Everyone (including me) believed this when I was in graduate school, but it put a premium on aligning oneself with Derrida’s skepticism. Those who believed in skepticism were in the know (and what a contradiction is implied in that formulation!) and could be allowed into the academic inner circle. All my professors attempted to do with me the entire time I was in graduate school was to lecture me on my own misbehavior based on my own misconfiguration of the problem. In their minds, Derrida had solved a problem that had bedeviled a lot of the best literary critics of the previous generation. And who was I, after all, to question them or Derrida? When I continued to ask thorny question (like how it was possible to know anything in a universe in which all our knowledge of anything can be deconstructed), I was shunned as an unbeliever (another problem in a skeptical universe; who gets to call it art in a relative universe but those who are in positions of power already? I have discussed this here, if you’re interested). See 1:20 in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY

When I was in graduate school, I had no answers to my belief that something was wrong in the graduate school universe, and I wrote my dissertation more in the spirit of inquiry into method than actually answering the questions I was raising. It wasn’t until I got out of graduate school and started reading old books in my now abundant leisure time that I found what I had been looking for all along, and in the most unlikely place. Augustine, who I had been avoiding along with Plato on account of his reputation in D. W. Roberston, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer, had held the answer all along. I change it a bit in my work, though.

Both of my latest works are separate attempts to answer my graduate school critics by deconstructing deconstruction on the basis of my new found confidence in a world that persist in spite of academic doubts about its existence (I’m quoting myself here; weird). In my work of satire, I make the case that artists and literary critics, and not the usual scapegoat of the bourgeoisie, have placed their spears in the shifting ground of a deconstructable universe as though they had found solid ground. Within the world of fiction, I point to some of my favorite works of fiction that have led artists and critics to set up as arbiters of faith in a thoroughly deconstructable universe. Only artists and critics are exempt from deconstruction, and they get quite upset when someone tells them that they are not.

In my work, I point out as gently as I can (because I modeled my main character on myself) that his youthful dreams of transcendence are totally unrealistic. But he refuses to see the world more realistically, as my antagonist, who is also based on another aspect of myself, does. In the end, neither of those two me-based people have the answers to the question of transcendence.

Gentle Giant’s Mr. Class and Quality

As a result of my thoughts in recent weeks, the lyrics to this song, Gentle Giant‘s ‘Mr. Class and Quality,’ have been on my mind. In them, the writers give vent to their feelings about the limitations of the bourgeois “middleman” who travels within strictly restricted boundaries. Their feeling is that the “middle” is nothing more than a detour from the “end” of literary experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNzZ7RXQtM

Look around my rooms and see the prizes I have showing
Working hard to build my life and plan the way I’m going
House and car and pretty wife – they’ve all been won by knowing
All been won by knowing
All been won by knowing.

Paperwork, white collared shirts – where would we be without them
Man of class and quality – I never shout about them
Choose my friends for my own ends. You can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them.

Middleman sees straight ahead and never crosses borders
Never understood the artist or the lazy workers
The world needs steady men like me to give and take the orders
Give and take the orders
Give and take the orders.

The bourgeois man has trophies of his accomplishment (“prizes I have showing”) as the result of his “hard work” and his “planning.” But, as everyone knows or should know, life throws us curves out of left field. It is in our reactions to unforeseen events that we should measure a man, and not on the basis of how much “paperwork” a man wearing “white-collared shirts” who “never crosses borders” has managed to fill out in his lifetime.

The moral of the song is that people who think they know based on giving and taking orders have not reached true knowledge, because the path that they have taken leads one down a path without looking for or thinking about other ways of looking at the world. The bourgeois way of “knowing” is contrasted with the more open knowing of people like “us,” who embrace the very pleasures of not knowing what is coming next. This, in the 1960s was equated with freedom. And if, like me, you were alive in the 1960s and were under 30 years of age, you could partake in the new world. And if you were over 30, you could partake if you gave up your attachments to things like order and solid middle class values. But some people wouldn’t budge, and they became the enemies of right-minded thought.

My Name Is Nobody

That is essentially the plot of Sergio Leone’s My Name Is Nobody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s

In that film, Leone pays a final tribute to his beloved Western genre, even as he kills it. My Name Is Nobody is the story of an aging gunfighter (played by Henry Fonda) who meets a young gunfighter (played by Terrence Hill). When he meets the young man, the old man takes it as a challenge. He is prepared to fight it out once more, but the under-30 Nobody (played, as I said, by Terrence Hill) has other plans for Henry. Rather than making him into a martyr, Nobody plans to make Henry into one of the greatest heroes ever by having him kill more men than have ever been killed in a single gunfight before: the 150 members of The Wild Bunch (the title of another Western by Sam Peckinpah; Leone loved Peckinpah; see this clip for Terrence Hill’s homage to him in the film). He succeeds, and this move takes Henry Fonda out of his ordinary life day to say life as a gunfighter who is constantly meeting up with people who want to kill him and transports him to the realm of heroes. Only then can he live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.

In my opinion, Leone thought he was transporting his linear heroes of his youth into a more timeless universe of art. When I was a young man (in the 60s and 70s), I, too, want to live in that timeless universe of poetry, much as Yeats transported himself from the daily back-and-forth of existence to an existence in which he could be at one with himself as a golden bird singing songs to drowsy Emperor (see my post on Creed’s Higher), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that such a world can only exist in fiction.

If I wanted to recreate it in fact, I would have to pretend that I, like Yeats, wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. This is my opinion of many of the most strident people in academia. It’s not that they don’t mean well (they do), but they do not acknowledge any change of state in their reconfiguring their universe from one based in reality to one based in an unrealizable fiction.

My Post-Academic Life

It was not apparent just how big a break this involved with the premises I had been working with for my whole life until I was out of graduate school school. Then I took some time to read 100 books on all aspects of business, reasoning that I knew nothing about how business works. I was stunned when I realized that the premises on which I had been working within academia were not the premises that obtained outside of academia. I was shocked, but I was also curious. Realizing that I hadn’t been all that happy in academia in the first place and realizing that there were few jobs available anyway, I decided to take my chances on becoming an entrepreneur, where the rewards were better and the pressure put on me to conform was significantly less.

I have never had a problem with my academic friends, who seem to me to have a far deeper and broader appreciation for life than someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has a more commonsense approach to money than those who believe that “others” pursue money for its own sake; but within academia, I was viewed only as the sort of person who must be lectured to. If I wouldn’t listen to reason, I would be (and should be) tossed aside for more reasonable men who had the sense to agree with what everyone was saying about artistic experience. When I got out of academia, I was subject to criticism by conservatives (and even my own dear lovely and far too liberal wife) as being too liberal on some topics. As I’ve said before, this has left me feeling as though I’m a man without a country. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my free thoughts, and I found that within and without academia, free thought comes with a steep price after all.

My Novels and Books

I’m willing to pay that price, because I know that it is the price of freedom, and America’s greatness in the world has been fixed to our ability (until the recent death of Steve Jobs) to come up with new ideas (telephones, automobiles, jazz, airplanes, transistors, rock and roll, computers, rocket ships, rap, etc. have all been American led inventions). In my work, I want to bring America back from the artistic abyssal world of Nobody to the world of time, in which Creed can return again and again (and even again, if necessary) from the static and so impossible world of Nobody’s unity to a world in which people have to live their lives one moment in time without convenient refuge in a world of fiction that can never be in fact.

I Come Through

It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel I have a new idea that everyone is unconsciencoiusly aware of of but no one has yet expressed. Because of this this, I expect to be misunderstood by anybody who reads this far (and let’s be serious, nobody will), but my world of temporary fiction also finds its ground in the 1960s, in which Paul McCartney and the Beatles could sing ridiculous fantasies about women who came in through the bathroom windows (not as people are supposed to through doors but who did not have enough sense to know that her version of reality is distorted by an also magical silver spoon (not gold, as it was in Yeats’ poem). This version is by Joe Cocker, because, let’s face it, that guy can sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXh2gnasw0

When the young woman comes in through the bathroom window, she wanders by her own lagoon (a Spenserian argument if there ever was one) but she, like Redcrosse, is a baby in her own mind, being young enough to still be sucking her thumb and so not old enough to have discarded the silver spoon that covers her ignorance of the way the world actually works. The way the world actually works is through time, as Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, and Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday, all the way back to Sunday, when the whole cycle starts all over again (it never gets back to me, as Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake didn’t either). This reminds my over-trained literary mind of the reference to the omphalos in James Joyce’s other masterpiece, Ulysses in which he imagines the impossible dream of being able to get back to Eden through his mother’s mother’s mother…until he gets back to the historical Eve from whom all women sprang.

It doesn’t work; and the reason is quite clear to anyone who has never read a book in their life. It doesn’t work because it is patently ridiculous to believe that unseen things do exist (like imaginary chains that link us back through our mother’s womb to Eve) while seen things (like the beach to which Stephen closes his eyes to in order to imagine such nonsense) do not. But because they have long histories in literary history, those who dedicate their lives to reading frequently think that they indicate a deeper purpose of meaning in the universe and not just nonsense. This is because James Joyce said so, and he was a genius, and geniuses wouldn’t say such things unless there was more than a kernel of truth in what he ways. This is also the reason that the worst offenders in this respect are not the ignorant with their abundant common sense, but airy academics, who believe that what they read in texts must somewhere exist in the real world and cannot be a complete fantasy. Charlie, in the fantasy above, was right when he complains that there is no such thing as a candy mountain. For not believing his senses, he is punished with the loss of a kidney.

I obviously disagree with my academic colleagues and friends, but then who am I do contradict so many great and powerful thinkers?

Movie Death

I was thinking about this because last year I watched 150 Westerns for a future project. I was thinking about the difference between the reality of death and its depiction in my favorite western, Once Upon a Time in the West.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86-K8BJlh9M

As you can see, there are a lot of guns in this film. They go off regularly. And when they go off, people die. Now, in real life, death is the ultimate end of experience. Once it befalls you, you’re snuffed out. You’ve gone off to join the choir invisible. You are no more, etc.

But the western has a different take on death. Yes, people die. But they also are not dead. They come back in another movie to get killed again. This is what differentiates art from life. No one comes back from being killed in real life (except if you believe in the miracle of Jesus Christ, but that is a matter of faith because you weren’t there). In art, we can experience the impact of a person’s death without actually experiencing death itself.

This give the depiction of death in the movies a different meaning than it has for us in real life. In the movies, we are following a hero on his path to his final destination. Those who get shot or blasted or wounded or maimed of crippled or mutilated in any way are simply the necessary casualties of the process of culling the weak from the strong. Those who survive the ordeal to the end are heroes.

And this is why American movies are so unbelievably violent. Just as in Yeat’s ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ the artists who perform their tragic play are secretly gay. An artist like Quentin Tarantino is also gay. He knows that his art of violence will not destroy the whole world in a holocaust of death, but only cleanse the world of his carefully-selected targets of his moral ire. The gimp people in Pulp Fiction. Hitler and the rest in his Inglourious Basterds. The hero is destined to live to the end, and in his life he will exemplify a moral truth. The villains are killed and killed justly.

This moral calculus exemplifies the approach taken to death by art and artists.

Thoughts on Moral Calculus of Movie Death

In the moral calculus, even the horrific death of a child serves a larger moral purpose, as here in one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, where Frank (played by a blue-eyed Henry Fonda) comes out of the bushes, having killed a whole family. A young boy walks out of the house, sees his dead family, grips some water over his heart, and looks quizzically at the villain. Henry/Frank smiles at the young innocent for a moment, and we believe there is a shred of humanity in him…until one of his henchmen asks him ‘What are we going to do with this one, Frank?’ His smile goes away after he has been named, but it comes back to his blue-eyed face again before…well, I’ll let the film speak for itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy52xEUsrvU

So the Kid is dead, and that’s okay, because his death serves a purpose. It set the moral boundaries of Henry/Frank. He is evil.

Sources of and Obstacles to the Moral Calculus

In the heroic configuration of the universe, the art of Sergio Leone follows the thought of Rousseau, who believed that nature had created all things equal, and it was the work of artifice that had distorted things from their natural balance through the unequal division of wealth and property. All we have to do to restore balance is to go to war with the people who are for protecting their individual property at the expense of the collective.

But this is only true if Rousseau was correct about his initial premise that nature is indeed equitable in the distribution of his gifts. But there is a competing position, that of Pareto, who says that the gifts of nature are bunched up among the upper 20% who have 80% of all Italian land. Pareto wanted to redistribute the land more equitably, and the Italians (elected?) the fascist dictator Mussolini to redistribute wealth more equitably according to the ‘natural’ principles laid out by Rousseau.

However, this may have put Mussolini on the wrong side of equation. The question was whether Pareto’s observations or Rousseau’s observation about the world was correct. Both cannot be exclusively true, although both could be partially true.

I tend to side with Pareto over Rousseau on the equation of the intentions of nature because of an observation that Pareto himself makes about the lowly pea plant. 20% of pea plants yield 80% of the pea crop. This is nature’s way of sorting out winners and losers in the battle for survival in a hostile universe. Those who flower most have the most offspring; those who flower least die.

This puts people like Mussolini at a disadvantage, because they are convinced that nature wants to distribute her resources equitably and it is within the power of human being to do so. All he had to do was to object to the capitalist pigs who had taken so many of the resources of civilization for themselves. He and his squadristi went to war with nature under the mistaken impression that they were restoring nature to its rightful place at the center of Italian nationalism.

But if Mussolini was wrong in his estimation of nature, then he would be fighting against the tide of nature. He would have to keep ramping up his perceived enemies in order to maintain discipline at home. ‘It’s the evil Americans or the evil capitalists who are working against our fairer system,’ he might have said. ‘Direct your anger towards them.’ This, in fact, is what happened. Eventually he broke faith with his people by siding with Hitler, who was also a fascist and who also ended up as the poster child for EVIL that artists like Tarantino could rally their troops around in a good old-fashioned blood romp.

Mussolini and Hitler were wrong about what nature wanted. In the struggle for power in the 20th century world, Mussolini lost out to the better prepared allies, not because they sent in troops to take 100 or more scalps from 100 or more Germans, but because the Americans had a better system of survival in a competitive world. That is no to say that because America won the last war that we are a unique or in any way exceptional civilization. But it does mean that on a relative scale that we were better than or enemies, whose eyes bit of more than their stomachs could digest. After the fall the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Soviet communism itself in 1991, the Chinese were wise enough to have learned the lesson that the world had changed; capitalism was the way forward.

And it doesn’t mean that because the Germans lost the war that they are evil. Some were, but the majority of Germans had bought into a false premise. That is why it’s so important to check your reasoning, not against your own very secure premises, but against wider nature, and why it’s important that you be as close to right as you can be. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, you must make allowances for being wrong, for no one is ever completely right about what nature wants. No one is absolutely right. He who makes less mistakes in an environment in which everyone is making mistakes is the winner. That is how I explain America’s victory over the Axis and not on account of any sort of permanent advantage. We were more right about our view of the universe than older thinkers like Marx, Lenin, Malatesta, or Mussolini.
Wikipedia references for each

My Fictional Universe in Relation to the Thought of Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken

It is in the realm of human nature to follow nature, but between ‘the truth’ of nature comes a veil of fiction. It is our response to the veil of fiction that defines our relationship to nature.

Think of an atom. We cannot see it, but we can imagine it nevertheless. We use analogies when we do. My analogy is of the solar system, as is (I’m guessing by using my imagination; I could be wrong) yours. So between our analogy of an atom and its ‘reality’ comes imagination. My beef with those who believe that they are in possession of ‘the truth’ is not that they haven’t grasped the truth of nature but that they make no allowances for the ‘fiction’ which comes in the form of analogies about ‘the truth.’

When Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are discussing their possession of ‘the truth,’ both are correct. But both are using a different set of analogies about the universe they are observing. It is therefore not the possession of ‘the truth’ that matters but the possession of the correct analogy that matters. And this is why people like Limbaugh, who believes that Darwin is one of the two worst thinkers of all time, beat out smarter men like Franken or Michael Moore. Limbaugh has a much better sense of market forces than Moore, who wants to redistribute wealth equally to all, or Franken, who is rich enough that he doesn’t mind paying more taxes for (to my mind very inefficient) services.

No one in the debate between conservatives and liberals is wholly right. The question of who is more right in regards to the specific issue of money becomes very clear. Rush Limbaugh signed a contract for $400 million dollars, while Air America went broke. This is not in spite of but because of Air America’s hosts’ reliance on truth. (I could not find a story on Google News about Franken having laughed at Limbaugh’s shilling for products on his show, but I remember it distinctly), but because Limbaugh is more comfortable with what he has to do to find and maintain an audience. Franken is more skittish.

My point is not to reduce all value to monetary terms. My point is that, simply because Al Franken has rejected monetary value doesn’t mean that he has correctly determined the correct value of money and monetary value in the world. Money matters more than Al Franken thinks it does. His business is supported by it, and he should give it its proper due. On the other hand, money matters rather less than Limbaugh, who occasionally talks about his fabulous wealth and ability to travel on his private jet to any location in the world, thinks. He still got addicted to pain killers precisely because money is not the central ingredient in your happiness.

Rush is more right on that subject than Al Franken, who ‘still thinks of himself as a comedian’ and who fled from advertising to a less capitalistic model of the truth. Unlike NPR, which forces people to pay for a service that they may or may not use, Air America relies on a model of goodwill participation of those (20%?) of those who really listen, rather than the broad reach of Limbaugh into the marketplace. Limbaugh must be entertaining if his listeners are not going to be turned off when he goes to commercial.

My point is that Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, and Joni Mitchell are looking to pierce the veil of fiction to get to the truth. Insofar as they are searching for the truth, I can follow them. But insofar as they reach ‘the truth’ by tearing away the veil of fiction, I always ask myself (in my imagination since I don’t have access to them personally) whether they really believe the things they are saying. (The reader will be relieved to know that no one answers).

Back to the Moral Calculus

The moral calculus of the Western demands that we give ourselves up to believing what we are seeing on screen and succumb to the fictional portrayal of events. Actors who die are not really dead, anymore than poets who travel to a separate world out of time have not really traveled to a separate world out of time. The veil of fiction prevails in our quest for ‘the truth,’ and those who believe too much go from being (perhaps callous) observers of artwork (like me) to true believers, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And no one wants that, so it’s important that we don’t forget the veil of fiction that lies between our analogous minds and the world ‘as it is.’

Directors in the 60s and early 70s thought that they were experiencing for the first time ‘in all of Christian minstrelsy‘ the revelation of ‘the truth,’ which had been hidden the parents of the Pepsi Generation only by their parent’s reliance of traditions which could be thrown off once someone realized that we don’t have to follow the path that our parents took. This tradition itself has a long tail, going back to the Enlightenment and even father back to Plato. But, immediately (10 years, which is immediately in historical terms) filmmakers like Louis Male realized that their picture of the universe was not all it was cracked up to be. Gustav Björnstrand starts talking about leaving the planet for a (completely fictional) planet where everything’s going to be put right again. (Hmm, I ask myself; should I follow him there?)

The Role of Art in a World of Violence

Art in the modern world is like the films of Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah. They value only heroes; other can be dispensed with (with relish) if they do not serve the ultimate purpose of art. Peckinpah believes his own press. He is one of the chosen people who is also on the outside looking into a (completely fictional) world of the now-fading West. He is still willing to do those things that other (middle class bourgeois men) are unwilling to do. He seeks the few other heroes, and dispenses with those who are not worthy.

This has its roots in Rousseau and Nietzsche, who also thought that the only thing standing in their way was the loss of a more beautiful past in which money and monetary value had less of a role and to which only the hero could return. But it turns out that this configuration of life divides the hero from other men in an (at least) 20/80 divide. This makes me question whether Rousseau was correct in his initial view of nature’s equitable balance, or whether or Nietzsche was correct in traveling outward to the ‘ends’ of experience to be among the supermen.

The cost of such an error in our estimation of the role of nature is immense in a country in which men based their whole philosophy on Jefferson’s declaration that we are guaranteed ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ by the social contract. This causes Americans to judge things on the basis of how close or far we are from the natural ideal. But, if Pareto was correct in his estimation of nature as picking winners and losers, then those who democratize too much, as I am inclined to do, are fighting against nature, not aligning ourselves with a long forgotten nature that only a select few of us can access.

The problem with this view of the world are legion. The chief problem with the heroic view of the world is that it denies the humanity of all for the select few who know the truth. But it turns out that ‘the truth’ is unknowable as it is, and in the hands of a Peckinpah it is based on a fairly unreasonable view of the world as it is.

As fiction, I love Peckinpah’s universe. As an account of ‘fact,’ I have to wonder about the man who actually believes what Peckinpah is writing. I don’t actually believe that Peckinpah believed what he was writing. But I also think that he wanted to bring his vision of the idealized view of the past to life. This is my problem with the work of purveyors of heroic literature in general: they look at the universe, decide something’s missing, and continue to pursue it anyway.

Two Perspectives on Reality of Your Death

The reality our situation is very very different from its portrayal in the movies. In reality, nature may in fact kill us all, but we rage against the dying of the light, because each of us thinks of ourselves as infinitely valuable in the universe. We hold the metaphysical key to life, and when we are snuffed out, our metaphysical worldview is snuffed out completely and permanently. We do not therefore put any monetary value on our lives. They are infinitely valuable to us; their loss means loss of everything.

This is the basis of Kant’s categorical imperative, which says ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ This is a foundational principle in the Jeffersonian secular Enlightenment universe, but it an optative wish, not an enforceable law. Moreover, it ignores the reality of experience, which is that others are not compelled by the wishes of the bourgeois, law-biding, middle class followers of the categorical imperative. Heroes don’t follow man made laws; they follow a higher law, and they are (always) validated because they are (always) right.

When it to the perspective that others take on our lives, we must allow for them to place a value on our lives. We can enforce through law the proscription against murder, but some men will decide that the $10 dollars in our wallet is more important than the cost of letting us live. So they shoot us, robbing us of our most valuable asset (our very life) over something so mean as an Alexander Hamilton. By ignoring the value aspect of life and retreating back to the stars where the earth can be viewed serenely, liberals like Al Franken and Michael Moore are ignoring some significant features of the world as it is. But when we travel back down from our adventure in the skies (or worse don’t even broaden our experience through space travel to imaginary places that exist only in the mind) we need to understand why the perspective of Rush Limbaugh, which places too much emphasis on wealth, is not entirely correct, either.

My Take on Fiction

The solution is not in fact to withdraw from the world to a higher perspective, but to educate yourself against the possibilities of being murdered by wrong-minded gunslingers who rely on an unacknowledged fiction. This requires a different sort of fiction than the heroic blood romps of a Tarantino, Leone, or Peckinpah or the work of Rousseau or Nietzsche. I have read and have enjoyed the works of these and many authors in the modern vein, but enjoyment is not all in the universe of knowledge; one hopes that the famous authors who know more than we know what they are talking about and are not people like the other Birkin who stands in for Hermione’s own lack of knowledge and then declares that the world can only be perfected if every human is killed. That’s the sort of thinking that led (though on a smaller scale) to the Holocaust.

This is what I was trying to accomplish in my fiction, which focuses, not on the hero who is guaranteed from the beginning of the tale to make it to the end unharmed but who must separate himself from the collective society, but on the kid who dies in the middle of Leone’s film. That kid must have a sense that his life is infinitely valuable, and that is why he stands frozen before Frank/Henry shoots him dead. But the kid is holding a bottle of water to his chest. That may be valuable to sustain life, but it has no economic value (scroll down to ‘The Meaning of Value‘ on this page). Frank has a gun and gets to call the shots in the universe of exchange.

My Kid is not at the end of a poker game. Instead, he’s in the middle of the game and is constantly trying to orient himself correctly to the larger poker world. However, he has dropped out of school, and this foretells (for the careful reader) all of his failings.

Within the poker world, my Kid must educate himself as closely as possible to the possibilities for the cards that he holds (whose value he knows) and his opponent’s cards (whose value he doesn’t), rather than relying on hero’s journey alone in the wilderness. This is the medieval universe of The Wanderer as well as the heroic journey of Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Leone’s fairy tale Once Upon a Time in the West. It may well be the price of participation in the world available to the few, but I would much prefer the middle and unheroic world of family, friends, and society available to the many.

He, of course, scored my favorite Western of all time, Once Upon a Time in the West. I could listen to the lilting theme all day (and I occasionally have).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s0-wbXC3pQ

His fisrt big break in movie scoring came from his pairing with Sergio Leone in his whistling theme for A Fistful of Dollars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpZjvbSC9_M

Being filmed on such a low budget, Morricone utilized all sorts of special effects in his soundtracks, giving them the unique feel of having sprung from the landscape, as opposed to the more traditional scoring of a John Ford Western.

This effect is used in ‘The March of the Beggars’ from Duck, You Sucker, where he uses a belch to to sound like a frog. At least, that’s what I interpret the sound as; I interpret the scene as being based on the descent into Hades in Aristophanes’ The Frogs; the sound is reminiscent of the Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx of frogs at the gates of Hades. In Duck, You Sucker, Juan leads the march of the beggars through the underground caverns of the bank in search of money. Instead, they find political prisoners locked inside the vaults. They are set free, of course. In any case, here is Morricone’s soundtrack for the piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSsTwB-tgvk

Morricone went on to write the music to over 500 films. What I like about his music is its playfulness with traditional themes, as here in his Dies Irae Psichedelico. The Dies Irae is a traditional hymn written in the 13th century. It begins with the lines

Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophets’ warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!

It is joined in Morricone’s vision with the thoroughly modern religious experience of psychedelia. What more could you ask for?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYN5fB_k-uw

Other bits of his work are more sedate. His Chi Mai was used in several films, including 1981’s The Professional. The soundtrack sold over 3 million copies and Chi Mai became a smash hit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-gUOqc2UuA

There are hundreds of great songs from the catalog of Ennio Morricone, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include his most memorable piece of work for me, the kid who grew up whistling the ‘Theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly‘:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYV-JSjpyU

That’s a nasty title and is probably why they changed the title to A Fistful of Dynamite in this promo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THn36Mwmv7U

Now the reason this is among the last three films I saved was that it’s by my favorite director of westerns, Sergio Leone, who directed my favorite western of all time, Once Upon a Time in the West, as well as my second favorite, For A Few Dollars More (the second in his Man with No Name trilogy).

The original title reflects a comedic tendency born of the 1960s exuberance at having broken free of the shackles of tradition. With a title like Duck, You Sucker, I did not hold much hope for its ability to hold up over time. What’s more, it stars James Coburn, who also starred in such mod hits as In Like Flint, so I didn’t think I was going to like it. Granted, I had seen him and loved him in Sam Peckinpah‘s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (and elsewhere), but I’ve never been a huge fan of his work and I didn’t hold out much hope for this effort.

I Was Wrong

I am not afraid to admit that I was wrong. Yes, Coburn is playing his usual brash and callous character—the one that Mike Myers has such a good time flaying in his Austin Powers character. And what is even more preposterous, he’s supposed to be playing an intellectual opposite Rod Steiger, who plays a poor Mexican peasant who’s only interested in money (and little else). But what I love about this movie is the sense I got from the first explosion that Leone has been paying attention to Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch (another of my top 5 favorite Westerns). Coburn is loaded up with explosives, and he’s not afraid to use them.

Leone’s European Perspective

Leone brings a European perspective to the Sam Peckinpah universe. Peckinpah’s universe itself is a bleak and nihilistic one. He was an alcoholic who felt he had missed out on the great adventures of the West and was living in a time when the old myths had been sundered and new men were coming to transform the landscape forever (the cowboys versus sodbusters myth of Shane). He, and his main characters, were living past their expiration date, and they decide to go out in a blaze of glory (and an orgy of blood).

Leone doesn’t have such a view of the past or such a nihilistic view of the future. Instead, the director had sat in Rome during the 30s and 40s watching American Westerns dubbed into Italian (by order of Mussolini) and he dreamt of freedom in America which was denied him in Italy. His future is not a European, but an American future. See my post on France Gall or the Ye-Ye Girls to understand just how prevalent such a view of the future was in the 1960s.

Duck, You Sucker appears to me to be part of Leone’s project of assembling his European perspective by co-opting the fresh perspective of the Sam Peckinpah Western.

I have always had a fond spot in my heart for the European perspective on American culture. It’s why I pursued an academic career. In Europe, the educated man is supposed to have some perspective on life derived from having lived in a country that had survived for more than one or two hundred years. America was a young country, but France, France had been around since before Gaul was conquered by Caesar (that’s a long time for those who don’t know).

It’s also why I got out of academia. Academics tend to build Ivory Towers that present barriers to entry for individuals of lesser talents. But those same barriers tended to exclude too many of the people with different ideas (like mine which I’ve been laying out in my explication of my Poker Tales). I found these barriers were being built with a mind to keep my perspective out.

Back to Leone

The film starts off with a quotation from Chairman Mao which sets the tone for the main theme of the film:

The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or embroidery; it cannot be done with… elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.

This sets the stage for such directors as Quentin Tarentino, who say (and apparently believes) that violence is the purest form of cinema. I have my doubts (but then who am I?).

In any case, Leone takes a more subtle approach in his explosion-filled fantasy. In the film’s best scene, Juan comes into the tent of his brother John (nice pairing of different names whose underlying meaning is the same) and lays his head on a map.

‘That’s your country you’re lyin’ all over there,’ says the helpful John.

‘It’s not my country,’ says Juan. ‘My country is me and my family.’

John reminds him of the other words that country covers, including ‘the governor, the landlords, and this revolution.’

Juan explodes in anger, as you can see here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMwTbb8NHQ

As Wikipedia notes, in the film, the intellectual John (Coburn) learns a lesson taught by to him by the peasant Juan (Steiger) and not the other way around. They quote Leone himself:

I chose to oppose an intellectual, who has experienced a revolution in Ireland, with a naïve Mexican… you have two men: one naïve and one intellectual (self-centered as intellectuals too often are in the face of the naïve). From there, the film becomes the story of Pygmalion reversed. The simple one teaches the intellectual a lesson. Nature gains an upper hand and finally the intellectual throws away his book of Bakunin’s writings. You suspect damn well that this gesture is a symbolic reference to everything my generation has been told in the way of promises. We have waited, but we still are waiting! I have the film say, in effect “Revolution means confusion”.

My Kind of Message

That’s my kind of message. It is the message that I take from the experience of Louise Brooks’ encounter with the director G. W. Pabst. It’s the difference between living your life at a distance and living your life in the immediate present. The intellectual distance can protect Pabst from contact with the creature he is anatomizing. He can make art about Lulu and can be protected from the natural fallout of action by putting a window on that world and allowing viewers to access that world without actually experiencing it for themselves. That is the role of art; it is an “artificial” recreation of that which we dare not touch ourselves. When Louise Brooks appears in his artifice as Lulu, Pabst is ecstatic; when it turns out that she was a Lulu in actuality, he revolted. “He didn’t like it,” says the actress.

Bakunin’s Thought

When John (Coburn) throws away the work of Bakunin, he is throwing away work based in the principles of nature. Bakunin had written:

The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.

By revolution, Bakunin had meant the effort to tear down the artificial barriers of entry put up by the bourgeois classes and to put in their place more “natural” boundaries in line with Nature herself. He doesn’t see any problem with this.

Another Justly Famous Scene

In another justly famous scene, the two once opposed Johns (points of view if you’re a stickler for propriety) come into alignment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW0wO-Vds_8

Juan is complaining about the traveler John who’s showed up in the country and has decided to stay.

‘He says there is no danger. All you have to do is watch the bridge from a long way,’ mumbles Juan to himself. He has turned his binoculars to make the bridge look even farther away than it actually is. ‘No matter how I look with them, I’m still too close to the bridge.’

The bridge is a metaphor in the film. Its subsequent destruction brings the two opposite poles (of intellectual and uneducated men) together in a new synthesis of cooperation against the man with ‘power’ to take what he wants by force and to enforce poverty on the poor in an inequitable distribution of resources. This is what both the family man and the Irish intellectual are after. After all flee under the bridge, they are all killed by John’s bomb, leaving a new synthesis and antithesis in which John and Juan are on one side of the cavern, and the brave captain who was wise (or foolish) enough to stand his ground is on the other.

My Reaction to Leone’s Film

I applaud Sergio Leone’s film for its awareness of perspective of the other. Like Louise Brooks, and unlike G. W. Pabst, he has an awareness of the non-intellectual’s value in the equation. He wants to coax him in. This appeals to me as a person who feels he was wronged in graduate school, as the Starkadders feel they must atone for the ‘great wrong’ they visited upon Robert Poste in my favorite comic novel of the 20th century . But, as in the Starkadder’s case, no one ever mentions what the great sin was, nor does it matter much in the end. What matters is what Flora Poste manages to accomplish between the beginning and her destined end. In Leone’s film, we already know the end of the film (at least if we think about it). What matters is how he (Leone) gets there.

It is in the ‘getting there’ that I have my problems with Leone’s film. First, I don’t believe that things are so cut and dried as Leone, from his (if not intellectual, still distant) distance from America, sees America as those of us who live in America see it (how long will it take you to understand that sentence? it means that I, American, see the world differently up close than Sergio, European sees it).

He takes a Hegelian/Marxist/Baukuninian view of the matter. All we needed to do, Leone was (and hoards of others were) telling us back in the 60s was to stick to a posture of revolt and all would be well. Leone, and most (not all) of my intellectual colleagues in academia wanted me to pursue a posture of ‘pure revolt.’ I thought the idea revolting and I backed away.

I want to be clear here. I do not begrudge my academic colleagues their voice. I do not resent them for their contributions to the gradually improving climate of human knowledge. I do sort of still resent their refusal to allow me ‘and my sort’ into their private club; but in the end it’s their tree house, and they can invite who they want to include and who they want to exclude in their club. Academia is not the only place to think about the problems that affect humanity.

But I always thought that my academic colleagues only meant revolution as a metaphor for critical thought (which was fine with me) but not as a call for actual revolution with the chopping off of heads and the exploding bridges which kill hundreds of fathers, leaving widows and orphans in their wake. But they were telling me that, no, they were for actual revolution, which I was and remain firmly against.

My Creative Destruction

I took a different message from the works of Bakunin, a message made popular in Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he defines capitalism as “creative destruction.”

This has at its base the accumulation of property which Marx made the basis of his Communist Manifesto. It also has at its base Bakunin’s exemplary apothegm “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.”

Only in Schumpeter’s case, it comes with a responsibility to create something out of the phoenix fire of destruction, rather being comntent to destroy what others have built or the academic who is content to climb above money to a ‘higher’ plane. This academic idealism is the subject of a recent book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche.

As the review of Miller’s work in Publisher’s Weekly says,

Miller remains neutral, preferring to juxtapose the behavior of his subjects side by side with their words, even if, as in the cases of Socrates and Diogenes, so much still remains unknown about their lives. Nonetheless, this compelling book elegantly lays bare the distance between the abstract formulation of right action and its achievement in the real world, indicating that the lives of the great philosophers can be exemplary but not always in the ways we might have hoped.

I don’t believe that it is enough to turn away from thought altogether just because some philosophers have failed to live up to their ideals. But I also don’t feel that it’s enough to remain neutral as a creature involved in a competitive universe. Some ideas are better than others, and taking the wrong side in an argument can mean the loss of resources in a universe of limited resources. As I noted in my post on the Introduction to Poker Tales, as well as in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, none of my students in 20 years has ever made the decision to follow Socrates’ ‘bad science’ in their own life. This is because even students in my introductory rhetoric classes know that the choices they make have consequences.

In the academic environment, where many students sit waiting for life to begin, my students’ first choice is often to try to get away without having to make a choice. This allows them to keep their options open until an ‘important’ choice comes their way. Socrates? Didn’t he die a long time ago? That’s right, I say. The choice you’re asking me to make is difficult, AND it doesn’t matter if I decide not answer, so what’s the point?” they say (well, I’m paraphrasing; no one actually ever said exactly that).

I have to agree with their reasoning here. It doesn’t matter if they decide not to answer. But I remind my students that the problems of life don’t go away simply because you chose to ignore them.

Burying your head in the ground is how non-intellectuals manage to keep being roped into the games that intellectuals are playing. Sure, we intellectuals (and I include myself in this category) are idiots who are searching after ends that never come. And sure, we are often wrong, as was Rousseau who abandoned his children or Shelley, who abandoned his marital obligation in search of ‘free love.’ As ends go, we still have a lot to learn. But as far as the science of life goes, a Western scientist has a far greater appreciation of what is going on when the earth rumbles. They check their scientific instruments, rather reaching for a passel of virgins and tossing them into a volcano one-by-one until the rumbling stops. You could do it, but it would be a waste of a perfectly good virgin.

The fact is, I tell my students, is that the choices you make matter, and if you choose not to choose, you still have made a choice. My students love this, because at least some of them have heard the song. They are usually shocked that an old guy like me knows the song, ‘Freewill.’ I very seldom tell them that it has been my experience that choosing freewill is not always (or even usually) the best choice. I’ll leave them to discover that fact (if in fact it is a fact) for themselves.

My Last Words on My Last Leone

So I like Sergio Leone’s work a lot. He’s produced 6 of my favorite 5 westerns of all time—the others are the Man With No Name Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, and My Name is Nobody—but as far as his having captured the essence of my reaction to America (being that I am actually an American living in America) he’s not quite captured that essence yet.

Bakunin’s followers include Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Herbert Marcuse, and Saul Alisnsky. This is why I am so hard on Bakunin’s followers. They represent the folly of academia’s reliance on ‘nature’ in their configuration of thought. In my experience, nature has little to do with human being’s engagement with it.

The solution to academic folly is not to fly from the battle and to watch from a safe distance as Kaiser Wilhelm drops his King Belly bombs balls into the beleaguered city. The same thing happens in Dr. Zhivago and The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, where people ‘sit back and play their guitars today just like yesterday’ and greet the new boss, ‘same as the old boss.’

My response is to stand up and fight the good fight head on. It is not enough to back away into a land of fantasy in which ‘us’ stand for true things as opposed to ‘them,’ who stand for ‘not-true things,’ but back away as soon ‘us’ are challenged, as having settled on a metaphor of revolution and not revolution itself. In such an environment, I have always been more comfortable being one of ‘them.’

That’s why I write my own books (but then again, who am I?).

I know that all of you have seen this film, which is the best of the ‘people on the run in an automobile’ movies. This movie is so much better than its more famous ancestor, Bonnie and Clyde, that it beggars comparison. But just in case you haven’t (as if that’s even possible; but if you haven’t, rent it from Netflix today), here’s a short preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiDBFqKgDA

You gotta love Peggy Cummings as the psychopathic Annie Laurie Starr, don’t you?

His first discovery was of Muddy Waters, who he teamed up with Willie Dixon‘s writing talent on Hoochie Coochie Man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ4NFsw4bOU

During a session with Muddy, he allows his side man Little Walter to record one of his songs (My Babe) and he (Len) discovers his next even bigger talent. The movie has the time line completely wrong, but that’s what movies do, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GID8SPUMDxQ

Len’s next big discovery is of Howlin’ Wolf, whose Smokestack Lighting is his next big discovery. Howlin’ Wolf was a serious MF in real life. Wikipedia says this of him:

musician and critic Cub Koda declared, “no one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.”

The film portrays him as a serious MF, as well, and he is contrasted in the film with Muddy Waters, who’s just sort of a dumb person who doesn’t understand where his money comes from, and Little Walter, who like guns and fighting a lot (I mean A LOT). Howlin’ Wolf doesn’t want to be bought off with Cadillacs. He’ll take what’s owed to him.

And when Muddy Waters gets jealous of Howlin’ Wolf’s status at a time when his (Muddy’s) records are not selling but he still has seniority at Chess records, Muddy attempts to steal one of his side men in an ‘I’ll-show-him-who’s-boss’ moment. Howlin’ Wolf shows up at a club with a gun, wielding in the face of his session man, who meekly decides that perhaps he should go back and play for his old band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAwjZLztd28

Len’s next big discovery is of Etta James (played by Beyoncé Knowles). The movie glosses over the details of Etta’s belief that she is the daughter of “Minnesota Fats.” She meets him, but the meeting isn’t shown.

Maybe it’s because it’s Beyoncé, but I enjoyed her rendition of “All I Could Do Was Cry.” Let’s see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_i-AI61PEo

Nope. I love her version, too. And since I love Etta so much, I thought I’d five you another taste. Here’s here most famous single, “At Last“:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVI254QGSQ4

Finally, Len discovers Chuck Berry. What can you say about that? He’s Chuck Berry (played by one of my favorite actors, Mos Def). The movie doesn’t have much more to say about him, either. Chuck comes from a country background, and it is the combination of blues and country (and not just the blues, as I was taught growing up in the era dominated by the Rolling Stones et al.) that Chess recognizes as ‘rock n roll.’ Chuck likes young girls and eventually gets thrown into prison, while Len Chess funnels 10% of Chuck’s royalties to the loyal Muddy.

Here he is playing “Johnny B. Goode“:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8JULmUlGDA

The movie was so-so. The history is seriously flawed (where, for instance, was Len’s brother Phil, with whom he bought the Macomba Lounge in 1947?), but I don’t mind that so much. That’s what art does. More importantly as art it glosses over some of the heartache that its writer seems to have understood but does really deal with with any depth.

But the music is fantastic! Hope you like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zU3U-9B3fE

Here’s the original (and I think much better) trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKCys3sd8Bw

And here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

As I Spit on Your Grave, the movie was censored and released in the United States in 1980. Many countries, such as Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and the former government of West Germany, banned this movie altogether, claiming that the movie “glorified violence against women”.

Roger Ebert has this to say about that:

Movie critic Roger Ebert gave the film no stars, referring to it as “a vile bag of garbage…without a shred of artistic distinction,” adding that “Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.” (click here for the whole review)

Nevertheless, Wikipedia goes on to say

Camille Keaton (the grand-niece of Buster Keaton) won a Best Actress award for her role in this movie at the 1978 Catalonian International Film Festival in Spain.

You be the judge.

Art, therefore, is necessarily opposed to the Status Quo way of looking at things, and artists tend to gravitate towards odd ways of looking at the world. What is more, they tend to think that people who are satisfied with living in the most prosperous area in human history (the American suburbs) are shallow. Only conflict, the artist says, is good. Complacency is bad. This means that artists will fall on the sid of total revolution more often than they will fall on the side of maintaining the suburban Status Quo. That’s what we all expect.

Of course, there are problems with the anti-Status Quo people (can I call them the Anti-Status-Quo-ites? I think I will). Most Americans live in suburbs, but a select few live in cities. The give a direction in the world away from the complacent suburbs to the big, powerful, capable-of-embracing-change cities. In such a world, the city people don’t need to pay attention to the Anti-Status-Quo-ites who inhabit the complacent suburbs or (horror of horrors!) who inhabit the country. This has, in recent years, divided the country up into Blue States (like New York, California, and Illinois) and Red States (like Montana, Texas, and South Carolina). People from the cities look down on their brothers and sisters from the country and their gun-toting, country-music-loving ways. They don’t even know enough to think about the errors of their ways. And, being ignorant, they do not have to be consulted for their opinion on the Coming Revolution.

They are people who candidate Obama (now President) was talking about when he made this speech during his campaign.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not,” Obama said.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama said.

Such comment bespeak a real divide in this country, and Obama (in my opinion) did a poor job of explaining away his remarks (though he tried). And Rush Limbaugh continues to push the remark forward to divide Obama from the conservative base. But my goal today is not to attack other people’s political motivations (I say again that I am not political) but to point out the limitations of politics through an example from the world of art.

And so I give you, The Dot and The Line: An Adventure in Lower Mathematics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSbdvzbOzY

Chuck Jones was one of the most gifted animators in history. Before Pixar, he was testing the boundaries of art. And in this short animation (released in 1965), he tested the boundaries of art and human relations through animation.

“Once upon a time, there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a dot” (1:20). It’s a narrative, so there must be conflict. He says, “You’re the beginning and and the end, the hub, the core, and the quintessence” (1:33), but she loves a squiggle “who never seemed to have anything on his mind, at all” (1:40).

This puts the knowing reader in mind of a set of ideas. The line is a too-rigid white male. The dot is a “frivolous” woman looking for love. And the squiggle is the totally free spirit unleashed by the rising spirit of free love. This was the situation I grew up with. I could identify myself as a straight line–I think we called them squares in my day. Women were indifferent to me, except as friends. They preferred squiggles.

The Line learns to bend himself—with great effort, mind you— into a myriad of shapes, while the Squiggle remains the same squiggle. The Dot confronts the Squiggle, who confesses that “I never know how it’s going to turn out” (8:45). The line ends up getting over her obsession with the squiggle, as she suddenly realizes “that what she thought was freedom and joy was nothing but anarchy and sloth” (9:00). She falls in love with the line, who imparts to his life a sense of direction and purpose.

Why Does The Dot Change?

Was it the Line’s ability to bend into shapes that made him so attractive to the formerly “frivolous” Dot? If that were the case, then Chuck Jones would have discovered an “Undeniable Truth,” and we should follow him, directing our energies towards guiding our women towards men like Bill Gates, who have a lot of money, and away from men like Allen Ginsberg.

I don’t think so. The lesson I learned from this cartoon and others like it was that learning is good, while staying the same is bad. This, incidentally, is the same lesson that a careful observer might have learned from watching the 1981 film My Dinner with André. In that film, the squiggly world traveler André has had a myriad experiences, while the stay-at-home lump Wally has led a restricted life at home in New York City. The people like the Line in Chuck Jones’ experimental animation, have the same values in My Dinner with André, but they stay at home in NYC, rather than venturing forth, as the squiggle André has:

New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison.

The Sense of an Ending

So my response to the Dot and the Line is not to jump in because the Line brings a sense of an ending to the Dot’s quest for balance in the world, as opposed to the Squiggle. What matters in both models is that we learn and grow. The direction we grow in is a matter of cultural preference, and culture changes. And as it changes, we change along with it.

In the 60s, we wanted to be squiggles. In the 70s, we wanted to be part of the in-crowd (‘the beautiful people’) of knowers, as opposed to the out-crowd of unknowers. By 1981, we were going back to Chuck Jones’ vision of the universe of human relations. Bill Gates and a hoard of geeks were taking over the world again, and ‘the great unwashed,’ with their dreams of revolution, were on the decline. Then, after a generation of greed, we returned to our idealistic roots with Obama.

Literary critics have often mistaken their feeling that they have arrived at an end for the feeling that others, who have not arrived at the same end as they, have not journeyed at all, but merely have stayed home, like Wally, not thinking at all. This is to mistake art—which must have an ending to every story—with life—where there are often different ways that reason can build on the same foundation of experience. This, in my opinion, is what happened in the 60s.

Culture in the 60s

In the 1960s, America was split along our response to the rise, for the first time in history, of American ideals to the center of the world stage. Liberals threw away the middle ground of changing reason for the absolute ground aesthetics, which offered a permanent and unchanging ground for our human experience. People on the left started talking about revolution to overthrow the power of those who were not embracing change as fast as those ‘in the know’ thought they should be.

The neo-conservative movement was founded at the same time. Neo-conservatives were operating on much of the same ground as the Liberals. They embraced ‘American exceptionalism’ as the end-point of history and wanted their rightwing ‘American’ policies to be embraced over the ‘pinko’ policies of the left.

This divide is still operational in America.

Searching For The Ground of Truth

It is instructive to look at a book by a committed liberal—Arthur Herzog’s The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America—to see how many of his statements would be made by right wing politicians today.

Clearly—whatever else is true of us—Americans are a people deeply deeply mired in their own rhetoric. To get on solid ground will mean to carry on a nonviolent struggle against deception wherever it appears, in institutions and in people. Even more than clean streets, we need clear heads. (27)

Our response, when confronted by such a statement, is to dig deeper towards the truth that lies beneath the mounds of error which have destabilized the ground on which we stand. But that statement could be made by Rush Limbaugh speaking about Barak Obama in 2010. It was, in fact, directed at Richard Nixon in 1973.

How, I have learned to ask, do we know when we have settled of ‘stable ground?’ if both Herzog and Limbaugh are voicing the same sentiment coming from two completely separate and politically opposed camps? My answer is that politics only appears to lead us to ‘stable ground.’

Where Would You Put Chuck Jones?

The reaction among academics is to reduce all speech acts to politics and then to judge people according to their politics. The fact of the matter is that Chuck Jones probably wasn’t thinking in political terms at all. But let’s say that the academics are right, and that all speech is political. Let me ask the question “Where would you put Chuck Jones in such a universe?”

• Is he a liberal? He actively campaigned for the reelection of FDR in 1994 with his film Hell Bent For Election. He does propose that the Line bend himself, rather than remaining static? And he does align himself with the citified world of opera (as opposed to hick music of the banjo) in his Long Haired Hare. But he does not go far enough. In 1965, that may have been okay, but in 2010 we have progressed from sweet and innocent Ye-ye to the world of Jane Birkin.
• Is he a conservative? He doesn’t give the Line too much leeway. His shapes need to be ‘rational’ shapes, rather than ‘arbitrary squiggles.’ A reliance on reason has become the mark of someone who is too ‘square.’ And he was thinking about opera in his citified music, not rap.
• Is he a moderate? He does toe a middle line between anarchy and rigidity.

The fact of the matter is that people can decide on any one of these three answers and be satisfied with themselves. But each of these classifications—made through reason—breaks down before we come to the end of reasoning to the truth.

What’s more, the necessity of using reason means that you must take all that you like and dismiss all that you don’t like. This makes is important that, not only do you have answers, but that the opposition have not quested for answers. The proposition that your opposition fails to grasp what you have grasped puts up false—and ultimately unnecessary—boundaries in the quest for the—ultimately unreachable—truth.

It was in answer to this that the Romantics eschewed reason altogether—reason meant that you had to learn things and place them in hierarchies through the imperfect light of reason—in favor of the metaphysical and immediate sense of the self without hierarchy. This has the advantage of having everyone think that because they have quested after and found answers that they are better than their friends. The disadvantage of the Romantic model of education is that it made everybody stupid, while not providing answers that would lead anybody to a ‘solid ground’ except in their own minds. And the concern with liminal boundaries of human existence is why liberals ten towards policies of destruction and revolution until they can end history as it was always supposed to be.

This is why conservatives embrace reason. It provides a ground on which they can build their uni-directional fantasies in a multi-polar and multi-directional world.

Conclusion

Things shift; times change; and with the shifting times, culture changes. Both sides of the American political debate are committed to an absolute vision of reality in which each side believes that they have access to the truth that is denied to their opponents. My thinking is that the liberals have thrown too much of reason away in their pursuit of absolute. I think that conservatives have restricted their pursuit too much by limiting acceptable art in their pursuit of an absolute truth.

And I still love Chuck Jones. He was a great artist who was toiling away in a medium which, at the time, no one thought was artistic at all. His position has changed in that respect: we now acknowledge him as one of the great artist of the 20th century. I can forgive him for not having grasped the final truth of things after which time and history will come to a standstill at last.

So here’s my last tribute to Chuck Jones: it’s a piece called What’s Opera, Doc?, but is commonly called Kill the Wabbit. It is a parody of Wagner’s Ring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYq-LLETyHE

Brilliant!

I’ve been working my way through the silent film era in Germany recently, and I have to admit that silent film is one of those things that takes getting used to. The pictures are often grainy (1920’s Golem), the stories are often abbreviated (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and scenes take far too long to play out for too little payout (Spiders). What do we expect? After all, these pictures are some of the first of their kind. Dr. Caligari, for instance, is the first horror film. Just like with Alfred Steiglitz, we need to make allowances for the fact that movies have improved from that day to this. And, like Steiglitz, we (or at least I) can appreciate them for their experimental nature.

So in the spirit of forgiveness, I watched Pabst’s silent masterpiece Pandora’s Box on Netflix last week. This is my favorite German silent movie I have ever watched (though to be sure I am still watching them). And the key to the success of the film can be laid upon the talents of Louise Brooks, who brings her magnetic presence to the screen. Pandora’s Box was her masterpiece.

Synopsis

The film takes place in four parts. In the first part, Louise plays Lulu, a somewhat frivolous show girl who gets a wealthy man to marry her, despite the fact that she knows he is wrong for her. She is the quintessential woman who uses sex (outward beauty) to get what she wants. Barbara Stanwyck would play the same sort of creature in 1933’s Baby Face, the film that got Hollywood serious about the Production Code; but this role is far, far darker. At the beginning of the film, Lulu is not a serious person. Instead, she dances gaily, protected by the world of wealth and privilege that he has access to. He is so distraught by the fact that she has seduced him that he offers her a gun and tells her to kill herself. “It’s the only thing that can save us,” he says. That’s hardly fair, so she murders him on their wedding day (she is Pandora, after all).

The second segment of the film takes place during her trial. She is found guilty, but she escapes with the man she actually loves. They are free to love one another, but the cocoon of wealth that protects her from the harshness of life is stripped from her.

The third segment takes place on a ship at sea. Her lover turns out to be a gambler and he owes money to someone. She is sold to a guy (for $300!) who is planning on bringing her back to be one of his prostitutes in his seraglio in Cairo. Her only hope is that her lover can win enough money at the gambling tables to save her from this terrible fate. Well, if you have read any novel ever, you know that he’s going to fail. And voila, he fails. Predictable, really.

But, deus ex machina, they escape and go to London, where the fourth and final scene takes place. There, Jack the Ripper is murdering women, and (once again, voila) she meets him on the foggy streets, where she is working as a prostitute. She lures him back to her room, but he tells her he doesn’t have any money. He draws his knife and is preparing to kill the evil prostitute. In a series of close-ups which draw closer and closer to the faces of these two lonely people, Louise Brooks shines. Her electric personality made Pabst focus on her as a great star. She says, “Come up anyway. I like you.” They go in together, but the psychopathic killer’s itch to kill cannot be overcome. After he places a mistletoe above her head (like halo of an angel, really), he kisses her and, seeing the glint of a knife on the table, kills her. All Lulu really wanted was someone to love her, not for herself alone, as Yeats would have it, but for her yellow (or in this case her black) hair.

To see the appeal of Louise Brooks, watch this clip from Pandora’s Box:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CHyM1TZOM

Why Haven’t You Heard of Louise Brooks?

Okay, I don’t know that you haven’t heard of her. I hadn’t heard of her, so I looked her up. And she is fascinating. She was a true rebel girl and fought against Hollywood’s studio system, which she thought was exploitative. This ruined her career, as explained in the following clip from a self-righteous documentary about how Hollywood used to censor people’s free spirit and artistic talents:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk7hLN44-uM

“That Hollywood treatment is murderous, just murderous. You’re not a person anymore. The people who you’ve been to dine with and spent weekends with, they look at you. It isn’t as if they’ve rebuffed you. You don’t exist anymore.”

Louise’s Life

In an interesting article in New York Magazine (May 31, 1982), Gael Greene, currently famed and fabled restaurant critic who is a frequent judge on Top Chef Masters, then author of Dr. Love (wow!), writes a book review of Louise’s autobiography, entitled Lulu in Hollywood. Gael writes of Louise’s days as a Ziegfeld girl, but leaves out the fact that her bob haircut is to this day still called a Louise Brooks. But other details catch the eye of Sex and the College Girl, Dr. Love, and Delicious Sex.

Louise Brooks has survived, precariously, to 75, but her career after Pabst seemed like the proof of his prediction [about her being exactly like her character Lulu]. Careless about her work and her love life, she drifted into worse and worse roles, and never married any of her numerous lovers. She could have had George Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, but “my heroes were men of action who pursued death unyieldingly.” Following a spell as a ballroom dancer and a failed comeback attempt in the late thirties, she was a salesgirl at Saks, then gave up the charade of being “an honest woman” to be kept by three men.

She left all three. I presume that Gael thinks she should have played the game better. But, like Veronica Lake, who famously said “I’ve reached a point in my life where it’s the little things that matter… I was always a rebel and probably could have got much further had I changed my attitude. But when you think about it, I got pretty far without changing attitudes,” Louise was her own woman, but unlike Veronica Lake her attitude ruined her career.

Her Rediscovery By the French

The French, careful discoverers after-the-fact of fine things foreign like film noir and Jerry Lewis, rediscovered her in the 50s. (For a complete timeline of her life, see here)

Then, after she became famous, she started writing books. Her life as an outsider began to fascinate people who were hoping to place her experience into a historical framework so that they can feel superior to their shady past. And it was at this point that she granted an interview to a film critic, which she made in a dowdy house coat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02xMWmc64ps

Her frankness is shocking sometimes: “It was very hard for him to find a beautiful woman in Europe. Did you know that about Europe. They weren’t beautiful all over” (5:45) (if you think she is lying, take a look at a picture of German film star Pola Negri):

But by far the best part of the interview comes at 7:10, when she begins talking about her relationship with Pabst. He was an intellectual, and she…well, she was not:

Louise: “He knew instinctively that I was Lulu. And that was fine in the picture. Making the movie was perfect. He’d just turn me loose, and I’d be alright. But off the set, he wanted me to be an intelligent woman, a well-disciplined actress, and I just wasn’t. He was taking drinks out of my hands; seeing that I was kept in my room. He was furious, because he approached people intellectually, but you couldn’t approach me intellectually, because there was nothing to approach. He was always a little bit mad at me.”

Interviewer: “At the same time, he was aware that you were a Lulu.”

Louise: “Oh, absolutely. But he didn’t like it.”

In other words, she was the uninhibited woman who had lesbian affairs and who posed for pictures like this one:

That sort of frankness and self-awareness in an actress is extremely rare .

Compare Her With Britany

Compare the ironies of Britany Spears’ Circus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVhJ_A8XUgc

She sings about there being ‘only two types of people in the world / The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.’ Well, she is not the watching type. ‘Don’t like the backseat, gotta be first.’

That’s fine. Everybody’s like that, I suppose. But (again like everybody) she wants people to follow her. Well, I have a problem with that. As she is telling people to follow her, her life was a circus train wreck, and I for one can’t reconcile the image stuck in my head of her with a shaved head with her telling her to “follow me, show me what you can do.” Why, I ask myself, would anybody want to follow her?

The key to understanding what she thinks she is doing is to focus on Britany’s sense of tradition. She is following in the path tread before her by Madonna and Jane Birkin. She divides the world into those who lead and those who follow. She is a leader, so everyone should follow her, not into the ‘reality’ of her life, which, like Lana Turner’s life is sad and pathetic, but into her fantasy life, which is fantastic.

I don’t really have a problem with that, as long as I know that she is talking about a fantasy. And I think the American people understand that, as well. Whether Britany understands that is a separate matter.

The Difference

The difference between intellectual art and life itself becomes apparent when you think about this. Marx, like all moderns, thought to elevate himself above himself in hope that from his elevated position he could see all. He was mistaken. By his mistaken belief that he had reached the end of history, he turned the intellectual environment on its head. Nature had been corrupted by false values held by the falsely conscious. They needed to be corrected by their betters. Man Ray would also attempt to forgo the temporal dimension of life for a static view of life which rearranged life in an a-temporal space.

But there will always be Lana Turners collapsing who don’t tie themselves back to the literary and intellectual world. And I think that Louise Brooks articulates the difference better than most from the point of view of those who are not intellectuals. They live their lives without the intermediaries of an intellectual framework. And when Pabst—or anybody else—attempted to control them, they fled. And yet, she seems to understand her predicament in ways that Britany Spears, who still expect people to follow her into decadence, if not insanity, never does.

Rather than following Britany, Madonna, and Jane Birkin back to the body, we need some intellectual component to our live that will free us from the terrors that await the live lived raw, as it were, uncooked .

But the intellectual component has limits of its own. The tendency to do away with time elevates thinkers like Marx and Pabst and the later Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Roseanne, Sandra Bernhard, Anthony Kiedis, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Lucy Liu, Rosie O’Donnell, Naomi Campbell, Pierre Lewis, Alex Rodriguez, Donna Karan, Mischa Barton, Britney Spears, David and Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, James Van Der Beek, Heather McComb, Zac Efron, and Lauren Conrad away from their ordinary lives to take up the higher position outside of time from which they can lord their ‘higher calling’ over the rest of us, inviting us to join them from their elevated position in the sky (see my discussion of Shelley’s Adonais in the section of Rousseau and Shelly).

No wonder they look for something else to hang their hat on than fading beauty. And people like Man Ray can provide a more complete, and to some more satisfying, vision than that provided by the classical world’s vision of perfect, symmetrical beauty. But by traveling so far from the world we live in into the world that they can imagine in their minds, they still leave things out of their perfect universes.

There’s something to be said for time. Look at Louise Brooks in her interviews. She’s old! Beauty, on which many of these actors and intellectuals trade, is fleeting. Even an old poet like Ovid knows that. The way to stop time is to travel into your imagination and live there. But Louise Brooks continued to exist long after she could not or would not be seen as existing by those who occupied postitions of power in Hollywood.

Waiting for the Revolution

In the years since I graduated from high school, the world has gradually realized that the revolution that people saw coming hasn’t come. Modernism has been exchanged for postmodernism, which is built on Derrida and his reading of Marx (among a lot of others). We now wait for a postmodern revolution. And until the time that somebody figures out what that revolution will hold, we are forced into a position of overturning the last revolution with the next in an ever-changing, ever-recurring, ever-renewing cycle. Hitler, having been repressed/suppressed, should rise again any day now.

Rather than forgoing the imperfections of the previous configurations of the world, I myself do not want to leave the imperfect pleasures, for a perfect world that must be deferred until the final revolution comes to pass. Such revolutionary fantasies are for children and intellectuals.

One Last Look

Anyway, here’s one last look at the woman, long since dead, who still has the power to inhabit my dreams:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfiyEsMOSu0

Interviewer: Are you going to take up skiffle?
Jimmie Page: No, I’d like to take up biological research.
Interviewer: What do you mean by biological research?
Jimmie Page: Well, cancer, if it isn’t discovered by then.

Alas, Jimmie went on to experiment with guitars and heroin, and we are still plagued with cancer. I can live with that, ’cause Jimmy’s an excellent guitar player.