"All the Stones the Builders Rejected"
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Through a friend of my friend Shannon McRae, this wonderful animation of Barabara Ehrenreich's explication of the Happy People... I suppose my first encounter with the Happy People would have been in the 1970s. There had been experiments like the attempt to levitate the Pentagon, or my friend Tom's Whole Earth theories about mucus, but these thought experiments harmed no one and made great theater; most of us still understood the difference between reality and make believe. By 1976, the year Tom Wolfe published "The Me Decade", there was real money changing hands for the power of positive thinking. I knew some Erhard Seminar Training graduates intimately, and learned that my skepticism was not just a buzzkill, but a hindrance to any progress. I nodded and demurred while a honest-to-stereotype yuppie complained that his mother's cancer was "her own damn fault". She had given herself cancer-- not by cigarettes or swimming in chemicals, but by bad, cancer-causing thoughts. I dodged repeated invitations to attend an est seminar, and instead went looking for Chicago theater while my girlfriend spent her money becoming more "real"-- ironic phrase, now that I think of it. I'm not bitter about never getting real with Werner Erhard; instead I attended a performance by the Japanese Grand Kabuki its own self. Here Ehrenreich points out that the "think and grow rich" con doesn't just take foolish people's money anymore; it now contributes to our collective delusion. Hell, it's one of the building blocks.
“Of all wars, only culture wars offer the hope of sheer, unadulterated hilarity. Sex and hypocrisy were staples of farce long before America became a nation, and they never go out of style.” (Frank Rich)
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"We Maltese — we bichon maltais, the Roman Ladies' Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world." (from the novel # The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroeby Andrew O'Hagan)
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“[T]he constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre. ... The doctrine of original intent rests on a set of implicit assumptions about the framers as a breed apart, momentarily allowed access to a set of timeless and transcendent truths ...
... [T]he doctrine requires you to believe that the "miracle at Philadelphia" was a uniquely omniscient occasion when 55 mere mortals were permitted a glimpse of the eternal verities and then embalmed their insights in the document. Any professional historian proposing such an interpretation today would be laughed off the stage.” (Joseph J. Ellis, “Immaculate Misconception and the Supreme Court”, The Washington Post)
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"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did beyond amendment.... Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs . . . Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before." (T. Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816)
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“Rabbits are clever about manipulating humans and can seem stubborn about learning how to live in our homes. It helps to see things through rabbit eyes: a wire is root that needs trimming, a piece of furniture is a tree, a household is a rabbit warren with strict hierarchy and rules. Behavior Rubbing chin on things, such as houseplants, priceless armoires, Italian leather shoes. What it means A great misconception: It does NOT mean marking territory. It is a rabbit custom, like saying grace before a meal. In short, "One day I will eat you."
What you should do Give your bunny more sticks and branches, keep your stuff off the floor, and kiss the antiques goodbye.”
(from Rabbit Language , or: "Are you going to eat that?" by Carolyn Crampton)
“We’re becoming peasants again. Most of us. There’s the money people and the people around them, and then there’s you. But the rest of us, we’re peasants.” (A character in Adam Haslett’s short story “Night Walk”)
As the Man with No Name told Tuco, “there's two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig." If Great-Granda couldn’t afford the suit of armor, or wasn’t ruthless enough to take it by force, you probably belong to a peasant family. Sharecropper grandparents, in my case, first generation to go to college. Most of us were peasants, peons (a painfully acute sobriquet), and then the Black Death killed so many of us that our labor had to be paid for, and some of the peasants became yeomen, and things got marginally better. We were no longer subject to the random cruelty of the baron’s bastard sons or the droit de seigneur , and even a cat could look at a king. Small scale, the craftsman selling shoes or ironware, started lifting us out of peasantry.
By the time Adam Smith noticed the phenomenon, religious dissenters from the Church of England-- unable to send their sons to the posh Oxford and Cambridge—started technical schools. The new technologies made their children better skilled and more valuable than any spare aristocrat. The stout yeoman bought respectability by marrying aristocrats, as sure as Jenny Jerome’s American father married her off (with substantial dowry) to Lord Randolph Churchill.
A specter was haunting capitalism— not the specter of communism, though that would have its day as a way for the more rapacious peasants, like Stalin and Mao, to prey upon their own kind. No, this was the specter of the corporation: a moneyed collective that will prove every bit as destructive to our species as Mao and Stalin’s collective farms were to the individual.
These business cooperatives-- call them “corporations”-- are mercantile guilds gone mad. Corporation is to small businessman as labor union is to laborer. It seems an obvious corollary-- but instead, corporations paint themselves as defenders of individual liberty, while the labor union-- defender of a peasants’ fair share of profit and health-- is a tyrannical, slovenly mob. And the peasants ate it up, repeated it among themselves, voted against their own self-interest. If the corporate paradigm said shit was sugar, then crackers would be asking for a spoon.
Remember Heinlein's novel Friday in which corporations replaced the nation-states, even waged war on one another? I remember shaking my head at how far out the old man had become, almost as goofy as that time he predicted a religious dictatorship scrapping the Constitution of the United States.
Now I’m wondering if the modern corporation and the Corporate Man signal a return to the days of the pyramid builders. They’re all very proud of the culture that they’ve built, a cathedral built for no god but Mammon. Humans don’t like admitting they’re being played for a sucker, so the pyramid builder, he who sells his labor to a corporation, romanticizes his raison de’etre like a man romanticizes his mistress.
I'm guessing most tributes to Lena Horne will include the 1943 version of "Stormy Weather", but it's interesting to compare that young girl's intuitive understanding with a bluesier version sung later in life. Not a false caesura in either version, by the way, which ought to teach pop idols the difference between genuine emotion and sentiment, but probably won't.
The other two songs, "Moon River" and "It's Not Easy Being Green", I posted for myself. I'd like to know what went through her head while rehearsing "Green". With that voice and those impossible cheekbones, this woman could have run the table as Hollywood's Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Sally Hemings or the Queen of Sheba-- but in that benighted time, she couldn't even hang on to the part of Julie in Showboat. The studio cast Ava Gardner in the "controversial" role of a "high yellow gal" passing for white in order to marry the man she loved.
So Lena finally said to hell with Hollywood, went home to New York and became a chanteuse instead. Ironically this was a winning decision: Hollywood discards its leading ladies quickly, whereas jazz and blues singing, like painting, rewards longevity and depth.
“He had seen society in its three great phases—Obedience, Struggle and Revolt... and he hesitated in his choice. Obedience was dull, Revolt impossible, Struggle hazardous.” (Balzac, Pere Goriot)
“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.” (William Drummond, some old Scotsman)
“Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful—whether it’s as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one—and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. ... Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers.” (Melvin Jules Bukiet , ”Wonder Bread” in The American Scholar)
“In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be. [Robert Parker] wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.” (Obituary by Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal)
“As Juke [on a 1974 Lily Tomlin special], Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place.... The concert films are excellent examples of what the Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”... Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.... Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to.” (Hilton Als profile of Richard Pryor in The New Yorker
“So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind. The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen. To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience.” (Ragnell on her blog Written World”
“I think that's a big part of it — she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now. But there are a million reasons. I love that she's the DC universe's premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40's, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft. And there's a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She's just brilliantly conceived. And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we're at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn't love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?” (Gail Simone, current writer on Wonder Wonan, in an interview at After Ellen)
“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.” (Saint Francis)
“The largest single survey to date of serial killers found: 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as children; 46 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adolescents; 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adults.” (Human Society of the United States)
“When John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger head of the department that watches over theological orthodoxy (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF), it was in full confidence that he would curb the proliferating dissidents, not least the liberation theologians of South America who argued that sin could often mean not wrongdoing by individual moral agents, but the injustice of social and political structures leading to poverty and oppression. He soon earned himself the sobriquet "the Pope's Rottweiler". Theologians guilty of unorthodoxy were summoned to his inquisitorial office: some were deprived of their teaching licences, and others were excommunicated. ... Benedict... continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly pedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. ... The cause of the crisis, he said, had been secularism, and the temptations secularism has posed to the holiness of priests. The innocent majority of priests in Ireland... are infuriated by Benedict's implied exculpation of the Vatican and the papacy.” (John Cornwell in The New Statesman)
“Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information. “There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.” Studies of highly sensitive people show their delicacy is “domain general,” Dr. Wilson said. Not only are they “exceptionally moved by symphonies” and find graphic depictions of violence “too hard to bear,” but they are also sensitive to drugs like caffeine, and their skin is easily irritated by the wrong soap, sunscreen and fabric. Highly sensitive pigs squeal a lot; highly sensitive people feel a lot. Sure, it’s painful at times. But just switch on some Bach and I’ll squeal my thanks for thin skin.” (Natalie Angierin The New York Times)
“Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But [Bill] Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites.... He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public.” (Profile of the late Bill Hicks by John Lahr in The New Yorker)
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
