#a postmodernist before his time

[iisthepopeoffools]

I feel bad for Protagoras. He had many insights into how truth is constructed but none of his writings survive and we mainly know him from Plato dunking on him.

#protagoras #a postmodernist before his time #moral relativism #debate bros should consider that debates are won by skill at rhetoric and not truth

[cliozaur]

While reading this tableau of everything and everyone in Paris around 1817, a feeling stirred within me, reminding me of something. Then it hit me—I teach a course on the theory of history, and when discussing postmodern or deconstructionist history, we explore Gumbrecht’s “In 1926,” an example of experimental history writing. Gumbrecht crafted a book that allows readers to start from any part, lacking a conventional beginning and end. His aim was to immerse the reader in 1926, presenting short chapters about various aspects of life during that year.

It appears that Hugo was innovative and postmodernist even before postmodernism was coined. Although his portrayal of 1817 focuses more on political and cultural life than on social and economic aspects, it serves the purpose of conveying an impression of what was happening around that time. The challenge lies in the fact that many of the names mentioned may fly over the heads of modern readers. Even I had to consult some of Donougher’s notes. I can imagine the difficulties faced by those without a historical background.

#les mis letters #lm 1.3.1 #les miserables #1817 #in 1926 #gumbrecht

[realhankmccoy]

fuckin cracks me up that Americans think of Blood Meridian as postmodernist.... ahahahahaha... this stupid fucking country. there's a lot of them who think it is, too. I guess they didn't notice the Bible literally materialising in it. I guess they never read a Cormac McCarthy interview? I guess they don't know what a western crossed with Stephen King written in a flat modernist style that -- oh how it would displease Harold Bloom, perhaps, to hear it -- clearly has Hemingway in it?

Who reads that book and thinks 'PoMo?'

anyhow at least that idiot who got it wrong tonight -- as he always gets everything wrong -- wrote a few good lines creepin on me before devolving into the standard issue conservative cucked stuff implausible seams showing about pussy (drag is only magical if you're convincing, hunty, and so is straight drag) and trying to use too many big words like Elon does in order to 'sound more intelligent' which obviously doesn't work when these people don't know the reason big words exist and how to use them... like saying you're 'aspirationally Jewish' which is still driving me up the wall... Elon says so much stupid shit.

so yes if that idiot had his shit together and realised he's an idiot and what to fix, i mean 3/8ths of that post was solid and probably his best writing in years, notwithstanding the massive glaring error about Cormac McCarthy, he who is quite comfortable with good vs evil, he who probably votes Republican -- being pomo. I mean what the fuck is Republican pomo anyhow? What would that even be? The whole Republican thing is an infantile longing for order, not the postmodernist project of sewing disorder.

Notwithstanding how it annoys me that I'm an influence on the idiot, for it has never been about control and narcissism with me (the idiot only projected this upon me because that's how Trump is and that's how he, as Trump's cuck, is) I actually don't like influencing anybody, probably because I don't like myself very much and don't need to be seeing any more of myself in the world. It actually just grosses me out and depresses me to see anything inspired by me. 100% of the time I think art inspired by me sucks, and why wouldn't I? I don't even like any of my art. That's not a posture, kids. I can't think of a single thing I've ever written that I'd feel comfortable handing to anybody like it's any good. This isn't some noble thing, either. I just don't like it. I don't like the sound of anything I have made, pretty much. And why would I? Why would I when I was programmed by the parents and the community to know my total insignificance and still am despite occasional moments where they try to make me feel like I have some? The overwhelming --

But whatever, it doesn't really matter as I believe in the Sagan stuff about our insignificance anyhow, at the same time believing in the signficance of everyone and all the small things, which I then have to apply to myself, because leaving yourself out is not objective, and then when I extend that to myself, the whole thing blows up because the forces that drive me don't compute.

Now, there is a sewing of disorder in the Republican as it generates chaos trying to get what it wants -- 'divide and conquer' and i know some awful liberal-ish money conquest women who also think that way.

That's not the same thing tho. That's like, Papa Hemingway with a John Wayne streak.

I really will never quite understand why Harold Bloom hates Stephen King but wets himself for Blood Meridian. It's like a boring Stephen King novel. Sure, I guess it's more formally literary but also you know, more formally boring. The Judge -- I feel like Mike Judge would do better in a Beavis & Butthead film. But Mr. Bloom didn't really watch MTV.

Nope, kids, I just didn't get it. Usually Harold Bloom is somebody I agree with almost across the board, but I just don't get it. Perhaps it's a HETERONORMATIVE THING, much like Tarantino fanboys are.

anyhow i kinda feel bad for that idiot cuck having to find every sticker on the sticker sheet and apply it to itself because it's so typically american these days.

it's so... 'i'm every woman' only it's not succinct, it's just embarrassing, like these americans always trying to elbow on top of each other in their rat race in which they're always a tool, always a derivative, never truly the Boss that they want to be, for their is always a bigger boss, and the biggest boss is Trump.

rather than dabble and wander between the whole sticker set of crowns and swords and cups and pussy and cock, why not just grow a pair of balls and commit to something outré

i mean look at it this way: even somebody who committed wholeheartedly to the entire Princess sticker sheet is more of a man than some idiot who can't figure out which Lucky Charm he feels like today. oh, i remember that age well... sometimes i felt like blue diamons, other times green clovers... and always like green trees, limited.

and there's always man of them to eat again and again

but when i see like a Canadian trans woman commit wholeheartedly to being a 5-yr-old girl, now that takes balls. that takes courage.

you either want to muddy the waters to seem deep, like Nietzsche says, or you want to clarify something or choose a course.

nothing this idiot cuck ever does smacks of courage. it is courage free. they have some good ability to pay attention to television at times, for whatever that's worth. maybe they are best suited for television analysis for geeks into the details of television shows. it's very American, caring a lot about your shows and the details.

hey, credit where due, it's American but i sure don't have the patience to figure out every detail and quote about some crap on tv.

so, yes, there's a toddler with a sticker sheet who wants to be a princess, but a real princess would jump in all the way if she had some balls:

and let us not think this is about emasculation, it's about people who are trying to be a sticker sheet generalist and paste them all onto themselves willy nilly in ways that i only find tragicomic, camp and kitsch

for example why not choose this sticker sheet? the reason is because the idiot cuck has no balls

as a channel-surfer of nuclear suburbia, it's too much sustained focus for the cuck, who is used to using the clicker to go through all the shows... a masculinity crippled by tv, much like Rabbit Angstrom ended up at in middle age

being that i am FUCKING BORED with systemic cucks maybe they can work on that but i doubt they're capable of it any more than they're capable of buying me a steak because

what's a toddler in front of a tv gonna be capable of?

seriously tho who thinks this guy is PoMo at heart?

he's such a conservative western christcuck who is terrified by the pomo world he finds himself in. that's what The Road was all about, kiddos. That's what everything he writes seems to be about. I don't share his terror... I'm liberal and we're not as big of cowards. OH IS AMERICA GOING TO COLLAPSE I'M SO SCARED

"a comedown of revolving doors"

either you're a chickenshit male or you're a female with far more guts, apparently. Cormac was a chickenshit. Emily Haines was not.

yes, you know, the American conservative is correct here, more correct than Harold Bloom I think.

'conservative pessimism' is what Cormac is i suppose Harold could be described as a conservative pessimist

too -- even as Harold's politics were with the Democrats, certainly he was trying to conserve literature in a sort of you know, different form of conservation -- there's a big difference between a 'conservative' and a 'conservationist', kids.

slip in a little Jesus

i dunno kids, i think there's something that neurotically went wrong with Harold Bloom, maybe frustration with feminism and identity politics and anarchists and deviance, that made his brain glom on to McCarthy a bit too aggressively is my theory cuz it truly has long been probably the main thing about Bloom that i can't get on the same page with... McCarthy enthusiasm

but i was spoiled by all that Stephen King at a young age, you see, and Stephen is far more imaginative and dreamlike than some writer of a fuckin' dark western.

but even... i mean i'm sorry, where's the Literature in McCarthy? Bloom never really seems to explain it. he just goes on and on about the character the Judge and the foreboding and the collapse of western civ... i mean, whatever dude ya never seen those themes before? Themes and ideas aren't discussing the LITTY RAT TURD or whatever ghost in the machine where did it go, where's Cormac LITTY RAT TURD if that's what this is all about? I just did not quite pick up on it, mmkay?

As for that cuck who is incapable of being exactly what i say its incapable of

it should find a sticker set that isn't just the generic all-encompassing one the parents always hand to the kids

and have the balls to go for it

David Bowie committed to different ways of life -- different personas -- for long periods of time -- it wasn't a costume party you flip in and out of like Lady Gaga who didn't understand it, you know?

like, read a book on method acting

i've been through a lot of looks and places and focuses and lifestyles in a lightweight curious fashion, more of a discovery zone than a statement

do you really want to look back on how you played king or bro every other day for years i mean zzzzz what are you a conservative? are you Elvis? Because he played the king as often as you do, princess and he was a Republican.

Bowie played the Goblin King briefly and it was explictly an evil role, portraying royalism as the establishment to be defeated.

Meanwhile there's Gaga in a crown with her Bad Romance posse and fake druggy fake decadence (the counter of albums sold and the ensuing profits is the most honestly thing about that video and what it's all about) which is just pathetic, the garishness of proudly capitalistic -- as proudly capitalistic as Trump

establishmentarian re-enforcement of daddies who owned 24 hotels or whatever thanks Gaga blech

anyhow, any deviance would be a good idea rather than copping from my page and being YET ANOTHER AMERICAN THINKING IF THEY SHOULD DON THAT COWBOY HAT FOR POWER.

how many times on this blog now have i talked about how much this video pissed me off when 'Greater Albania' Bugs Bunny here gets her rodeo on

Dua Lipa is just more of this push for Warner Brothers to turn music into a Barbie product in the kids' bop aisle at Wal-Mart. Her lyrics don't even gel in this dumb song or her stuck up tone wrecks it... it comes across as totally fake and there being no real 'love' at all which is probably the truth, ain't it? But she sings the lie.

That White Town song she samples is better than her song, and i doubt Bugs Barbie or Lola Bunny Lips or whatever she goes by is capable of gender-bending.

This is what good music used to be, kids. Chaka Khan gets what adulthood is about -- it's not about rabbit tricks (which are rooted in retaliatory fear of being eradicated and then turn into aggro, which is a pervasive mentally unhealthy and effectually sociopathic and repetitively abusive cowardice and sickness in most americans, from Trump to Swift) and it's not about Trumpian conquest and taking.

#cormac mccarthy #harold bloom #dua lipa #chaka khan #modernism #westerns #postmodernism #cowboy #cowgirl #cowboys #cowboy culture #Youtube #metric #emily haines #white town

[rollercoasterwords]

hiiiiii how are u hope u are doin good :-)

i remember how once you said something about the ending of the hand that feeds being based on reproductive futurism (? and i thought that sounded really interesting so i looked it up but. okay. maybe i am just a little bit dumb but i could not connect the two concepts at all + also i am interested in hearing your thoughts about how the ending ties into that idea so if u WANT to ramble or even talk briefly about that i would personally be very interested in reading if not please feel free 2 simply ignore this ask i will not be even a little bit offended i promise :-)

anon i am literally kissing u on the mouth for giving me an excuse 2 break out my edelman slideshow!!!!!! ok buckle up i'm gonna put this all under a cut but here's how i broke down edelman's theory of reproductive futurity + ethical queerness when i was an undergrad ta:

first of all u are NOT dumb edelman is just really fucking boring and his writing is SUPER dense and full of all these references to psychoanalytic and postmodern theorists so u need like. a ton of background knowledge 2 even engage w it. it literally broke my brain trying 2 understand 'no future' the first time i read it so i am HAPPY 2 explain it in a way that's easier 2 understand bc it's not actually all that scary + complicated!!

first off - important words to know. most of this is edelman drawing on those postmodernists + psychoanalysts i mentioned earlier, so it gets confusing if u haven't encountered any of it before. but basically: the Real is like...true reality. the thing that's actually at the center of all life + society, which is actually nothing, bc it's all just meaningless chaos. we live in a random and unfeeling universe! hooray!

the Symbolic is humans' response to that meaningless chaos - an attempt to assign meaning to life by constructing symbolic structures of meaning. think about things like law, religion, politics -- all structures by which we assign meaning and understand the world, which are really covering the fact that there is no real, pre-existing Meaning in the world. it's all made up by humans. fun!

the Death Drive is a product of humans creating the Symbolic. bc we're all basically playing a big game of pretend where we act like the Symbolic has real meaning and try to ignore the chaos of the Real, we all feel an internal urge (the Death Drive) towards the Real, an internal urge to tear down the Symbolic covering the Real and embrace the chaos at the center

Jouissance is a manifestation of the death drive; essentially pure pleasure without any meaning. because it refuses meaning, it forces a confrontation with the Symbolic by highlighting the fact that the Symbolic is constructed and not real.

here's my little chart trying to illustrate all that lol. the Symbolic covers/hides/obscures the real and in the process claims that it is true reality. however it cannot eliminate the Real at its core, out of which grows the Death Drive, which manifests as Jouissance.

so here's the breakdown of what edelman is saying about all this. basically, all society is contrived social structures which insist they are not constructed, and all those social structures are grounded in Reproductive Futurism: an imagined future in which we just repeat the past ("the good old days" mentality, if you will) to continue to uphold our Symbolic structures

within reproductive futurism, there are two important figures: the Child and the Queer.

now, we aren't talking about actual children or queer people here. we're talking about the idea of The Child, the idea of The Queer. we're talking about them as figures, with figural roles.

the figural role of the Child is to uphold reproductive futurism. we're told we need to uphold the past (Symbolic structures) in the imagined future for the sake of our children. just think about how basically all politics positions itself as "think of the kids!!!!" while simultaneously hurting real-life children - perfect example in what's going on w trans legislation in the u.s. right now, where politicians are banning gender-affirming care for imagined, theoretical children who might one day regret it, but ignoring real-live trans kids who beg them to stop. politics isn't about children, it's about The Child

the figural position of the Queer, on the other hand, is to oppose/threaten reproductive futurism. an important note here - edelman isn't talking about queerness in terms of gender or sexuality or identity; he's talking about it as a structural position that threatens reproductive futurity. because we need an excuse to protect the figural Child--a threat to rail against, in order to make all our politics and Symbolic structures necessary--the Queer is ironically produced by the same systems that claim they want to destroy it, a chronic threatening figure so that politicians (and anyone invested in upholding the Symbolic) can point the finger and go "see!! look how the Queer threatens the Child!! we need [x oppressive law/structure/etc] to protect the Child!!!!"

so--within this context, edelman suggests that there is, essentially, a more and less ethical way to be Queer. an ethical Queer, according to edelman, embraces their figural status as oppositional to the Symbolic. rather than going "omg noooo i'm not a threat" the ethical Queer goes "yeah fuck your Symbolic i'm gonna kick and scream and wreck shit and make sure you never forget how contrived it all is!!" however, edelman also stipulates that an ethical Queer does not try to escape the Symbolic; an ethical Queer isn't trying to rebuild any new society, bc to do so would inevitably result in the same structural creation of a Real, a Symbolic, reproductive futurism, and the figural position of the Queer. the ethical Queer knows there's no way to escape the Symbolic, and because of that the figural position of the Queer will always exist, so rather than trying to assimilate to the norm and abandon that figural position, an ethical queer accepts and embraces it.

^ an ethical queer refuses to deny the Death Drive and pretend that the Symbolic (all our nice, contrived social structures) are anything but a flimsy veil over the Real

^ in this way, edelman's theory is a fundamentally negative one. it isn't hopeful or positive; it doesn't imagine a better future--because to imagine a future at all is to inevitably fall back into the trap of reproductive futurity

this sort of concludes the summary on edelman, so it's usually where i ask if there are any questions etc. so. feel free 2 send me another message if any of this was confusing!! i am happy 2 elaborate

the next part of the slideshow is a film analysis of megamind using edelman's theories--unfortunately there's a 10-image limit on mobile so i can't fit it all here. it's just an example meant 2 ground the theory a little and show how it can be applied to ur own outlook/analysis/thinking irl--if u want it, lmk + i'll make another post, but otherwise this is the end of my reproductive futurity crash course!! hope u enjoyed <3

#ask #txt #edelman is really fucking confusing at first but once u get u like...Get It yknow #at least ime #and then it haunts u forever bc literally EVERYTHING is structuted around reproductive futurity it's inescapable....

[trowelaway-blog]

Why Stone Ocean is cursed to be underappreciated

Posting this rant here because I think people might like to read it. Wall of text ahead.

In the manga industry, mainstream publications are usually split by target demographic: shonen for boys/young men, shojo for girls/young women (think Sailor Moon, Rose of Versailles, etc), seinen for young men, and josei for young women are the main four, with shonen being THE thing people think of when they hear the word "manga". Before SBR, Jojo was published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump, alongside such titans as One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Naruto. And until SO, Jojo pretty well fit in with the shonen demographic, bizarre though it is. Fundamentally, it comes down to cool guys punching each other in cool ways, which shonen readers are absolutely down with.

But then SO comes along. Imagine Araki going to his editors at WSJ and saying "yes, this next part will be centered around a nineteen-year-old American woman in prison". It's a stark contrast to the historically-focused Jonathan or Joseph, or the Japanese cool guys Jotaro and Josuke. The whole premise is absolutely orthogonal to WSJ's target demographic; looking at SO as a whole, it's clear that Araki was pushing boundaries - for example, making Anasui first appear as a woman (he "wanted to make a character that transcended gender", which ironically FF ended up doing in the anime).

All this is anathema to the famously formulaic shonen genre, where the friendly, big-eater protagonist with a good heart who never gives up defeats enemies with the power of friendship, even from his hot-headed, abusive rival/frenemy, and also there is a Designated Girl there for some reason. There were few other WSJ titles with female protagonists; the only contemporary that comes to mind is Claymore, which only got a few months in WSJ, starting and ending in Shueisha's adjacent, less-renowned monthly publications Monthly Shonen Jump and Jump Square. (These days, there are more titles with female leads in WSJ, like The Promised Neverland, and, uhh... hm. The Emperor and I, I guess? Maybe you could argue for Spy x Family and Chainsaw Man part 2?)

In other words, SO pushed the envelope in many big ways. Interestingly, we already saw Araki start to expand his creativity beyond the shonen genre a little in DiU, and definitely in VA, where he starts to delve deeper into his idea of "fate", and where there are rumors about how Giorno was originally supposed to be a girl. But it's not just feminism - the story itself is complicated, with postmodernist touches that bring the reader's own experience into the story (i.e. the ending) and all the classic Jojo bullshit cranked up to 11 (frogs, snails, rods, "assassination feng shui"...). So it didn't exactly resonate with, say, Dragon Ball's reader base.

The final thing to remember is that SO ran from 1999-2003. All these themes that we're much more accepting of now - I mostly mean messing with gender roles - were not so unremarkable 20 years ago (at least in America; I can't comment on the gender politics of millennial Japan). It's not ancient history, but times have certainly changed; look at Guilty Gear's Bridget controversy, and ask yourself how that would've gone down in 2000, when virtually no one was coming out in support of trans people. To put Jolyne and Hermes and FF, and their bizarre adventure, in that context - it just didn't resonate with the world at the time.

For SBR and Jojolion (and, now, Jojolands), Araki moved to seinen magazine Ultra Jump, where he could be more creative and more adult. Stone Ocean got screwed over in a lot of unfortunate ways, but in my opinion the main thing was the growing pains of Araki's maturing storytelling, which just didn't jive with the typical shonen reader. The fact that Stone Ocean got published and sold at all is a testament to his existing reputation.

So yes, SO is massively underrated, and seems to have a curse on it to that effect, given how the anime adaptation was screwed over by covid (and, according to some, Netflix’s distribution). It's subtle and daring and complicated, which people reading Jojo for the fights didn't really go for. But it was not only a foreshadowing of Araki's even more matured storytelling in SBR and Jojolion, it's a magnificent work in its own right, and deserves to be appreciated as such.

(More can be said by anyone who actually has experience in the pre-2012 Jojo fandom either in the West or in Japan, which I don’t.)

#stone ocean #manga #no spoilers #wall of text #history of manga #? i guess? #jjba

[world-cinema-research]

Week 2 Blog Post by Grant Montoya

À bout de soufflé (Breathless) 1960

Breathless is a critically acclaimed New-Wave French film that was released in 1960. The impact it had on the filmmaking world was monumental; its many hallmarks include experimental cinematography methods, abrasive humor, stylized visuals, and the introduction of jump-cuts to name a few. It influenced the way Hollywood would produce movies in the coming decade. Roger Ebert is even credited with stating that “Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in 1960.” 

Jean-Luc Godard was the director of the film who received substantial help in post-production from another director by the name of Jean-Pierre Melville. The movie had an estimated budget of $90,000 and had earnings of about $590,112. The movie didn’t have a big launch, but soon after people recognized its brilliance. Despite this being the first feature film of Godard’s career, the focus was to make something different. The 400 Blows (1959) directed by François Truffaut came out a year before Godard’s. These two films are usually regarded as the “best” of the French New Wave era.

As mentioned, film buffs' favorite critic Roger Ebert has made it known that this is one of the most important movies of all time. continuing his quote from earlier:

"It is dutifully repeated that Godard's technique of "jump cuts" is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society." - Roger Ebert

Although I have only viewed the film once, I wholeheartedly agree with his words here. I may be wrong, but I feel that the movie could be considered slightly postmodernist because it recognizes itself by means of self-referentiality and relativism. I think this is what Ebert was hinting at here.

At the time of this film's production, France was enduring an economic recession from the devastating effects of World War II. According to freelance writer Ted Mills,

"Although there wasn’t a lot of money floating around, there was still enough to make short films[...]The film was shot on a handheld camera, by Raoul Cotard, who had used such a camera in the war for newsreels[...]Godard turned his brain inside-out, like emptying a bag across a table: all his cultural obsessions, not just in cinema, but in writers, philosophers, music, and more, all came out." - Ted Mills

It seems like this turbulent time was beneficial for Godard. Perhaps the ordeal of the war invigorated him, or the lack of funds available gave him an excuse to truly unleash his artistic spirit because nothing was really at stake.

Trying to put this film in place as conventional or unconventional is a difficult task. It could be considered unconventional in its production, for sure. $90,000 isn't much of a budget at all for that time period and the actors weren't too well known before the making.

On the other hand, many of the creative choices might be too much for a general audience to digest. Within the first 5 minutes of the film, there is some crass, self-spoken humor from Belmondo's character which makes one think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Little girls hitchhiking!

I'll charge a kiss per mile.

The short one's not bad. Nice thighs.

Yeah, but the other one...

Oh, hell, they're both dogs."

Our protagonist here lacks inhibition throughout the entire movie. It is hard to understand his goals, aspirations, or motives. There is hardly anything for the audience to latch onto besides the doom that awaits him. Very against the grain.

Quote #1

Michel Poiccard : "Why won't you sleep with me?"

Patricia Franchini: "Because I'm trying to find out what it is that I like about you."

These two lines of dialogue from our two main characters aren't anything extraordinary, but because of their simplicity, we are reminded of the motives between these two and their dynamic for most of the movie. Michel is portrayed as a crook who lives in the now; a hedonist who doesn't understand what it means to love. Meanwhile, Patricia is entertained by this swooner but can't seem to understand what Michel's true intentions are or what kind of a man he is.

Quote #2

Michel Poiccard: "If you don't like the sea... or the mountains... or the big city... then get stuffed!"

I could have chosen any one of Michel's many quips for the spot of this quote. Aside from the hit and run on the policeman at the beginning of the film, Michel's commentary is really what keeps the movie chugging along. It's blunt, funny, and very surprising to see in a film as old as this one.

Image #1 depicts Jean Seberg's character (Patricia Franchini) gazing into the camera, and this shot appears many times throughout the movie. I think this full-face capture is great directing because it burns the actor/character's features into your mind and it offers an intimate way for the audience to connect with the characters. Apparently, this was a time when Godard and other filmmakers focused on the craft of raw cinematography, more so than the pieces of what makes a movie emotionally captivating (plot, dialogue, scores, etc.)

Image #2 is taken from the apartment scene, a part of the movie that drags on for about 24 minutes where Michel rambles on and Patricia continues prying. This is perhaps the most creative choice the director made in this movie, and it sort of works for it. The still reflects the playful nature of two people who hardly know each other, and stresses the fact that these two aren't fornicating in a setting where it would seem inevitable.

[fettesans]

Top, screen capture from Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi), directed by Giulio Berruti, 1979. Bottom, Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It (series), 2020, silicone, jewelry, syringe needles, clarinet ligature, tent stake, vise, pigment, dimensions variable. Via.

--

There was a time when irony was supposed to have died—when Americans, frightened and weary, worried that the world had robbed them of their constitutional right to laughter. They needn’t have fretted: Irony—satire—political discourse that operates through the productive hedge of the joke—have not only evaded death in past decades; they have, instead, been enjoying a renaissance. Jokes have informed many prominent, though certainly not all, political protests; they have also, more broadly, come to shape the way people understand the world around them. Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy. Jokes, in other words, with their charms and their appealing self-effacement and their plausible deniability (just kidding!), are helping people to do the messy work of democracy: to engage, to argue, and, every once in a while, to launch a successful bid for the presidency of the United States.

Scrolling through Instagram to see the pictures from the March for Science, I marveled at the protest’s display of teasing American wit. (“Remember polio? No? Thanks, science!”) And then I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda. (...)

Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That’s the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans’ “vast descent into triviality,” and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans’ great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun. (...)

Postman was a postmodernist who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thought, and he worried, as Daniel Boorstin had before him, that our images had come unmoored from our fuller realities—and that people, being tied to them, were similarly adrift. He saw a world in which Americans were made pliant and complacent because of their cravings for distraction. He knew that despots often used amusement to soften and systematize their seizings of power. He worried that television—an environment where facts and fictions swirl in the same space, cheerfully disconnected from the world’s real and hard truths—would beget a world in which truth itself was destabilized. “In a print culture,” he argued, “writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.”

Megan Garber, from Are We Having Too Much Fun?, for The Atlantic, April 27, 2017.

#diptych #safe new world #linked excerpts

[child-of-hurin]

du you have any opinions on walter benjamin, or in particular his theses on the philosophy of history?

I like the Theses on History immensely, they inform not just my philosophy of History but pretty much my ideology, and understanding of reality :) It’s a text I like to revisit from time to time.

The theses were very popular in my college’s history department when I attended, so we visited it in pretty much every theoretical class. ‘brush against the grain’ was a motto both historical materialists and cultural materialists (and… postmodernists) could agree on… I internalized this on such a fundamental level that you see me doing this in fandom too 😭

I’m very touched specifically by that thesis 7, although the reflection on civilization is what gets me most of the time. I don’t know that I have anything interesting to say about it; I think the vehemence of this specific point in the text can be a powerful tool in the twin processes of decatechization and radicalization against imperialism/historicism/enlightenment. These are topics I normally abstain from speaking about here because I think they’re both rather delicate and radical, but we can talk more in depth about it, if that’s what you were looking for. 

What ARE you looking for btw? This was such a strangely pleasant ask to get, I’m really so into the Theses but I don’t think I ever mentioned the depths of my appreciation before! I wonder what made you ask. Have you read the Theses, are you planning to? It’s a short text and people who are specialists on WB’s works are still discussing it; it reads a bit like a work of art, in that it aims to make a huge impression through vivid images, so I think they’re very accessible, but also very stimulating, they invite you to chew on what’s there. I think it’s a potential great read for anyone. I have read a couple other things by him, but (except for Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? Maybe?) I think they’re way less accessible for a non-academic reader.

#walter benjamin #i showed this to my wife and she said you got my number edhbjfjfg #also idk if its on purpose but i love you writing do as du #it has charm

[p4xman]

Hey, do you think there’s one reality?

Because people think there’s one reality, But there’s loads of them all snaking off like roots. And what we do on one path effects what happens on other paths. Time is a construct. People think you can’t go back and change things but you can. That’s what flashbacks are. They’re invitations to go back and make different choices. When you make a decision you think it’s you doing it but it’s not. It’s the spirit out there that’s connected to our world that decides what we do. And we just have to go along for the ride. Mirrors let you move through time. The government monitors people. They pay people to pretend to be your relatives and they put drugs in your food and they film you. There’s messages in every game. Like Pacman. Do you know what pac stands for? PAC. Program and control. He’s program and control man. The whole thing’s a metaphor. He think’s he’s got free will but really, he’s trapped in a maze. In a system. All he can do is consume. He’s pursued by demons… that are probably just in his own head. And even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game it’s a fucking nightmare world and the worst thing is it’s real and we’re living in it.

hey are you bandersnatch because Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a 2018 interactive film in the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It was written by series creator Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade. The film premiered on Netflix on 28 December 2018, its release date only officially announced the day before. Netflix did not confirm the interactive nature of Bandersnatch until its release, though there was much media speculation. In Bandersnatch, viewers make decisions for the main character, the young programmer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), who is adapting a fantasy gamebook into a video game in 1984. Other characters include Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry) and Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), who work at a video game company; Stefan's father, Peter (Craig Parkinson); and Stefan's therapist, Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe). A postmodernist work with free will as a central theme, the film was named after a real video game planned for release by Imagine Software in 1984, the game in turn named after the bandersnatch, a creature of Lewis Carroll's creation. Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones were approached by Netflix about making an interactive film in May 2017, during which time Netflix had several such projects for children underway. Difficulty in writing the highly non-linear script led to Netflix's creation of a bespoke program called Branch Manager; the unique nature of the content required adaptations in the platform's use of cache memory. Bandersnatch was originally to be part of Black Mirror's fifth series, but its lengthy production led to its release as a standalone film, delaying the fifth series to June 2019. Critical reception was mixed, with a positive response to the technical design of the film but criticism of the story's characterisation. There was mixed commentary about the narrative and the extent to which viewer choices affected the story. The film received average rankings in critics' lists of Black Mirror instalments by quality, but garnered numerous awards and nominations, winning two Primetime Emmy Awards. A lawsuit filed by Chooseco over the film's use of the term "choose-your-own-adventure" was filed in January 2019 and settled in November 2020.

#;ask

[chicago-geniza]

Guess who slept for 12 hours again because they are normal and have a normal amount of fatigue! Friend swung by yesterday evening with a card to sign for our mutual friend who's recovering from major surgery. First time meeting him in person even though we live in the same city, so that was nice. Chicago is a vast and sprawling metropolis--it's a trek from the South Side to the Northwest Side, especially when the grid is so deliberately segregated and public transit routes follow the redlining model by design. Anyway! We have taken meds, made and consumed food (eggs cooked w/ goat kefir & sea salt, served w/ green chutney & wilted greens, I felt fancy; the extra sourness of goat dairy substitutes well for coconut milk and complements the warm spice spectrum when you're using other flavors from South Asian cuisine, or their staple ingredients)--we have also fed Rugal and done T shot. Now we gotta:

Do editing at least

Preferably do translation

Make soup before veg spoils & before farmer's market tomorrow to free up the crisper

CVS - pick up prednisone & T

Groceries

Stop being afraid of the trash & take out 2-3 bags

Check mail; COVID tests are being delivered today (offer some 2 mutual aid)

Email cousin!!!

Check uni email

Finish reading Erofeev article so you can talk to prof about it later this month & follow up on neoplatonism & dialectics (terminal grad student brain), & also on what seems to be flitting like those little silver fish under her argument--the reflexive (as in: reflecting back on the self) criticism of monastic & solipsistic tendencies in himself/in the Shestidesyatniki intelligentsia, but critically, like, later re: the people who became constructivists and postmodernists and later came to haunt Russian-language livejournal, снобизм! When you do that "vypadaniia" from all affiliations--instotutional, ideological--you risk the conflation that acquaintance of mine made, right, where he called both marriage and friendship "institutions," he collapsed the legal and the interpersonal-relational-communal in his own mind (it made me insane). You can't have a symposium, you can't have dialogue, in a wholly closed circle--a closed circuit, if we're going for the energy metaphor she starts with--because even the rhetorical questions of the Socratic method are addressed to an other, they are a prompt to thinking-together, it is a process in tandem. There must also be a push and pull, an opennness to the subjectivity of others, right? Us / the system (Evil) / быдло-толпа (who have nothing to do with me) as a circuit does not a scholar make, and as a framework for the world is not conducive to The Scholastic.

Finish reading Korzenie review from Zycie literackie

Look for printer cord

???

#get out of mold basement start sleeping enough and now I'm Like This again sorry #stop reading rozanov and become an a anarchist if you're so committed to the individual venichka you still need comrades tho

[hiswordsarekisses]

It is written in our Scriptures: “The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek; God is not in any of his thoughts” (Psalm 10:4). Indeed the willful denial of reality is an affront to heaven, contempt shown for the gift of life, and sacrilege of all that is worthy (Psalm 14). It is sheer folly to regard life apart from the fear of the LORD, for that is reishit chokhmah (רֵאשִׁית חָכְמָה) - the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10). The existence of God as the Almighty Creator and Moral Lawgiver is therefore First Principle of all sound reasoning regarding reality. The so-called “postmodern world” is notorious for failing to explain anything of substantive meaning. Everything is left unexplained; no “metanarrative” (i.e., “worldview” or “totalizing” philosophy) is permitted; no logical connections to a “real world” are sound; there is no grand “story” to our lives, and therefore postmodernism entirely misses the essential point of everything.

King David asked, “Who shall abide before the Presence of the LORD?” and the Spirit replied: “the one who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart” (Psalm 15:2). It is the one who is honest – “the one who speaks truth within his heart” (דבֵר אֱמֶת בִּלְבָבוֹ) that dwells in the “tent of the LORD,” for God is called the God of Truth (אֵל אֱמֶת), and the Faithful God (אֵל אֱמוּנָה). In heaven there is only the language of truth, and truth is the language of heaven. The “pure in heart” – that is, those who accept the truth of their inner condition, who acknowledge their lost condition, mourning over their lives, and who humbly find themselves starving for God’s deliverance – these are the ones who shall behold God (Matt. 5:2-6). In this connection Blaise Pascal wrote: "I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business. But as for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end, I view differently. This negligence in the matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity: yea, it astounds and appalls me” (Pensees).

Postmodern Christianity is a phenomena of despair. By "despair," however, I do not mean "gloom" or "dejection," but rather an absurdist anti-intellectualism that derived from the loss of hope regarding obtaining real knowledge about the world. In popular culture, we see that this despair arose just after WWI (in the USA, some time earlier in Europe), though its roots trace back to the epistemological skepticism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1784-1804), who posited "limits" to the mind's ability to know reality by defining a chasm between apparent reality (phenomena) and hidden reality (noumena). The realm of phenomena was open to inspection using the methods of reason, science, etc., whereas the realm of the “numinous” was only "managed" by positing transcendental "categories" to help lend order to the unknown. Kant's doctrine opened the door to various forms of irrationalism, since all the meaningful aspects of life (love, meaning, hope in afterlife, freedom, the existence of God, etc.) were relegated to the murky world of the unknown, leaving us with only a world of "managed appearances" to traffic in as human beings in the world.

GW Hegel (1770-1831) took the next step and speculated wildly above Kant's uncrossable line. The phenomenal world (Zeitgeist) was "really" a manifestation of Absolute Spirit working its way out through "dialectic" in the space-time world. Later Karl Marx (1818-1883) rejected the idea of Spirit and substituted material forces (i.e., economics) as the engine that drove historical processes. Nietzsche and his intellectual heir Adolf Hitler soon became "true believers" of such irrationalism... Derrida, Foucault and other “postmodernists”celebrated the loss of intelligibility as a political opportunity to ”reconstruct” reality as subjective preference.

The division of rational and irrational modes of encountering reality opened the door for absurdist encounters with the spirit realm. Hence we see the rise of neo-paganism, witchcraft, various forms of the occult (including pop-Kabbalah), new-age thinking, and also in extreme forms of “charismatic” Christianity and the ongoing apostasy of American “Evangelicalism.” Since God cannot be understood using reason, He is known only through the experience of mystery. Faith is therefore expressed by rejecting rationality and embracing the ludicrous, and appeals to logic and clear thinking are rejected. Epistemological nihilism is symptomatic of the despair of the "postmodern" age. [Hebrew for Christians]

[birdwholanded]

Kafka on the Shore

I have read Norwegian Wood, Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Killing Commandatore and Kafka on the Shore shares some similar themes to his other works. Kafka on the Shore was written by Haruki Murakami in 2005. The characters mentioned are Crow, the protagonist named Kafka Tamura, Sakura, Oshima, Nakata, Hoshino, and Miss Saeki. An important part of the story already is “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. The storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in and walk through it step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.” (5) The setting is described as being Shikoku, Takamatsu, Tokyo, and Osaka. The story is about a journey of self discovery and meaning. A quest to find one’s purpose.

In other Murakami books like the Wind up Bird Chronicle and Killing Commendatore, war is discussed like the Sino Japanese war between Japan and China and the Manchurian war. In this story it discusses airplanes dropping bombs in the 1940’s during World War II. Gas was being sprayed to children. The Japanese citizens detested the American soldiers for doing it. Tankas and haikus are discussed because the protagonist Kafka goes into a university and discovers them. The Edo and Meji periods are mentioned. The Edo period lasted from 1603-1867. The Meiji period is from 1868-1912. The Taisho to the early Showa period is discussed too.

There is a philosophical section of the story with a talking cat and an older man. I think they have passed on and are figurative symbols of holiness.

Franz Kafka stories are mentioned like “The Castle”, “The Trial” , ”The Metamorphosis” so I have to see where that leads. Franz Kafka was a postmodernist writer that grew up in Prague Czech Republic.

A teenager is running away from everything that is familiar to him like his father and town and creating a new life for himself in a new town. I think this will be a coming of age novel and self discovery. I enjoy the part of the story with the talking cats. It reminds me of Winnie the Pooh in the magical sense with talking animals. The title Kafka on the shore could be about rebirth and creating a different identity for yourself completely. Starting anew from what you knew. I haven’t read Franz Kafka books so I am not familiar with them. In the story, it talks about killing cats and cutting their heads off. It’s graphic in that way. The character goes to university and learns everything he thought he knew over again. Nothing he knew was right. A passage from the story that I found to be interesting is “A dark, ominous pool of water. It was probably always there, hidden away somewhere. But when the time comes it silently rushes out, chilling every cell in your body. You drown in that cruel flood gasping for breath. You cling to a vent near the ceiling struggling but the air you manage to breathe is dry and burns your throat. Water and thirst cold and heat those supposedly opposite elements combine to assault you. The world is is a huge space but the space that will take you in and it doesn’t have to be very big is nowhere to be found. You seek a voice but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence but guess what? All you hear over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain. Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself that’s it. That’s my heart.” (10-11) It is a beautiful passage because to me it could be referencing the flood that ‘God’ brought to earth and people have to deal with it in their own way. The flood is good because it adds new life to things and replenishes figurative and literal “dryness. The passage speaks to the truth in ways because there is a” flood” of everything sometimes and it takes the strong to feel good when one is overwhelmed with things.«1912-1926 was the Taisho period under the emperor Taisho. 1868-1912 was the Meiji period. 1926-1989 is the Showa period. From what I interpret the story to be so far is to be completely letting go of things you know and being open minded to learning things you have never known before and being vulnerable. Being born again and starting afresh in a new universe where everything is a possibility figuratively speaking. Seeing things from a new perspective and new world viewpoint. One book that I know Franz Kafka writes is the metamorphosis about how a person changes and metamorphosizes into a cockroach because he may have “sinned” and that was is fate. After he completes his life as a human, he got reincarnated into a cockroach because he wasn’t a good human being and that was his fate in the next life if one believes in that. I think the story is set in the present day but it references the past with World War Two references. I think reincarnation is a theme in the story because the talking cats could be representative of people’s spirits. It’s a story about a journey. They travel far across highways in Japan to where they need to end up. Leeches are described as falling from the sky in a surreal manner. Fate is a theme. Murakami mentions Oedipus. He mentions Greek mythology in his writing. Kafka on the shore is a song name and the lyrics are “You sit at the edge of the world ,I am in a crater that’s no more. Words without letters Standing in the shadow of the door The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard Little fish rain down from the sky. Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die. Kafka sits in a chair by the shore Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world it seems.

#book review #haruki murakami #kafka on the shore #japanese literature

[samchristian23]

Midterm Assessment

Introduction

This post will use the works “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels1, Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”2, Christian Metz’s “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema”3, and “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” by Fredric Jameson4, along with the opening scene from Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie5 to analyze and visualize the trans-decade conversation that has been happening between critical theorists. This post will first lay out the ways in which the theorists align in their views, with a photo of Karl Marx preceding it, because that sounds fun. Then, it will lay out the ways in which they disagree. And finally, it will take a look at how these thinkers converse through the lens of the opening scene from Barbie.

Similarities

All of the theorists I have listed and will be analyzing have several commonalities. The most obvious is their near universal critique of capitalism. Metz is the one theorist who doesn’t offer a direct critique of capitalism in his work, as it is heavily focused on semiotics as they pertain to cinema. That said, he does reference terms and ideas that speak to ideas of capitalism, such as “signifiers”, which are a key part of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum11, which Jameson draws heavy influence upon in his work. Each of these theorists also share their opinion on the importance of ideology in our lives and the systems we live in. Before I provide examples, I’ll provide a brief definition of ideology: ideology is a system of beliefs and ideas that dictate societal behavior and structures. Marx and Engels famously wrote that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”6 Their analysis of ideology works in tandem with their critique of capitalism, positioning them not only side-by-side, but as one in the same. Althusser similarly looks at ideology in the lens of capitalism and labor production. He lays out his theories on Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatus. In his words, “What distinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the following basic difference: the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence’, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function ‘by ideology’.”7 He believes that these systems are used to control a society in order to maximize labor production. Jameson confronts ideology from a postmodernist point of view. His thinking is that if ideologies are the systems that make up our reality, then our ideologies are hollow, as our realities have become so. All of these theorists call upon historical and social threads, events, and ideas in order to make their points. Marx and Engels are an exception to this, but they participate in this conversation by acting as a sort of guiding star for Althusser. In just the first sentence of his “The State” section in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, he evokes Marx’s name, stating “The Marxist tradition is strict, here: in the Communist Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brumaire (and in all the later classical texts, above all in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin’s on State and Revolution), the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus.”8 Note how he also evokes Lenin, another key figure and theorist through history. Metz draws upon the works of nearly countless artists, theorists, and thinkers, in order to crystalize and solidify his arguments about the Semiotics of Cinema. Jameson does the same as Metz, but for postmodernism rather than semiotics and structuralism. It is clear that each of these authors see the thread that has been woven through the works that came before them, and recognize that they are a part of the thread that will follow.

Differences

Not every conversation is one of total agreement, as much as we might enjoy that. While there are very few, if any direct disagreements on specific points between these thinkers, they,  while sharing commonalities and ideas on several points, are coming to this conversation from different viewpoints. First of all, besides Marx and Engels and their connection to Althusser’s work, none of these theorists are coming to this conversation from the same subject. As I mentioned, Marx, Engels, and Althusser are more focused on ideology and how it relates to capitalism and labor production, whereas Metz is focused on semiotics and they pertain to cinema, something that Marx, Engles, and Althusser are not worried about in the slightest. Jameson works as a soft conceptual link between these thinkers, considering art in his analysis of a capitalist society. And yet, he still is coming to this from a view of postmodernism, not touching on most of the ideas laid out by the rest of these thinkers. These thinkers also disagree in their critiques of capitalism, in that they look at it from a variety of lenses that do not easily overlap. Marx and Engles are approaching this critique form a historical and economic perspective, as seen here: “This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the reason why, must be explained from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g., the illusions of the jurists…”9. Althusser is diving more into the ways that ideology sustains capitalism through his invention of the concepts of the ISA’s and RSA’s. As I said before, he does use Marxist theories to help guide his points forward. Jameson’s critique is through the lens of postmodernism and consumerism, rather than through labor production and ideology in Marx, Engels, and Althusser’s analysis. As I mentioned previously, Jameson uses art in his analysis to a much higher degree than Marx, Engels, and Althusser do, as shown in statements such as, “think of the Faulknerian long sentence or of D.H. Lawrence's characteristic nature imagery; think of Wallace Stevens's peculiar way of using abstractions; think also of the mannerisms of the philosophers, of Heidegger for example, or Sartre; think of the musical styles of Mahler or Prokofiev.”10 He looks at how art and creativity is commodified through consumer culture, whereas Marx, Engels, and Althusser focus on how that culture is created and held up. Metz is probably the greatest outlier in this group, with some very slight commonalities. While semiotics can be used to understand capitalism and consumer culture, as we see with Jameson, but more so with Baudrillard’s work11, it is likely the subject that has the least to say about capitalism, especially when it comes to the semiotics of cinema. Metz is more so looking at how film can be understood as a language, through the signs and signifiers it conveys to us, as well as how narrative structure helps us understand this language, and helps convey the message of what the film is saying through this language.

Barbie

In order to effectively analyze and visualize the ways that Marx, Engels, Metz, and Jameson speak to one another, we must use a piece of media to do so. Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie (2023) was the biggest film of 2023. In the lead-up to its release, there was great speculation on what kind of film this would be. Gerwig is famous for her auteurist filmmaking and creative vision, while Barbie is famously a billion dollar venture from the mega-corporation Matel. The film would be produced by Mattel Pictures, leading to worries that the previously mentioned dichotomous aspects of the film would lead to a lesser product than Gerwig had been known for. The film opens with a scene that sets the tone for the entire film, with a humorous tone, and yet a sort of grandeur that makes the film feel important. This scene is an homage to the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey12. We see little girls in mid-century attire playing with baby dolls in the same rocky and prehistoric environment that the apes were in at the beginning of Kubrick’s film. A narrator, who we come to know is Dame Helen Mirren, delivers a speech about how little girls used to only be able to play with baby dolls, to play as the role of a mother. We then see the little girls looking up in awe at something, which is shown to be the original Barbie doll, several times the size of the girls. Barbie, as portrayed by Margot Robbie, gives the girls, or perhaps the whole world, a wink. When she does this, the girls start to break their baby dolls and teacups, smashing them like the ape does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the Richard Strauss piece “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays, the same piece that appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After this, one of the little girls throws her doll up into the air, and it spins in the same way the bone spins when an ape throws it near the end of the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene. The doll suddenly transforms into a title card, and the music changes to a string piece reminiscent of the instrumental on Dua Lipa’s song “Dance the Night”.

In his piece “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema”, Metz argues that film is a language as much as the written word is, and much like the written word, conveys messages to us through signs and signifiers. These signs and signifiers are conveyed through shots, musical cues, and other elements of the film. This opening scene to Barbie has a lot it is trying to convey. Gerwig understands the importance of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. By delivering this scene as an homage, Gerwig is telling that audience that this film will be important. Not only does this scene announce the importance of this film, but also the importance of Barbie as a figure of female liberation. By showing us Barbie from a worm’s eye view, the camera delivers to us the message of Barbie as a gargantuan figure, not only physically, within the story of the scene, but culturally as well, especially when paired with the narration. This opening does have a sense of humor to it, in stark contrast to the Kubrick scene. The little girls in mid-century clothing and their teacups and dolls feel humorously out of place against the backdrop of the prehistoric land in a way that the apes did not. Similarly, Barbie feels out of place when she appears, in direct contrast to the sleek, black obelisk that infatuated the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Her striped swimsuit, big sunglasses, and bold hairstyle are the exact opposite of how the obelisk is perceived in Kubrick's scene. However, it is unclear whether this scene is parody or not. And even if it is not, it is not quite clear whether it is pastiche either. Frederic Jameson states that “Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles.”10 The difference, as Jameson would say, is that “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which chat is being imitated is rather comic.”13 Through this lens, it cannot in good conscience be said that the opening scene of Barbie is parody, for we have seen through the lens of Metz that Gerwig takes this film very seriously, and believes in its importance, and the importance. That said, pastiche is a parody that has no reference point, no reality to spoof. This scene clearly has a reality it is paying homage to: that of Kubrick’s film.

The opening scene of Barbie also delivers great social commentary, particularly of the feminist variety. Remember the moment where Helen Mirren notes that up until Barbie came around, little girls could only play with baby dolls and perform maternal duties. The implication is that Barbie changed all of that. If we see the baby dolls through the lens of Althusser, we can see that they are an Ideological State Apparatus. Ideological State Apparatuses work in connection with the Repressive State Apparatus to keep the production of labor running efficiently. In the 1950s, when Barbie was invented, the role of women in American society was clear: stay at home, take care of the kids, and make men’s lives easier. The baby dolls, then, can be seen as training. These dolls had been put in the hands of little girls since they were no more than toddlers, and they were told to start performing their duties as mothers and caretakers. When Barbie arrived, as the film is telling us, she disrupted the ISA of the baby doll, showing the little girls of America that they didn’t have to be mothers and caretakers. They could be whatever they wanted. It must be remembered, however, that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”6 When Mattel began producing Barbie dolls, they began to see profits come from this idea of female liberation, and took advantage of what Barbie symbolized. Of course, Barbie may have been a symbol of female empowerment when she was an infantile invention, but as her grasp of the toy market tightened, so did her grasp over the ideas of those who were playing with her. She imposed unrealistic expectations onto the little girls of America, leading to things such as mass body dysmorphia and confidence issues. And Mattel said that the only way to fix that was to be more like Barbie. And to be more like Barbie, you had to buy more Barbie, thus continuing the consumerist culture that Jameson was so critical of in his work.

Conclusion

By reviewing the works of these four theorists, we have drawn a very clear path on which one could walk in order to see the conceptual thread between authors. The ideas of capitalism and ideology shine a guiding light through their works, as it does with the opening scene of Barbie. This conversation, that we see starting with Marx, but has truly existed for centuries before him, will continue to be had, and the works of art that our society produces can show us the way, as Barbie has done for us.

Works Cited

1Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, 5th ed. C.J. Arthur (London, United Kingdom: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 

2Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, 1st ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

3Christian Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).

4Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Essay. In Modernism/Postmodernism. Peter Brooker (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014). 

5Barbie. Film. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023. 0:00:00 - 0:03:23

6Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, 5th ed. C.J. Arthur (London, United Kingdom: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 59

7Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, 1st ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 93

8Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, 1st ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 90

9Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Ruling Class and The Ruling Ideas,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, 5th ed. C.J. Arthur (London, United Kingdom: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 62

10Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Essay. In Modernism/Postmodernism. Peter Brooker (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014). 166

11Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra from Simulations.” Essay. In Modernism/Postmodernism. Peter Brooker (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014).

122001: A Space Odyssey. Film. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. 0:00:00 - 0:19:52

13Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Essay. In Modernism/Postmodernism. Peter Brooker (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014). 167

#oxyvisualanalysis #@theuncannyprofessoro

[drdamiang]

NASTY SATIRES

A NASTY LITTLE COLLECTION OF SATIRES YOU WON'T LIKE

TWISTED

"Are we out of our minds?"

Miko Peled

Oh, what have

they done

to your message?

How horribly it has

got twisted

torn inside out.

But this message

we deemed universal

is for

them alone

not for me not for you

not for any of us

it is darkness to light

what song is to drone.

KIRK ARGUES

today's Captain Kirk

is not like Kirk

at his inception

ditto

the Enterprise,

Starfleet and

the Federation

for example

there is bit of

a shift

in the Prime

Directive

which demands

maximum interference

and colonial suppression

though it must be

pointed out

Kirk finds himself

out on a limb

opposed to

these measures

much better, easier and

more humane

to nuke

them

he argues

CLASSIC

nothing Classic

about this age

no writers, no heroes,

old Stones, no Beatles

the beats

as machine driven

in repetition as

befits our (to

give it its

fill title)

corporate post-postmodernist

ultimate late capitalist

globally hegemonic

master

and slave disposition

and if they

don't make

bands like

they used to, what

about

Presidents

look at this dude

this murderous dude

in the office now

trigger

finger on the

button

more Neddy than Kennedy

more nixed than Nixon

less Lincoln

more Jefferson

by which

I mean

not Thomas but

that warmongering Confederate

Jefferson guy

albeit without a shred

of Southern charm

AT LAST

Ah!, here you are

at last

a reader

who just so happened

to be somewhere

around digitally,

in the cosmic vicinty

not far away, or maybe,

yes far away, on

a whole different continent,

new world, old world,

first world

third world

but not just around the

corner from me

behind concrete walls

high as the ramparts

on a medieval

castle, separated by

strict iron laws that

set us

apart

on the scale

of humanity

as if such

a scale ever did exist

has a

right to exist

no reader, you will

find no

such terminal divisions here

no such pretexts for

expulsion

extermination

to find such indeed

be

prepared to

travel

and steel yourself

for the shock

of

the chasm at the heart

of this holy land, and

those who

will go to any lengths

to call it

a nation

RED

I took a red pill

saw

a very

different

reality

so took whole

handful of them

put some in a syringe

and spiked them

into

my bloodstream

saw a red world

where blue was no

longer tolerated

every bit of blue ocean

made to swear allegiance

stick to its agreed location

consensual level and

common place.

ZEALOTS

you are the zealots

with whom I once

so deeply sympathized

(more fool me)

you serve a hard god

a no-nonsense god

a warrior god

of blood and thunder

and sacrifice of the first born

my god

now seems as if he

could not be

more different

so far from the god

whose called his wrath

down

upon the Amalek

a god

who sacrificed his own son

to understand

the depth and nature

of human

suffering

JOE KOOL-AID

cool behind

those Maverick shades

(Maverick

wannabe shades)

you go

demolition derby

break

every amendment

break the fourth

fifth wall

deliver

the bombs that

will forever

define you

as drop

dead gorgeous

Amanda cannot wait

for the elegy to

write

and underperform

INCOMPLETE

do not learn

we never

learn

what have we

learnt?

don't hold back

just

let rip

tell me

tell me!

look at me

pay careful attention

thorough scrutiny

all those years

gone to waste

sitting down

lying down

standing up

writing something

learning nothing

what in here

worth speaking?

out there

worth reading?

what

good are books

when there are tanks

in the street?

indiscriminate slaughter

clearing a path house

to house

room

to room

every alley

every precinct

this book of horrors

as yet unwritten

as yet incomplete

one two

three four;

every paragraph

breaking

every wall

HILL OF YOUR DECLINE

yes, you old murderous

bastard, and

not before time

we're revisiting that poem

Amanda wrote

your

inauguration rhyme

wonder

what she was thinking

must

have been

out of her

mind

to stand before us and

proclaim this old

pseudo Stalin (other

Uncle Joe)was

the best for democracy

best for

the people

best for the planet

what must

have possessed her?

what

was she hoping for?

House on the Hill

City

on the Hill

Fool on the Hill way

more like

and

slip those Maverick

shades off

whilst I'm

talking to you

you

dull

miscreant

purveyor of lies

manufacturor

of untruths

unless truth remains

under the purview

of the corporate elite

truth the monopoly

of the military

industrial complex

the road

we must take

leading to disaster

ultimate defeat

RESTORED

precision bombing

order restored

keeps heads down

people deep

in their holes

if holes they have

not

sitting ducks

in the open

keeps

them quiet and

subservient

no chance for

up to no good

precision bombing

fist

of enlightenment

power preserved

order restored

HEADS UP

you think

the law

is there

to protect

you

could not

be more wromg

it is

about comtrol

we make the definitions

interpret and

alter them

if you disagree, well

tough

where do you

go with that

when the

law fails

we always have

the .45 through

the

back

of the head?

SHORT SHRIFT

we have to concede

some fighters

were killed

some

evil people died

some who thought

Benjamin Netanyahu

of this slaughter

to be

the agent and

architect

and

overall shit

were

expired

some who even

cursed the god of Israel

for his love

of genocide

were given

short ahrift

when your cause is

this noble

and there is

this much evil

there is no question

you have to kill everybody

this

being

logical

we have to concede

#poems #poetry #collection #satire #satires #biden #benjamin netanyahu #genocide #humanity #war #gaza #wordplay

[cryingoflot49]

Book Review

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What is the meaning of life? How is it possible that the richest man in America could be so unhappy? These two questions sound like the kind of trite cliches that serve as fodder for predictable Hollywood movies and cheesy novels on the bestseller list. But when taken on by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in the earliest phase of his writing career, they get treated with a unique twist that only this singular author could pull off. The Sirens of Titan has earned its reputation as one of Vonnegut’s best and as an American classic as well.

It tells the story of Malachi Constant , whose name changes throughout the novel to mark different stages in his growth as a human being. He inherits a fortune from his father, who he never knew, and lives a meaningless life of debauchery, getting whatever he wants, and never achieving any sense of purpose. But we’ll come back to him later.

There is another important character who goes by the name of Rumfoord. He also is rich and lives in a mansion with his uptight wife Beatrice who thinks that other people are nothing more than pollution. She has preserved her virginity all throughout their marriage. Rumfoord doesn’t actually live in the mansion though. He lives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, and he travels through time and space with his dog, making occasional appearances on Earth that attract massive crowds of people who look to him to explain the meaning of life. Rumfoord can see the future and make things happen as he pleases. His purpose in the world is to start a new religion unlike the ones that already exist in that this new one will unite all of humanity rather than dividing us all, causing us to fight with each other interminably. His function in the narrative is to act as both chorus and deus ex machina. You could say he is Vonnegut’s doppleganger since the author of a novel is the god and creator of the world inside his writing. But Rumfoord clearly explains that he is not God even though he has godlike powers.

So getting back to Malachi Constant...Rumfoord arranges to meet with him and tell him about his future. Constant is to travel into outer space where he will impregnate Rumfoord’s wife Beatrice. Riffing off of Oedipus Rex, Malachi and Beatrice do everything they can to prevent this from happening and yet it happens on a flying saucer that is taking them to Mars.

Vonnegut’s mastery of writing technique is on display here in the way the narrative shifts to Mars. And this is Mars the planet, not Mars, Pennsylvania. Yes there really is a town called Mars in Pennsylvania (and if you think that’s crazy, there is also a town called Bucksnort in Tennessee, a town called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, and a city called Batman in eastern Turkey). Vonnegut creates a dramatic contrast in time, space, and narrative structure with these dramatic disjunctions of location and the accompanying dissociative fugue suffered by his characters. This technique has come to be a characteristic of postmodernist fiction, but something tells me Vonnegut cared little for that kind of labeling. The section about Mars starts with an army private named Unk who has been brainwashed so that he can remember nothing of his past. Unk, along with all the other soldiers, has electrodes placed under their scalps and are remote controlled by commanding officers to obey orders or else suffer excruciating pain. Unk, along with everyone else in the army, had formerly been a disgruntled Earthling who got recruited to Mars where Rumfoord builds an army. His plan is to invade Earth. Unk’s memory starts to return and he finds a letter he wrote to himself before they performed the brainwashing surgery. The letter tells him he has a wife and son on Mars and his duty is to rescue them so they can return to Earth and live as a family. But when he finds them them, Unk ;earns they have no interest in him or his plans. Here we learn that Unk is actually Malachi Constant after having his memory erased and his wife is Beatrice. Just like Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, Malachi and Beatrice can not escape their fate and their son Chrono is the result.

What can be gathered from this section is that, first, Vonnegut is critiquing the military. After being traumatized by his experiences in World War II, Vonnegut took every opportunity he could to remind us all that wars should never be fought. By constructing an army on Mars of brainwashed men without memory, unable to think, and capable of nothing but obeying orders, most specifically orders to kill without conscience, Vonnegut reminds us of the inhumanity of the military. It turns men into machines. At the same time, the contrast between Malachi and his Martian identity as Unk shows that he is developing as a human being. The pain he feels when he tries to disobey orders shows that he is becoming self-aware in ways that he wasn’t when living on Earth where he lived without effort or self-consciousness. Furthermore, when he found his letter and realized he had a family on Mars, his impulse was to rescue them; this contrasts sharply with the hedonistic and selfish Malachi who cared about nothing but promiscuity before coming to Mars.

The third stage in Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he returns to Earth and meets up with Beatrice and Chrono at the mansion owned by Rumfoord. The space-travelling millionaire had organized the army on Mars to attack Earth and lose the war. By doing so, the entire human race had to stop fighting with each other and unite in order to defeat the alien invaders. Vonnegut knew that humans achieve strength in unity mostly when they have a common enemy. In ordinary circumstances that common enemy is other people, but Vonnegut via Rumfoord depicts the benefit of having the entire planet fighting a common enemy and so the Martian invasion becomes a necessity. You would think the climate crisis would be enough of a threat to unite us in this way, but I guess we are too dumb to see that. Rumfoord uses the opportunity to start a new religion in which all humans cooperate, living in harmony and peace. This is one of three passages where Vonnegut explains his concept of what life is meant to be about.

Malachi Constant, otherwise known as Unk, receives yet another name when he arrives in a flying saucer. He is dubbed the Space Wanderer and he emerges from his spaceship in Maine with a beard and long hair, a bit Christ-like you might suppose. The satire of Jesus Christ does not end there. As the central figure of this new religion, plastic trinkets of the Space Wanderer hanging dead with a noose around his neck are commonplace among followers of this new religion. This is an obvious jab at the prevalence of the cross and Jesus crucified on it found in so many Christian homes and on so many t-shirts and necklaces worn by the Christian faithful. There is something perverse and sickly about the Christian fascination for the gory torture of their savior as if they take sadistic delight in seeing their messiah suffering in maximum pain.

When the Space Wanderer meets up with Beatrice and Chrono on a scaffolding on the walls of Rumfoord’s estate, Rumfoord climbs up into a tree and addresses them through a loudspeaker as if speaking with the voice of God coming out of the sky. But he isn’t God, he is just a man in a tree with a microphone. Anyhow, he confronts the family with their dilemma by asking if any of them have ever done anything that wasn’t entirely selfish. Being unable to answer the question, they board another flying saucer and take off again for outer space. The irony is that the Space Wanderer as Unk and Malachi Constant did do things that were beneficial to other people, trying to rescue his family from Mars for instance. He just lacked the self-awareness to realize he had done so. This passage represents the awakening of his morality and takes him further down the path to self-consciousness that will later distinguish him as a fully realized human being who understands the meaning of life.

The final stage of Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he arrives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, to find Salo, the companion robot to Rumfoord who lives there in a palace before he dies. Salo, being a robot who developed human emotions, has dedicated his life to serving Rumfoord but disassembls himself when Rumfoord sinks into a depression and tells him to leave. Rumfoord learns that he wasn’t the master of Earth at all and is, in fact, being used by forces in the universe he can never comprehend. His purpose, and the purpose of the human race is entirely mundane and everything we think we know through religion and philosophy is nothing but wrong-headed delusions of grandeur. But Malachi arrives with Beatrice and Chrono and since they are the only people on the moon, they are forced to take care of each other. Chrono disappears into the woods to live with a flock of birds and the two remaining people find happiness by taking care of each other. They learn that the ultimate purpose in life is to take care of the people around you. The ending of this novel is beautiful in ways that can’t easily be expressed in this review.

As mentioned before, Vonnegut gives three scenarios in which he depicts life as it should be. One, as already stated, is the religious gathering that happens after the Earth is invaded and the human race unites to win the war. Another instance is where Chrono, after abandoning his parents on Titan, goes to live with the birds in the forest; he becomes like the birds by learning to fly and transcends his own humanity by becoming a part of nature. The third instance is when Unk and Boaz’s spaceship gets redirected on its way to Earth and lands in a cavern on Mercury. Boaz is an African-American and the commanding officer of Unk. In the cave, he renounces his position as Unk’s superior and finds a species of creatures called harmoniums that nourish themselves with vibrations (there was a Canadian progressive rock band named after these creatures so check them out if you are so musically inclined). When Boaz plays music for them, they gather around him and he falls in love with them. Being an African-American orphan, he finds his peace in life by playing music for creatures that honor him with admiration. He also realized his responsibility to them when he finds they die if they get too close to his cassette player which is the source of his music. With love comes responsibility. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and I’m sure that had something to do with his portrayal of the music-appreciating Boaz who wanted peace more than war. Notice how the people who find happiness in this story all have to leave Earth to achieve it.

Something should be said about the title too. In the narrative, the Sirens of Titan make only infrequent appearances. Rumfoord shows a picture of them to Malachi Constant in order to lure him to Mars with the possibility that he might get to sleep with them since they are more beautiful than any Earth women he has ever seen. After receiving this picture, it begins showing up in advertisements for cigarettes. I believe Vonnegut is commenting on the use of sex in advertising. The Sirens are used as a lure for Malachi, and used by the tobacco industry for commercial gain. But at the end of the book, Malachi finds the Sirens are actually a statue on the bottom of Rumfoord’s swimming pool at his palace on Titan. The pool is polluted with algae and the Sirens are covered with slime and muck, but Malachi doesn’t care since he has grown to live a life of devotion to his wife Beatrice and is no longer temped by lust. Promiscuity and profits are no longer relevant when he finds he has a purpose. This is emblematic of how he has reached full maturity as a human being. While the book is framed as being about the search for the meaning of life, I think that the underlying thrust of the novel is that Malachi Constant is a man like Howard W. Campbell Jr. in Mother Night and maybe even like Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (which I consider to be the most misinterpreted book in the history of fiction except for the Bible); he is a man lacking in self-awareness. He only begins to grow when he confronts himself and develop the self-awareness he needs in order to become fully human. This process of transformation is the whole point of the story.

There isn’t much to detract from this novel. You could say that Beatrice is underdeveloped as a character as so many of the politically correct will say. But ultimately, The Sirens of Titan has too much going for it for me to really care.

And it is amazing how ahead of its time this book was. Written in the 1950s, it expresses the values of the late 1960s counter-cultures on an uncanny level. It is pro-peace and anti-war, it expresses the desire for all humans to unite, it portrays an African-American man who finds the love and justice he desires though music no less, it calls for a new way of living in the world, it involves space travel, exoticism, and fantasy that approach the kinds of psychedelia that would later show up in movies like Barbarella. It also serves as a statement about how beautiful world peace could be while poignantly reminding us that such an existence will likely never be possible. But despite that, we can still find meaning in life. Vonnegut’s optimism had a bitter tinge to it that reminds the reader how human we really are. Unlike Icarus, we will never fly too close to the sun and maybe that is something good. The Sirens of Titan makes me feel that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. will be remembered as a great American satirist, humanist, and humorist along the lines of Mark Twain. I realize now how lucky I am to have read this.

#book reviews #kurt vonnegut jr #books #novels #science fiction

[werewolvesandaccordions]

Strauss – Eine Alpensinfonie The last tone poem Richard Strauss wrote was also his most extravagant, calling for the largest orchestra of all his music [along with the typical orchestra the work calls for 12 horns, 2 trumpets, and 2 trombones offstage, as well as a heckelphone, cowbells, a wind machine, a thunder machine, glockenspiel, celesta, and organ]. An Alpine Symphony was inspired by a hike up the alps that Strauss took years before, and I can only imagine he had a Wordsworthian level of Romantic awe climbing the slopes. In writing music to reflect on his trip, he’d ended up with a glorious quarter hour at least of passionate music. The poem takes the listener through 24 hours in the alps, recreating the sense of majesty through the sunrise, peace through the pastures, violence through the storm, and indifference through the main descending theme; the cold, mysterious statement. For me, it’s one of those pieces that is easy to get lost in, to follow along with the delicious string, woodwind, and brass writing, to let the music flow over you, and to make you forget that any time has passed. Though the music is too warm at times, too dramatic to be an indifferent objective nature painting. Interesting enough, it could be considered an atheistic symphony. Strauss had been compelled by Mahler’s death to complete the work, and while he wanted to depict the alps, he also wanted to evoke Nietzsche after reading Der Antichrist. Strauss wrote, “Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity… It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity… I shall call my Alpine symphony: Der Antichrist, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.” Though he dropped the atheist aspect in the final form, it makes sense to think that he is glorifying the natural world around us as is without evoking the supernatural. If I wanted to do a more postmodernist deconstruction, I’d argue the “true” program of the work is how humans project emotion and morality onto nature. It isn’t the sun and the trees and the mountains that are happy and full of wonder, it’s the viewer/listener. And it isn’t the mountain that is afraid when a storm passes through; we are afraid of the storm. In a way, this journey through the mountains is almost a journey through life, with it’s ups and downs, its most playful and most serious, the joys, anxieties, angers, sorrows, and few moments of peace. At this point I’m getting a little too Romantic, so I’ll stop typing now and let you sink into the music. Movements: 1. Nacht (Night)2. Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise)3. Der Anstieg (The Ascent)4. Eintritt in den Wald (Entry into the Forest)5. Wanderung neben dem Bache (Wandering by the Brook)6. Am Wasserfall (At the Waterfall)7. Erscheinung (Apparition)8. Auf blumigen Wiesen (On Flowering Meadows)9. Auf der Alm (On the Alpine Pasture)10. Durch Dickicht und Gestrüpp auf Irrwegen (Through Thickets and Undergrowth on the Wrong Path)11. Auf dem Gletscher (On the Glacier)12. Gefahrvolle Augenblicke (Dangerous Moments)13. Auf dem Gipfel (On the Summit)14. Vision (Vision)15. Nebel steigen auf (Mists Rise)16. Die Sonne verdüstert sich allmählich (The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured)17. Elegie (Elegy)18. Stille vor dem Sturm (Calm Before the Storm)19. Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg (Thunder and Tempest, Descent)20. Sonnenuntergang (Sunset)21. Ausklang (Quiet Settles)22. Nacht (Night)

mikrokosmos: Strauss – Eine Alpensinfonie The last tone poem Richard Strauss wrote was also his most extravagant, calling for the largest orchestra of all his music [along with the typical orchestra the work calls for 12 horns, 2 trumpets, and 2 trombones offstage, as well as a heckelphone, cowbells, a wind machine, a thunder machine,…