Gurus & Good Old Boys · 27 November 2007
Let me say at the beginning that I feel you might want to disregard this if you do not want to be put off.
Well ok. Here you are.
Sometimes a new reader will mistake me for a man, and send an email that’s a bit mis-pitched. I like that.
Is it because I don’t dissimulate? (Though really: there’s feminine “maybe” and “I feel” backpedaling all over my prose, in a good honest way. And I am always soft… unless someone gets overly declarative.) The excessive analyticalness? Am I… turgid? Actually I suspect it’s just the odd references to music or books that are not for women.
What business does a female have with Norman Mailer, Ian Curtis, Bob Dylan, Henry Miller, (and for godsakes this masculine legacy of yoga practice)?
Apropo off all this: A friend sent a train of thought past me the other day, a train she didn’t intend for us to condense into an argument or a statement about the way things are: When do good old boys and gurus get conflated? Is full-on hero worship ever a useful part of practice?
But as I was saying. Some recent man-art mentioned here: Bob Dylan biopic. Henry Miller Library. Norman Mailer obits. Yeah, all of that is some serious hero worship. Good old boys erecting gurus. And at the same time defining lineages--who gets to claim them and who gets left out. All examples of appreciation that's really more like appropriation.
The Dylan movie is a total drag in this regard. I know you were trying, Todd Haines, but you failed. I walked out thinking: every editorial decision was made with “What Would Bob Think?” on your mind. Even your effort to smuggle in a woman’s subjectivity to the heart of the work can’t save you from the hypermasculinity that guru-erection entails. I walked out saying: Bob is for me, but this is not for me.
That's because, for example, Haines cannot resist re-appropriating the collective male in-joke that is Martin Scorcese’s interviews with Joan Baez. Joan, who mothered and made Bob and then got left in the dirt the second he was a little larger than she, said some unfortunately weepy and submissive things to Scorcese, who then edited and amped them to make Bob look like a big, ladykilling hero. Haines seizes it and re-makes a fictional version: that Bob, what a cock. Women artists fall before him, swooning “He was so much better at expressing my thoughts than me.”
I walked out of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, feeling I'd just witnessed the same kind of man-on-man hagiography. Miller is for me, but I can do without the creepy little hipster-clerks who want to own him. Voyeurism is bad enough, but voyerism post-mortem? The library’s centerpiece is a bookstore that in addition to offering Miller’s works, showcases all the things that appreciators decided “go” with his lineage. The beats, the transcendentalists. (And oh, the Russian masters. Easy, guys.) No women. No women authors.
I get it. Miller’s all about transcendent, male self-discovery. The appreciator-curators’ erotica selection, set alongside the Sexus trilogy? Not Anais Nin’s short stories—which were enough to make me blush and cover when I first read them on a public bus traversing rural Taiwan (though other passengers wouldn’t exactly be able to read over my shoulder)—but the creepy, not-really-sexy Marquis de Sade. Wouldn’t want to let the girls in.
Let me go on. All the appreciations of Norman Mailer, that violent, condescending hack? Yeah, brilliant guy I want in my personal canon. But please, let us not perfunctorily praise great men without an eye to who they held down. Follow my link of two weeks ago and check it out: that’s all he really is, and he is all of that. Most memorials glossed this in erecting uncomplicated “greatness.”
Anyway. This is one place that gurus and good old boys flow together: in the appreciation cults. In how memorializations create in-groups, and who you put in those groups, and in what you leave out.
Beta boys, god love you. You started out Say Anything but died derivative in High Fidelity: you wanted the brainy strong girl when you were fresh and ballsy, but ended up fantasizing for a fan.
Why not love it when women find their voices? You won't stop knowing who you are if girls get in with the gurus too. Or even if we become them.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: evolution
, self-deception
, social theory
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this was awesome! and i actually understood it! maybe my women’s studies degree comes in handy. i was just thinking last night about how i thought you were a man when i first started reading your blog.
in re: Henry Miller and his elk. i am down with the idea of discovering the true self and even doing this among one’s tribe. but to sequester oneself and claim your true identity is such a cop out. mmm, then i again, i don’t hang out with a bunch of republicans just to become closer with my true democratic nature, but somehow that seems different.
i think full on hero worship is never a good thing, but maybe a little bit of partial hero worship well earned and for the right reasons?
without spilling the beans, THIS is exactly why i am so excited about the path that you are on.
Posted by: cranky housefrau · Nov 28, 03:42 AM · #
:-)
Ginsberg said (repeatedly) that Dylan was the best poet of the 20th century. And, BTW, Allen was weirdly IN those “genius-seeking” (no women need apply) ranks, but not OF them. The easy answer would be to say that that was because of his orientation. But I (like to) think there was more to it than that.
Posted by: karen · Nov 28, 05:04 AM · #
now where do I start this: should it be with my copy of AntiOedipus in hand so that I can handily undo (or at least make a hairy, sticky mess out of) easy categories like gender roles and center/margin and so forth? No, it’s probably with the philosophical differences between Miller and Sade. Yes, two writers who took up explicitly erotic content (Sade once said that the point of his 700 odd pages in 120 Days of Sodom, was to make the writer spill some seed—see how even there, the reader is male?). BUT, Sade’s project has to do with Enlightenment principles applied to, well, what Foucault called “blood” (nobility as well as physicality, bodies, torture, etc, etc, etc) whereas if you watch REDS, there are lovely little micro-interviews with people, including Miller, and Miller says, at one point, “I think there was as much fucking back then as there is now, but there was more LOVE in it!” Is that “masculine”? Or should we only stick to that great line from Capricorn about “An Egyptian fuck!” Sexy literature, right? A man’s domain? Kathy Acker, anyone? Carol Queen? Pat Califia? To say nothing of how and why Deleuze and Guattari love Miller; it’s not for his gender politics or lack thereof. If they want to stock those shelves, I recommend a pack of Deleuze and maybe some Acker, as well as Nin, of course, and Lawrence, who really WAS an influence on Miller. Making it all “sex lit by guys” is like putting phone books in there in honor of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. Anyway, long rant over. Cheers!
Posted by: patrick · Nov 28, 08:09 AM · #
Haynes made an ambitious movie about “hiding” — about faking it so completely that you eventually have no “it” to hide. Dylan was covering his middle-class midwestern jewish self from the get go. Haynes’s Dylan went for any persona that appeared powerful enough to sufficiently veil himself: Hobo, Carnie, Lady Killer, Genius.
Posted by: knl · Nov 28, 10:02 AM · #
Yes, I really liked the way the film pulled that off. And the way the interaction with BBC Man brought that theme to the fore. The Scorcese doc really tells that story too.
The other theme I was glad to see made central was Blanchett's and Bale's characters' fatigue with finger pointing in a politically tumultous time. The poet’s refusal to disassociate from the evils of the day in order to feel innocent of them.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 10:11 AM · #
Cranky, yes: a little bit of hero stuff helps us figure some things out, yes?
Karen: I’m chipping away at my Allen pedestal, you know. But I do like to think he was WAY ahead of his time too. Not just Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ roll but Peace, Genderbending and the World Soul.
Patrick: OMG I need to catch up on my reading. Cosmodemonic what? Thurn and Taxis what? So nice that D&G sanctioned HM!
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 10:19 AM · #
Owl, you really need to force me not to just let loose here; it’s like waking up the night after the party thinking, “oh crap, did I say THAT?” That, and I need someone to get me to practice more.
Posted by: patrick · Nov 28, 12:15 PM · #
Lowriding past this take of yours owl-girl. Do I do a drive by and then tromp on my 440 GTO, lay rubber with no substance?
Yeah life is damn unfair. Chaotic,divisive,
irrational and the sexes are grappling in the eternal struggle for Grail-love and self-discovery. I say bring on the tantra, all of it. The very source of the spark is the holy difference between men and women. With that difference a huge chasm forms stuffed with injustice,power grabs,appropriations and the shameless,wholesale rewriting of ‘history’. But i am a self-avowed apologist for the species. WE simply have not been around long enough to figure this out. What, 100,000 years of wallowing in swamps then barely emerging to establish some primitive laws of probity and civility?
Mailer,Scorcese,Miller – all of them physically diminutive men no doubt terrified of the feminine power. Much heralded egoists all of them and self-enthroned. I am entertained by them at times but I cannot take them seriously anymore than I take Hemingway seriously. They are only glimmers and wisps in the fire of the tantric dance. And speaking of Shiva…
How about the ole girls club we know to be Yoga Works? Talk about a conspiracy amongst some bitter middle-aged women feigning spirituality but projecting little more than a desperate need to control,dictate and homogenize. Not many strong,out-spoken male chieftans over there. Yes, some good and true female teachers but you get my drift.
If you were a hapless,hetero male and wandered into Maty’s class some years back it was like being given latrine duty on a kibbutzim in the Negev in August. The socail nature of humanoids seems to coagulate around tribe,sex and or hierarchy. Who’s in power in the end is not the point its instead the terribly unskillful tendency to abuse that power which is my concern. If we don’t deal with that one I doubt we will survive much past the 21st Century.
Posted by: tristan · Nov 28, 12:34 PM · #
I didn’t see any major kind of self-discovery in Miller. What I remember in reading Miller that he dithers frenetically between sensual and animal. I don’t really like Henry Miller but he brought to me part of my understanding of what rape is. I need to read some of his books again.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 28, 01:15 PM · #
Oh, and I really like Nin for what she tried to do with her stories — the novellas, that is. I want to like her as much as other people proclaim they do but I don’t think she accomplished what she really should have or, really, what it is that she wanted to accomplish. I regretfully deduct points for that.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 28, 01:18 PM · #
Only if you want me making trouble for you in other venues, T. And I will say that the infusion of quiet, nothing-to-prove masculinity is one good revolution. Surprised and grateful, check.
Sorry for not reprimanding you, Patrick, but your molotovs are the best cultural cocktails I’ve had in quite some time. Though clearly, yes, nothing would be better than to channel that intelligent fire into your practice. Go. Now. For readers who would like an expanded and annotated version of that amazing comment, redacted by me, drop a line and maybe I’ll send you the key. It’s all about the 120 Days of Sodom and the Cosmodemonic, oh yes.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 04:22 PM · #
On this subject, it’s maybe telling the ferocity of critical complaint and foul-crying that greeted the end of Touch of Evil, when the Dietrich-cum-gypsy mournfully says of the drowned and monstrous Welles that he was “some kind of a man.”
It was viewed as implausible that her character—or a woman in general—could have any admiration for that kind of monstrous masculinity, the kind that makes itself all too apparent as flesh and brutally so. You know… the Norman Mailer thing. The Henry Miller thing, even, although his personality was always so touchingly needy, a more broken-down bravado, machismo-free, perhaps mediocre, with a touch of the acrobat who screws up his routine by looking back to see if the audience is astonished enough. (Mailer never looked back, having assumed astonishment and his own genius from the start.)
But this is only problematic, genderwise, on the assumption that a woman views every woman as herself or sees herself in every woman, always feels implicated, is crippled either in empathy or resentment at every turn. So she theoretically hates Dylan because he’s cavalier or just plain weird with the women (cf. Alicia Keys), hates Miller because his false bravado demeans its springboards, hates Ian Curtis not at all (oh so sensitive, poor fellow), hates Mailer for the contradictions in his self-love and woman-love and macho self-aggrandizement and unbridled misogyny.
And certainly, I’ve met women who do this—often in sociology departments—whose empathy is overdetermined on sex/gender roles and doesn’t find perchase in any other kind of humanity. But there’s no necessity in it, nor is it strange that it isn’t so for Ms. Owl. And I don’t see any good reason why a woman couldn’t appreciate somebody who was both “a great detective. And a lousy cop.”
As far as the real hero worship, well, everyone has their fetishes. I don’t think men more than women. Or vice versa. I like Cassavetes, for example, and Cary Grant.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 28, 04:28 PM · #
You can’t like Cary Grant, DM. Not after what he did at the start of Philadelphia Story!
Thank you, really, for all of this. You’re right that the empathy overdetermined on the social identity axis is the norm sociology departments; and I suppose this is what Patrick was intimating at the start as well. Elsewhere, my liberal appreciations would be less odd.
I love that line at the end of Touch of Evil. When you and I took that 75-year-old ex-casanova professor of ours to see ToE at Cinema 21 circa 1999, and he crooned over dessert at Montage about the gorgeous Marlene (remembering how he had wanted her the first time he saw the film as a young professor- seducer), I found that spark of remembered virility to be exciting and powerful. Especially since he’d always been so erotically dead to us. It was not out of line. Not exploitative. Not creepy. Just alive. And exciting he would share something that good that with us, knowing we would know the stories of his past, and knowing he’d have to correct our Venn Diagrams in the morning.
He is probably gone now, you know.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 04:59 PM · #
On the contrary. Slated to teach sailing classes on the Columbia well in to 2008.
Which is so perfect.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 05:12 PM · #
I thought I wasn’t allowed to like Cassavetes because of what he did at the end of Husbands...
And yeah: sad to think, but you’re probably right about our old professor/sailor/survivalist. I’ll still remember him how I never knew him, with a full black beard and barrel chest, scaring the hell out of everybody.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 28, 05:13 PM · #
Hoooo!
Crossed paths in the ether. Glad to hear he’s still gibbing and booming.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 28, 05:14 PM · #
Yes. Those kids won’t know what they’re getting.
Cassavetes can do whatever he wants. It’s not even him, in a sense, anyway.
Though when Godard kills women in the name of Marxist social commentary ( Vivre sa Vie ) he is full of shit and completely pisses me off.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 05:22 PM · #
Woo hoo! Can I enroll as an alum? I’d completely forgotten about that Montage trip. Thanks. I can’t for the life of me remember how or by whom that trip was possibly initiated.
Husbands has been on my list—it just moved up in the queue. I’m personally quite fond of Shadows. Fond’s I think the right work for that one. I don’t know that you can be fond of Faces. Although you can think it’s really good (or even love it).
Posted by: R · Nov 28, 08:04 PM · #
It was my idea, as your president. I was inspired by a certain someone’s obsession with the idea of going extracurricular with FFF. And by my feelings for that film.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 08:29 PM · #
What if Godard just killed men in the name of Marxist social commentary, like he does in Weekend?
Or, you know, the way Stalin did?
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 28, 08:30 PM · #
And I think, with years, that one can become fond of Faces. I’ve grown into that feeling.
But you’ll get in trouble with your wife if you become as fond of Husbands as I am.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 28, 08:46 PM · #
Wait. He kills people in Weekend? I turned it off after 20 minutes of annoying traffic jams because I thought it was going to be some kind of comedy. I bet that the man-killing would have made me mad as well.
I have this weird intolerance for killing in general.
Kind of makes the communism thing a drag. Even when they try to do the killing with Godard-quality artistic panache, it just doesn’t work for me. Sorry, Fidel.
Oh wait. Am I failing to distinguish between simulated violence and actual violence? Interesting. Maybe the difference isn’t a difference insofar as the American experience goes.
Screw Godard. Screw Bruckheimer. Screw Tarantino. I am “categorically biased” to be offended by violence against humans.
Not kidding. This is why I watch so little film.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 28, 08:48 PM · #
I can vouch for this.
Posted by: R · Nov 28, 09:01 PM · #
Oh, and the difference is that, in My Life to Live, it’s not that the character that is killed in the name of Marxist commentary happens to be a women—it’s that she’s killed as a woman. That’s Goddard’s point, not mine; it wouldn’t work symbolically for what he’s is doing, otherwise.
(See also every other movie by directors from Catholic countries who write in Mary characters who have to be killed in the end for their inherently sinful nature and for the generalized sinfulness of the human condition so that the equally sinful male lead character can be redeemed through her sacrifice and go on living.)
I don’t know that I got to the end of Weekend, either, but I doubt that Goddard was working the same allegory there—or that the men in that case (or in Stalin’s case) were killed as men.
Now, that’s not to say that the allegory doesn’t work for the Marxist commentary that Goddard is trying to make. (I think I remember disagreeing with our feathered friend on that one.)
(But then again, what do I know? I spend all my time with those durned sociologists…)
Posted by: R · Nov 28, 10:38 PM · #
Maybe we’d be even more upset that the death in Pierrot is joyful?
Weekend was his first awful movie, and Vivre sa Vie will always be his most beautiful—it’s Brechtian, maybe, but not so Marxist, anymore than Jeanne d’Arc was, which was shown for a reason. He’s recreating both it and Pandora’s Box, and she’s both Joan and Lulu, divinely suffering victim and self-mercantile opportunist (lest we forget Karina’s Nana has left a stable bourgeois marriage to embark on her vision quest of self-salesmanship, inauthenticity, etc.) I don’t care if it’s also Sontag’s favorite movie—she was a fantastic appreciator, if still a poor thinker, and I love the movie, too, desperately. Desert-island-like. Nana had to die for the film to make sense—it’s about her and about the movies and women in the movies and Godard’s aestheticized love for his wife and of the female archetypes and of course, still, those children borne of Marx and Coca Cola BOTH. Or are we upset that Bovary dies, too? Effi Briest? Young Werther?
It’s charming if it’s true, if you identify so strongly and so viscerally the thing and its double. (I say this as if I could sit through most horror movies, which I can’t—I only made it 10 minutes into the Amityville Horror. Made me crazy.)
Anyway, regardless, Karina’s still quite alive, and she looks to have survived even a stroke or something. No babies had to be thrown away to save that particular Botticelli, as far as I know, and we were never meant to celebrate Nana’s death, even as a romance, the way it would have been in Tarantino or that ilk. It was a nonarbitrary, still shocking tragedy that happened largely in silence, and it was meant to be felt as tragedy and violence.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 29, 12:47 AM · #
*respectfully watching from the wings, noting that I’ve written a diss chapter on JLG and taught Weekend on 3 different occasions. Some commentary: JLG’s varying disrespect for/violence toward women sits alongside his Marxist politics, as if the two don’t acknowledge each other. Brechtian elements increase from VSV to Weekend and beyond. For a nicely awkward viewing of what might be domestic rape, see Une Femme Mariee (A Married Woman). The death of Nana in VSV can be seen as a Mother Courage citation: tragedy which intends to bring rational questions, Brechtian ones, “why is the world this way,” Marxist avenues…very much agreed that it’s not how Tarantino Inc. would have done it…a final recommendation: 1966, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Put this film in your head.
Posted by: patrick · Nov 29, 06:20 AM · #
Speaking of Mailer, did you ever see Town Bloody Hall?
Posted by: ASHTANGI · Nov 29, 08:39 AM · #
Let us all just revert to “Last Tango in Paris” one of my favorites. A kind of primates-in-love expose. Dispense with pretense and embrace the instinctual. Brando’s last role as ApeMan before blowing up into the cosmic 300 lb clown. Women might be dismayed to learn just how infectious the Bertolucci-Brando fantasy of jungle love is in the male population. I’ll cop to it. Wandered around for weeks after the movie doing Brando imitations on butter and fingernail clippers.
Time to head out to Ashtanga.
Posted by: tristan · Nov 29, 09:19 AM · #
How exactly is the violence offensive to you? I feel the primitive visceral response to the images and the sounds but there’s no rationale connected to any of that for me. I can’t watch violence but, strangely, I can’t describe it as offensive either.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 29, 10:21 AM · #
Lloyd Dobler is so beta he’s almost alpha.
Posted by: R · Nov 29, 10:57 AM · #
Oh my god I love you guys. And you’re crazy!
I have words for every one of you, but right now I have to be a good owl and think about global supply chains for sweat-free apparel.
I’ll leave it to R, if he comes around, to tell you how “charming” I am when it comes to on-screen violence. I’m not going Katharine McKinnon analytical on you guys. It’s visceral.
And Brando was sort of hot. Even as the brute Tennessee didn’t at all mean, I can only assume, to be sympathetic. What can I say?
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 29, 11:03 AM · #
So agree about Lloyd. That’s exactly what it is.
He’d take Brando any day.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 29, 11:06 AM · #
“I’m the distraction who’s going to England with your daughter.”
Posted by: R · Nov 29, 12:00 PM · #
A strangely chosen bit of Town Bloody Hall
Shows Germaine Greer in fantastic form, at least.
It’s a crying shame that all the copies of Mailer’s cringe-inducing Dick Cavett appearance have been taken off-line for the moment.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Nov 29, 03:35 PM · #
Hmm. I thought I posted something, but it’s not here. An owl ate it?
But to summarize: Awesome post. Thanks to R to directing me here.
And check this out: the 1990 softcore film adaptation of Henry & June, starring Uma Thurman as June.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxoZLwUIlvM&feature=related
Some choice lines:
“Violence,” says June. “I hate your violence…Men…”
And from climactic Anais and June: final love/fight scene. “Love?” says June. “You just want experience. You’re a writer. you make love to whatever you need. You’re just like Henry!”
Maybe it’s not the penis; is it the pen? But no, the penises with the horn-rimmed glasses didn’t like to share the pen, so that’s beside the point. :) Consider this just a glib aside, with emoticons.
But if you have an hour, dipping into the film, completely serialized there in youtube, is a delightfully trashy excursion into the realm of bad literary adaptation.
Posted by: NoMoreHirams · Nov 30, 11:38 AM · #
Please, more Hirams!
Posted by: R · Nov 30, 12:02 PM · #
I seriously love you all of you. What an honor to be in a room full of thoughtful men.
Hiram! It looks like you hit “Preview” a second time rather than “Submit” the first time you posted. I bow to whatever was lost to the ether. Also, no more Hirams. You are breaking the cycle of Hirams. You own Hiram. I’ll watch the H&J for real on DVD.
Tristan. Off to Ashtanga at 9:09? But I assume you were off to midmorning JB, and that is a good thing. As for primates in love, do primates love or do they just fuck? For some reason this makes me want to refer to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Just to upset DM’s about what I do and do not stomach.
Town Bloody Hall. That clip is so great. Here’s the NYT article about that night. It’s thoroughly amusing and, as I said initially, a great snapshot of a certain era of NY intelligencia.
Patrick. Well don’t be too respectful. (BTW, here is Dr. P. talking Eraserhead and Godfather killings and Godard in his own right. He can stomach anything but Laura Linney family drama. Now that shit is just TOO REAL.)
Carl. I answer your question in the link above.
DM. That’s just it, isn’t it? Sontag let her half-baked arguments run ahead of her full-bodied appreciations. Though I remember our first real conversation away from the library circulation desk—where I began discouraging you from reading the wrong things when you would check them out on my shift, and the banter began. (Yes, I lurked in your library record too. Which I can actually admit in the present political environment.) Standing in the Oak Grove in Fall ’98 you told you’d just read a magazine devoted entirely to Camp. The understanding was that we were the only two people in town who had actually discovered Against Interpretation. Or maybe I misunderstood that day. But in any case we cannot gang up too much on Sontag because she’s complicit in our bond on my end. The situation is this: Brechtian or Marxian or desperately beautiful art or Susan’s favorite: there is no disputing my feeling on this. I don’t have an argument. I’m not saying death doesn’t go in film: my god, what good art is not about death? I’m saying Godard pissed me off. I thought he had no right. I hate him killing her like I hate Bourdieu writing a tiny clueless little pink book about “Masculine Domination.” Despising that film is just my way of appreciating it.
Lloyd Dobler is so beta he’s almost alpha. Almost alpha. Almost alpha.
More in a bit.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 30, 03:58 PM · #
He he. I was one of those confused ones about your gender too. Heck, on the opposite scale, I might be too soft in my writing. But have you noticed how soft some guys can be who write in the ashtanga yahoo support group? I think it’s actually kind of nice that male ashtangis don’t have to be macho.
Cheers, Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Nov 30, 07:42 PM · #
Brando.
Mmmmm.
Posted by: karen · Nov 30, 09:19 PM · #
Strange that so many thought you male; the baby blue stripes and the slim owl scream all-woman to me.
Funny that you read Nin on public transportation. I did too! For me though, it was in NY. I would read it on the L to Williamsburg, among a rather literate bunch of people, at first assuming that people might not recognize it, and then deciding that most of my fellow riders had probably seen much more lewd acts on the train.
On the topic of people not being very well read, what is your diagnosis of this video? It’s in the genre of “let’s show how dumb Americans are,” and of course a little editing goes a long way in making these, but can editing take us this far???
http://www.bendecho.de/8984ecb037-amis-sind-dumm
Posted by: NG · Nov 30, 10:01 PM · #
NG, that is a fun video, but it’s in the veign of the British actor who spoofed Americans by catching them in naive circumstances, in the movie Borat. Some people in the video seemed to be enjoying mentioning names of states as answers to countries – they were smirking when doing so. The background scenery had as much variety as in the movie – Texas, Florida, New York. It sounds as if a reporter did this for fun while doing his regular work. He also rigged a map, showing Korea where Australia is on the map. I don’t doubt that there are ignorant people out there, but people get flustered when they get in front of a camera as well. And most people that make their living by getting in front of the camera read teleprompters and practice their scripts. The people being asked questions are not given time to prepare what they are going to say. These are candid shots that were not edited.
Cheers,
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Dec 1, 05:53 AM · #
Sorry, (0v0), one more thing, and I’ll settle into my mediation cushion and peace out. The media should not be so smug. For a fun view about how many in the media are just good looking coiffed heads, you can read the book, “Your call is important to us, the truth about bullshit” by Laura Penny. Actually, I loaned it to my coworker, but seeing that he has not read it I’ll be glad to send it to someone who wants to read it. She exposes a lot of things out there, big pharma, big gov’t, big media. So while I think we can admit that many of us Americans are naive and ignorant of other countries, so are many people in their respective countries ignorant of other countries.
Posted by: arturo · Dec 1, 06:05 AM · #
Lost last rap to the ether. So owl-girl yes J.Blu is a good one. Part Jewish Moma part merry crankster. Best adjuster in the business imo. For whatever reason I enjoy practicing with 3 different teachers during the week it seems to oblige my natural multiple personality disorder.
Monkey-love can be heart love. Chimps in zoo’s appear quite kind and familial. And its not that hard to fall in love with a lady of the night. Love can start with the carnal and move to the sublime creating a magnificent double energy helix on the way or it can do the same in reverse. What’s difficult is what ‘society’ says about love and sex. The school marmish strictures and judgments. Nonsense. Give me a scarlet letter any day. I guess thats why we have artists. To debunk the propaganda.
But let us not go overboard. Dylan is overated. It was the time and place of his ascendance as much as it was Bobby Zimmerman. Please lets not make gods and goddesses of these characters. America adores disemboweling itself with celebrity worship. To this end the resurrection of Bob Dylan in 5 year intervals is everybody’s High Colonic. Give me Don Rickles and that bag of Doritos any day of the week.
But to every rule there is an exception and Brando is mine. All bad boys must have an inspiring idol, just one in a Universe of self-contradiction. I love him for his irony,his humor,his savage beauty and his brazen middle finger.
“...I don’t like the country,the crickets make me nervous.”
Posted by: tristan · Dec 1, 10:48 AM · #