Madame Pickwick Art Blog 2011-03-05T01:59:20Z /feed/atom/ WordPress Dave <![CDATA[spenser and the poetry of opposites]]> /?p=30283 2011-03-05T01:59:20Z 2011-03-05T01:53:45Z Continue reading →]]> Herbert Spenser’s achievement in “The Faerie Queene” was to embody the great antitheses of the Elizabethan era: both the magnanimity and grace of the age that inspired poets and sent adventurers around the world, and the frantic cruelty that degraded even the most civilized. He managed, beyond that, to resolve both worlds, creating a synthesis that mirrors Elizabeth’s achievement in creating the unity of the Elizabethan State. Spencer is the poet of opposites and their reconciliation. And to experience his struggle n reconciling the contradiction of Elizabethan life makes the epic books of “The Faerie Queene” worth reading. …

Queen Elizabeth I of England, the “Ermine Portrait” attributed to William Segar (formerly, to Nicholas Hilliard), 1585. Oil painting for William Cecil, Lord Burghley. (Hatfield House, collection of the Marquess of Salisbury) Read More: http://ansmagazine.com/Winter07/Cabinet

The Elisabethans stare from museum walls, strangely contemporary yet remote. There is a presumption that we should recognize in these portraits of Raleigh and Drake and Edmind Spenser, the prototypes of modern man, freed from the old patterns and relative simplicities of the Middle Ages and possessed of a sensibility similar to our frame of reference. Alas, they remain strangers. Specimens pickled in time. Despite the frank confident expression in their eyes, there is a problem in discerning distinct individuality. There is a contradictory juxtaposition; Faces of a man’s man, short hair and trim beards are at odds with the peacock display of their bright ornamented attire.

The Procession Portrait. Robert Peake the Elder 1590. Read More: http://www.ask.com/wiki/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I

Although we know the Elisabethans to have been passionate and volatile, they are portrayed with a stiffness and formality close to heraldry. There is a sense we are viewing heroes emblazoned on canvases, emblems of chivalry rather than unique personalities. The essential mystery of what it felt to be alive in the middle years of Elisabeth’s reign remains an unsolved enigma.

Edmund Spenser comes closest to unraveling the mystery behind these public faces, for his “The Faerie Queen” is a record of man’s mind responding to and being modified by the Elisabethan Age. At first, the journey through the poem seems daunting. From the first stanza we are in a strange, abstract world.

Sir Francis Drake wearing the Drake Pendant, a cameo of the queen. Gheeraerts the Younger, 1591. Read More: http://www.ask.com/wiki/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I

A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many’ a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield.
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemed, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

Like the Elizabethans of the portaits, the poet’s personality is elusive. The knight pricking on the plain quickly vanishes into that golden haze that surrounds the Elisabethan Age. The images that define “England’s Glorious Hour” is imbued with images of the queen addressing her troops at Tilbury, flame haired and dazzling, a silver corselet over her white velvet dress; Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe while the Armada sweeps through the channel; Raleigh’s absorbent cloak, Hilliard’s miniatures; Ben John son roistering at the Rose; the gardens of hampton Court; the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

Sir henry Unton. Like any ambitious Elizabethan he was, of necessity, a courtier who parlayed his friendship with the Queen's reigning favorite, in this case the Earl of Essex, into an appointment as ambassador to France. When Unton died abroad of a fever in 1596 his widow commissioned an artist to depict him amid the scenes, above, of ehat had been a totally exemplary Elizabethan life. Read More: http://www.esacademic.com/dic.nsf/eswiki/296439

Spenser belongs somewhere in this world, but he also belonged to another, darker world. This was the filth and stench of the London streets and a gang of blind beggars trying to club a pig to death; the constant threat of plague; Bedlam; appalling cruelty: men strung up, cut down still living, castrated and disembowled;Elisabeth at Kenilworth Park releasing a captured deer, but first cutting off its ears.

ADDENDUM:
Elizabethan Bear & Bull Baiting were immensely popular sports during the Elizabethan era. Even Queen Elizabeth was pleased to spend an afternoon watching these forms of entertainment. Bull baiting had been introduced to England during the Medieval period of the 1200′s – nearly every town in Elizabethan England had a Bull and Bear baiting ring. Seen as a great sporting and gambling event. Upper and Lower classes took part of it. A lot amounts of money were payed on the outcome of the these contests. Bearbaiting was where a bear was tied to a stake and four or five trained dogs would attack it most bears would walk away with torn noses, mouths and permanent scaring. Sometimes though the bear did not make it out of the ring alive. Bullbaiting was a lot like this a bull would be tied to a stake and be have dogs fight it until the bull died. Other sports included whipping a blind bear unlit blood was drawn. Read More: http://www.kidpub.com/story/lst-i-believe-your-doing-speech-animals-rights-and-stuff-right-i-may-have-wrong-person-oh-well a

Portrait of Maria di Cosimo 1. 1555-1557 Alessandro allori, Historical Art Museum Vienna. Read More: http://www.audreybmorin.ca/costumes/blue_dress/index.htm

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“There were three Ravens.”—The north-country version of this noble dirge contains some verses of appalling intensity:—
“His horse is to the huntin gane
His hounds to bring the wild deer hame;
His lady’s ta’en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
“O we’ll sit on his bonny breast-bane,
And we’ll pyke out his bonny gray een;
Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair,
We’ll theek our nest when it blaws bare.
“Mony a ane for him makes mane,
But none sall ken where he is gane:
Ower his banes when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.” read More: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27129/27129-h/27129-h.htm
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The medieval idea of an Ordered Chain of Being constituted a grand “unified theory,” actually a belief system: the Elizabethans believed in a hierarchical ordering of all existence from heavenly bodies to a hierarchical ordering in society with a semi-divine monarch at the head to a hierarchical ordering of human physiology and psychology. These hierarchies were connected by a complex of “correspondences.” Tillyard argues that Ulysses speech on “degree” from Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s most comprehensive document on the Chain of Being.

Of the “chaos, when degree is suffocate,/ Follows the choking,” which concludes Ulysses’ speech, Tillyard comments: “If the Elizabethans believed in an ideal order, animating earthly order, they were terrified lest it should be upset, and appalled by the visible tokens of disorder that suggested its upsetting. They were obscessed by the fear of chaos and the fact of mutability; and the obsession was powerful in proportion as their faith in the cosmic order was strong…. to an Elizabethan [chaos] meant the cosmic anarchy before creation and the wholesale dissolution that would result if the pressure of Providence relaxed and allowed the law of nature to cease functioning.”

This concept of order, and conversely the constant threat of disorder, goes a long way to informing many aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the histories and tragedies: among those aspects are Shakespeare’s translation of source material into the plot structures of his plays, the psychology of his characters, the imagery that informs their speeches, and their fate they must confront. Read More: http://www.wvup.edu/mberdine/Shakespeare/ShakElizWorldView.htm

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[An audacity of hope: art non grata?]]> /?p=30314 2011-03-05T01:54:05Z 2011-03-04T18:50:02Z Continue reading →]]> Or is it an audacity to call it art? Its audacity not to call it art. Peter Alexander Por’s recent   exhibit called Persona Non Grata- The Veil of History seemed to rile the back hairs of a large number of the religious community in Canada; the knee-jerk response showing how reactionary the burgher class tends to be. A popping good time was not had by all.  One of the paintings was of the pope riddled with bullets; another had Barack Obama nailed to a cross cast as a victim and crucified in the wake of special interests.

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2011/03/c7587.html''right up through Robert Rauschenberg and more recent Pop and post-modern manifestations. The works of these people sit in the great museums of the world, looking like punks in a parlour. And the avant-garde artists, many of whom had academic credentials, knew there was pleasure in this madness --- gathering, discovering, hoarding, looking for the perfect application, a wedding of chance and inspiration. André Breton in L'amour fou (1937) describes himself and Alberto Giacometti eagerly searching through Paris fleamarkets, as if in a dream, trying to follow their desire to the exact object needed for the completion of pieces they were working on. Peter is obviously in the tradition. Look at the accretions on his canvases, the toys and other gadgets, the wonderfully appropriate strip of decorative lace...'' read more:

But there is method to Por’s madness. Evidently, the creationist collars and flock fail to pick up any of the extra-rational qualities of the work. Or the humor. Name of the Rose anyone? Por’s ideas which ignore conventional taste and call into question the process of art making.derives from a long tradition: Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists.

Organized religion was not amused:Bezpala Brown Gallery president Darrell Brown said the gallery received about 8,000 e-mails in one hour from the American Catholic group America Needs Fatima which launched a web campaign against Peter Alexander Por’s exhibit “Persona Non Grata: The Veil of History,” running at the gallery from February 5 to 25. Brown first promoted the exhibit with a provocative press release called “Pope shot, Obama crucified at the Bezpala Brown Gallery.”

“Pope Benedict XVI’s portrait is riddled with bullet holes, a less than subtle expression of the hurt and anger directed at a pontiff and an institution that has abandoned its flock, choosing to focus on dogma while its subjects suffer and, in many instances, die from its archaic policies,” the release read, referring to the clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the Church. Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, called the exhibit’s message “very insulting, very misleading and inaccurate.” read More: http://bcc.rcav.org/canadian/491-sheila-dabu-nonato

tribute to the cathars.judy stoffman:Why would an artist waste his talent and attention on ignoble and depraved figures? Peter Alexander Por has lived through dark times. Born before the end of World War II in Budapest, when Hitler and Stalin were still ripping up Europe, he is a contemporary of many of his subjects. They have shadowed his life. Brought up as a Catholic, he is acutely sensitive to the great struggle between good and evil in the world. The existence of cruelty and murder offends him personally and he cannot forget it. It is as though he lacks the protective skin that most people have developed to be able to function.

ADDENDUM:
Ray Ellenwood:Consider Pope Innocent The Third. Not content to wield immense power in Europe, he grew impatient with a group of dissidents (the Cathars, whom he saw as heretics) living in the area of Languedoc around Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne in what is now France. These people had the effrontery not only to question doctrine, but to condemn luxury and corruption in the church. This was in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Innocent encouraged King Louis IX to mount the Albigensian crusades, essentially sending what is now the north of France against the south, cousin against cousin, in the first and only crusade of the Catholic Church against Christians. The armies enforcing the Pope’s point of view enjoyed his absolution and were given the right to claim the property of those they destroyed. Thousands of men, women and children were killed. The entire town of Béziers was wiped out….

don't mean the movie kind --- Godzilla or Hannibal Lecter --- I mean the real thing, the historical human embodiments of nature red in tooth and claw, powerful instigators of mass slaughter, the ones who make you want to believe in fairy tales about poetic justice and avenging gods. Peter Alexander Por has been living with a gang of these creatures during the past year, for reasons known only to himself, researching, looking for ways to depict them.-ray ellenwood

Dante knew what such holy men deserve. And what about that devil who shook the hand of Romeo Dallaire, or the perpetrators of genocide in what was Yugoslavia, or in Armenia, or Indonesia? It’s not always easy to get a clear picture of them. One man’s brutal dictator may be another’s Uncle Joe, even a hero or protector. According to the Globe and Mail of December 18, Hitler has only now been struck from the honour roll of the citizens of Dulmen in North Rhine-Westphalia, seventy years after orchestrating some of the defining horrors of the twentieth century, That may be why Peter’s monsters remain veiled, sketchy, missing colour and detail, with ambiguous lines somehow squaring them off in what could be a hopeless wish to define or confine them.

But one thing is sure: these personae are more than just non grata. Peter’s studio is full of signs that he is fascinated with, and hates viscerally, the kinds of powerful violence they represent. There, you see military targets bearing images of “enemy” soldiers, paintings of young men with big guns, sculptures where the artist has beaten plowshares (or at least pieces from implements such as a mitre saw) into mock-weapons, in a parody of the military/industrial complexes whose wicked, leaking bullyboys have dominated so much of the international press in recent days. Read More: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2011/03/c7587.html a

Anti Bullshit Cannon. 2011. http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/200462-peter-alexander-por?tab=ART+WORKS

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In an earlier interview with LifeSiteNews Brown said Por, “painted holes, he does not regard them as bullet holes – that was my view as to how it would be perceived too … by analogy, [they] suggest that this is a troubled institution. He was not in any way intending to incite hatred against an individual. He was intending to promote debate about the Church and its stance on certain issues.”

Por told The National Catholic Register that the portrait of the pope is not riddled with bullet holes but rather that the 37 holes represent a “visual pun” on Pope Benedict as a “holey” man.

“In a way, I’m a court jester. I’ve told the Pope his story about the sex abuse is full of nonsense or gaps, and those are holes,” the 66-year-old Por said.Read More: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/web-campaign-targets-bullet-ridden-pope-art-exhibit/
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Q. Are there ideas as dangerous to our modern worldview as an Aristotelian treatise on laughter would have been perceived in 1327?

A. Even our times have been full of dictatorships that have burned books. What does it mean, the Salman Rushdie persecution, if not to try to destroy a book? We are always trying to destroy something.

Even today we have this continual struggle between people that believe certain texts are dangerous and must be eliminated. So my story is not so outdated, even though it takes place in the Middle Ages. We are not better.

Even here, people are discussing whether it is advisable or not to allow certain kinds of information on the Internet. Is it really permissible to allow people to teach people how to poison your mother, or make a bomb, through the Internet? We are always concerned that there are fearful texts. …

…Q. In “The Name of the Rose,” there was a serious discussion of whether Jesus laughed. Do you believe that God has a sense of humor?

A. What is the strange and unique property of a human being? To know we are mortal … which is an important piece of knowledge, if not so exciting. And I think just because we are the only ones to know we have to die, we are the only ones who try to react by laughing. In this sense, if God exists, he has no need to laugh. But maybe he would smile … (laughs). Read More:http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/theodore-beale.html

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[black plague & neurotic gloom: no belief no deny]]> /?p=30233 2011-03-04T18:50:43Z 2011-03-04T11:58:13Z Continue reading →]]> Skepticism and timorous uncertainty marked the second half of the fourteenth century.The generation that survived the plague could not believe, but did not dare deny. It groped toward the future, with one nervous eye always peering over its shoulder toward the past. It was a kind of neurotic gloom, a state of mind similar to that which permeates contemporary Western society.   What arose from the Black Plague that began in 1346,was, among the survivors, a new skepticism about life and God and human authority. Within three years, every third man, woman and child in Europe was dead….

Pieter Bruegel. The Triumph of Death. "One of the deadliest pandemics the world had ever experienced is the Black Death. This bubonic plague outbreak have started in Central Asia and reached Crimea in 1346. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population, reducing the world’s population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. The plague returned at various times, resulting in a larger number of deaths, until it left Europe in the nineteenth century. Read more: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/136729_the-15-worst-killer-epidemics-in-history#ixzz1FUvhZRF7

Boccaccio: “Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial, especially since they wanted to bury each person in the family grave, according to the old custom. Although the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by hundreds. Here they stowed them away like bales in the hold of a ship and covered them with a little earth, until the whole trench was full.” Read More: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plague.htm

Yet the mark of the Black Death was seen not only in the cemeteries. The sharp fall in moral standards, noticed in so many parts of Europe at this period, was nowhere more striking than in London. Criminals flocked into the city, and chroniclers tell of the great increase in lawbreaking. After this period, the city began to enjoy a dubious reputation for wealth and for wickedness.

Froissart. Defeat of the jacquerie. "The Jacquerie was a popular revolt in late medieval Europe that took place in northern France in 1358, during the Hundred Years' War. The revolt centered in the Oise Valley north of Paris. These rebellions were known as the Jacquerie after the peasant revolutionary Guillaume Caillet, popularly known as Jacques Bonhomme ("Simple Jack") or Callet. The revolt was suppressed by French nobles led by Charles the Bad of Navarre." read more: http://www.lessing-photo.com/dispimg.asp?i=03080129+&cr=8&cl=1

One third of a continent’s population cannot be so quickly eliminated without considerable dislocation to its economy and social structure. One can expect to find conspicuous changes in the life of the European community immediately following the Black Death. Some traces of the scars will survive into the succeeding decades or even centuries. It is not questioned that the Balack Death did not so much introduce radical changes as vastly accelerate changes already underway. England had already begun to move from the manorial system by which the villein held his land in return for services rendered to a new relationship in which land was rented and services paid for in cash.

The sudden disappearance of so much of the labor force meant that those who already worked for wages were able to demand an increase, while the rest clamored to share in the freemen’s privilege. If the landlord refused, conditions were peculiarly propitious for the villein to slip away and seek a more amenable master elsewhere. Though the genesis of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 may be found far earlier, it was the Black Death that ultimately created the conditions in which rebellion became inevitable.

"During the time of the plague which was also known as Black Death many people believed that the Jews were responsible for this. Jews were accused of poisoning wells and were tortured to confess. This time in Jewish history became known as “the valley of tears.” Many Jews were killed by the plague and more by persecution. During this time more than 350 massacres of Jews were counted. " Read More: http://cobalt.rocky.edu/~douglas.thorne/Final%20Project.html

Any account of the Black Death that ignored its impact on the minds of its victims would be notably incomplete. People felt, fairly or unfairly, that the Church had let them down. It had failed to protect its flock, had forfeited its claim to special status. The decades that followed the plague saw not only a decline in the spiritual authority of the Church but also a growth of religious fervor. The second half of the fourteenth century was marked by resentment at the wealth and complacency of the Church and by fundamental questioning of its philosophy and its organization.

In England it was the age of Wycliffe and of Lollardry, a new and provocative anti-clericism. In Italy, it was the Fraticelli, dissident Franciscans who believed that poverty was the essence of Christ. The second half of the fourteenth century was a time of spiritual unrest, of disrespect for established idols and a search for strange gods. In the end the Reformation would have happened anyway, but the tempo would have been slower, opposition more intense, reaction more immoderate.

"Other than the deposition of Richard II, the Peasants' Revolt in 1391 was the greatest historical event to occur while Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. This image, by Jean Froissart, depicts the turning point of the rebellion. William Walworth, mayor of London, strikes down Wat Tyler, who led the rebellion along with John Ball and Jack Straw, in the presence of the young King Richard II. The rioting continued for some time after, but after the sudden loss of their leader and the subsequent dispersal of the main body of peasants, the revolution was essentially finished." Read More: http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/mdr4/chaucercolloquium/2007/12/angry_mobs.html

ADDENDUM:

http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture30b.html

http://history-world.org/black_death.htm

When the Black Death reached Britain in 1348, the Church had to suddenly explain why its own people were dying, when the plague was supposed to be killing only heretics, infidels, and nonbelievers. The Church was hard pressed to find answers, especially when people began to die quickly, many of whom had not received their last rites and were doomed to spend millennia in purgatory. Priests, fearing they might catch the highly contagious pestilence, would not even perform last rites to the dying.Read More: http://www.wowessays.com/dbase/ad1/bsw176.shtml a

Hans Holbein the Younger. Death and the Count, from The Dance of Death, c.1538 Read More: http://www.art.com/products/p14197292-sa-i2947228/hans-holbein-the-young-death-and-the-count-from-the-dance-of-death-c1538.htm

Jean Froissart. Peasant Rebellion 1358:Thus they gathered together without any other counsel, and without any armour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. And they then went to another castle, and took the knight thereof and bound him fast to a stake, and then violated his wife and his daughter before his face and then slew the lady and his daughter and all his other children, and then slew the knight by great torment and burnt and beat down the castle. And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein. These mischievous people thus assembled without captain or armour robbed, brent and slew all gentlemen that they could lay hands on, and forced and ravished ladies and damosels, and did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such, and he that did most mischief was most praised with them and greatest master. I dare not write the horrible deeds that they did to ladies and damosels; among other they slew a knight and after did put him on a broach and roasted him at the fire in the sight of the lady his wife and his children; and after the lady had been enforced and ravished with a ten or twelve, they made her perforce to eat of her husband and after made her to die an evil death and all her children. They made among them a king, one of Clermont in Beauvoisin: they chose him that was the most ungraciousest of all other and they called him king Jaques Goodman, and so thereby they were called companions of the jaquery. They destroyed and brent in the country of Beauvoisin about Corbie, and Amiens and Montdidier more than threescore good houses and strong castles. In like manner these unhappy people were in Brie and Artois, so that all the ladies, knights and squires of that country were fain to fly away to Meaux in Brie, as well the duchess of Normandy and the duchess of Orleans as divers other ladies and damosels, or else they had been violated and after murdered. … Read More: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/froissart2.html

http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa071798.htm

http://www.william-shakespeare.info/bubonic-black-plague-elizabethan-era.htm
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Daniel Defoe: It was thought that there were not less than 10,000 houses forsaken of the inhabitants in the city and suburbs, including what was in the out-parishes and in Surrey, or the side of the water they called Southwark. This was besides the numbers of lodgers, and of particular persons who were fled out of other families; so that in all it was computed that about 200,000 people were fled and gone.

It was now the beginning of August, and the plague grew very violent and terrible in the place where I lived, and Dr Heath coming to visit me, and finding that I ventured so often out in the streets, earnestly persuaded me to lock myself up and my family, and not to suffer any of us to go out of doors; to keep all our windows fast, shutters and curtains close, and never to open them; but first, to make a very strong smoke in the room where the window or door was to be opened, with rozen and pitch, brimstone or gunpowder and the like; and we did this for some time; but as I had not laid in a store of provision for such a retreat, it was impossible that we could keep within doors entirely.

However, I attempted, though it was so very late, to do something towards it; and first, as I had convenience both for brewing and baking, I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold, and which seemed enough to serve my house for five or six weeks; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese; but I had no flesh-meat, and the plague raged so violently among the butchers and slaughter-houses on the other side of our street, where they are known to dwell in great numbers, that it was not advisable so much as to go over the street among them.

It is true people used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that could be used were used, but then the poor could not do even these things, and they went at all hazards.

Innumerable dismal stories we heard every day on this very account. Sometimes a man or woman dropped down dead in the very markets, for many people that had the plague upon them knew nothing of it till the inward gangrene had affected their vitals, and they died in a few moments. This caused that many died frequently in that manner in the streets suddenly, without any warning; others perhaps had time to go to the next bulk or stall, or to any door-porch, and just sit down and die, as I have said before.

These objects were so frequent in the streets that when the plague came to be very raging on one side, there was scarce any passing by the streets but that several dead bodies would be lying here and there upon the ground. On the other hand, it is observable that though at first the people would stop as they went along and call to the neighbours to come out on such an occasion, yet afterward no notice was taken of them; but that if at any time we found a corpse lying, go across the way and not come near it; or, if in a narrow lane or passage, go back again and seek some other way to go on the business we were upon; and in those cases the corpse was always left till the officers had notice to come and take them away, or till night, when the bearers attending the dead-cart would take them up and carry them away. Nor did those undaunted creatures who performed these offices fail to search their pockets, and sometimes strip off their clothes if they were well dressed, as sometimes they were, and carry off what they could get.

If I may be allowed to give my opinion, by what I saw with my eyes and heard from other people that were eye-witnesses, I do verily believe the same, viz., that there died at least 100,000 of the plague only,…Read More:http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/defoe/defoe_part_1.htm

 

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[A note of dissonance: who cares if you listen]]> /?p=30257 2011-03-04T11:58:39Z 2011-03-03T23:05:10Z Continue reading →]]> Electronic composition. Its an odd contradiction: Impenetrable, inaccessible, yet highly influential. A notoriety built partly on his personal view that reinforced a belief that contemporary music was for an elite cognoscenti. His supporters of his twelve tone theories, including Stephen Sondheim, helped it gain a toehold in academia and in concert halls. Though he had many detractors, his supporters, countered with the argument that his complex music required greater involvement, intelligence and commitment from listeners than they may have been willing to implicate themselves with in the past.This helped set him up as an archetype of the impenetrable creator of music audiences aren’t supposed to like.

Picasso. Three Musicians. "You have to find musicians who'll be willing to perform your work, and who'll perform it well. That last opens a can of worms of its own, since performances of Schoenberg tend not to realize the music's potential. So one reason, perhaps, that people don't like Schoenberg is that they haven't really heard his work. One final observation. Atonal music itself isn't really a problem. It's common in film scores -- where, Adorno-like, it tends to depict tension or distress. So it's not just the atonality of Schoenberg, but his wild complexity that makes him difficult to hear (exactly as Berg declared long ago, in his famous essay "Why Schoenberg's Music is Hard to Understand"). But what that complexity means, and why Schoenberg had to make his music so very difficult ..." Read More: http://www.gregsandow.com/schoen.htm

His famous article from which much of his notoriety developed was “who cares if you listen” , kind of a musical rhetorical question similar to what physicist Richard Feynman must have thought when he wrote his book, “What Do You Care What Other People Think”, the screw you version for science nerds.   But, the typical  facile  appraisal of a composer whose music is far more human than we would like to admit becomes facile when the general population is asked to render judgement. Remember babbitt composed cabaret music and string quartets.

Babbitt:If the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical lifesmanship, he also will offer reasons for his "I didn't like it" - in the form of assertions that the work in question is "inexpressive," "undramatic," "lacking in poetry," etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous equivalents hallowed by time for: "I don't like it, and I cannot or will not state why." The concertgoer's critical authority is established beyond the possibility of further inquiry. Certainly he is not responsible for the circumstance that musical discourse is a never-never land of semantic confusion, the last resting place of all those verbal and formal fallacies, those hoary dualisms that have been banished from rational discourse...Read More: http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html image: http://www.furious.com/perfect/ohm/babbitt.html

Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen (1958) :This article might have been entitled “The Composer as Specialist” or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, “The Composer as Anachronism.” For I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. his composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy- and, usually, considerable money- on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. e is, in essence, a “vanity” composer. he general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. he majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ‘professionals’. t best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists. Read More: http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html a

Babbitt:I never went to computers. I could have started with computers with Bell Labs with Max Matthews in 1957. But you couldn't imagine what it was like at that time. With the turnaround time, you might as well have gone out and hired an orchestra. You had the punch cards and the mainframe computer in which you had to pour your work into. I knew enough about it to know that this was not for me. You'd be amused to know that RCA (who build the synthesizer) asked me to put out a record originally because all of their programs were highly mathematical. It was machine-language programs so I got someone else who knew more mathetmatics to work with them. So they put together a private collection called Music From Mathematics where an engineer there synthesized "A Bicylce Built For Two" and you get the picture. It's an interesting piece that he did- as far as I know, it's the first computer generated piece. Read More: http://www.furious.com/perfect/ohm/babbitt.html image:http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2011/01/31/portrait-of-a-serial-composer-the-milton-babbitt-documentary/

“Much of his output was for small-scale forces (partly out of necessity, as few orchestras could stomach his works either musically or financially). However, James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra did give the premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra in January 2005. Despite the severity of his music, Babbitt had a mischievous sense of humour, as titles such as Sheer Pluck (1984, for solo guitar) would suggest….

While he opened up many fascinating ideas, critics said that Babbitt – who described himself as a maximalist to differentiate from the minimalists – found himself in a musical cul-de-sac. As John Adams wrote: “Atonality, rather than being the promised land, proved to be nothing of the kind. After a heady first planting, the terrain [its] composers discovered was unable to reproduce its initial harvest.” —Read More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8296854/Milton-Babbitt.html a

"But Mr. Babbitt expanded on Mr. Schoenberg’s approach. In Mr. Schoenberg’s system, a composer begins by arranging the 12 notes of the Western scale in a particular order called a tone row, or series, on which the work is based. Mr. Babbitt was the first to use this serial ordering not only with pitches but also with dynamics, timbre, duration, registration and other elements. His methods became the basis of the “total serialism” championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers. " Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/arts/music/30babbitt.html image:http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/unapologetic-composer-who-pioneered-the-creation-of-electronic-music-20110209-1amya.html

ADDENDUM:
Milton Babbitt, 1958: The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and- most probably- not transitory. Rather, it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of “common practice,” but in a variety of universes of diverse practice. Read More:http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html

"# Babbitt used higher mathematics in the composition of his music. Mathematically, a Super Bowl fan must be able to add four numbers and decide whether the total is greater than ten. Extra credit is given to fans who can remember the rules for Roman numerals. This year was Super Bowl XLV. # Listening to Babbitt's music requires intense concentration. Watching football does not require much attention span at all. The plays are short and there is plenty of time in between for commentators to explain what happened - just in case you missed something. # Babbitt's music has little commercial value. Corporations spend millions of dollars for a few seconds of Super Bowl air time to sell their products. ...Read More and Image :http://mixedmeters.com/2011/02/milton-babbitt-and-super-bowl.html

This fall from musical innocence is, understandably, as disquieting to some as it is challenging to others, but in any event the process is irreversible; and the music that reflects the full impact of this revolution is, in many significant respects, a truly “new” music, apart from the often highly sophisticated and complex constructive methods of any one composition or group of compositions, the very minimal properties characterizing this body of music are the sources of its “difficulty,” “unintelligibility,” and- isolation….

"Now, if you're looking for reasons why the classical music audience doesn't like contemporary music, Adorno suggests a powerful one -- they don't want to face what's really going on in the world, and use the music as an escape. This is challenging, and also interesting -- far more interesting than the usual complaint from the contemporary music world that audiences are lazy, unwilling to pay attention. It's more interesting, too, than Milton Babbitt's self-serving notion that his music is by nature beyond ordinary comprehension, serving instead as some equivalent of advanced scientific research." Read More: http://www.gregsandow.com/schoen.htm image:http://blogs.loc.gov/music/2011/02/my-dinner-with-milton/

…First. This music employs a tonal vocabulary which is more “efficient” than that of the music of the past, or its derivatives. This is not necessarily a virtue in itself, but it does make possible a greatly increased number or pitch simultaneities, successions, and relationships. his increase in efficiency necessarily reduces the “redundancy” of the language, and as a result the intelligible communication of the work demands increased accuracy from the transmitter (the performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener). Incidentally, it is this circumstance, among many others, that has created the need for purely electronic media of “performance.” More importantly for us, it makes ever heavier demands upon the training of the listener’s perceptual capacities. Read More: http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html a

---His work profoundly influenced younger musicians such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. One of Babbitt's early students was the future Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim. ''I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts armed with all his serious artillery,'' Sondheim once said.---Read More:http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/unapologetic-composer-who-pioneered-the-creation-of-electronic-music-20110209-1amya.html image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubbu/favorites/page7/?view=md

Second. Along with this increase of meaningful pitch materials, the number of functions associated with each component of the musical event also has been multiplied. In the simplest possible terms. Each such “atomic” event is located in a five-dimensional musical space determined by pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration, and timbre. These five components not only together define the single event, but, in the course of a work, the successive values of each component create an individually coherent structure, frequently in parallel with the corresponding structures created by each of the other components. Inability to perceive and remember precisely the values of any of these components results in a dislocation of the event in the work’s musical space, an alternation of its relation to a other events in the work, and-thus-a falsification of the composition’s total structure. Read More:http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html
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MILTON BABBITT: You know why. I don’t have to tell you, I don’t have to tell anyone why it’s an inaccurate term; it’s an historical term. It describes a certain chronological period at the end of the eighteenth century and so it defines something. Well, after that it becomes normative; it becomes a kind of music; it becomes qualitative, quantitative, and it’s misleading. I rather like Wiley Hitchcock’s term. It sounds elitist, so I won’t offer it to you yet. I’ll tell you my anecdote about this. Many, many years ago at the Smithsonian in September, there was a huge, huge, huge congregation on the subject of American music. We were there for three or four days (I’ve forgotten now) and the Smithsonian decided to recognize every kind of music. There was ethnic music; there was non-ethnic music; there was music from every little corner of every little forest in North Dakota and I’m not exaggerating. Little groups who had their own kind of music, which they invented on their own kinds of instruments were all there. And something they called classical music was assigned to a tiny corner. The three people involved were a historian, a music critic, and I was the composer. And then there were people in the audience and Wiley Hitchcock was one of those, I tell you, I mentioned him for a reason. So we were there, talking and immediately the historian, who was Richard Crawford from Michigan, said “Look, I can’t stand this being classical, we have to do something with the word. It just offends me as an historian.” I said, “Fine. It offends me for other reasons. What are we going to use?” So then the discussion began—you can imagine what the discussion consisted of. It consisted of, first of all, the assumption that we were calling ourselves serious musicians. But then other musicians would say, “We’re just as serious as you are.” And of course, I don’t take a composer seriously just because he takes himself seriously, but there was nothing I could do about this, so we can’t call it serious. And then there were people that would call it concert music, which is what the Performance Rights Societies were calling it and then saying, “Well, we can’t call it a concert because every little rock group now gives concerts and they get 50,000 people and we’re lucky to get 50. So who are we to use the term concert?” So it went on like that quite literally and tiresomely for a long time, then finally one of Hitchcock’s terms, I said, “I don’t mind one of Hitchcock’s terms, which is cultivated music.” Well, you can imagine what that induced: the scream of elitism and we just gave up. But the best example of that is a magazine that likes to consider itself (I hope I’m not offending everybody), likes to call itself sophisticated, The New Yorker, just did an issue on music, did you see it? Read More: http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=1554

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/02/02/133372983/npr-exclusive-new-documentary-on-the-late-composer-milton-babbitt

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_babbitt.html

http://www.tntg.org/documents/Profile%20Richard%20Feynman.pdft

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[the black plague: groaning in sympathy]]> /?p=30214 2011-03-03T23:05:34Z 2011-03-03T17:54:09Z Continue reading →]]> The Black Death came out of Central Asia killing one third of the European population. And among the survivors a new skepticism arose about life and God and human authority.

Most fourteenth-century people regarded their doctor with tolerance and respect but also with an uncomfortable conviction that he was irrelevant to the real problems of their lives. They were, of course, ready to believe almost anything that was told them with authority, but their faith had been considerably undermined by the doctor’s own lack of confidence. Resignation or anguished fear was the only reaction his activities could reasonably inspire.

Pope Gregory the Great leads a litany procession in Rome in 590, praying for an end to the first pandemic plague. This miniature from the Tres Riches Heures of the duc de Berry was painted by Pol Limbourg, whose brothers Hermann and jan, witnessed similar proceedings in Paris during the Black Death Read More: http://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/WesternCiv102/102Week1.html

Boccaccio: “…They did not restrict their victuals so much as the former, nor allow themselves to be drunken and dissolute like the latter, but satisfied their appetites moderately. They did not shut themselves up, but went about, carrying flowers or scented herbs or perfumes in their hands, in the belief that it was an excellent thing to comfort the brain with such odours; for the whole air was infected with the smell of dead bodies, of sick persons and medicines.

Others again held a still more cruel opinion, which they thought would keep them safe. They said that the only medicine against the plague-stricken was to go right away from them. Men and women, convinced of this and caring about nothing but themselves, abandoned their own city, their own houses, their dwellings, their relatives, their property, and went abroad or at least to the country round Florence, as if God’s wrath in punishing men’s wickedness with this plague would not follow them but strike only those who remained within the walls of the city, or as if they thought nobody in the city would remain alive and that its last hour had come.” Read More: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plague.htm a

"A primitive gas mask in the shape of a bird’s beak. A common belief at the time was that the plague was spread by birds. There may have been a belief that by dressing in a bird-like mask, the wearer could draw the plague away from the patient and onto the garment the plague doctor wore. The mask also included red glass eyepieces, which were thought to make the wearer impervious to evil. The beak of the mask was often filled with strongly aromatic herbs and spices to overpower the miasmas or “bad air” which was also thought to carry the plague. At the very least, it may have dulled the smell of unburied corpses, sputum, and ruptured bouboules in plague victims." Read More: http://sylvaansuz.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-plague-doctors-garb/

Germany is of peculiar interest since it provided the setting for one of the Black Death’s most unpleasant byproducts. The Flagellant movement. It was the Black Death that turned the whim of a freakish minority into a powerful international force. At the news that the Brethren of the Cross were on the way, the townsfolk would pour out to welcome them. The first move was to the church, where they would chant their special litany. The real business however, usually took place outside. A circle was formed and the worshippers stripped to the waist. Their outer garments were piled inside the circle, and the sick of the village would congregate there in the hope of acquiring a little vicarious merit.

"The Black Death, earthquakes and clerical scandals brought about a return of the movement in 1349. It spread throughout Europe, reaching Poland, Denmark and England. Hugo Spechtshart of Reutlingen, a priest and musician, was impressed by what he witnessed, and transcribed the Geisslerlieder that he heard; his work is one of the earliest examples of a folk-song collection: the Chronicon Hugonis sacerdotis de Rutelinga."Read More: http://www.danielmitsui.com/hieronymus/index.blog/1855432/songs-of-the-flagellants/

First the master thrashed those who had committed offenses against the order, then came the collective flagellation. Each brother carried a heavy scourge with three or four leather thongs, the thongs tipped with metal studs. With those they began rhythmically to beat their backs and breasts. Three of the brethren, acting as cheerleaders, led the ceremonies. The worshippers kept up the tempo and their spirits by chanting the hymn of the Flagellants. The pace grew. Each man tried to outdo his neighbor, literally whipping himself into a frenzy. Around them the townsfolk quaked, sobbed, and groaned in sympathy.

ADDENDUM:

http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture29b.html

The public usually welcomed the procession of flagellants into their villages and towns since it served as a major event in the otherwise drab life of the peasant. But the flagellants also served as an occasion for celebration. Those who attended the processions could work off surplus emotion in a collective fashion. Although we may tend to laugh at the flagellants and read them off as lunatics, they did help medieval men and women cope with the ravages of the plague. After all, taking part in a procession served as an inexpensive insurance policy that God would forgive them. “Before the arrival of the Death,” writes historian Malcolm Lambert, “flagellation was one of the few outlets open to a fear-ridden population; after it had arrived, the worst could be seen, and there were practical tasks, such as burying the dead, available to dampen emotions.” (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 1992, p.221.)

"The divine and secular powers lost their authority because of them being helpless faced with the epidemic. This affected mostly those people who belonged to a cultural Minority in the medieval society. So there were many pogroms against the Jewish, which couldn’t be suppressed by the divine and secular powers and which led to the result that after 1353 only a few Jews lived in Germany and the Netherlands anymore. The pogroms started after there were rumours about the Jews being the cause of the disease and the confession of Jews, who told under torture that they were to blame." Read More: http://deathblack.wordpress.com/category/church/

By 1349, the flagellant movement came into conflict with the Church at Rome. This clash was perhaps inevitable. After all, the Masters were claiming that they could purge sinners of their sins, something the Church claimed it could do alone. The German flagellants began to attack the hierarchy of the Church in direct fashion. In mid-1349, Pope Clement VI issued a papal bull denouncing the flagellants as a heretical movement. The flagellants had formed unauthorized associations, adopted their own uniforms, and had written their own church statutes. Numerous princes in France and in Germany began to prohibit the entrance of the Brotherhood into their provinces. Masters were burned alive and the flagellants were denounced by the clergy. By 1350, the flagellant movement vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.Read More: http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture29b.html
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“We all recognize the late Middle Ages as a period of popular religious excitement or overexcitement, of pilgrimages and penitential processions, of mass preaching, of veneration or relics and adoration of saints, lay piety and popular mysticism,” wrote William Langer in 1958. “It was apparently also a period of unusual immorality and shockingly loose living,” he continued,…

"Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken Artist: Josse Lieferinxe (French, active 1493-1505) Date (Period): 1497-1499 (Renaissance) Medium: oil on wood" Read More: http://art.thewalters.org/viewwoa.aspx?id=6193

…which we must take as the continuation of the “devil-may-care” attitude of one part of the population. This the psychologists explain as the repression of unbearable feelings by accentuating the value of a diametrically opposed set of feelings and then behaving as though the latter were the real feelings. But the most striking feature of the age was an exceptionally strong sense of guilt and a truly dreadful fear of retribution, seeking expression in a passionate longing for effective intercession and in a craving for direct, personal experience of the Deity, as well as in a corresponding dissatisfaction with the Church and with the mechanization of the means of salvation as reflected, for example, in the traffic of indulgences.

These attitudes, along with the great interest in astrology, the increased resort to magic, and the startling spread of witchcraft and Satanism in the fifteenth century were, according to the precepts of modern psychology, normal reactions to the sufferings to which mankind in that period was subjected. Read More: http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture29b.html

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[tin drums:Rabbit angstrom and Doonesbury]]> /?p=30179 2011-03-03T17:57:47Z 2011-03-03T11:36:23Z Continue reading →]]> He was known more for his narrative story telling than illustrations that seemed secondary. Known more for an ostensibly corrosive pen that satirized and skewered the U.S. Government and the establishment behind it. The tyranny of the majority. Its hard to believe Garry Trudeau’s Doonsbury is forty years old. A lifetime of variations on one idea, that basically stayed in the box. Its all been summarized in a new book, make that  a brick of twelve pounds and 700 pages, which is less than 20% of the output. The comic strip filled a need for light tolerable dissent that would be picked up by the dailies and lent them a form of credibility under a thin veneer of calorie reduced anger. make that smirk.

If it was really radical he would be competing in an underground an alternative market of the Robert Crumb’s.Trudeau’s work is a distillation of of other currents and then sapped of their critical content.  It is a chronicle of modern times, that juxtaposes the white American profit motive where improbable caricatures are juxtaposed with real events.  In a way Doonsbury is a complementary character to John Updike’s Rabbit Redux. They are two sides of the dial. And in many ways thy are similar.Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the protestant middle-class descendant of the European burgher IS the reader of the daily.

Lynn R. Mitchell:What was Garry Trudeau trying to say in Sunday's Doonesbury comic strip? For those who have not seen it, the comparison in eight panels appears to be of Barack Obama with Adolf Hitler ... or perhaps it's supposed to be a contrast in the two men. In the world of Doonesbury, all is not always as it seems.... Read More: http://swacgirl.blogspot.com/2009/09/hitler-vs-obama-what-was-doonesbury.html image: http://loonpond.blogspot.com/2009/10/thomas-sowell-obama-hitler-south.html

What can be expected from a Yale Scroll and Key member?The inspiration is not Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” or Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cats Cradle”.  In contrast to his fellow cartoonists, who were producing mostly drivel,  Trudeau got into Vietnam, Watergate, gender politics etc. through the eye of pop psychology. Its not coincidental that he  came from a  Republican background, yet finds himself with the counterculture. Gilles Deleuze and Sartre? Hardly. But a worthy study in semiotics. Political cartoons had a long history in America, and Trudeau cannot claim to have innovated on their introduction.

Doonesbury inspired not for the drawings. His characters were not very well rendered: for the first few months, Mike and the gang didn’t even have mouths. In most cases, the strip consisted of four almost identical panels, with only the words changing. The strip succeeded because it was topical, covering civil rights, women’s rights, the generation gap, Richard Nixon, and, perhaps most famously, Vietnam: B.D., the quarterback from Walden College, goes to war as an unrepentant booster of U.S. ambitions in South Asia, and, when he gets yanked home, famously protests, “But this war had such promise!” Read More: http://arts.nationalpost.com/tag/comics/page/2/

"Reading Sowell's column, I did indeed think that America had already become a banana republic, and Sowell was well on his way to becoming a chief banana. Stupid is as stupid does. Or as the new testament put it, Ye shall know them by their fruits. And his column, which dresses up simple dislike and irrational prejudice in the guise of rational argument, is genuinely fruity." Read More: http://loonpond.blogspot.com/2009/10/thomas-sowell-obama-hitler-south.html

Over time, Doonesbury’s stable diversified; paper-thin feminists (Joanie Caucus) or sex symbols (B.D.’s girlfriend, Boopsie) became some of the most interesting protagonists, including his stately congresswoman, Lacey Davenport, and Ms. Caucus’s daughter, J.J., who grew up to become a performance artist and married Mike Doonesbury. Duke, Trudeau’s caricature of the writer Hunter Thompson, was at various points a journalist, owner of the Washington Redskins, ambassador to China, owner of a medical school in the Caribbean; Mike joined an ad agency and sold out; Zonker became a tanning professional; B. D. moved to California and became a highway cop.Read More: http://arts.nationalpost.com/tag/comics/page/2/

Snapping the whip Subjects: Labor unions Labor leaders Anarchists Powderly, Terence Vincent, 1849-1924 Political cartoons -- United States Source: Puck, 1886? p. 104 Medium: Lithograph read more: http://www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/pages/pages.asp?ldID=105&guideID=510&ID=4223

ADDENDUM:
What we basically have with Trudeau’s work, or product, is an entertainment commodity that assimilates into the “Society of the Spectacle” that American culture inhabits and actively promotes. Its dumbed-down entertainment thats a spare part in the military industrial and entertainment complex that controls consciousness. The creation of amyth that Trudeau was a rebel or a radical is pure fluff.

Watergate was the point of no return. Trudeau provoked indignation and adoration in equal measure when his character Mark Slackmayer, a radical DJ, declared Nixon’s former attorney general, John Mitchell, “guilty, guilty, guilty!” even before he had been charged. The Washington Post commented sniffily that “If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty, it’s going to be the due process of justice, not a comic strip artist.”

But the Washington Post hadn’t counted on the tenacity and the thick skin of Garry Trudeau. As he wrote on the 25th anniversary of Doonesbury, “Satire is unfair. It’s rude and uncivil. It lacks balance and proportion, and it obeys none of the normal rules of engagement. Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. And as if that weren’t enough, this savage, unregulated sport is protected by the United States constitution. Cool, huh?” Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/garry-trudeau-doonesbury-40 a

Wanted, a leader! - The labor-agitation orchestra on the go-as-you-please plan Subjects: Labor leaders Powderly, Terence Vincent, 1849-1924 George, Henry, 1839-1897 American Federation of Labor Political cartoons -- United States Source: Puck Medium: Lithograph read more: http://www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/pages/pages.asp?ldID=105&guideID=510&ID=4223

Other public figures whom Trudeau targeted were no less undignified in their responses. Donald Trump called him a “jerk” and a “total loser”. When Trudeau invoked Frank Sinatra’s links with the mafia in an astonishing strip that ended with a photograph of the singer cavorting with his mob friends, Ol’ Blue Eyes made the mistake, during a concert at the Carnegie Hall, of attacking not just Trudeau but also his wife – who was a big television sweetheart at the time. “Well, that’s the first rule of the neighbourhood, you don’t go after the women and children,” Trudeau says. “The audience booed him, which must have come as a shock to Sinatra.”…

George Grosz. Donald Kuspit:More particularly, any art that highlights capitalist society’s dirty underside of perpetual war, emotional terror and traumatic ugliness, and the desperate pursuit of pleasure that seeks relief from them -- that dares to function as a social conscience, that places blame where blame must be conspicuously placed, that dares to tell truth to power, that accepts responsibility for its crimes against humanity when power will not accept them -- must be prettified into inconsequence, treated as a kind of misplaced glamorization of society. Any art that fearlessly exposes its inherent barbarism -- with an uncompromising, vehement realism more than equal to its own uncompromising, toxic character -- is its enemy, and must be defeated by being re-made as a silly joke, a fatuous burlesque, a media caricature of itself, an artistic folly rather than an exposure of its own folly. Read More: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/otto-dix3-24-10.asp image:http://www.blamonet.com/vb/showthread.php?t=175723

The lesson of all this is that when Doonesbury comes calling, do not react, no matter how hurtful the things the strip says about you. It will only make Trudeau redouble his attack if you do. It was funny how few of his victims understood that basic principle, not least the politicians. Dan Quayle, whom he depicted as a feather, wailed that Trudeau had a vendetta against him. George Bush the elder was incapable of not responding, saying he wanted to “kick the hell out of him”. Jeb Bush once came up to Trudeau at a Republican convention and cautioned him to “walk softly”. “And of course that just encouraged me,…Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/garry-trudeau-doonesbury-40 a

Otto Dix Read More: http://www.blamonet.com/vb/showthread.php?t=175723

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In order to lighten his workload, the syndicate put him in touch with an inker, Don Carlton, with whom he has worked for the duration of his career. This division of labor would lead to a ginned-up controversy in the early nineties, when Entertainment Weekly and the Wall Street Journal took shots at Trudeau for not drawing his own work—apparently unfamiliar with the common comics-industry practice of parceling out penciling and inking duties to separate artists. Trudeau responded wryly: “After years of absorbing the blame for the drawing in Doonesbury, it’s odd to wake up one day and find myself stripped of the credit.” Read More: http://slyoyster.com/book-club/2010/two-doonesbury-things-for-you-this-morning/ a

Jack Levine. ---His 1946 painting “Welcome Home,” a satire of military power, generated controversy when it was later shown in a State Department exhibition that traveled to Moscow. Levine was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, though he has said that in the end he never did. Levine remained a figurative painter throughout his career and fell out of fashion with the ascendance of abstraction at mid-century. “I love the Old Masters,” he said in 2005. “I don’t care for anybody modern. … I want to paint with the dead ones.” In a 2004 essay in New York magazine, writer Pete Hamill said Levine was a man of the left but never an ideologue. “He knew what side he was on and what he wanted to put in his paintings,” Hamill said. “But he expressed his vision; he did not illustrate it.”---Read More: http://www.allartnews.com/social-realist-artist-jack-levine-dies-on-monday-at-new-york-city-home-at-age-95/

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Universal Press Syndicate withdrew a threat of legal action against the Wall Street Journal after the newspaper ran a “Doonesbury” editorial.

The lengthy December 18 editorial was actually quite critical of “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, but Universal felt the piece contained enough of an apology/retraction to call off its attorneys. Universal’s attorneys had set December 18 as the deadline for an apology/retraction for the Journal’s November 21 editorial-page “aside” comparing Trudeau to Milli Vanilli, the disgraced music duo exposed as lip-syncers of other singers’ voices.

This aside was based on a report in the November 8 Entertainment Weekly (EW) magazine implying that Don Carlton is a ghost artist for Trudeau. Read More: http://business.highbeam.com/4130/article-1G1-11796505/wall-street-journal-vs-doonesbury-ups-considers-journal

Read More:http://books.google.ca/books?id=mBfWS0qaJbkC&pg=PA221&lpg=PA221&dq=garry+trudeau+skull+and+bones&source=bl&ots=5aFZfSybCy&sig=5Rrw48sWwSqcH98f4Jq2DSg12-k&hl=en&ei=Z0huTdeqA4a0lQfr3O1C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=garry%20trudeau%20skull%20and%20bones&f=false

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg89497.html

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[“bring out your dead”]]> /?p=30201 2011-03-03T11:36:49Z 2011-03-03T00:43:10Z Continue reading →]]> In 1346 a Tartar army picked a quarrel with Genoese merchants who traded in the Crimea, chased them into their coastal redoubt at Feodosiya, and laid siege to the town. The usual campaign of attrition was developing when the plans of the attackers were disastrously disrupted by the onslaught of a new and fearful plague.

The Tartars abandoned the siege, but not first without sharing their misfortune with their enemies. They used their giant catapults to lob the corpses of the victims over the walls, thus spreading the disease within the city. Though the Genoese carried the rotting bodies through the town and dropped them into the sea, the plague was soon as active within as it was without, since so few places are so vulnerable to disease as a besieged city.

"Medieval society never recovered from the results of the plague. So many people had died that there were serious labor shortages all over Europe. This led workers to demand higher wages, but landlords refused those demands. By the end of the 1300s peasant revolts broke out in England, France, Belgium and Italy. The disease took its toll on the church as well. People throughout Christendom had prayed devoutly for deliverance from the plague. Why hadn't those prayers been answered? A new period of political turmoil and philosophical questioning lay ahead. " Read More: http://www.themiddleages.net/plague.html

Those fortunate inhabitants who did not immediately succumb knew quite well that even if they managed to survive the plague, they would be too weak to withstand a renewed Tartar attack. They escaped to their galleys and fled toward the Mediterranean. With them traveled the Black Death. Within three years every third man, woman and child in Europe was dead.

"In the two images below, death (represented by a skeleton) visits both the rich man and the peddlar alike. Over 100 editions of Holbein's Dance of Death have been published since the original French edition appeared in 1538." Read More: http://www.library.illinois.edu/blog/digitizedbotw/

The population that awaited the Black Death in Europe was ill equipped to resist it. The medieval peasant, distracted by war, weakened by malnutrition, exhausted by his struggle to win a living from his inadequate portion of ever less fertile land, was physically an easy prey for the disease. Intellectually and emotionally, he was prepared for disaster and ready to accept it if not actually welcome it.

"strange, crow-faced, cloak-wearing doctors and talking about how if you had an "X" daubed over your door, you were a goner. Still, a disease that was so relentlessly fatal (50 per cent of those infected die within a week if untreated) was always bound to be thought of as a good way of instilling empire-building fear in young children. When the Soviet Union's biological weapons program was hastily disbanded, there was a mysterious outbreak of plague in Kazakhstan. But this was before Borat, so no one really paid any attention to it." Read More: http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2009/08/london-ten-best-illnesses-of-all-time.html

The Europeans of the fourteenth century were convinced that the plague was an affliction laid on them by the Almighty, a retribution for the wickedness of the present generation. Credulous and superstitious, they believed without question in the direct participation of god on earth and were well versed in old testament precedents for the destruction of cities or whole races in an access of divine indignation. Because they were unable to see a natural explanation of this sudden holocaust, they took it for granted that they were the victims of god’s wrath.

ADDENDUM:

Giovanni Boccaccio: “…Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety…

"New evidence has been uncovered that leads some experts to believe that the plague's origins may come from Egypt. Eva Panagiotakopulu, who is an archaeologist and fossil-insect expert at the University of Sheffield, England, is the woman responsible for science's latest discovery. Eva has found archaeological evidence to back up the plague's possible origins in Egypt, and that evidence has recently just been published in the Journal of Biogeography." Read More: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/366005/did_the_bubonic_plague_originate_in.html?cat=37

…Some thought that moderate living and the avoidance of all superfluity would preserve them from the epidemic. They formed small communities, living entirely separate from everybody else. They shut themselves up in houses where there were no sick, eating the finest food and drinking the best wine very temperately, avoiding all excess, allowing no news or discussion of death and sickness, and passing the time in music and suchlike pleasures. Others thought just the opposite. They thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry, to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could, laughing and jesting at what happened. They put their words into practice, spent day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately, or went into other people’s houses, doing only those things which pleased them. This they could easily do because everyone felt doomed and had … In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased. Read More: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plague.htm

http://www.william-shakespeare.info/william-shakespeare-bubonic-plague-black-death.htm

Lewis Turco. The Black Death. 1665.

“I have a buboe, mum,” my daughter said

and raised her sleeve to show me. In the street

the bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!”

The heart of me froze like a drop of sleet,

dropped into my bowel when my darling child

Raised up her sleeve to show me. In the street

the crier’s bell rang out both dark and wild.

The end of time opened like a flower,

fell into my bowel as my darling child

showed me her fatal wound. Our final hour

blossomed before my eyes in Satan’s garden,

for the end of time had opened like a flower.

I felt the heart in me begin to harden

against a Deity who could ordain

such an evil blossoming of Satan’s garden.

What were the sins that could have earned such bane?

What sort of Deity could so ordain?

“I have a buboe, mum,” my daughter said.

The bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!” Read More: http://lewisturco.typepad.com/poetics/2010/03/the-black-death.html

http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/westciv/plague/

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[Sundown on the golden age]]> /?p=30137 2011-03-03T00:43:46Z 2011-03-02T17:22:31Z Continue reading →]]> When Jan de Witt became defacto head of the Dutch republic it ushered in an era of prosperity and liberalism, for the time, that was unheard of. Dutch commerce, trade, and especially the arts developed an identity that has been enduring. As is wont to happen, in a crisis, a moment of panic, a mob killed him and the Golden Era was no more….

de Hooh. Village House. In the background a sevant scours a pan. Cleaning was a constant Dutch preoccupation. Read More: http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/pieterdehooch/villagehouse/

But what was this mentality of the past that was particular to the Dutch. It could be termed the “regent mentality” ,  a phrase that indicates an authoritarian paternalism of an egoistic patriciate: a coolness,and haughtiness that became the desired archetype and identity that defined Dutch middle-class identity into the modern era. A deliberate and cultivated snobbery that impairs any cultural growth. This an the affluence of investment income produced a leisure class that was ingrown, constrained and claustrophobic, petty and parochial. The burgher.

“The self-indulgent emulation of French aristocratic manners and habits by the wealthy Dutch regents was thought by many to be the cause of the decline of economic power and international prestige of the Dutch Republic after the Golden Age. Large servant staffs, and valets in particular, were one of these decadent and depraved fashions of the French nobility. Similar to the French elite, the Dutch elite was assumed to have used the servant and especially the valet as a status symbol of wealth and power. Domestic service in the cities of the Dutch Republic would then have been characterised by a polarisation between households organised according to the bourgeois basic structure and households organised according to the hyperbolic aristocratic fashion.” Read More: http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2004/aproned_maids_liveried_lackeys.pdf

"The museum has some of the equipment to assist with the trial and just punishment including thumb screws, branding irons, execution swords and axes, racks and pillory boards. The most famous prisoner of the prison was Cornelis de Witt , who was convicted of perjury. Later with his brother Johan he was lynched by the mob in front of the Prison. There is a grisly painting of the De Witt brothers’ mutilated corpses strung up at the Rijksmuseum." Read More: http://denhaagdiary.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html image: http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/botero-exhibition-abu-ghraib-torture-men-women-horse-cat-lynx-and-escher/

A combined French and British invasion saw the Dutch turn from De Witt and the regents to their traditional military leaders, the House of Orange. Blind to the problems of De Witt, the public saw only the regents’ failure to keep out the invaders. Young William III of Orange saw his chance and may have helped feed panic in the crisis. And panic bred violence in The Hague. On June 21, 1672, the day Utrecht fell to the French, four men attempted to assassinate De Witt. De Witt’s brother Cornelius was arrested on dubious charges, tried, tortured and kept in prison. De Witt resigned but refused to flee.

Gerard Ter Borch. 1661. A Lady at her Toilet. The central figure finishes dressing for a party with the help of her maid, who laces her bodice. Her elegant gown recalls the rage for French fashions that prevailed among the well-to-do Dutch read more: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2004/terborch/fullscreen/195-035.htm

On August 20, a mob formed outside a prison whereDe Witt was visiting his brother. The mob broke into the prison and dragged out the brothers; Cornelius was thrown down the stairs, beaten with clubs, and stabbed with pikes. Jan was shot and then finished off by clubs. Within an hour all was over and the madmen, drunk with bloodshed, danced on the bodies which were finally hung up by the feet on a lamp post; horribly mutilated, even cut to pieces by desperadoes who desired a bloody relic. It was an indication of the savagery that Dutch civilization still contained.

Jan Vermeer. The Geographer. The painting may be mistitled. The man's chart shows not land and sea, but stars, while the globe behind him is not terrestrial, but celestial. "Vermeer converted to Catholicism at age 20, probably as a condition for marriage to his Catholic betrothed. But there is no reason to doubt that his conversion was sincere. The scholar Daniel Arasse has suggested that Vermeer's "religion of painting" drew him to, and was reinforced by, the Catholic "dogma of the mysterious union of the visible and the invisible, along with a faith in the power of the image to incorporate a mysterious presence that is both living and indefinable." If Arasse is correct, in the distracted gaze of the Geographer we encounter the Catholic sacramental tradition, in which the sensate world of color and materiality invites us to participate, even as spectators of the painting, in an intuited world of inexpressible Mystery." Read More: http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/2008/06/geography-of-spirit.html

ADDENDUM:
The image of the regent patriciate as an aristocratic elite heavily engaged in conspicuous consumption, as presented by eighteenth-century moralists, has been persistent. Moral indignation over the patriciate’s betrayal of the burgher values and thus of the nation itself, has been a recurrent theme in the historiography on the Dutch Republic. Dutch historians right up to the 1960s adopted this discourse to analyse and explain the behaviour of the patriciate and the downfall of the Republic after the Golden Age. They also found it difficult to hide their moral indignation over the patriciate’s shameful and degenerate nature. D.J. Roorda was the first historian to move away from moral contempt and analyse the regent patriciate as a social group attempting to tighten their grip on power through aristocratisation.88 In the 1980s, Joop de Jong, Luuc Kooijmans and Maarten Prak wrote three studies on the elite in three cities in Holland in the eighteenth century that analysed the behaviour of the patriciate as a social group. The conclusions to these studies vitiated Roorda’s aristocratisation argument and confirmed the essentially burgher nature of the patriciate; their lifestyle would only have been modestly sumptuous and always within budgetary limits.Read More: http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2004/aproned_maids_liveried_lackeys.pdf

http://madeinatlantis.com/amsterdam/evolution_dutch_nation.htm

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[fortune has it]]> /?p=30151 2011-03-02T17:23:03Z 2011-03-02T11:20:00Z Continue reading →]]> He tried for popular acclaim and never got there. It may have accelerated his undoing. Phil Ochs. A folkie of a time that now seems far removed from where we are today.He always seemed a bit marginal; not the archetype of the guitar strumming dope smoking hippie out of the Laurel Canyon scene.He was more in the tradition of a Herman Melville or Poe with his use of “untrustworthy narrators”, but Ochs never carried the idiom far enough after hitting the beach. Still, he was authentic.  But the times today have really changed. Or have they? …

“The psychosis of the Eisenhower era”, as record producer Van Dyke Parks described it, implanted in Ochs’ the conflict that was to mark the years of protest to come. Deeply patriotic, the teenage Ochs began to understand something of the injustice in his midst and he began to see beyond the surface. In college while studying for a career as a journalist, Ochs befriended folksinger Jim Glover who introduced him to the music of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers; his writings took a notable turn to the left. And after years of study on clarinet, Ochs obtained his first guitar, winning it from Glover in a bet when he wagered that Kennedy would beat Nixon in the ’60 election. Read More: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/movie-review-phil-ochs-there-but-for-fortune/

"In one of his post-war essays Adorno made his famous question, is it possible to write poetry after Auschwitz. "Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. The eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress's smooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinner jacket, are models for those who must become whatever the system wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society; everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacrifice his claim to happiness."---Read More: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/adorno.htm image: http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

At issue with all the popular music of the time is whether it was simply commodity or a form of propaganda, as Adorno warned. A cookie cutter approach to protest.Even a re-packaging like Dylan. Establish a formula, a couple chords and stir to taste.   Adorno had an advice  for what he termed “true” listening and in Och’s music the original intentions can be heard even though the  politicization of music was commonplace in the Vietnam era. In Theodor Adorno’s point of how music is listened to, Phil Ochs can be viewed as a link between music written for the masses which actually has a more profound meaning, which is still representing a valid form of expression, unlike much of what passed as “cool” in that era.

"The American song exists because people have enjoyed it and asked for more. It is the musical expression of consumer sovereignty. And like everything typical of America it gets up the intellectual nose. Coming to America as a refugee from Nazism, the philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno took it upon himself to pour scorn on the music of Hollywood. For Adorno this disgusting sound, riddled with cliche and kitsch, was not art but ideology -- the sweet pill of false consciousness which numbs the senses of the working class. The American song, Adorno argued, be it by Gershwin or Berlin, by Jerome Kern or Cole Porter, is an instrument of capitalist exploitation. It is not the consumer or the producer that is sovereign in this debased musical culture, but the "owners of the means of communication," namely the capitalist class." Read More: http://spectator.org/archives/2006/08/24/the-music-of-america

ADDENDUM:
He always had to play second fiddle to Bob Dylan. He had a vision of the being a world-saving hero. And the folk music movement in the early 60′s had the same messianic sense that it could change the world. That sense could be equally predictable and as reactionary in its own way.

Theodor Adorno: Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated economic forces – designated this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word – say, “intolerable” – over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying “intolerable.” By the same pattern, the nations against whom the weight of the German blitzkrieg was thrown took the word into their own jargon. The general repetition of names for measures to be taken by the authorities makes them, so to speak, familiar, just as the brand name on everybody’s lips increased sales in the era of the free market. The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword. Read More: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

Chris Barsanti:As Christopher Hitchens points out in the film, there was a difference between those who liked Dylan and those who even knew about Ochs -- anybody could be into Dylan, Ochs's songs were for those who cared. Cared about what? The Ochs who comes through in Kenneth Bowser's documentary is the kind of active dreamer that societies need to have around in times of national crisis, to put some poetry to the pain and to stand up as an emblematic fighter for a better humanity. read more:http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/2011/phil-ochs-there-but-for-fortune/

The theorization of mass culture that he advances in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1992 [1936]) attributes a potentially powerful political
element to the consumption of mass culture. For example, Benjamin focuses on mechanical reproduction, the means by which capitalism mass-produces commodities, in order to posit a participatory, potentially democratic relationship to consumption, rather than thenegative and authoritarian understanding maintained by the culture industry thesis. The passivity assigned to the consumption of mass culture is transformed, such that ‘mechanical reproduction of art changes the reactions of the masses towards art’. In other words, mechanical reproduction’s ability to change our relationship to art by making it more accessible (which Benjamin argues also makes it less auratic) pressures a reconceptualization of the function and nature of art rather than appraisal of mass culture from the privileged perspective of high culture. A great deal of subsequent cultural criticism has swung between the contrasting though not at all unrelated positions of the
Frankfurt School. Read More: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/upm-data/9574_019598intro.pdf

Basic idea of Adorno and Horkheimer:Popular music is standardized to a point that it is “predigested” – the audience has already heard it. Therefore, it requires no intellectual effort to listen to it. It does not challenge the intellect to push itself. The music is simply accepted as is. Furthermore, the “familiarity” of popular music is such that it acts as a friend in an unfriendly world. It reassures the listener that all is well. This is why stores and shopping malls frequently use popular music as a kind of "audio wallpaper." The belief is (and there is a great deal of research to suggest that they are right!), that pop music relaxes shoppers, and makes them more likely to buy something. As such it acts in the service of those who control the economy. The music is able to “substitute for what the listeners are really denied” true freedom of choice, and the ability to effect real change in their environment. Read More: http://www.grebel.uwaterloo.ca/swood/Readings/Adorno%20Popular%20music.htm image: http://pejamovie2.blogspot.com/2011/01/watch-free-online-phil-ochs-there-but.html

” Ochs, who committed suicide in 1976 at thirty-five, never understood that there was a limited audience for brainy musical editorials composed in a rigid singsong mode and sung in a droning, nasal voice with a modest range and faltering intonation. If his verses were finely wrought, his singing conveyed an emotional distance from the words.” Read More: http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=134741

The earnestness of Ochs’s approach was compounded by an almost utopian ideal that was easily discouraged. There was a ambivalence on his part over wishy washy white liberal politics that under a veneer of civilized do-gooding, was actually almost as racist and ethnocentric, as their adversaries. Certainly as elitist.

In the interwar period, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s collaboration produced a highly influential approach to mass culture. Their work on the culture industry (a neologism meant to suggest a paradox in that ‘culture’ was thought to be antithetical to ‘industry’) asserts that this institution ‘has molded people as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product’ . Not just products, but themselves as product called consumer, is what the culture industry offers its audience. Miriam Bratu Hansen makes this point abundantly clear as she points out that in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Horkheimer and Adorno ascribe the effectivity of mass-cultural scripts of identity not simply to the viewers’ manipulation as passive consumers, but rather to their very solicitation as experts, as active readers’ . Particular to the culture industry, however, ‘is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry’ ….Read More:http://www.uk.sagepub.com/upm-data/9574_019598intro.pdf a

"Ochs's hammy, adenoidal delivery, on the other hand, could never be taken seriously; his hopelessly unreliable narrators, whether draft dodgers or witnesses-cum-co-conspirators to acts of abuse, would later influence satirists like Randy Newman." Read More: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/phil-ochs-there-but-for-fortune/5221

Art critic Clement Greenberg shared Adorno and Horkheimer’s disdain for mass culture. His ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which originally appeared in the Partisan Review (1939) criticizes mechanical reproduction and the mass production of culture. ‘Kitsch’, his term of choice for mass culture, is used in a derogatory sense. It connotes a tawdry and tasteless
absence of aesthetic purpose; cultural production dismissed as inferior and designed to appeal only to the popular tastes believed to epitomize mass markets. As kitsch, mass culture marks a crisis in the separation between high and low culture, which leads Greenberg to describe it as ‘a spreading epidemic’ that replaces the dominant role of the avant-garde as gatekeepers of taste and culture.Read More: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/upm-data/9574_019598intro.pdf

Ultimately, the story of Ochs is complex and tragic.  His bipolar illness, aggravated by booze, probably contributed to his  paranoia and a vulnerability to taking his own life.  What he realized, in part,  was that violent police response to radical demonstrators at the DNC was an indication on the level of freedom America would tolerate, and it was not to cross a line that advocated a dismantlement of  property law and monopoly of wealth.

By his third studio album, Ochs’ transition was not into the realm of folk-rock–as his peers had moved into–but to an expansive, concept-driven format that made full use of orchestration and a variety of genre. String quartets, honky-tonk piano, woodwinds and electronic music provided a sweeping soundscape for Phil’s resounding tenor. Seemingly always aware of, yet in battle with, the tragic destiny of mental illness that would later claim him, Ochs fueled his passion with alcohol and work. But the brilliance of his music was never enough to satisfy the burning restlessness within the man or his conflicted self-image, equal parts self-important and shattered. Read More: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/movie-review-phil-ochs-there-but-for-fortune/

"Barthes’ work infused analyses of culture with new dimensions and analytical possibilities, for it maintained that the most powerful work of mass culture was carried out not at the level of primary signification (or what it denotes), but at the level of its secondary signification (or connotation). The intelligibility of secondary signification, in turn, rests on the culture at large in the same way that a word means something in relation to the language of which it is a part." Read More: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/upm-data/9574_019598intro.pdf

While his folk singing peers embraced folk-rock in the mid-’60s, Ochs took an artier musical direction and moved to the West Coast, where he recorded his disappointingly received 1967 album, “Pleasures of the Harbor,” which featured ornate, semiclassical orchestrations. The album’s producer, Larry Marks, recalls that Ochs was certain it would go to No. 1 and gain him recognition as America’s greatest singer and songwriter. It peaked at No. 168 on Billboard’s album chart.

Read More:http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_industry_1.shtml

]]> 0 Dave <![CDATA[golden age : reveling in “glorious simplicity”]]> /?p=30112 2011-03-02T11:21:04Z 2011-03-02T00:38:08Z Continue reading →]]> The Golden Age of the Dutch was the era of Jan de Witt. The Dutch bested the great powers of the world in the arts and science before the reactionary House of Orange put him to death, which marked the end of the Golden Age.

"Described by noted Rembrandt scholar, Christopher White as "the apotheosis of Rembrandt's activity in etching in the 1640's, and according to popular opinion of his whole career, is the large etching known as 'The Hundred Guilder Print.'" (White, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 57) White traces the origin of the title to a print seller named Mariette, who sold an impression of this print to Rembrandt himself, for 100 guilders. The print has also been called Christ Healing the Sick, and Christ Healing the Sick with Small Children. The figures present in the composition reflect several characters from the New Testament, including Jesus, the Pharisees, and St. Peter." Read More: http://rembrandt-etchings.blogspot.com/2008/12/print.html

“There may be no other country in which in the brief span of a hundred years so many paintings were executed as during the 17th century in the United Provinces, in Holland, as this land is commonly called abroad, or the Netherlands, to use the name it gave itself. It is estimated that between 1600 and 1700 no less than 5 million paintings were executed in small and large centers of painting, a figure that is even more surprising if you think of the distrust of holy images professed by Calvinism from the very beginning of its spread. The wave of iconoclasm it set in motion was so powerful that it cut off the most classic destination of the most significant artistic production…. Read More:http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/dutch_art/golden_age.html a

Frans Hals. Family Portrait. 1620. "Hals' works have found their way to countless other cities all over the world and into museum collections. From the late 19th century, they were collected everywhere - from Antwerp to Toronto and from London to New York. Many of his paintings were then sold to American collectors, who appreciated his uncritical attitude towards wealth and status. A primary collection of his work is displayed in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem." Read More: http://hoocher.com/Frans_Hals/Frans_Hals.htm

There is very little indication that Jan de Witt was aware he shared his time with artists we think of as the glory of seventeenth-century Holland. A letter to a painter survives, in which the historian Bernard Vlekke calls “painfully haughty and condescending”.But, if De Witt didn’t manifest any great awareness of that aspect of his world, he maintained the Holland in which such things were possible, in which the art of painting flourished as never before, or since, in so small a space, among so few people. His invigorating effect was to be seen in the multitude of works produced in those years.

"The two large format group portraits of the Regents and Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse in Haarlem are not only one of the last major work by this artist who ranks beside Rembrandt as the greatest of all portrait painters, they are also the last historically significant examples of this genre. Whereas Hals previously presented individual gestures, attitudes and poses in a ceremonial and more than momentary context, here he isolates the individual parts and the individuals themselves. The faces above the white collars seem to float against the dark ground of a room that is difficult to distinguish. The "breakdown" of the figurative corresponds to the brushwork whose ductus is no longer fluid, but broken so that it seems to crumble into particles of color. Here and there, a shimmer of red flares up through the black like the final glimmer of dying embers in the ashes." Read More: http://hoocher.com/Frans_Hals/Frans_Hals.htm

The Dutch painters had no great patrons- no cathedral triptychs to paint, few huge walls to decorate. But they had thousands of front rooms and parlors that suddenly required paintings. Nothing grand: “Holland’s glorious simplicity” was Contantijn Huygen’s phrase. In fact, it was this simplicity- perceived with the intense curiosity of Vermeer- that becomes the greatest mystery.

“…What made such a prolific artistic production possible and, above all, what led the United Provinces to write a fundamental chapter in the history of European art? Among the many factors that could be cited, we should mention first of all the vitality of a pictorial tradition that went back to the beginning of the 15th century, the golden age of the duchy of Burgundy, and – thanks to the wealth of the cities of the Netherlands and the level of professional expertise demanded by the Burgundian court– that was already included by right among the great artistic schools of Europe….Read More: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/dutch_art/golden_age.html a

"Author name: Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613, Haarlem - 1670, Amsterdam). He was a Dutch portrait painter. Van der Helst moved to Amsterdam some time before 1636, for he was married there in that year. His first dated picture, a group portrait of the regents of the Walloon Orphanage (currently the location of Maison Descartes in Amsterdam), dates from 1637. he moved to Amsterdam and in 1639 he won his own schutterstuk commission, The company of Captain Roelof Bicker and Lieutenant Jan Michielsz Blaeuw. In Amsterdam he may well have trained with Nicolaes Eliaszoon Pickenoy." Read More: http://artmight.com/Artists/Bartholomeus-van-der-Helst-1613-1670/HELST-Bartholomeus-van-der-Abraham-Del-Court-And-Maria-De-Keersegieter-4133p.html

Of course, the word “simplicity” does no justice to Rembrandt. He often defied prevailing taste, being impossibly theatrical and exotic: he was altogether too much for the officers of the militia company, who asked him for a group portrait, and too much for the burghers of Amsterdam, who certainly hadn’t expected anything like that one-eyed barbaric chieftain, rebel against the Romans. Yet something in his portraits, the self-portraits, the merest scribble, or in the painstaking beauty of such etchings as “The Hundred Guilder Print”, reveals a sense of human individuality, of what it is to be alive, capable of love and fear and passion. It is this contact with day-to-day life that evokes an abiding interest in Jan de Witt’s Holland.

"Pieter de Hooch, 1661-1663. Mother Lacing her Bodice beside a Cradle As we see from de Hooch's painting above, one need not have a clear view of what lies beyond for this mechanism to prove effective. The simple suggestion of a further realm is sufficient. With that departing path in place, the eye then leaves the image not by crossing the frame of the picture, but rather by metaphorically stepping out beyond the painting into the broader world that lies behind that painted interior." Read More: http://www.artofbonsai.org/feature_articles/tokowindow.php

“In the second place, the Netherlands learned to relate to art is a different way from the other European countries. After the connection of art with courts, monasteries, and religious associations had waned, new relations emerged. Increasingly wealthy and numerous – in Amsterdam alone, the population had grown from 60,000 inhabitants in 1600 to 135,000 in 1640 – and in step with the European nobility, the urban upper class had discovered that paintings were a symbol of power, objects to be collected avidly. On the other hand, Holland was the Mecca of trade and consequently paintings could also become merchandise. … Until then, trade had been based mainly on spices, textiles, and tulip bulbs, but it gradually extended to paintings as well, and that is the reason why many Dutch paintings are not very large. The fact that they were easy to handle and were less bulky made it easier to place them on the market. In the last analysis, that also explains the dissemination on an international scale of 17th‐century Dutch works and – unlike, for example, 14‐ and 15th‐century Italian works – their presence in almost every museum collection in the world. They were so successful commercially that, at least until the foundation of municipal museums, there were very few paintings from this period in their homeland.” Read More: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/dutch_art/golden_age.html a

Pieter de Hooch. Throughout the Dutch Golden Age the home remained the tranquil focus of family life wherein the Dutch took their pleasures: reading books, drinking gin or beer, wine or tea; making music. Genre painters like De Hooch represented domestic scenes appealing to the bourgeois buyers, and in so doing compiling a comprehensive record of daily life. Read More: http://www.artunframed.com/hooch.htm

Some of the greatest Regent paintings are those  Frans Hals painted of the patrician men and women who were trustees of such homes. “The Regents of the St. Elisabeth’s Hospital (1641) and “The Regentress of the Old Men’s Home” (1665) are examples; the latter a very monochromatic picture, full of firmness, goodwill, and earnest good manners. To some historians, this quality which the Dutch call “deftige” , a mixture of coolness, haughtiness, and paternalism, was by no means an unmixed blessing. “Deftige” became the ambition of the entire Dutch middle-class of the next two hundred and fifty years, and from this general ambition Netherland society suffered under a kind of suffocating atmosphere that manifested itself as a deliberate snobbery. As time went on, the “regents mentality” bolstered by wealth from the Indies, by investment rather than action- produced something ingrown, constrained, claustrophobic.

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