Stopping to Listen, Moving to Follow.

I seem to be always profoundly affected when I walk into a bookstore (or when watching a particularly evocative movie trailer). Usually it's an unnameable emotion/energy rush that brings me close to tears. (Inspiration? Yearning?) I tend to refrain from trying to put a name on it, recognizing that tears and crying are often simply energetic releases, and don't need to be labeled or associated with a specific causation.

What's strange, though, is that today, I was walking among the stacks with a clenched fist, amid visions of tumbling paperbacks and crashing shelves.  Interesting development, and a little unsettling, honestly. I really do feel like something wants to get outta my brain (it's pretty crowded in there at this point), but I'm having a hard time stopping enough to listen, and moving enough to follow it. In many cases, I've been holding my ideas for so long, I have lost sight of the doing of them, and they only live in fragments in my mind. 

Mercury's going retrograde soon, meaning it'll be a time to tie up loose ends, revisit old, open cycles to conclude them.  I think I had better get to work on some/anything. 

Lots of excuses not to:  can't do it alone, but should know what I'm doing at this point; I'd imagine it's well nigh impossible to bring allies/collaborators together for a sustained effort with no resources...so many ideas I can't focus on one long enough to see it through to completion... and the list goes on.

But, if this visceral reaction continues when I'm surrounded by creativity and ideas, something is going to need to happen in my life as a creator of art.  Looking around...where to start?

Holding up, as t'were, a funhouse mirror up to Nature.

In short, this is why I do what I do in the manner that I do it.

"What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. the personal aspect is a limitation--and even a sin--in the realm of art. When a form of "art" is primarily personal it deserves to be treated as if it were a neurosis." - Carl G. Jung

The Black Swan, and the fallacy of literalism

I read a story that's going around the intertubes, about Crazy Chicks in the movies, as evidenced by the popularity of Black Swan, and how it represents a misogynistic artistic view, and re-inforces images of women as blahblahblah.  The article contains a pretty good list of movies that have women with broken psyches.  So what? The movie is an allegory of the ballet.  It's an extended metaphor, which takes some actual brainthought energy on your part if you're going to act like you give a damn enough to write about movies and popular culture.

Plays and stories have to be about something compelling, so that we look at life differently.  Nobody wants to see a play about the second-most important day in a person's life. If  Sophocles wrote about the day before Tiresias shows up at Oedipus's house, the only terror and pity engendered in the Ancient Greek audience would be that they wasted two hours of their precious Dyonisian revelry sitting in a hot amphitheater, looking at some guy sittin' around wondering what's up.

Art not only has to present the most important moments in a life, but sometimes it also has to shift the story's viewpoint so that audience's viewpoints can shift.  The old journalistic saw also holds true: Man Bites Dog is a news story.  Dog Bites Man is not a news story (although if it happened to Michael Vick, it would be a satisfying slice of karma for the day).  That's why the Demi Moore/Barry Levinson/Michael Crighton steamy crapfest Disclosure, for instance, had to be about a female as the aggressor in a sexual harassment case--the role-reversal forces us to look at the situation differently.

The mythic feminine is yin energy--an actively receptive vessel, life-giving, an invitation to action. The mythic masculine is yang energy--outwardly active, productive, a response to the call to action. There's really no getting around that hard-wired fact. When that energy goes awry, it is News. It is a story worth telling. It speaks to some primal part of who we are, as both men and women integrating both yin and yang in our fullest expression.  The "misogynist" viewpoint of the article completely misses the other side of the coin.  Yes, there are plenty of "women gone crazy" plots, most having to do with that aspect of their feminine side gone amock, which wreaks havoc in their world and the world around them.  The analog to those plots, however, are the "broken man" stories...men who are unable to express their yang nature (all those A-list star turns as developmentally-delayed or cognitively deficient wounded males).  Both sides of that coin make for compelling stories because they resonate on a mythic level of our pre-civilized consciousness.  And when actors are good at it, they win awards--on both sides of the Y-chromosome equation.  They win, and they sell tickets because they show us the broken aspects of ourselves, so it resonates with us (subconscious terror at viewing our inner weaknesses on display) and allows us to externalize the broken part of ourselves as part of a story (pity).  Thus, we leave exhausted, satisfied, and a little drained (catharsis).  Except for when Sean Penn does it.

Of course, there are exceptions.  Jodie Foster in Nell.  Fight Club (though that does address the issue of the mythic male in breakdown as no other film has or can.)...Jodie Foster in Nell.  (But I had to reach for that one, and I don't think that film made much of a dent in the popular awareness.  "Tay in da Ween?" Really?

The Bottom Line:  The Black Swan is an allegory stuck in a world that has scant little room for metaphor--especially when it comes to the mythic aspects of gender roles in popular entertainments.

Grand Theft Culture

I read with a smile in my heart that the FBI had arrested some 127 individuals as part of the largest crackdown on the Mafia in the history of law enforcement.  Some of the arrests were for killings and crimes committed decades ago, by now-old men. Will it have a lasting impact on organized crime?  Maybe not. But still--to that, I say:  "Bravo, FBI". 

And, while I'm at it:  "Vaffanculo, Mafia."

(Full disclosure: I know of one person who was involved in some way in organized crime in the past of my distant family. Logic and probability suggest there may have been more, but it was never a topic of conversation, nor immediately apparent.)

The glorification of La Cosa Nostra is something that has always sat uneasily with me.  The Godfather movies--the first two, at least (thanks in part to Sofia Coppola's multi-award-winning turn in Godfather 3) were a beautiful, lush exploration of self-determination, cultural identity, honor, familial obligation, and the promise of America.  The Corleone family, in a way, represents the closest we could come in America to actual royalty.  They lived a life of dynastic power, courtly rituals, a distinct code of honor, and unimaginable wealth; and all the while, operating above--or beyond the reach of--the law. As a story tied intricately into the shadow side of the American psyche, it is a powerful narrative of cultural identity, tribal honor, and the American immigrant mythos. 
 
Then, as with any mythic vision, what follows from that initial spark becomes, over time, a crass counterfeit, with all the trappings, but none of the Truth, of the original. Scarface. Goodfellas. The Sopranos. Goombahs all over the airwaves and internets.  I remember reading how mafiosi used to watch The Sopranos as a comedy...they laughed at how on-target it was, and took it as a great flattery.  I say again: vaffanculo. You give my ancestors and my people a bad name.  

You know, art can be used to shine Light onto the Shadow, so we can better understand ourselves as a people, and as individual humans.  There is a place for the anti-hero in art, culture, and society. The anti-hero is a tragic figure--a cautionary tale, and a safety valve for the darker impulses of humanity. But, in the end of the anti-hero's story, the world is set "right" again.  (Faustus pays his debt, for example). The problem is, the anti-hero has become the hero in our world now. We glorify criminals in pop-culture--actual criminals, who commit actual, harmful crimes. The Mafia is just one particularly glaring example.  But, you know...fuhggedabahdit. Wuhddayahgunndu, right?

Sinclair Lewis, American Prophet

When I read Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel about the rise of fascism in America, I was riding a train from Atlanta to New York...inadvertently maintaining continuity with the period in the story. I was by turns aghast, despairing, awe-struck, and incredulous at Lewis's writing--there's no other word for it but, "prophetic."

I immediately saw that It Can't Happen Here would work very well as a theater piece, and the way I see it, by using a strict adherence to the story and period it would allow the audience to make the disquieting connections to current events and climate.  In my work with my solo show,Il  Teatro Machiavelli, (wherein I present a period- and dramaturgically airtight Punch-and-Judy-show adaptation of Machiavelli's The Prince) I generally find that the othertimeliness of the setting heightens the timelessness and contemporaneity (yes, that's a word) of the show's themes in the audience's experience.

All that to say, I'm becoming more convinced that the time is ripe for this show.  I saw the attached video starting to make the rounds from the YouTubes, and I dove straight back into the book for the prequel.  Read this, from It Can't Happen Here, then (try to) watch the video.  Is there any other word, but "Prophetic"?

Background:  Buzz Windrip is the candidate for President, who is campaigning on a platform of smoke-and-mirrors populism.  The groundswell of support in the nation is being led by a WCTU type (Yes, the organization still exists in operation) named Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch. (I insert here a picture of the founder of the WCTU, just because Miss Annie Turner Wittenmyer looks like just the type of gal to start a Women's Christian Temperance Union):  

In the first song, the League of Forgotten Men is a loose ad hoc confederation of disgruntled Depression-unemployed men. In the second, more ominous, song, M.M. is abbreviation for the paramilitary arm of the Windrip movement, the Minute Men (a festishistic patriotic throwback to the Nation's Founding mythos...Tea Party, anyone?). Doremus Jessup is the New England Newspaperman who serves as the primary protagonist of the story. (Lewis could really craft a name, that's for sure.)

Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the platform, they were greeted by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the celebrated author, lecturer, and composer, who--suddenly conjured onto the platform as if whisked out of the air--sang to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" words which she herself had written:

Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.,
Riding on a hobby--
To throw Big Business out, by Gosh,
And be the People's Lobby!

Chorus:
Buzz and buzz and keep it up,
Our cares and needs he's toting,
You are a most ungrateful pup,
Unless for Buzz you're voting!

The League of the Forgotten Men
Don't like to be forgotten,
They went to Washington and then
They sang, "There's something rotten!"

And later, just after Windrip is elected:

Past [Doremus Jessup's] house after midnight, through muddy snow tramped a triumphant and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and bellowing to the air of "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just that week by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch:

The snakes disloyal to our Buzz
We're riding on a rail,
They'll wish to God they never was,
When we get them in jail!

Chorus:
Buzz and buzz and keep it up
To victory he's floated.
You were a most ungrateful pup,
Unless for Buzz you voted.

Every M.M. gets their whip
To use upon some traitor,
And every Antibuzz we skip
Today, we'll tend to later.

Then, when I saw this, I was gobsmacked:

So.  Any one of my Lefty artist friends wanna get a copy of the book and start a conversation?