Don Martin:
The reason for the enduring popularity of a cartoonist like Don Martin, of the old middle period Mad Magazine, is that his cartoons were a mockery, not of individual existing people, or even necessarily of existing readily recognizable human types, but of the human species in general. His dough-y physiognomies were one-size-fits-all, executed in the spirit of derisory procrustean mischief. Misanthropy of the sort that Martin conveyed, was, of course appealing to young people, since a vision of man as intrinsically and generally ridiculous will offer the implicit hope to the typically self-conscious adolescent that he will escape particular ridicule.
The T.A.M.I. show of 1964:
This concert footage from 1964, released as a documentary film many years afterwards, was from a time when the unfettered Dionysian energies of black music were not yet so inextricably ensconced in the popular culture of white musical consumers that a performer like James Brown would not appall or even frighten some members of a racially diverse teenage audience. When watching this concert recently, it was clear that, while most of the white members of the audience were there to see Freddy and the Dreamers, or to swoon to the naive, elegiac ditty “Ferry Across the Mersey” performed live by Gerry and the Pacemakers, or even to hear, without knowing its provenance, a straightforward homage to American R and B performed by the Rolling Stones, the blacks were there to throb sympathetically to the priapic seizures of Brown, whose paroxysmal style of performance, deriving from black “Pentecostal” church music, appealed easily and automatically to the aesthetic requirements of negroes, but was pure exoticism to any white teenager who had not been raised in a “holy roller” church.
While some of the whites were eager to share the ecstasies of the blacks in their midst, and saw the white performers’ obvious admiration for James Brown (and, at one point in the concert, Mick Jagger’s attempt to imitate him) as their cue to come unhinged for this style of performance, the image that has become indelible for me is of the heartbreakingly pretty white girl, surrounded by more compliantly enthusiastic peers and, in the row in front of her, a vibrating clot of alien and crazed blacks. The look on her face as she sits motionless and transfixed, is one of a well-brought-up and feminine American middleclass white girl, who is aghast, disgusted and terrified at an idiotic, primitive, and savage spectacle. At this point, Brown is doing his famous routine in which he pretends to pass out from the exhaustion of pleading for something from his “baby,” and is wrapped in a ceremonial cloak by one his band members, who attempts to lead him off the stage…and then, Brown revives and continues his agonized screaming. Again, this kind of thing has always been near and dear to the hearts of blacks, but, I contend, it requires a perverse propaganda aimed deliberately at the gullible, for whites to swallow the poisoned pill of this kind of regression to an orgiastic immersion in the mob. It should be said that, in fact, even in the black rendition of this mode of performance, there is deliberation in this seemingly spontaneous manifestation of the unconscious and the irrational, but the audience whose most intrinsic human needs require that deliberate setting for maniacal release, are not whites, for whom it is a re-visitation of an earlier developmental stage, when the individual rational self had not yet broken apart from the mass.
Today, the assumed requirements of the James Brown version of musical performance are now so commonplace that a musical sensibility that is centered unapologetically on music-making and relegates the outward show of feeling to the realm of the incidental is understood to be a particularly staid and traditional reaction to the marketed frenzy of the popular and the mainstream.
An Observation:
On Capitol Hill, in Seattle, a young man dressed like Pippi Longstocking, complete with pigtails and flowered skirt said, as he passed me on the sidewalk, “Pain…Pain…my whole life is PAIN!” He may have been talking on a cellphone, with earpieces and a mic that were not immediately noticeable, but it seemed as if he were simply letting it be known to all within earshot that the nether-dredging operation had not “taken.”
Drug Symbolism
In the period between the public awareness of the drug problem and the mystique of the psychedelic era (from Reefer Madness [1938] until the Life Magazine treatments of the LSD culture [1967]), popular culture embraced the moral fable of drug addiction as a proxy for the Fortunate Fall and its story of reclamation, and many of the tropes of movies and television were attempts to exploit both these conveniently binary religious implications, and the disingenuously erotic imagery of chemical bondage as the “le petit mort” requiring a patriarchal intervention to undo the depredations of the Seducer/Pusher.
Classical Music Today
Popular culture is a phantasmagoria of willful uglification and deliberate defilement, but, it is not monolithic, and, because of the sectarian possibilities of the internet, anyone who is sickened by the spectacle of ruination can find a place for himself where, with kindred spirits, he attempts to rebuild from the ruins, or find a rendition of an aesthetic restored to its former untrammeled condition, in a slightly newer re-invention of the wheel. However, it is a condition of troubled times that these forms of a humanizing and unifying vision are self-consciously pursued as part of a general fragmentation, and must knowingly shut out alien essences which in the past were beyond the pale of each functioning culture, and were terra incognito.
And, classical music in movies has been used as an ironic counterpoint to the tacitly irreverent and atomized view of humanity common among those directors who are products of Hollywood and, with varying degrees of militancy, have sought to vilify any remaining vestiges of traditional western modalities of thought that might impede the sensation of a manic barrage of images cut loose from any moorings in received versions of truth. In fact, the classical music that is often used in the most incongruous contexts is being simultaneously mocked and levelled to the general commodified run of ephemera.
Carl Van Vechten’s Ghost
Sympathy for the downtrodden of other races is how members of a successful, racially homogeneous society express their love for humanity; however, a belabored and counterintuitive sympathy for hostile outsiders is how decadent members of the dominant race of the present dysfunctional, racially heterogeneous society express their hatred for humanity.
PoMo Postures
The postmodernist can present himself as superior in generosity, because any cultural trend that is prominent at the moment meets with his approval as the satisfaction of human needs and wants that cannot be disparaged, since there is no essential ground upon which to rank those wants and needs. If a pizza chain draws people to a shiny new building indistinguishable from a bunker or a crematorium, the need or want that compels the people in droves validates the enticement and the aesthetic presentation of such, and the negro ape anthems piped in on the state of the art sound system will be pronounced good if it energizes the mindless feeding of the patrons whose heedless appetites , being fed, must endear them to us, or so says the postmodernist, in his rendition of humanism.
Slut Walk Talk
It is indicative of the puerile character of the feminist ideology that anyone who attempts to advise potential victims of rape to be careful (and states the ways in which they can radically reduce the likelihood of being raped) will be accused of blaming actual victims, who may or may not have been careless.
Of Course
Misogyny is very real, but it is at its highest levels in overlapping sectors of society that generally get a pass for it: namely, negroes, hopelessly unattractive women, and gay men.
Oct. 18
Ninety per cent of the energy that goes into being hip is expended on the effort of keeping a straight face.
Garfunkel and Oates
Satire, in the not-so-distant past, was undertaken to show that some who claimed to be virtuous were actually corrupt, or that the moral standards shared by all were being flouted by those who had the power and in a position to presume to represent us in high places. Now, satire is merely a belabored insistence that everybody is corrupt, even the self-deprecating little satirical vixens like Garfunkel and Oates, who constantly remind us that all the degeneracy requiring a merciless exposure is amply evident in their own lives. Their cuteness is played as a counterpoint to the f-bombs, slatternly canniness, and unflappable complicity in their own degradation. The only evidence that the audience still believes in a working conflict between virtue and vice is the explosive laughter that this counterpoint inevitably produces, even in those who would never speak of virtue without using finger quotes.
Patriarchy
The white knight is the man who believes that women are intrinsically pure and innocent, and need to be protected. The neo-patriarchalist is intent on protecting as well, but is as conscious of the sad truth that women are depraved, and need to be kept under male control.
Family Origins
There are three kinds of veterans of grossly dysfunctional families: The kind who are embedded forever in that dysfunction, hate it, but will never escape; the kind who know that any true survival of the spirit requires a breaking away from malevolent influences and have emerged as wiser and stronger in their determination to avoid the depravities of their past victimization, by returning to the traditions that their own parents flouted and traduced; and those who have been offered a way into the touted fringe culture of postmodern demolition, and pride themselves on having gotten in on the ground floor by being shown the radical contingency of the structures of humane and civil life, and have made a vocation of embracing barbarism and its sanguinary catharses, while valorizing the outliers whose difficulties enlist a version of compassion that throws fuel on the last vestiges of tradition.
Ogresses in Charge
The hopelessly unattractive woman who has reached late middle age with her resentment, jealousy, and bitterness still intact, and has parlayed her refusal to make peace with her predicament into an ideological bludgeon against normal life, should not be entrusted with the well-being of young, impressionable women. If she manages to galumph her sterile spinsterhulk into an advisory role, she is more likely to direct attractive young women off the edge of a cliff, than to advise them with their best interests at heart
Just as there is survivor’s guilt among those who have escaped death while their peers have not, there is also the resentment possessing the walking wounded, towards those who are as yet unscathed.
