works.

Big Brother is singing at you

It's getting late and I can't stay in too late, so I have to keep this brief.

Mainly I just wanted to repost this excellent rumination on the―and it beggars belief that I am typing these words about a real thing that exists―Disinformation Government Board.

Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.

And that gets to the heart of it, I think. It's not like deception and censorship are new to this government or any other. But when they're publicly labeled a top priority meriting their own bureau and nobody is supposed to notice anything amiss, that's dismaying independent of who is nominally in charge of it.

Fail better

Out of nowhere I found myself wondering if there were a puppet show version of Waiting for Godot. And so I consulted the Great Gazoogle, as it seemed like the kind of innocuous search you could trust them with. Anyway, I found this video.

It's not a straight adaptation, but whoever made it does seem to have read Becket. Also seems to be Irish.

This one actually uses Godot dialogue, acted out by cutout shadow puppets.