2011_3-17 Technological Icons for an Affluent age
If the sun and moon would doubt/they would immediately go out. (Wm. Blake)
You impress me as a hardcore skeptic and it has shaped your view of teaching. You seemed to fret a lot about the no-talent kids you had in class, and even feel some guilt about how you handled them. From Day One I accepted them; they came with the territory, so I turned my attention to those kids I could reach. In some ways maybe it wasn’t fair, but it simplified my job, and I had only so much energy to give and I didn’t see any virtue in wasting it on the whole class.
Frankly, I am amazed you lasted so long in Academe. With your technical skill, intelligence and general all-around know-how you could have done many things and made more money, although it sounds like you did well with what you made. Like you I was skeptical about the whole enterprise of Higher Education but I felt I should at least give teaching a whirl to see what I could do. Spratt was my vehicle for opening that possibility for me. By the time I got to UNLV could see that Higher Education was tied to the Federal Government, the Military-Industrial complex, and Corporation Land. (The first Chancellor of UNLV was from the world of Advertising. When I handed him the AFT Charter in 1968 he said to me, “ Does this mean you are going to bring your union goons here?”) After AE had run its course artists took on a new identity: the businessman artist. There was no longer the isolated genius creating in a hovel; all romantic conception faded away. These new artists were producing “necktie art” and art drained of personality. Artists were, as I recall, after “objecthood.” My best student in Vegas, after two years in the Masters program at Berkeley, saw some of my transitional drawing in 1971 and called my work “self indulgent,” a mortal sin in his book. At the same time Spratt had been telling me that artist were bound to be working hand and glove with industrial craftsmen in the creating of “technological icons for an Affluent Age.” Due to my working class background, I had always felt like a “Stranger in Paradise” in Academe. It was hard for me to feel at home and comfortable in Academe, and teaching had taught me that. I was good in the classroom but not with the institutional bullshit. And clearly, the drift of the Art World was in a direction not compatible with my inclinations and preoccupations. So I decided it was time to check out. And I did.
I had gone to UNLV as a 29-year old naïve idealist and at 35, after a few short years of intense living and activity I left exhausted, psychically played out, and despairing over the artistic, political and social conditions in America. During the last couple of years at UNLV I taught as a subversive, someone who wanted to undermine the whole enterprise as corrupt and joined at the hip with a Political Establishment that was run by money and power. It was as if I had revolted against my patrons, Spratt, Tansey, Bowman, the lot, who had duped me, I felt, had me believing university teaching was an honorable profession full of sterling personalities. After 5 years I saw it quite differently. I could write a book to list all the negative incidents of those 5 years. Sometimes I think I was lucky to get out alive. I had paintings slashed, drawings defaced, and unhappy mothers buying guns to come after me for corrupting their darling boys.
Three times in my life I have taken a leap in the dark with no idea where I might land. The first was leaving Madison on a whim in 1957 when I had only one year to go to graduate, and I ended up in the Bay Area in California, and you know what happened after that. The second leap of faith was leaving UNLV and teaching behind when I had zero possibilities ahead of me. That turned out pretty good too. The third time was leaving my job at the church at the age of 59. I can’t tell you how many people told me I was crazy, leaving a sure thing for something iffy. That leap turned out very well—a good job with great people in a welcoming subculture that led to 5 years of online writing. It’s faith baby, faith. Each time I came out smelling like a rose.
Obviously, with your more middle class background, you didn’t feel that discomfort that bugged me. You were better at rolling with the punches. You got along for, what, 40 years. Fairly early on you got married and settled in for 18 years, secure in your job and, I suspect, oblivious of the institutional bullshit. You were more career orientated from the get-go. You told your self you could keep the bullshit at arm’s length and apparently you managed that for years. In all the emails you’ve sent me I don’t recall any serious complaints about colleagues, intermural politics, or boredom. You stayed on even keel and above the fray. God, I wish I had been talented in that way. But I am a different type of personality, more volatile and impulsive, more willing to take chances. And, I dare say, much more emotional. I remember you as congenial but always at an emotional distance, with a tendency to be aloof and as such, a bit untouchable. It kept you immune from a lot of tussles that are wearing, from things that easily got under my skin. I was a hot button where you were, are, a cool customer, now, then and forever. Don’t you see yourself that way? But you are a bit manic about your intellectual propensities, very grounded in empiricism and science, always trawling for bright nuggets of insight and wisdom that you can hang your hat on for a few weeks until something else attracts your interest. I can understand the need to build oneself a picture or a system that helps us keep our heads above water, which holds off doubt, obscurity and the enormity of the indecipherable universe. We each have carved a mask and a niche to survive in until it’s time “to grab the Tiger by the tail.”
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Disaster Capitalism
2011_3_09 Disaster Capitalism
Larry O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are now assuming that the Democrats have won the showdown with Scott Walker; they are saying that because some emails have come to light that show the governor has been negotiating with the absent 14 senators for the past few days while telling the public he won’t negotiate. According to one of the senators interviewed by O’Donnell last night they have the raw material for a compromise settlement right now; a deal could come soon.
That was great news to Rachel’s guest last night, Naomi Klein, the author of that great book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. She was visibly elated over this latest turn of events. Here’s an excerpt from her book.
“What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of coporativism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war against the third party sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing alliance’s share of the national wealth…” (The global pattern was) an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; dissemination of national owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands…”
The start of our recession was a crisis along these lines. The bailing out of the banks (to big to fail was the mantra) with taxpayer’s billions was one example of how the new Robber Barons pulled the wool over the eyes of the workers and the Middle Class. And who got the blame? The folks who bought the houses who should have known better, it was said, not the greedy real estate agents, who got no more than a slap on the wrists. They laughed all the way to the bank, as did their bonus-bloated brethren on Wall Street, while being immune from blame and suffer no consequences. like the homeowners did. Meanwhile all the good jobs disappeared; many were shipped over seas and people with PHDs were forced to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage or drive a delivery truck just to keep body and soul together. And now we have situation with the Tea Party advocates being top dog around the country in control in many states governments, like in Wisconsin, Ohio, Idaho and Indiana. Feeling rich with power they are going for the big prize: dumping unions, the workers’ last bastion of countervailing power. Governor Walker and others are trying to persuade the Middle Class, feeling resentment over the better deals the public sector unions have gotten for themselves (God forbid!) so those unions and their “Bosses” (what are CEOs if not Bosses?) have to be taken down a peg or two, or even better, eliminated—who needs them anymore? They are actually attacking their legitimacy, with collective bargaining in Wisconsin going back 50 years. The right wing money establishment has a master plan to dismantle unions, thus depriving the Democratic Party of election funds. Secondly, they then seek to privatize as many institutions as they can, which would greatly be facilitated with the a Republican in the White Hose in 2012, say, a Republican like Scott Walker or some other person with Tea Party values or affiliations. We now see what they want to do. As Grover Norquest phrased it, “We want government small enough to drown in a bathtub.” They want to eliminate government—all but the Military—as a viable entity. These people hate to pay taxes; they want to keep every red cent they get. They have no social conscience. Let the churches and the ERs take care of the helpless and homeless. It’s not their concern and shouldn’t have to be. Let the families of the mentally ill take care of their kin. We can’t afford that anymore; we have wars to wage. They are now showing a particular animus toward teachers who they are demonizing as inept part time workers who don’t deserve the salaries they get. They denigrate education at their own peril. They know not what they do.
Scott Walker is obviously a gambling man; he was willing to shoot the moon believing that the reaction to his so-called Budget Repair Bill would be small and feeble. That turned out to be a colossal miscalculation, which might cost him his future career. From the start the Bill was perceived as a union-busting piece of legislation, a ruse and smoke screen to cancel out most of their collective bargaining rights. It had nothing to do with budget issues. He fooled no one. As he told the person he thought was Dave Koch on the phone, “This is our moment to grab power.” Not quite; instead he awoke a sleeping giant, as tens of thousands showed up to assert their anger and their rejection of his move to depose unions in Wisconsin. He unintentionally reinvigorated the ‘monster’ he set out to destroy and his miscalculation may haunt him the rest of his life. The big moment may belong to the workers, not the plutocrats.
Larry O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are now assuming that the Democrats have won the showdown with Scott Walker; they are saying that because some emails have come to light that show the governor has been negotiating with the absent 14 senators for the past few days while telling the public he won’t negotiate. According to one of the senators interviewed by O’Donnell last night they have the raw material for a compromise settlement right now; a deal could come soon.
That was great news to Rachel’s guest last night, Naomi Klein, the author of that great book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. She was visibly elated over this latest turn of events. Here’s an excerpt from her book.
“What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of coporativism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war against the third party sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing alliance’s share of the national wealth…” (The global pattern was) an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; dissemination of national owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands…”
The start of our recession was a crisis along these lines. The bailing out of the banks (to big to fail was the mantra) with taxpayer’s billions was one example of how the new Robber Barons pulled the wool over the eyes of the workers and the Middle Class. And who got the blame? The folks who bought the houses who should have known better, it was said, not the greedy real estate agents, who got no more than a slap on the wrists. They laughed all the way to the bank, as did their bonus-bloated brethren on Wall Street, while being immune from blame and suffer no consequences. like the homeowners did. Meanwhile all the good jobs disappeared; many were shipped over seas and people with PHDs were forced to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage or drive a delivery truck just to keep body and soul together. And now we have situation with the Tea Party advocates being top dog around the country in control in many states governments, like in Wisconsin, Ohio, Idaho and Indiana. Feeling rich with power they are going for the big prize: dumping unions, the workers’ last bastion of countervailing power. Governor Walker and others are trying to persuade the Middle Class, feeling resentment over the better deals the public sector unions have gotten for themselves (God forbid!) so those unions and their “Bosses” (what are CEOs if not Bosses?) have to be taken down a peg or two, or even better, eliminated—who needs them anymore? They are actually attacking their legitimacy, with collective bargaining in Wisconsin going back 50 years. The right wing money establishment has a master plan to dismantle unions, thus depriving the Democratic Party of election funds. Secondly, they then seek to privatize as many institutions as they can, which would greatly be facilitated with the a Republican in the White Hose in 2012, say, a Republican like Scott Walker or some other person with Tea Party values or affiliations. We now see what they want to do. As Grover Norquest phrased it, “We want government small enough to drown in a bathtub.” They want to eliminate government—all but the Military—as a viable entity. These people hate to pay taxes; they want to keep every red cent they get. They have no social conscience. Let the churches and the ERs take care of the helpless and homeless. It’s not their concern and shouldn’t have to be. Let the families of the mentally ill take care of their kin. We can’t afford that anymore; we have wars to wage. They are now showing a particular animus toward teachers who they are demonizing as inept part time workers who don’t deserve the salaries they get. They denigrate education at their own peril. They know not what they do.
Scott Walker is obviously a gambling man; he was willing to shoot the moon believing that the reaction to his so-called Budget Repair Bill would be small and feeble. That turned out to be a colossal miscalculation, which might cost him his future career. From the start the Bill was perceived as a union-busting piece of legislation, a ruse and smoke screen to cancel out most of their collective bargaining rights. It had nothing to do with budget issues. He fooled no one. As he told the person he thought was Dave Koch on the phone, “This is our moment to grab power.” Not quite; instead he awoke a sleeping giant, as tens of thousands showed up to assert their anger and their rejection of his move to depose unions in Wisconsin. He unintentionally reinvigorated the ‘monster’ he set out to destroy and his miscalculation may haunt him the rest of his life. The big moment may belong to the workers, not the plutocrats.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
A Few Laughs and Four Films
2011_3_05 A Few Laughs and Four Films
Let me start with some humor provided by David Fitzsimmons, our local political cartoonist, who also writes a satirical column in the Arizona Star on Saturdays about the weekly folly in in the state’s politics. He poked fun at our state Senators up in Phoenix, most of whom have “spent three years in the eighth grade. “He goes on the say, “Most of them think a Rhodes scholar is an asphalt expert and PBS is something that happens to wives “to make them edgy once a month.” He also weighed in on the subject, hot in the press this week, about the desire of some citizens of Pima County—that is to say Tucson-- wanting to secede from Arizona. It is an idea that has a great appeal to Sue and I, however foolish it sounds. He has three suggestions for possible names for this 51st state. The people who advanced the idea thought “Baja Arizona” was a good name. Fitzsimmons goes them one better: “Bajajaja.” If you don’t like that he has two other suggestions: “Arizonistan,” or “Mexafornia.” He also thinks everything north of Tucson should be called “southern Utah.”
I have seen four films in the past few days that are worth a few remarks. Two are low budget American films, one is a French erotic drama, and one is an early action film with Michael Caine.
PRINCESS KA’IULANI I picked up for Sue, as she is an aficionado of all things Hawaiian, and she was in tears by the end if this film. The father, a Scottish man, takes the Princess, a mere teenager, away to England when some greedy American businessmen trying to hi-jack the islands for their own profit and dominance, threaten the royal family. Being wrenched away from her homeland was very hard on her and to make things worse she is abused at the school she is sent to by the wealthy aristocrat who becomes her protector. Fortunately her host has two teenage kids, a boy and a girl, and they like her and soften the blow of being away from home. Eventually she and the lad fall in love; a period of bliss follows, but it is not to last. She was too committed to helping her homeland and he had to take care of the estate once his father was gone. And when she did return to the islands she did play a part in her people getting the right to vote. But, alas, she died shortly thereafter. The American influence could not be stemmed. In 1950 it became our 50th state. However, a minority has preserved the Hawaiian culture and it has made a bit of comeback in the past decade or so. In 2007 Sue and I went to Molokai to attend a Hula event that lasted three days. And the Hula celebrated was the traditional Hula, not what you find in the bars in Honolulu.
The young woman who played the Hawaiian Princess was O’orianka Klicher, the same young woman who at 14 played Pocahontas in Terrence Malik’s film, “The New World.” She did a good job in both films. Interestingly, in both films she plays a doomed Princess who falls in love with a foreigner, both Englishmen, and then spends time in England, to end up dying in their early twenties.
The DVD contains two discourses on Hawaiian history and both are informative and authoritative. They fill in some details and add nuance to the Princess’s character.
CONVICTION is a small movie but effective, about a timely topic: DNA testing that free men from prisons who were mistakenly jailed, tried and sentenced. The movie tells the incredible story of two mischievous kids who had lousy parents, so they bonded together to hold off a mean-spirited world. San Rockwell plays the brother, who is hot-headed, impulsive, and a magnet for trouble, while Hillary Swank plays his sister, Betty Ann Waters, who also has a temper and enough will and determination to move mountains, even if it takes 18 years. That’s how long the brother is in jail for a brutal murder he didn’t commit.
He goes to prison in 1980. The sister eventually becomes a lawyer, and once she finds out about the DNA tests she goes after a blood sample from the crime of the assailant, and then enlists Barry Scheck, the well-known DNA lawyer, to help her prove they got the wrong man. The brother had made the mistake of insulting the female Sheriff’s deputy who had arrived to take him in for questioning and she takes umbrage at his attitude, and actually decides to frame him out of spite, and she pulls it off by threatening Water’s wife and an ex-girl friend who lie to the jury saying he told them he killed the woman, who was stabbed something like 47 times. The sister, Betty Anne, finally gets the women to retract their stories. All her patience through several setbacks and her diligence on finding out the truth pay off in the end. Unfortunately the ex-Sheriff’s deputy could not be brought to justice because the stature of limitation had run out. Nonetheless the DNA test proved Waters wasn’t the killer, so he was freed. He was one of 254 men who have gotten off because of the DNA tests. Justice delayed is better than none at all. The actual killer has never been found.
LEAVING is a hot-blooded French movie that stars the bilingual Kristen Scott Thomas who has never been so sexy. It is not a new story; one thinks of Nora in “The Doll House,” and Emma Bovary. It is the dilemma of the trophy wife who finally pushes back, usually with tragic results. Suzanne (Thomas) has been married to a doctor for twenty years and he hardly pays attention to her. Anymore. They have two teenage children, a boy and a girl. Superficially, they appeared to be an ideal family. But then the husband hires Ivan (Sergi Lopez) a Spanish laborer, a hunk but also an ex-con, to do some cleanup work around the house. One thing leads to another and when Ivan makes a play for Suzanne she has already decided to go for it, as she’s tired of being the bored and ignored housewife. That initiates a passionate affair driven by lust and a dream of a different life, one more emotionally satisfying. But when the husband finds out he initiates a war between himself and Suzanne; he blocks every avenue that the couple have to make some money. They are quickly reduced to penury, their backs up against the wall. In desperation Suzanne and Ivan invade the family home and walk off with paintings and other valuables which she figures, she was only taking back what was really her’s after twenty years of service. The cops saw it differently and Ivan was arrested when he tried to sell what they took. The husband made a deal with Suzanne: come back home and Ivan will be freed. She has no choice so she takes the deal. But he can’t stand her husband any more, and one night she gets out of bed and takes her revenge. The film ends with Suzanne and Ivan at their secret meeting place in the countryside. They embrace and…at this point I told Sue it should end here; we needed go further, as we know how it has to end, badly. And it did end right there.
It’s easy to think they might have made it as a couple if the husband had let her go and been fair with her about what she was owed. It is also easy to be swayed by their passion, which was borne on Eros rather than love. But few experience that kind of ecstasy in their lifetime. But as Rex Reed commented in his review; he salutes the sincerity Kristen Scott Thomas brought to the role of Suzanne but ultimately she’s “a woman who is basically naïve, careless and self-destructive.” The trade-off of such reckless passion is a state I would characterize as NO EXIT.
PLAY DIRTY is the last film, an early Michael Caine vehicle, about a suicide mission to blow up a petrol depot in the desert that Rommel needed for his tanks in the battle for North Africa. It’s a “Dirty Dozen” type plot; an officer behind the lines dreams up this next-to-impossible-mission that he recruits several criminals for it to be led by a naïve engineer, which is Caine. The reason I ordered it from NETFLIX is I am reading Caine’s autobiography and it was one movie of his I thought I hadn’t seen—there were several-- but as it turned out I had seen it, probably when it came out. But no matter, I didn’t mind seeing it again, although it was predictable from beginning to end.
The movie was shot in Spain in geography first exploited by Sergio Leone. Caine tells a funny story about another film being shot close by, “Shalako,”with his old buddy Sean Connery. Some Indians on horseback came riding over a sand dune and the run smack into, not cowboys, but German tanks and other armored vehicles. The horses bucked their riders and high-tailed outa there. Laughter abounded but it took an hour to clean up the mess.
As for “Play Dirty” I did enjoy seeing several middle aged British actors that I used to see quite often in the sixties and seventies, like Harry Andrews and Nigel Green.
Let me start with some humor provided by David Fitzsimmons, our local political cartoonist, who also writes a satirical column in the Arizona Star on Saturdays about the weekly folly in in the state’s politics. He poked fun at our state Senators up in Phoenix, most of whom have “spent three years in the eighth grade. “He goes on the say, “Most of them think a Rhodes scholar is an asphalt expert and PBS is something that happens to wives “to make them edgy once a month.” He also weighed in on the subject, hot in the press this week, about the desire of some citizens of Pima County—that is to say Tucson-- wanting to secede from Arizona. It is an idea that has a great appeal to Sue and I, however foolish it sounds. He has three suggestions for possible names for this 51st state. The people who advanced the idea thought “Baja Arizona” was a good name. Fitzsimmons goes them one better: “Bajajaja.” If you don’t like that he has two other suggestions: “Arizonistan,” or “Mexafornia.” He also thinks everything north of Tucson should be called “southern Utah.”
I have seen four films in the past few days that are worth a few remarks. Two are low budget American films, one is a French erotic drama, and one is an early action film with Michael Caine.
PRINCESS KA’IULANI I picked up for Sue, as she is an aficionado of all things Hawaiian, and she was in tears by the end if this film. The father, a Scottish man, takes the Princess, a mere teenager, away to England when some greedy American businessmen trying to hi-jack the islands for their own profit and dominance, threaten the royal family. Being wrenched away from her homeland was very hard on her and to make things worse she is abused at the school she is sent to by the wealthy aristocrat who becomes her protector. Fortunately her host has two teenage kids, a boy and a girl, and they like her and soften the blow of being away from home. Eventually she and the lad fall in love; a period of bliss follows, but it is not to last. She was too committed to helping her homeland and he had to take care of the estate once his father was gone. And when she did return to the islands she did play a part in her people getting the right to vote. But, alas, she died shortly thereafter. The American influence could not be stemmed. In 1950 it became our 50th state. However, a minority has preserved the Hawaiian culture and it has made a bit of comeback in the past decade or so. In 2007 Sue and I went to Molokai to attend a Hula event that lasted three days. And the Hula celebrated was the traditional Hula, not what you find in the bars in Honolulu.
The young woman who played the Hawaiian Princess was O’orianka Klicher, the same young woman who at 14 played Pocahontas in Terrence Malik’s film, “The New World.” She did a good job in both films. Interestingly, in both films she plays a doomed Princess who falls in love with a foreigner, both Englishmen, and then spends time in England, to end up dying in their early twenties.
The DVD contains two discourses on Hawaiian history and both are informative and authoritative. They fill in some details and add nuance to the Princess’s character.
CONVICTION is a small movie but effective, about a timely topic: DNA testing that free men from prisons who were mistakenly jailed, tried and sentenced. The movie tells the incredible story of two mischievous kids who had lousy parents, so they bonded together to hold off a mean-spirited world. San Rockwell plays the brother, who is hot-headed, impulsive, and a magnet for trouble, while Hillary Swank plays his sister, Betty Ann Waters, who also has a temper and enough will and determination to move mountains, even if it takes 18 years. That’s how long the brother is in jail for a brutal murder he didn’t commit.
He goes to prison in 1980. The sister eventually becomes a lawyer, and once she finds out about the DNA tests she goes after a blood sample from the crime of the assailant, and then enlists Barry Scheck, the well-known DNA lawyer, to help her prove they got the wrong man. The brother had made the mistake of insulting the female Sheriff’s deputy who had arrived to take him in for questioning and she takes umbrage at his attitude, and actually decides to frame him out of spite, and she pulls it off by threatening Water’s wife and an ex-girl friend who lie to the jury saying he told them he killed the woman, who was stabbed something like 47 times. The sister, Betty Anne, finally gets the women to retract their stories. All her patience through several setbacks and her diligence on finding out the truth pay off in the end. Unfortunately the ex-Sheriff’s deputy could not be brought to justice because the stature of limitation had run out. Nonetheless the DNA test proved Waters wasn’t the killer, so he was freed. He was one of 254 men who have gotten off because of the DNA tests. Justice delayed is better than none at all. The actual killer has never been found.
LEAVING is a hot-blooded French movie that stars the bilingual Kristen Scott Thomas who has never been so sexy. It is not a new story; one thinks of Nora in “The Doll House,” and Emma Bovary. It is the dilemma of the trophy wife who finally pushes back, usually with tragic results. Suzanne (Thomas) has been married to a doctor for twenty years and he hardly pays attention to her. Anymore. They have two teenage children, a boy and a girl. Superficially, they appeared to be an ideal family. But then the husband hires Ivan (Sergi Lopez) a Spanish laborer, a hunk but also an ex-con, to do some cleanup work around the house. One thing leads to another and when Ivan makes a play for Suzanne she has already decided to go for it, as she’s tired of being the bored and ignored housewife. That initiates a passionate affair driven by lust and a dream of a different life, one more emotionally satisfying. But when the husband finds out he initiates a war between himself and Suzanne; he blocks every avenue that the couple have to make some money. They are quickly reduced to penury, their backs up against the wall. In desperation Suzanne and Ivan invade the family home and walk off with paintings and other valuables which she figures, she was only taking back what was really her’s after twenty years of service. The cops saw it differently and Ivan was arrested when he tried to sell what they took. The husband made a deal with Suzanne: come back home and Ivan will be freed. She has no choice so she takes the deal. But he can’t stand her husband any more, and one night she gets out of bed and takes her revenge. The film ends with Suzanne and Ivan at their secret meeting place in the countryside. They embrace and…at this point I told Sue it should end here; we needed go further, as we know how it has to end, badly. And it did end right there.
It’s easy to think they might have made it as a couple if the husband had let her go and been fair with her about what she was owed. It is also easy to be swayed by their passion, which was borne on Eros rather than love. But few experience that kind of ecstasy in their lifetime. But as Rex Reed commented in his review; he salutes the sincerity Kristen Scott Thomas brought to the role of Suzanne but ultimately she’s “a woman who is basically naïve, careless and self-destructive.” The trade-off of such reckless passion is a state I would characterize as NO EXIT.
PLAY DIRTY is the last film, an early Michael Caine vehicle, about a suicide mission to blow up a petrol depot in the desert that Rommel needed for his tanks in the battle for North Africa. It’s a “Dirty Dozen” type plot; an officer behind the lines dreams up this next-to-impossible-mission that he recruits several criminals for it to be led by a naïve engineer, which is Caine. The reason I ordered it from NETFLIX is I am reading Caine’s autobiography and it was one movie of his I thought I hadn’t seen—there were several-- but as it turned out I had seen it, probably when it came out. But no matter, I didn’t mind seeing it again, although it was predictable from beginning to end.
The movie was shot in Spain in geography first exploited by Sergio Leone. Caine tells a funny story about another film being shot close by, “Shalako,”with his old buddy Sean Connery. Some Indians on horseback came riding over a sand dune and the run smack into, not cowboys, but German tanks and other armored vehicles. The horses bucked their riders and high-tailed outa there. Laughter abounded but it took an hour to clean up the mess.
As for “Play Dirty” I did enjoy seeing several middle aged British actors that I used to see quite often in the sixties and seventies, like Harry Andrews and Nigel Green.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
All the Worlds a Stage
2011_2_25 All the World’s a Stage
There were two versions of the Globe Theater on the south bank of the river Thames. The first burned down due to an accidental fire in 1613 and the second was completed the next year, with some improvements, but on the same spot. The second Globe lasted 31 years when the theater-going fell into disfavor under the Puritan rule. It was then pulled down to make room for tenements. The modern replica of the Globe Theater was built very close to the original site.
In the prologue to “Henry VIII” Shakespeare calls the Globe “a wooden O.” Actually it was a timber-framed polygon with as many as 16 sides, which made it look like a oval in form from a distance. The Elizabethan Theater, unlike the modern theater, which is tied to scenes and technical machinery, was portable, self-contained, adjustable, and only needed an audience. The public stage was a spin-off of the common scaffold stage of street theaters of the medieval era. The area in front of the stage was called “the Yard.” Part of the audience saw the play from that perspective and they had to stand for the length of the play. Otherwise the audience sat in box seats arrayed in three levels in a circle around the three-sided stage.
Usually the stage was head high to allow for a working space underneath the floor; then the posts were covered with a drape so the theatergoer could not see beneath the stage. Since it was below the stage level it was referred to as “Hell,” and there was a trap door in the floor of the stage so “devils” could emerge from below. (In 18 plays Shakespeare used the Hell’s trap door only twice.) In likewise fashion the ceiling above the stage and the three-tired up-stage background was called “Heaven.” It was painted with blue sky, clouds, and yellow stars and sometimes in other theaters with a zodiac on the ceiling too. (They think it was painted by a itinerate Flemish painter.) If any one were to be interested in more detail of the components of the Globe Theater I would highly recommend THE GLOBE RESTORED by C. Walter Hodge who not only wrote the book, he illustrated it with some very fine pen and ink drawings.
The phrase “behind the scenes” will take on a new meaning when you study the composition of the old Globe Theater. The word “scene” comes from the Greek word “skene” which means tent or booth, again a reference to the smaller portable stage of the Middle Ages. The “proscenium” was the area in front of the scene. The back-stage area was called the “Tiring House.” The word ’Tiring’ actually was a reduction of the word ‘attire,’ and referred to the dressing rooms, storage and wardrobe.
Players entered the area from an outside door in the back. The up-stage façade was a vertical plane arranged with several levels. The first two were stacked on each other with six doors and windows. At floor level, right in the middle of the façade, was the “inner stage,” the main entrance and exit for the players, which was cover by a curtain. (In some Elizabethan theaters the inner stage was a double door made out of wood.) There were two additional wooden doors on each side of the main entrance or inner stage. Directly above it was the “upper stage,” a gallery or balcony above the inner stage, used as required by musicians, sometimes by spectators, and often as part of the play. It was flanked by two “window stages,” one on each side. In short, there was symmetry to these first two levels. Two more vertical levels extended above the inner and upper stages. The first was called the “top stage.” It was used mostly by musicians. (Symbolically, it could represent the perception of the Music of the Spheres, since there is a thread of Hermetic Philosophy clearly throughout the structuring of the Globe.) Above the top story was the super-celestial stage known as the “The Hut’ or “The Heavenly Throne.” This was a space equipped with machinery to lower divinities, if that was called for, through another trap door to the floor of the stage. According to Hodge the upper stages of Renaissance theaters had a tendency to “impart symbolic importance to vertical display.” There was, if you will, a climbing toward the uppermost level through 7 levels—from yard to hell to main floor to inner stage to upper stage to top story to heavenly throne. The number seven is a number sacred to Christianity and Hermetic Philosophy. Perhaps it was part of a kind of occult or hidden shorthand behind the invention of the structure of the Globe Theater. Another consideration in this regard is the stage faced east, just like the altar in Christian churches in Europe—toward Jerusalem. In other words, the construction and layout of the Globe Theater is what Paracelsus termed a VITA COSMOGRAPHICA, a diagram of the cosmos as a two-way street, God comes down from his Heavenly Throne and humanity endeavors to elevate itself to the Heavenly Throne. I would call that a HIEROGLYPH, a sacred reading of a hidden truth. Here is how Frances Yates put it in THEATER OF THE WORLD, her splendid book about the Globe Theater and its intellectual and Hermetic influences that informed the ideas behind its construction.
“The painting of the ‘heavens’ in Burbage’s theater, with its images of the signs of the zodiac and of the planets, would have been a matter of great importance. For, apart from their practical use as cover and for acoustics, the ‘heavens’ emphasized and repeated the cosmic plan of the theater, based on the triangulations within the circle of the zodiac. They showed forth clearly that this was a ‘Theater of the World,’ in which Man, the Microcosm, was to play his parts within the Macrocosm.”
Which brings me to my drawings and what I call THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, for I have intuitively evolved a concept and method similar to the emblematic method so popular during the Renaissance. After a search of 5 years I came up with my own version of VITA COMOMGRAPHICA. To quote John Blofeld, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, the challenge is “to create mental symbols related to spiritual goals,” images the Tantric practitioners calls a “yantra,” a visualization that can summarize in two-dimensional form a cosmic diagram, which is what the Globe Theater does in three dimensions. One of the better-known yantras is the Tibetan WHEEL OF LIFE; a series of concentric circles jammed packed with Buddhist’s symbols and beliefs. Such images are objects for contemplation, a starting point, again to quote Blofeld, “to transfer the force of desire to the symbol so that the desire is concentrated directly on the goal. If the adept is accomplished in the art of visualization, there will be not be much element of make-believe, for he will have learnt to produce mental creations which are more real to him than the ordinary objects of his environment.” I have chosen to call my images hieroglyphs, would-be sacred symbols with hidden meanings, and the entire series of drawings THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER.
After I quit teaching I spent 5 years searching for a way to describe a transformational experience I had had in the late sixties. Around 1973-1974 I settled into an approach I was happy with. In 1975 I wrote my first book, PRIMUS ROTA, which I self-published and privately distributed to 5 western sates. Remembering the Renaissance theater had a tendency “to impart symbolic importance to vertical display,” my pen and ink drawings favored a vertical format divided into three horizontal levels.
In the drawings I used a vertical format that divided into three registers or levels. I thought of the levels as a tripartite division of reality, roughly considering the lower level the material world; the middle level was that of the psyche; and the topmost level was the spiritual realm. Water and the desert came to represent the lowest level; the middle level could be represented in a variety of ways; and a bird in flight or a mandala in a midnight sky represented the topmost level most of the time. The theater idea is evoke by the use of a platform, if you will, a proscenium, with most of the narrative imagery and action taking placed on staging platform. It was like a world apart yet fixed within a cosmos in which it played a vital role. The divisions between the levels were not hard and fast; more like subtle and blend at the borders. To use an image from Carl Jung, they constituted a UNUS MUNDI, one World.
About two years after I started using the tripartite hieroglyphic approach, I came across a picture of the Serekh Motif, an ancient Egyptian emblem that was common on royal residences in the Early Dynastic Period. It was an image on a stela with a tripartite hieroglyphic arrangement that surprised me when I fist saw it. It was obvious I was not the first to think of the idea, to say the least. The Egyptians beat me by 5,000 years! Here is what it looks like. On the bottom level was a panel that described a hall of a typical Egyptian temple columns that gave you a sense of spatial depth. It was meant to suggest the world of space and time. It would equate with my lower material level. The middle register had, again something typically Egyptian, contained the image of an animal, a snake, said to be a cobra. I equated the cobra with my level of the psyche, and inevitably with KUNDALINI, with SERPENT POWER, with a special form of healing energy, with self-knowledge and individuation. The top most register had another and larger animal, a falcon, representing the God Horus, originally a solar deity, an animal representation of the living kings of Egypt. He was one of oldest gods of the nation, as his presence on the Serekh Motif indicates.
When I first read the books of Frances Yates, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, THE ART OF MEMORY, and THE THEATER OF THE WORLD I was thrilled to find such a kindred spirit and her discourse on the symbol-rich background to The Globe Theater taught just how a ‘hieroglyph’ worked and how I might create some myself. Like with the Globe Theater I put my actors on the stage between the darkness of hell and the glories of the Heavenly Throne.
As Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage.” And when Ben Jonson saw the charred remains of the first Globe Theater after the fire, he exclaimed, “See the World in ruins!”
There were two versions of the Globe Theater on the south bank of the river Thames. The first burned down due to an accidental fire in 1613 and the second was completed the next year, with some improvements, but on the same spot. The second Globe lasted 31 years when the theater-going fell into disfavor under the Puritan rule. It was then pulled down to make room for tenements. The modern replica of the Globe Theater was built very close to the original site.
In the prologue to “Henry VIII” Shakespeare calls the Globe “a wooden O.” Actually it was a timber-framed polygon with as many as 16 sides, which made it look like a oval in form from a distance. The Elizabethan Theater, unlike the modern theater, which is tied to scenes and technical machinery, was portable, self-contained, adjustable, and only needed an audience. The public stage was a spin-off of the common scaffold stage of street theaters of the medieval era. The area in front of the stage was called “the Yard.” Part of the audience saw the play from that perspective and they had to stand for the length of the play. Otherwise the audience sat in box seats arrayed in three levels in a circle around the three-sided stage.
Usually the stage was head high to allow for a working space underneath the floor; then the posts were covered with a drape so the theatergoer could not see beneath the stage. Since it was below the stage level it was referred to as “Hell,” and there was a trap door in the floor of the stage so “devils” could emerge from below. (In 18 plays Shakespeare used the Hell’s trap door only twice.) In likewise fashion the ceiling above the stage and the three-tired up-stage background was called “Heaven.” It was painted with blue sky, clouds, and yellow stars and sometimes in other theaters with a zodiac on the ceiling too. (They think it was painted by a itinerate Flemish painter.) If any one were to be interested in more detail of the components of the Globe Theater I would highly recommend THE GLOBE RESTORED by C. Walter Hodge who not only wrote the book, he illustrated it with some very fine pen and ink drawings.
The phrase “behind the scenes” will take on a new meaning when you study the composition of the old Globe Theater. The word “scene” comes from the Greek word “skene” which means tent or booth, again a reference to the smaller portable stage of the Middle Ages. The “proscenium” was the area in front of the scene. The back-stage area was called the “Tiring House.” The word ’Tiring’ actually was a reduction of the word ‘attire,’ and referred to the dressing rooms, storage and wardrobe.
Players entered the area from an outside door in the back. The up-stage façade was a vertical plane arranged with several levels. The first two were stacked on each other with six doors and windows. At floor level, right in the middle of the façade, was the “inner stage,” the main entrance and exit for the players, which was cover by a curtain. (In some Elizabethan theaters the inner stage was a double door made out of wood.) There were two additional wooden doors on each side of the main entrance or inner stage. Directly above it was the “upper stage,” a gallery or balcony above the inner stage, used as required by musicians, sometimes by spectators, and often as part of the play. It was flanked by two “window stages,” one on each side. In short, there was symmetry to these first two levels. Two more vertical levels extended above the inner and upper stages. The first was called the “top stage.” It was used mostly by musicians. (Symbolically, it could represent the perception of the Music of the Spheres, since there is a thread of Hermetic Philosophy clearly throughout the structuring of the Globe.) Above the top story was the super-celestial stage known as the “The Hut’ or “The Heavenly Throne.” This was a space equipped with machinery to lower divinities, if that was called for, through another trap door to the floor of the stage. According to Hodge the upper stages of Renaissance theaters had a tendency to “impart symbolic importance to vertical display.” There was, if you will, a climbing toward the uppermost level through 7 levels—from yard to hell to main floor to inner stage to upper stage to top story to heavenly throne. The number seven is a number sacred to Christianity and Hermetic Philosophy. Perhaps it was part of a kind of occult or hidden shorthand behind the invention of the structure of the Globe Theater. Another consideration in this regard is the stage faced east, just like the altar in Christian churches in Europe—toward Jerusalem. In other words, the construction and layout of the Globe Theater is what Paracelsus termed a VITA COSMOGRAPHICA, a diagram of the cosmos as a two-way street, God comes down from his Heavenly Throne and humanity endeavors to elevate itself to the Heavenly Throne. I would call that a HIEROGLYPH, a sacred reading of a hidden truth. Here is how Frances Yates put it in THEATER OF THE WORLD, her splendid book about the Globe Theater and its intellectual and Hermetic influences that informed the ideas behind its construction.
“The painting of the ‘heavens’ in Burbage’s theater, with its images of the signs of the zodiac and of the planets, would have been a matter of great importance. For, apart from their practical use as cover and for acoustics, the ‘heavens’ emphasized and repeated the cosmic plan of the theater, based on the triangulations within the circle of the zodiac. They showed forth clearly that this was a ‘Theater of the World,’ in which Man, the Microcosm, was to play his parts within the Macrocosm.”
Which brings me to my drawings and what I call THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, for I have intuitively evolved a concept and method similar to the emblematic method so popular during the Renaissance. After a search of 5 years I came up with my own version of VITA COMOMGRAPHICA. To quote John Blofeld, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, the challenge is “to create mental symbols related to spiritual goals,” images the Tantric practitioners calls a “yantra,” a visualization that can summarize in two-dimensional form a cosmic diagram, which is what the Globe Theater does in three dimensions. One of the better-known yantras is the Tibetan WHEEL OF LIFE; a series of concentric circles jammed packed with Buddhist’s symbols and beliefs. Such images are objects for contemplation, a starting point, again to quote Blofeld, “to transfer the force of desire to the symbol so that the desire is concentrated directly on the goal. If the adept is accomplished in the art of visualization, there will be not be much element of make-believe, for he will have learnt to produce mental creations which are more real to him than the ordinary objects of his environment.” I have chosen to call my images hieroglyphs, would-be sacred symbols with hidden meanings, and the entire series of drawings THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER.
After I quit teaching I spent 5 years searching for a way to describe a transformational experience I had had in the late sixties. Around 1973-1974 I settled into an approach I was happy with. In 1975 I wrote my first book, PRIMUS ROTA, which I self-published and privately distributed to 5 western sates. Remembering the Renaissance theater had a tendency “to impart symbolic importance to vertical display,” my pen and ink drawings favored a vertical format divided into three horizontal levels.
In the drawings I used a vertical format that divided into three registers or levels. I thought of the levels as a tripartite division of reality, roughly considering the lower level the material world; the middle level was that of the psyche; and the topmost level was the spiritual realm. Water and the desert came to represent the lowest level; the middle level could be represented in a variety of ways; and a bird in flight or a mandala in a midnight sky represented the topmost level most of the time. The theater idea is evoke by the use of a platform, if you will, a proscenium, with most of the narrative imagery and action taking placed on staging platform. It was like a world apart yet fixed within a cosmos in which it played a vital role. The divisions between the levels were not hard and fast; more like subtle and blend at the borders. To use an image from Carl Jung, they constituted a UNUS MUNDI, one World.
About two years after I started using the tripartite hieroglyphic approach, I came across a picture of the Serekh Motif, an ancient Egyptian emblem that was common on royal residences in the Early Dynastic Period. It was an image on a stela with a tripartite hieroglyphic arrangement that surprised me when I fist saw it. It was obvious I was not the first to think of the idea, to say the least. The Egyptians beat me by 5,000 years! Here is what it looks like. On the bottom level was a panel that described a hall of a typical Egyptian temple columns that gave you a sense of spatial depth. It was meant to suggest the world of space and time. It would equate with my lower material level. The middle register had, again something typically Egyptian, contained the image of an animal, a snake, said to be a cobra. I equated the cobra with my level of the psyche, and inevitably with KUNDALINI, with SERPENT POWER, with a special form of healing energy, with self-knowledge and individuation. The top most register had another and larger animal, a falcon, representing the God Horus, originally a solar deity, an animal representation of the living kings of Egypt. He was one of oldest gods of the nation, as his presence on the Serekh Motif indicates.
When I first read the books of Frances Yates, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, THE ART OF MEMORY, and THE THEATER OF THE WORLD I was thrilled to find such a kindred spirit and her discourse on the symbol-rich background to The Globe Theater taught just how a ‘hieroglyph’ worked and how I might create some myself. Like with the Globe Theater I put my actors on the stage between the darkness of hell and the glories of the Heavenly Throne.
As Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage.” And when Ben Jonson saw the charred remains of the first Globe Theater after the fire, he exclaimed, “See the World in ruins!”
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