I’ve been listening to some 60′s torch singers lately, particularly Nancy Sinatra. There’s something going on in one particular song, written for the James Bond film of the same name. It has all the icy strings, the soaring vocals of that late 60′s early 70′s ‘Bond theme’ tunes.
You Only Live Twice
You Only Live Twice or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and love is its name.
And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.
This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.
(repeat all once more)
This resonates with Eurythmics’ Love Is A Stranger , strung through with chilly strings as well …
Love is a stranger in an open car
To tempt you in and drive you far away
Love is a danger of a different kind
To take you away and leave you far behind
These songs tread the dark edge of romantic obsession. They also point to the beckoning other, the stranger who appears at the edge of the scene, the observer who sees something else, who transforms the situation entirely. Artists and other creative types dance this dance with the world, I think, transforming existence with the gaze. As one friend put it in a Facebook status post, “Being creative makes you a weird little beast because everything seems so bloody interesting for some strange reason.”
The ability to imagine some ordinary object becoming something else … that’s the “danger of a different kind” that “takes you away and leaves you far behind”. I think of Merle Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup …
Meret Oppenheim fur lined tea cup
… or some of the Dada sculpture movement’s vintage ‘dangerous domestic objects’ like Man Ray’s “The Gift” (produced with assistance from Eric Satie of all people, in 1921) …
Man Ray : The Gift (1921)
And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.
The danger here? Change of any kind, the invitation to step out of routine or the ordinary and make change in one’s own life. Conventional romance is far more comprehensible than the initiation into creative life, or ‘choosing to follow the muse’.
Last night at an artist’s talk the sculptor present discussed giving up her successful career as a NYC architect to spend her days in the physical labor of welding her artwork. The illusion of career certainty swapped for aching body, torches, smoke, the certainty of black snot when she blows her nose. The centered joy of producing an object with her body, an object that has its own language, its own relationships with viewers. What is that? Usually the kind of decision that ‘normal people’ find incomprehensible.
You only live twice …
I’ve made the incomprehensible decision twice. First I chose classical music performance as a career. Second, when life informed me that it had other things in mind than me looking at the inside of a practice room in that conservatory of music, I chose to become an artist.
Its funny, one of the members of my MFA thesis committee wrote ambiguously of my work that it was “a labor of love”. On some level, it has to be. You have to be obsessed with these ideas that take you out of yourself, the “bloody interestingness” of everything. You have to be willing to go on these journeys after having exhausted yourself with customers, or office work, or teaching, or whatever else is paying your bills …
This stranger in an open car hands me a pile of snapshots of our “snowpocalypse” and invites me to shape a 5 minute thriller-film where the people are just realizing that the sun will never come out again. This stranger points me to images of women in 3d world countries carrying water and invites me to dream for them a life spent less in service of necessity. This stranger whispers, write those ghost stories to repair our 20th century history written with shell casings . . .
This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.
This post is some gristle-and-bone work, a little Bluebeard work … Periodically I scan and archive older work. Today’s trip through the flat files unearthed this piece of embroidery from 2003.
I adapted the image of the beheaded, disemboweled woman from a photograph in a book about Ed Gein. Ed was a serial killer from Wisconsin, wild and strange land of my youth. His particular brand of insanity inspired fictional characters Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, and Leatherface. In the small town of Plainfield, LaCross County, WI, he made skin suits, tanned body parts, and gave the neighbors ‘venison’ for Christmas …
This was the lady he was caught for killing, someone local, someone in town. Berenice Worden ran the local hardware store; he bought antifreeze from her, killed her, and then, well, treated her body as if it were that of a hunted animal.
And Ereshkigal Hung Innanna by her Heels
The title and content refer to Innanna’s mythological journey to Hell. Its a Sumerian myth. Innanna, a fertility goddess and princess, as both rite of passage and to rescue her lover Dummuzi, makes the descent. She meets Ereshkigal, her sister, Queen of Hell. Ereshkigal undresses her in the original ‘dance of the seven veils’, disembowels or dismembers Innanna, hanging her upside down for three days before freeing Dummuzi and Innanna both. At the end of the trial, Innanna re-members herself, and makes the journey to the surface in the company of her lover and another companion.
A precurser myth to that of Persephone-the-poor-kidnapped-girl, Innanna’s journey has always fascinated me. Perhaps because of her agency throughout – Dummuzi is her chosen lover; she chooses to make the trip to rescue his soul; etc. She is never subject to circumstance; rather she makes her way through all of these difficulties.
While Persephone’s journey was a singular trauma for both mother and daughter, Innanna’s voluntary trial was a difficulty endured on behalf of another.
This journey mythos also predates Christ’s “Harrowing of Hell” during the Crucifixion. He was hung on a tree (the cross), and while dead for three days visited Hell to free those virtuous souls who were stuck in Hell because Christ had not arrived yet on Earth.
Story-source aside, we are left with the image of the gutted female body, remade in needlepoint, feminine handcraft extraordinaire. A woman considering another woman who has been gutted, on some level recognizing how the faceless female body is gutted regularly in our culture. All individual women somehow collectively one woman, the reductive logic of woman-hatred or -worship. Woman-identification before human-identification. Huh? Oh, yeah, we are only our bodies.
The photograph reminding me, women are usually the hunted ones. There weren’t a handful of penises in Ed’s collection, after all. He had a shoebox full of vulvas under his bed.
We can also file this post under “the poetics of annihilation : entertainment edition”. Warning : this post meanders …
Batman’s world as a reflection of human psychology has always been pretty clear to me. The hero survived incomprehensible loss as a child. Upon becoming an adult he polices his own demons by catching and locking up human ones. Batman walks between worlds, as all trauma survivors do, the world of civilized humans that we all participate in every day and the world where the trauma happened. Batman makes his own rules, a means of regaining power in a world that rendered him powerless when he was a child. He works to keep a chaotic underworld repressed or at bay … the story elements become personifications of the processes of trauma survival, particularly, in this post, managing the chaos of the PTSD process.
Revisited The Dark Knight, the second Christopher Nolan Batman film, this week. In it, we meet one of the most powerful portrayals of antisocial criminal insanity put on film, Heath Ledger’s Joker.
The Joker : With Makeup
He describes himself as the dog who wouldn’t know what to do with the ambulance if he caught it. He sets all the money on fire, sets about killing yet another gang leader and asks “what a hungry dog will do for food”. He knows human motivation, human reactivity, and he sets fire to it whenever possible in ever-escalating scenarios. It doesn’t even seem to matter to him that one set of ideas succeeds or fails; he simply moves on to the next in a series of intense escalations.
Early on in the film the audience meets him through a series of his crimes. He asks of his victims, “Wanna know how I got these scars?” He tells Gambol one story, he tells Rachel another. In either situation there’s an invitation to the game the audience may be playing, that of, this horribly evil character can become comprehensible through the injury that created him. The Joker turns this notion on its head by telling different stories in each situation. He denies us the ability to relate to him, which makes him all the more terrifying as a character.
Joker Scarred, Without Makeup
There’s something else here, some other truth about relating to difficulty of any kind. Looking to the deep past to discover the source of present difficulty, or the reason why? Giant waste of time. The Joker forces those around him to deal with him on his terms. In the present. Doesn’t matter how he got those scars. His face is scarred and you’re the one looking into it. You’re the one confronted with the difficulty of him. His face is scarred and the scars themselves are scary, they make him ‘other’ in a way that unscarred faces are not. They cast him outside of ordinary interactions.
The movie documents the creation of social self through face, and the alteration of persona through its mutilation, through Harvey “Two-Face” Dent’s scarring accident. Harvey’s loss as an adult undoes him, as does the Joker’s visit to his hospital room to initiate him into an existence as a force rather than a specific human being.
Trauma survival has been described to me as the undoing of personality that Buddhists seek through enlightenment, via sudden extreme difficulty. The process of assimilating change quickly determines whether or not the human being involved is able to successfully integrate the EVENT into everyday life. Some traumas affect the biological mind in ways that point to deep psychological and physical connections of selfhood that have not begun to have been studied by science.
Story-cycles like Batman present the logic of trauma and its un-rational, yet logical, effects on persona in ways that touch on the universal difficulties of trauma. Why are the three plot-movers in this show masked? Batman wears a mask to enter into his second identity. The Joker’s mutilated face defines his relationship with the larger culture. And Two-Face, his ‘birth process’ out of the loss of Harvey, becomes the center of the movie.
Faces are the start of all human connection. When I suffered an accidental facial injury that involved black eyes, a broken nose, and almost 150 stitches in my mouth, it redefined my social interactions negatively for about six weeks. At another point in my life I gained a lot of weight. This also changed how other people responded to me. A year and a half later, when the weight came off, all of the tiny human interactions of my day improved as well.
Linguistically we also have loss of face : loss of our sense of status in the community. Our metaphorical language for social identity or persona starts with our faces. The sense of social role and facial appearance may be more deeply understood by actors and women, actors because persona is their bread and butter, women because the act of putting on makeup can reflect the act of composing onesself for the day. Of “making up the self”.
The Joker lives outside the human community, in almost total anomie. This permits his psychopathy. Harvey makes the traumatic journey from inside to outside through his trauma, losing his central human connection on his trip out. The Batman, of course, has to operate in both locations, shitty playboy Bruce to the neighbors, caped crusader at night.
Batman had a choice, our mutilated villains did not.
When a face is mutilated, it cannot be made up. Perhaps this is why Heath’s Joker skewers with his sloppy cheap stuff. Nothing can cover those scars.
When a face is mutilated, it cannot be made up. When a social identity has been shattered by trauma, it has to be made up, re-invented. If like Harvey Dent that reinvention is one woven with revenge and other reactions to loss, where is that person headed in life? The Joker ends up straightjacketed in Arkham Asylum. Even the Batman is stuck defined by how he chose to relate to his past, the adult reaction to childhood events.
When a face is mutilated, it is up to our neighbors not to wince. Our resilience as a culture is only as strong as our public ability to accept survivors as human beings who are not mutilated by the events they survived. Rape survivors may or may not have physical scars on their bodies. Our culture’s reinforcement of them as “raped”? As “forever raped” or “broken”? Not only is it a lie, these public attitudes can create scars where there would have been none before.
Somehow, the cycle of reacting in horror to accounts of events that were matter of fact to the people who actually lived through it has got to stop. Ordinary people are injured in horrifying ways; other ordinary people do horrifying things. We don’t usually have the spectacular make-up to tell us who the “bad guys” are. “Bad guys” may have ordinary or redeeming social features to them.
Oh, memory. People working in the PTSD field have described the process of the illness as time-looping through difficulty, having a repeating loop that can be triggered by things that, on the surface, sound similar (gunshots vs. car backfiring) The Joker loves to blow things up, set them on fire. One veteran of the Iraq war I spoke with about it described it as “having gasoline in his blood”, waiting for some ordinary event to spark his anger and “set him off”. The only regular thing about the Joker is his relentless push forward, creating chaos in an irregular yet continuing rhythm. This is what gets under my skin about that character, I think. For so many people that kind of fire is in their lives, waxing and waning, a response to a trigger somewhere in the body, a trigger disconnected from reality, relating to memory via a tricked out story …
… I wrote about Heath’s Joker as the Fool over here, in a post that’s in the blog I’m slowly migrating to this one. One other thread that I may discuss about this character in the future is his relationship to appetite. All good tricksters are deeply aware of the power of appetite. The Joker’s off-the-cuff statements about appetite, our animal nature, manipulation, and motivation fit the trickster’s archetype wonderfully.
He [Duke Ellington] had begun to record and managed to sell some of his tunes to the publishers of Tin Pan Alley. But he was still not satisfied, and he confessed his unhappiness to his friend Will Marion Cook, a classically trained conductor and Broadway composer.
During long taxi rides through Central park, the two men talked about music. Cook urged Ellington to get formal training at a conservatory. Ellington didn’t feel he had time for that. “They’re not teaching what I want to learn,” he said.
“In that case,” Cook told him, “first find the logical way. And when you find it, avoid it. Let your inner self break through, and guide you. Don’t try to be anybody but yourself.”
It was advice Duke Ellington would follow all his life.
“Duke Ellington knew how to take what could be and make it what is. He understood what it took to make something invisible visible.”
From the second episode of Ken Burns’ monolithic documentary, Jazz.
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai remains a perennial critical and popular favorite. Set in the late 1580′s in Japan, a group of farmers hires seven masterless samurai to defend their village from bandits.
The three-hour masterpiece is streaming on Netflix right now. Apparently Criterion or somebody else is going to release a new, remastered collection of Kurosawa’s work. Most of his catalogue is streaming. Snow day off work? Time to revisit Kurosawa.
I find his films take on the complexity and ambivalence of violent behavior quite truthfully, for a fictional medium. Additionally his post-war films become a long consideration of Japanese identity both during and after American occupation. All ripe territory for my minor obsession, the poetics of annihilation.
The impassioned speech in this clip speaks to the consequences of war. The film’s historical moment : ongoing lawless strife. The farmers ~ that nourishing class ~ besieged by the process of violence again and again become animals …
Taking a moment to plug the Cluster opening at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts tomorrow night. Ton of excellent work, all of it new, some pieces are enormous stretches for the artists – Connie Cantor will be unveiling a 14-foot behemoth of a painting made with layered veils of tiny marks, for example. Additionally it will be interesting to consider the breadth of media in the show, and whether or not it comes together cohesively.
Also on Friday night, the quiet gathering of Pittsburgh documentary filmmakers and viewers happens again. Documentary Salon will be meeting at Pittsburgh Filmmakers in the mini-Melwood screening room on the second floor at 6:30. The group will be screening a 50-minute segment of Rebecca Einhorn’s Mythopoeic Times. If past conversations are any indication of the future, considered discussion will follow, moderated by documentary filmmaker and teacher Will Zavala.
From Mrs. Dalloway:
“What business had the Bradshaw’s to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself – but how? Always her body went through it first; when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally) they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the social problem of the appropriateness of discussing suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway has spent the day arranging for the party, which is unfolding at the moment of these two paragraphs. A soldier back from The Great War has committed suicide. This death, discussed by her party guests, puts her off. How can it be discussed in the midst of gaety, of social connection?
That’s the thing, isn’t it, the barbarity of suicide, the difficulty of necessary social communication of the event itself. How do we articulate an incomprehensible action to each other? Or an action that might be closer than we’d wish to express … fear of suicide’s contagion, the name of the act becomes hissed in whispers, like that of a cancer diagnosis of a friend.
There will always be that line giving pause, “But he had flung it away.” No melodrama here, just Woolf presenting the puzzle of how to include a stoppage in with the continuation of society life.
… how one pop song woven of samples pierced the culture of mass distraction in ’85.
19 was relief to the relentless call to party in the shadow of the Russian arsenal. A live round between A-Ha’s Take On Me, anything by Wham, Don’t You Forget About Me from the Breakfast Club soundtrack.
I was fourteen. The cultural two-step to the malls was underway, the towering hair of popular music. Kids like me hid in runaway apartments ran rooftops crawled sewer tunnels quoted Dostoevsky chainsmoked and ridiculed the jocks who later suited up to join the ruling class.
I remained silent, a vessel for collected projections, a good girl running with the wrong crowd. Let them think what they want to, they will anyway. Show up, do as your told. Sneak out, dance until dawn, blue nail polish, kabuki makeup. Cultural material like this gave me fuel for endurance, relief from Reagan’s mantras of lies.
How could people believe Reagan? He was so fake. Lie after lie, emptying VA hospitals and declaring everybody cured. Then they’d turn up on your street corner crazy as ever. Did people have eyes? Apparently not, they re-elected him. We had to live in the shadow of our missiles and their missiles.
When everybody’s lying, the truth shines. Even when a thief makes it.
Hardcastle sampled Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells ~ well, that’s what a court later decided. The narration about the war was lifted from an ABC documentary film. The narrator, Peter Thomas, was originally ambivalent about the use of his voice in the ‘song’.
19 peaked at #15 on the Billboard Top 100 charts. More telling of the cultural moment : 19 was US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play number-one single July 6, 1985 – July 13, 1985, replacing Madonna’s Into the Groove/Angel dance mix.
From the Indian point of view, soul is inside you, and you are inside the soul of the world. It is not one or the other; it is not either-or.
When you are healing yourself, you are also healing anima mundi, because the anima mundi and the soul inside you are not two separate entities. You are part of the anima mundi and anima mundi is part of you.
I totally agree with Hillman’s proposition that psychotherapy has been too much engaged, almost obsessed, with the inner psyche, rather than seeing that you cannot heal the individual psyche unless you have a healing world outside you. So you can go on not only for a hundred years of psychotherapy, but you can have the next five hundred years of psychotherapy, and people will still be sick and ill, because the individual psyche cannot be separated from the communal, social, and universal psyche. That’s why art in India is also a healing of society … when we contribute something, it is not for our own ego-satisfaction, not for our ego-boost, but it is so that this great flow of art and architecture and poetry and music and paintings continues. Our contribution is in the flow of art started by many, many great artists …
Mr. Kumar was interviewed by Suzi Gablik. The interview was published in her collection, Conversations Before the End of Time : Thames & Hudson, 1995. Excerpted from pages 142 and 143.
…
Instead of running for cover in a sudden nasty rain a week earlier, he used the downpour to set a somber mood for a scene in Central Park in 1955, using Bird drenched to the skin as a metaphor. ”Ninety-nine percent of the directors I’ve worked with would have been screaming and shouting that they couldn’t work,” says Mr. Valdes.
”Things happen that you can’t control,” Mr. Eastwood says with a shrug. ”If someone throws a scene at me and says you must shoot this scene today because the set won’t be available tomorrow, I won’t say, ‘I haven’t thought about it, slept on it, meditated over it, so I can’t shoot it.’ ” Nothing that has gone wrong tonight will follow him home. He will, he says, ”jump into the shower, brush my chops real good, jump into bed” and be asleep in five minutes.
In Idaho, on ”Pale Rider,” Mr. Eastwood left 50 members of the crew and cast cooling their heels for several hours while he climbed up a mountain with his camera crew to get shots of trees with dying autumn leaves that he wanted for his title sequence. Something in the pit of his stomach warned him that the leaves would be gone by the next day, when he was scheduled to shoot them. ”The next morning, every leaf was off the trees,” says Mr. Valdes.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/17/movies/clint-eastwood-s-riff-on-charlie-bird-parker.html
reminder
Posted a few days ago in the New York Times. This article points to the social construction of mental disease diagnostics, and how American psychiatry is creating new norms about human consciousness on a global level.
“Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places …
In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.
That is until recently.
For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. … There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well … we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?em
