You just posted that to upset me...

Ok, MC. You know I can't let this one go unchallenged.
This an old idea of mine, which I probably have expressed to you before, but for the good of the world I shall textualize here:

We need art like Thomas Kinkade's.

There. I said it.
Don't get me wrong, I find almost all of it as saccharine and eerie as the next guy, but I think it serves a necessary purpose.
Thomas Kinkade holds up a picture of a world without sin or evil or meanness. A world where a weekend away at a cottage doesn't involve awkward lack of conversation with estranged family members. A world where the countryside isn't dull. A world as it would be seen if we could see the glorious beauty hidden in all things (hidden in the things themselves, or hidden from our marred visions, i am not sure. Probably both).
These days we have plenty of art that shows us the ravages of the world ('Guernica'), the horrors of being human (DeKooning), even the beauty amidst the brokenness of the world (PT Anderson), etc. This art all shows the world how it is. And the best of it hints at how it might be. But I think there is a place for Art that shows how it might have been, how it IS (in a 'weight of glory' revealed sense). So I do pity the soul who only admires Kinkade and no-one else, they are impoverished and living in a false world. They are not human. But, after seeing scores of films lately whose theme is, 'Look how fucked up our world is -but look, sometimes there might be something a little good'. I am thankful for pictures like Kinkade's. (This juxtaposition of film/paintings reveals something about Kinkade's medium, too - in a film you can contrast bad/good in two different scenes, but in painting you have to pick one or the other. Unless you want to mix them, as Mark suggested, but I think this is nothing more than raining on the Kinkade parade - since the bad would obviously overshadow the good (pointing to the frailty of the Acadian/Kinkadian vision). )

So stop being such a hater.

p.s. had a horrible flu for the last week - hence the lack of posting and possible incoherance of this one.

I mean, that shit is right up your alley, isn't it?

Idea: An art project where someone paints stroke-perfect copies of Thomas Kinkade tableaux, but with a sordid element: a BDSM scene through the window of a cozy cottage, a drunk splayed across the cobblestone street, a child run down by the Clydesdale-drawn carriage. All done in that soft-edged style and drenched in that freakishly dappled light, natch. Am I the only one who thinks that would be hilarious?

Thinking about that, I'm reminded of Komar and Melamid's People's Choice project, where they conducted a poll to determine the Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings of several countries. In America, for example, they found that a majority of people desired paintings that featured realistic depictions, natural scenes, families, or historical figures, which K. & M. subsequently combined to create the theoretically Most Wanted Painting. Incidentally, they later conducted a similar survey to determine America's Most and Least Wanted Songs, which must be heard to be believed.

On the subject of much-maligned artists, I also wanted to share this passage from Air Guitar, Dave Hickey's brilliant, paradigm-inverting essay collection, on Norman Rockwell:

The people who hate Rockwell, however—the preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians—inevitably mistake the artist's profession for their own. They accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgments, which he never does. Nor could he ever, since far from being a fascist manipulator, Rockwell is always giving as much as he can to the world he sees....
People are regularly out of sync with the world in Rockwell's pictures, but it is not the end of the world....But the pictures always rhyme—and the faces rhyme and the bodies rhyme as well, in compositions so exquisitely tuned they seem to have always been there—as a good song seems to have been written forever. The implication, of course, is that these domestic disasters are redeemed by the internal rhymes of civil society and signify the privilege of living in it, which they most certainly do.

I would not apply a similarly gracious reading to T.K.'s work—it is too crass and false (and not in the Warhol way)—but Hickey gives us a beautiful reminder of what art can be and a challenge to crawl out of our dark caves and make something big and openhearted and democratic in the best way.

Two quick inauguration thoughts:

1) I'm amazed at how unprofessional every single television announcer sounded today. Their remarks consisted of the same dozen one-from-column-A observations—"This truly is a great day in our nation's history" or "he has an enormous task ahead of him" or "such a gifted public speaker"—repeated ad nauseam. Even this eventually degenerated into childish gaping: "There's Bill Clinton," "There's Air Force One," "There's the Washington Monument," "Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln." I began to suspect that the commentators had little idea what was going on, like the guy who can only say "yep" and "mm-hmm" while the mechanic is explaining what's wrong with the engine. Now, I don't know that I could have done any better, and I do admittedly love the way it humanizes them, but these people's job is (ostensibly) to interpret history for us as it happens, to act as a kind of filter through which raw events become something like comprehensible. And yet in the face of actual history they become babblers like the rest of us, cluttering up the event rather than elucidating it. Please, news anchors of America, don't be afraid of dead air. Shut up once in a while. That said, all the inept commentary was kind of a nice reminder that events actually happen. I know that sounds like a stoner epiphany, but hear me out. The news is so often given to us in a sanitized, packaged form, and at times it is hard to remember that this slickly narrated, neatly organized story is actually part of the messy real world, with no easily discernible beginning or finish, the world we experience ourselves every day. To hear the announcers fumble for words was refreshing in a way, a sort of aural equivalent to removing the forest of on-screen graphics (which I think are called bugs) that attend all news shows (which, by the way, would be amazing).

2) Our new president will get most of the press today, and rightfully so, but I think the moment that most affected me this morning was seeing George W. and Laura Bush board the helicopter that would take them away from Washington. I generally agree with those who call his presidency one of the most destructive of recent years, but I couldn't help feeling for the guy, thinking about the cavalcade of emotions he must have felt—relief, sadness, pride, regret—while watching the city, whose center he had been just a few hours ago, now receding beneath him, a physical reminder of how quickly things can change.

If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...

What Ben decries below is at least a half-truth: rebellion is necessarily defined by its opposition to the thing being rebelled against, that opposition determines the terms of the rebellion. It's related to the old Thomist (?) idea that evil is merely the absence of good, with no positive presence of its own (not that rebellion is evil, but it's a helpful metaphor). Thus, rebellion contains an implicit acknowledgment of the reality/success of the opposite—to rebel against an authority, we must admit that it is an authority, or is at least perceived as one. And Zizek is right, cynicism is indeed a commodity these days—look at any 'hip' tv show, for instance. Or take a trip to Hot Topic, for that matter. Once again, Cat and Girl comes through for me here.

That said, that doesn't totally invalidate it—the king's head is in the basket, no matter how you look at it. And it is true that if we give too much credence to the idea of rebellion as conservative, we can incapacitate ourselves into an existential mess (which is a good part of the story of 19th and 20th century philosophy). I don't think that's the point of recognizing that, though—rather, it is a warning about how we wield power: in violently declaiming our enslavement to one idea, we may retreat into the clutches of another master whose chains have an ugly familiarity. As Dylan says, "You gotta serve somebody." A real life example might be seen the actions of our own government—in an ostensible attempt to protect our precious freedoms (whatever that means) from the actions of terrorists, we ended up with the Patriot Act and the concomitant culture of censorship, surveillance, and, well, terror (see also: every political revolution ever). It's also a call to vigilance. Rebellion thrives off of generalizations, and inevitably reacts to a caricature, not the thing itself, which can keep us from seeing it when it crops up again:

"You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. It is tedious work," the little prince added, "but very easy."

There is a real danger in saying "Well, I'm glad we're through with that" and forgetting about the supposedly vanquished idea, only to have it creep in through the back door. This is perhaps why there are so few old radicals—people's ideals temper with age, and they often come to embrace even the shortcomings of what they once derided (e.g. the later Wordsworth).

Moreover, there is a kind of authority-endorsed fake rebellion that ultimately affirms the status quo. We can watch The Office and chuckle with smug superiority at the absurdity and drudgery of office life, but we still end up in our cubicle the next morning, having successfully blown off the steam that might eventually drive us to quit. It's Carnival: a safe, bounded reversal of the social hierarchy that reinforces it in the long run. I think this is what Zizek is really getting at in that quote, and he is right to decry it.

As a side note, I take issue with Ben's comment that "no one has ended up lusting after a nun." Really? What about your own obsession with "the veil"? (Which is admittedly not lust, but still.) Consider the now-cliche movie plot about the hunky guy accepting a dare to turn the frumpy, bookish girl into the prom queen—she turns out to be gorgeous, and he falls in love. Is this not a variation on the seduce-a-nun fantasy? Also, on a purely logical note, be careful about making a claim and then dismissing everything outside its bounds as "deviance," Freud. :)

I suspect that this whole topic is connected at some deep level to Bloom's "anxiety of influence" which I wrote about at length for my senior seminar paper (B+, by the way). Perhaps I'll try to ferret that connection out in a later post. Also, who's proud of me for not relating the issue to hipster-ism? Me, that's who.

we gotta take the power back!

It is a common (po-mo/po-co) academic trope to insist that if something is a reaction to something else before it, the reaction is merely a product of the something before it, not something actually new, and therefore suffers the same flaws as the very thing it is a reaction against.
To give some specific examples:
"Romanticism is still functioning within an Enlightenment framework",
"Children who rebel against their parents are still being controlled by their parents' values",
"The extremely modest garb worn by nuns ends up over-emphasizing the importance of their bodies in the same way as those who would lust after them do",
and lastly - this really gets my goat - are the myriad ideas that 'seem' to be anti-capitalistic but as a matter of fact only reify the structures of capitalism. Zizek tends to be toward the head of this train:
The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity/fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."
-taken from wikipedia, but everything I've ever read by Zizek, which is admittedly not a great deal, sounds just like this

This sort of thinking may seem to be quite smart, and indeed seems to find its impetus in the desired freedom of the oppressed by pitching the necessity of some third, new way to break their chains.
But I don't think any of this is the case. If anything - such thoughts seem to affirm the oppressor's hold on the oppressed:
If the kid who chooses the opposite of what his parents chose is led to believe that his actions reveal his current subservience, he is then trapped in the knowledge that nothing he can do can release him, and the mental hold his parents have is regained.
I'm sorry but rebellion is rebellion, not submission.
Modesty is modesty; no one (bar maybe the deviant) has ended up lusting after a nun. Mission accomplished! Romanticism championed the Enlightenment; they were using the language/mindset given to them, as we all do, but they wanted the opposite, and that is what they got.
Now, I agree that if reactions are only knee-jerk reactions, then yes, they are in some way less 'free', but 1) reacting conversely can be a choice, and 2) knees do that for a reason.

Things can be fought - it is only the Big Dog who would want us to think other wise. Let's not give him (male pronoun intentional) the power back with our academic ramblings, and let's call a molotov cocktail a molotov cocktail.

Some footnotes

So here we get into classic Ben/Mark conversation mode. As usual, I don't think Ben disagrees with any of this—I guess I'm just writing my own footnotes to his posts.

On evangelism:

The first thing I thought of reading that post: isn't sin the primary reason 'evangelism' exists today? But I get it—so many religions muddy the water (spoil the broth?). And I like Ben's* point. Relationship is fundamental to the Godhead, and so we ought to reach out—though I am not entirely clear on what other religions have to do with that. Aren't we reaching out to everyone, be they of another faith or none at all? (And, stepping into Stereotypical Arrogant Evangelical character for a moment, isn't everyone else really believing in nothing anyway?)

What I really wanted to say, though, is this: I think the multiplicity of religions is also an act of grace. God has granted that truth is not an either/or in this world, not the exclusive province of Christians, but rather that it comes in shades that can be grasped at different depths by different people--what we call general revelation, I suppose. That God would allow everyone some kind of access to truth, right where they are, should be a cause for a) celebration and b) humility in ourselves. How wonderful it is not to shoulder the whole burden of the truth, and how often must I remind myself that this is the case!

On bumper stickers:

There is certainly a point here about bumper sticker ethics, the idea that if you say you support/believe something, then you do. Which is silly, of course—it's sound and fury, signifying nothing. Thoreau would be livid. If we are going to hold convictions, especially if we are going to shout them at others, we ought to be prepared to live them out.

Two things, though. First, we shouldn't deny the power of speech, place it in opposition to "real protest," i.e. action. Certainly political speech (or any kind of speech) is most effective when paired with action, but it is still an extraordinarily powerful tool in itself, as "the man" knows. Why else would so many writers and artists have been called before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee? Bumper stickers are obnoxious, but I wonder if they aren't also vital. Second, and more importantly, why judge the Beetle owner? Perhaps they do in fact give a sizable portion of their income to the causes whose blazons they bear. Perhaps they have chosen to splurge on a sensible, safe car for the sake of their children. Perhaps they feel a bit sheepish about owning it and are considering trading it in. As David Foster Wallace said about a similar situation, "None of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider."

And finally, conversations like this one are tailor-made for a Cat and Girl cartoon.


Real post coming.

*To whom are these posts of mine addressed? Ben? A general, anonymous reader? My friends? Myself? There may be some pronoun juggling until I figure this out.

and zeesz is vy Hamerica...

So as I was walking to the grocery store today, I saw another VW Bug (the new one, not the old one) with a couple of bumper stickers proclaiming the driver's disdain of the Iraq war and avid support of 'the environment'. Since it is was a (expensive) Beetle with these stickers, it is exemplar of two cultural trends:The strong correlation between affluence and education (the richer you are, the more likely it is that you have had a better education). And, the likewise strong correlation between education and 'liberal' sentiments:anti-war, eco-friendly, etc.
And I realized there is something interesting in this:
Regradless of what their bumper stickers say, the rich Beetle driver is actually supporting the War more than anyone - Monetarily. The rich pay more to Uncle Sam than any of us, and regardless of their words, their actions show their unflinching support. I do fear then, that the right to free speech that we are guaranteed in this country is so whole-hearetedly supported by the man (it is what we're fighting for'over there') because it placates the desire for real protest - protest that actually changes things. If you really don't like the war, don't pay taxes. Serving jail time will probably be the end result of this exercise of free 'speech' and so it would be fair to argue that voicing (bumper-sitckering) one's complaints about the government is the only feasible route.
Maybe so, but I think that Americans should start putting their money where their mouth is if they are going to talk so much.

evangelism!

So, at the risk of sounding a little LaFitte-ian:
Status quo:
the fact that there are religions other than Christianity in the world is one of the primary reasons that 'evangelism' exists today.
My response:
This is a little bit annoying. Why not have made just one religion, God? People could then either follow or not follow, so free-will would still exist, and the religious situation of the world would be so much less confusing/violent/befuddled?
and then it struck me:
perhaps the reason Christians are only a few, rather than everybody, is because then we
can be more like God -
It is at the the heart of the Godhead's nature to reach out to others: In relationship to other members of the trinity, and in revelation to Humans - most fully in the Incarnation of the Son. So, If the role of the Christian is to ultimately be transformed into the likeness of Christ, then we must be put in a place where we are able to reach out, to extend ourselves towards others. To seek 'the Lost'. So, awkward and annoying though evangelism is - it is a key part of our theosis, and is (maybe) why God has allowed for so many religions to exist in the world.

[cough]