Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2008
Dylan: Lay Down Your Weary Tune
For Black Dog Barking, who wondered in comments why the invisible hand of the market never put this on a commercial album. My answer would be that the invisible hand works in mysterious ways, only a few of which having to do with markets and money.
As noted, the photography is from Miranda Jane, who is unknown to me until now. More of those "invisible college" things that the pointy heads such as myself talk about.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Small Towns
I grew up in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, but I both entered and exited grade school in small towns in North Carolina and Kentucky, respectively.
I began the first grade (“pre-school” not being an operative concept in the 1950s South), in Summerfield, North Carolina. It’s now a bedroom community for Greensboro, and it’s not really that far, only 10-15 miles, but the roads back then weren’t that good, and Summerfield felt very rural. By “rural” I mean that there was a tobacco farm next door, a mule pen maybe 40 yards from our back porch, and the first money I ever actually earned (as opposed to little “tips” for being cute or helpful) was at a “tobacco stringing party” where the whole neighborhood tied harvested tobacco leaves to sticks, to be hung in the curing sheds.
There was also a General Store across the street, and across an open field and parking lot was a drugstore, complete with soda fountain. I must have charmed the manager of the drugstore, because he made me ice cream cones with chocolate syrup and peanuts and charged me far less than usual because I’d been buying Drumsticks at the General Store. Or maybe he was having some weird kind of competition with the General Store. In any case, I spent large amounts of time in the drugstore, reading comic books and magazines, and the sight of a pre-schooler bookworm was probably just cute as all get-out.
When we first moved to the area, we lived in Greensboro for a while. I’m not absolutely sure if Dad worked in Greensboro or Winston-Salem. If it was the latter, then we moved so he’d be closer to work, but I think he worked in Greensboro. I can only remember going back to Greensboro from Summerfield a couple of times, to see our friends the Appels; the son Steve, had been my “best friend” for maybe all of the three months we lived there. Steve’s sister was mentally handicapped, that may have been the euphemism for “retarded” then, although “retarded” may have been the euphemism. All I can remember about her was that she was sweet and shy, saying very little, and she had a lot of health problems. I know now that it’s very rare for health issues to be confined to the “mental;” there are usually profound developmental malfunctions accompanying most mental handicaps.
I don’t remember much about school in Summerfield; we weren’t there very long. There were two “alpha males” in my class, me and a guy named Terry, and we got along. It was actually a trio that included a girl named Carol (these are very treacherous memories, I acknowledge; I’m not positive that was her name). It being the Baby Boom and all, the school got some “Portables,” pre-fab classrooms, installed a month or two after we started school, and there was a split-grade 1st and 2nd grade class formed, with the brightest of the first graders put into it. I would have gone into it, but it was already known that we were about to move back to Nashville, Dad’s transfer not having worked to anyone’s satisfaction, so our trio got broken up and Carol and Terry left. I had only a few weeks to get used to that, then we moved back to Donelson, and I became “the new kid in school” despite having lived in Donelson for years.
As an aside, having reminded myself of Terry and Carol, I don’t ever recall passing through a “girls are icky” stage. I will acknowledge being terribly annoyed at times by my younger sister, but I’ll stipulate that I was probably even more annoying to her. But one of the pains of my adolescence was watching various girls that I’d substantially liked deliberately dumbing themselves down in accordance with “community standards.” At the time I thought it was because I was in the South; now I acknowledge the more general problem. Still, my experience suggests that it’s worst in the South.
Anyway, Donelson Elementary gave way to a new, much closer school, Hickman Elementary, which I left behind about six weeks into my Sixth Grade year. This move was to Russellville, Kentucky, where Dad had found a job managing a bowling alley (that dates me, I think; they call them “lanes” now). This was definitely one of those “small town gentry” places that John Barnes talks about; the business failed after a year basically because the man who’d purchased it hadn’t kissed the proper feet, and the local Men of Influence wouldn’t sponsor leagues, which are the lifeblood of a bowling establishment.
When my sister and I entered school, my folks were told (condescendingly), that the school was organized on a “three track” system, not really separate classes for “A,” “B,” and “C” students, but, well, that was how it actually was; they just didn’t call it that. And they’d found that transfers from Tennessee schools were “usually a bit behind” where the same grade Kentucky students were. So they placed Marilyn and me in the middle (B) group, and said that if we had any trouble keeping up, they’d move us back to the slower (C) group for a while. Then if we caught up, we could move back to the average group.
A week later, both of us were moved to the advanced classes; I spent the entire year more or less sitting in the back row, reading the World Book Encyclopedia and occasionally giving demonstrations to the class about such things as the destructive distillation of wood or writing short stories and little science fiction plays. My sixth grade teacher, very wisely, God bless her, realized quickly that she had a mutant on her hands and didn’t try to get in my way. As long as I turned in the assignments and didn’t disrupt class (well, the wood distillation was a little disruptive, in the sense that it stank up the place), she didn’t try to rein me in.
The school was also very musical, with the music teacher being a real power in the place, and musical numbers being a common entertainment at school assemblies. I had a good voice, but no musical training beyond church choir (no snide remarks, now), so it was one place that I had the unusual comfort of not being a standout (phys ed was another; I was pretty average except in things that they didn't pay attention to, like swimming). On the other hand, I’d have liked to learn to read music, and they didn’t teach that, for some reason.
I’d already turned into a science geek, making some of my first buddies by telling them about the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation while we were discussing some of the first issues of The Hulk. And there was an older student, I think in high school, who was also a chemistry geek—gads, he actually had access to real nitric acid—and I expect we’d have done some interesting, if dangerous, stuff if the family had stayed in town.
After a year, though, it was back to Donelson, for an entire 7-12 sequence at Donelson High School. High school is itself a simulacrum of a small town, and, as many have noted, everything we do later in life reflects the tribal customs that we all learned in High School. But that another essay or twelve, and if I access this particular file structure much longer, I’m going to get maudlin, if I haven’t already.
I began the first grade (“pre-school” not being an operative concept in the 1950s South), in Summerfield, North Carolina. It’s now a bedroom community for Greensboro, and it’s not really that far, only 10-15 miles, but the roads back then weren’t that good, and Summerfield felt very rural. By “rural” I mean that there was a tobacco farm next door, a mule pen maybe 40 yards from our back porch, and the first money I ever actually earned (as opposed to little “tips” for being cute or helpful) was at a “tobacco stringing party” where the whole neighborhood tied harvested tobacco leaves to sticks, to be hung in the curing sheds.
There was also a General Store across the street, and across an open field and parking lot was a drugstore, complete with soda fountain. I must have charmed the manager of the drugstore, because he made me ice cream cones with chocolate syrup and peanuts and charged me far less than usual because I’d been buying Drumsticks at the General Store. Or maybe he was having some weird kind of competition with the General Store. In any case, I spent large amounts of time in the drugstore, reading comic books and magazines, and the sight of a pre-schooler bookworm was probably just cute as all get-out.
When we first moved to the area, we lived in Greensboro for a while. I’m not absolutely sure if Dad worked in Greensboro or Winston-Salem. If it was the latter, then we moved so he’d be closer to work, but I think he worked in Greensboro. I can only remember going back to Greensboro from Summerfield a couple of times, to see our friends the Appels; the son Steve, had been my “best friend” for maybe all of the three months we lived there. Steve’s sister was mentally handicapped, that may have been the euphemism for “retarded” then, although “retarded” may have been the euphemism. All I can remember about her was that she was sweet and shy, saying very little, and she had a lot of health problems. I know now that it’s very rare for health issues to be confined to the “mental;” there are usually profound developmental malfunctions accompanying most mental handicaps.
I don’t remember much about school in Summerfield; we weren’t there very long. There were two “alpha males” in my class, me and a guy named Terry, and we got along. It was actually a trio that included a girl named Carol (these are very treacherous memories, I acknowledge; I’m not positive that was her name). It being the Baby Boom and all, the school got some “Portables,” pre-fab classrooms, installed a month or two after we started school, and there was a split-grade 1st and 2nd grade class formed, with the brightest of the first graders put into it. I would have gone into it, but it was already known that we were about to move back to Nashville, Dad’s transfer not having worked to anyone’s satisfaction, so our trio got broken up and Carol and Terry left. I had only a few weeks to get used to that, then we moved back to Donelson, and I became “the new kid in school” despite having lived in Donelson for years.
As an aside, having reminded myself of Terry and Carol, I don’t ever recall passing through a “girls are icky” stage. I will acknowledge being terribly annoyed at times by my younger sister, but I’ll stipulate that I was probably even more annoying to her. But one of the pains of my adolescence was watching various girls that I’d substantially liked deliberately dumbing themselves down in accordance with “community standards.” At the time I thought it was because I was in the South; now I acknowledge the more general problem. Still, my experience suggests that it’s worst in the South.
Anyway, Donelson Elementary gave way to a new, much closer school, Hickman Elementary, which I left behind about six weeks into my Sixth Grade year. This move was to Russellville, Kentucky, where Dad had found a job managing a bowling alley (that dates me, I think; they call them “lanes” now). This was definitely one of those “small town gentry” places that John Barnes talks about; the business failed after a year basically because the man who’d purchased it hadn’t kissed the proper feet, and the local Men of Influence wouldn’t sponsor leagues, which are the lifeblood of a bowling establishment.
When my sister and I entered school, my folks were told (condescendingly), that the school was organized on a “three track” system, not really separate classes for “A,” “B,” and “C” students, but, well, that was how it actually was; they just didn’t call it that. And they’d found that transfers from Tennessee schools were “usually a bit behind” where the same grade Kentucky students were. So they placed Marilyn and me in the middle (B) group, and said that if we had any trouble keeping up, they’d move us back to the slower (C) group for a while. Then if we caught up, we could move back to the average group.
A week later, both of us were moved to the advanced classes; I spent the entire year more or less sitting in the back row, reading the World Book Encyclopedia and occasionally giving demonstrations to the class about such things as the destructive distillation of wood or writing short stories and little science fiction plays. My sixth grade teacher, very wisely, God bless her, realized quickly that she had a mutant on her hands and didn’t try to get in my way. As long as I turned in the assignments and didn’t disrupt class (well, the wood distillation was a little disruptive, in the sense that it stank up the place), she didn’t try to rein me in.
The school was also very musical, with the music teacher being a real power in the place, and musical numbers being a common entertainment at school assemblies. I had a good voice, but no musical training beyond church choir (no snide remarks, now), so it was one place that I had the unusual comfort of not being a standout (phys ed was another; I was pretty average except in things that they didn't pay attention to, like swimming). On the other hand, I’d have liked to learn to read music, and they didn’t teach that, for some reason.
I’d already turned into a science geek, making some of my first buddies by telling them about the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation while we were discussing some of the first issues of The Hulk. And there was an older student, I think in high school, who was also a chemistry geek—gads, he actually had access to real nitric acid—and I expect we’d have done some interesting, if dangerous, stuff if the family had stayed in town.
After a year, though, it was back to Donelson, for an entire 7-12 sequence at Donelson High School. High school is itself a simulacrum of a small town, and, as many have noted, everything we do later in life reflects the tribal customs that we all learned in High School. But that another essay or twelve, and if I access this particular file structure much longer, I’m going to get maudlin, if I haven’t already.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Planet Fabulon
This is more of what you can find if you do an image search for "Snakes on a Dame." Both from the website Planet Fabulon, which I recommend highly for its old pulp covers and Midnight Movie Madness feel.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Joe Malik’s Dogs
Illuminatus by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, is a monster of a book, published as a trilogy and cut down from an even more gargantuan original manuscript. It is, in fact, much too big an edifice for me to describe here, and I shan’t. I may go at it at bits and pieces some other time.
Robert Anton Wilson, who died in January of last year, is also a complex and complicated subject, a man seriously wired into a particular zeitgeist that is quite recognizable to those interested in it: New Age philosophy, politics, sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, science fiction and several of the attendant pseudo-sciences. Again, too big a subject for the moment.
But Ben and I went to see him once, and that’s a tale to tell.
First off, let me note that I never do this: just show up on the doorstep of some author or celebrity. I mean, it’s rude, no matter how politely you do it. It’s an imposition. It’s all manner of things you shouldn’t do. So I blame Ben. Well, not really, but it sounds better to put it that way.
Wilson, as nearly as I can tell, was used to having things like that happen, although he hadn’t yet the rock star that Illuminatus was going to make him. At the time, only a few months after Illuminatus had been published, he was still living only a few blocks away from U.C. Berkeley, and he was a nexus of one of those intellectual zeitgeist thingees. In fact, he hosted a regular salon, a weekly meeting of Berkeley intellectuals and intellectual wannabes. So Wilson invited Ben and me to the next gathering, which was very kind and gracious of him, see above note about rudeness. He also sold me a copy of Principia Discordia, the photocopied bible of the Discordian Movement, mentioned prominently in Illuminatus. These days, it’s all over the web, but thirty years ago it was pretty rare. I had more than one friend over the years ask for copies of my copy. But, of course, I’d have bought it even if it were crap, again, see the above note about rudeness and consider my wish for atonement.
We did chat with Wilson a bit before we left. We did come back later to his gathering, and that was also much fun, sufficiently so that I became a regular for a while.
Ben and I make a pretty good team. He’s very extroverted, while I’m mildly introverted. He draws people out; I remember what they say. When Ben and I went to Wilson’s gathering we had a fine old time. When we left, Wilson walked us to the door and said, “Loved your act, fellas.” Which is pretty cool.
Then there’s the other thing.
That first conversation often drifted over to things in Illuminatus and I mentioned The Language and Music of the Wolves which is stipulated as one of the central characters, Joe Malik’s favorite records. A while back, in an essay about WRPI, I wrote a little about the grief that said record had caused at the station, owing to its weirdness. It’s a recording of wolf howls in the wild, and not to everyone’s taste, especially not people who wanted their radios to emit music, not wolf howls. But I’d bought a copy (from the bargain bin, of course) and I’d grown to like it a lot, which is why I spoke of it.
“Ah,” said Wilson. “You’ve found Joe Malik’s dogs.”
See, one of the minor mysteries in Illuminatus is “what happened to Joe Malik’s dogs.” His neighbors were always complaining about his dogs, which were against the rules in his apartment building, but no one ever saw them, and, when Malik disappears, the police never find his dogs, either.
Well, of course, there were no dogs, just wolf howls on a record. I hadn’t made the connection, actually, partly because that wasn’t a mystery that I cared about. Or maybe my subconscious had solved the mystery and didn’t bother to tell me. But it did tell Wilson.
I’ve done this more often than you’d think. I once made an innocuous remark to another author that convinced him that I knew of a pseudonym he was writing under, so he proceeded to tell me all about it. I never told him that I had no prior knowledge of the matter, because, well, magicians never explain their tricks, and that’s one of mine.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
More than One Way
I took one of those aptitude tests in high school and I scored in the third percentile. That mans that if there was a hundred guys, two of them would be dumber than me. And I could be their leader… --Bobcat Golthwait
Every high school is a small town, an enclosed community with its own rules and customs, some universal, some idiosyncratic. Joss Whedon famously pitched “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” as “High School is Hell.” The response was almost universally, “And…?”
For a few, most often jocks and cheerleaders, at least in popular imagination, high school is the peak, and it’s all downhill from there. This also happens in college, of course, and all of this applies to the college experience as well. Irwin Shaw’s story, “The Eighty Yard Run,” is about a college football player who recognizes his peak experience many years after it occurs: a spectacular play in his last college game. It seems to offer him the future, but ultimately it becomes nothing but past glory.
For the rest of us, high school and college are prologues, where we are “cursed with great potential,” as Charlie Brown used to say. But even high school and college have more than one hill worth climbing, more than one status pyramid to scale. It is a tad ironic that the highest status for students at an institution of learning is seldom bestowed on those who, you know, actually learn, but there are usually some perks and privileges involved in being a high ranking member or the geek clique, maybe not enough to offset the danger of being bully bait, but you don’t have to be smart or good in school to be bully bait.
Besides, these stereotypes aren’t set in stone. There was more than one jock at Donelson High who was plenty smart and got honestly good grades. There was also my own idiosyncratic, Clark Kent-ish existence, where I compartmentalized my athletic identity at the downtown Nashville YMCA, accepting the bookish knurd label at my high school. I also avoided the awkward high school social scene by almost exclusively dating girls from other high schools.
There have always been these little private retreats from small communities. If one wants a more general escape, one could go to the big city, whichever one that might be, although for centuries that merely meant getting stuffed into some encapsulated community within the city. But at least cross-fertilization was easier. There are a lot more Juliets for the Romeo to find in the big city. Cities are big markets, and one of the markets is in spouses.
Modern transport and communication has broken down the practical barriers to escape from even the most isolated village, at least in this country. But more than that, modern American society has vastly multiplied the number of status hierarchies there are to join and climb.
In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and later, The Pump House Gang, Tom Wolfe chronicled the emergence of strange and exotic sub-cultures in the U.S., hot rodders, surfers, and paparazzi, as well as profiling the icons of those sub-cultures, “Big Daddy” Roth, Dick Dale, Phil Spector, Murray the K. The books were revelatory, in the smacking-hand-to-forehead-and-exclaiming “Of course!” kinda way.
If I get a small enough group, I could be their leader…
Science Fiction Fandom was a very small pond until SF hit television and what would once have been cult movies began making mega-bucks. Fandom began as small clubs of geeks (almost exclusively male) who met through pulp magazine letter columns, then ironically bulked up as the magazine slowly died. There was also a time when it all melded, with comic books and D&D gamers side by side with costumers, RenFaire prithee-speakers, and Heyer Teas. Now, disaggregation is the order of the day, and comics or gaming conventions easily top the SF Worldcon in attendance. Moreover, the SF fan base is aging almost as rapidly as the Fox News viewership, and most under-30 convention attendees are legacies, the children of the earlier generation of fans.
Still, I expect the readership at least to get a nice final kick when the Boomers retire, giving many of them the time to catch up on their reading. So I still have some time to sell Dark Underbelly.
And anyway, there’s always Aikido. And I have this essay thing going on...
Every high school is a small town, an enclosed community with its own rules and customs, some universal, some idiosyncratic. Joss Whedon famously pitched “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” as “High School is Hell.” The response was almost universally, “And…?”
For a few, most often jocks and cheerleaders, at least in popular imagination, high school is the peak, and it’s all downhill from there. This also happens in college, of course, and all of this applies to the college experience as well. Irwin Shaw’s story, “The Eighty Yard Run,” is about a college football player who recognizes his peak experience many years after it occurs: a spectacular play in his last college game. It seems to offer him the future, but ultimately it becomes nothing but past glory.
For the rest of us, high school and college are prologues, where we are “cursed with great potential,” as Charlie Brown used to say. But even high school and college have more than one hill worth climbing, more than one status pyramid to scale. It is a tad ironic that the highest status for students at an institution of learning is seldom bestowed on those who, you know, actually learn, but there are usually some perks and privileges involved in being a high ranking member or the geek clique, maybe not enough to offset the danger of being bully bait, but you don’t have to be smart or good in school to be bully bait.
Besides, these stereotypes aren’t set in stone. There was more than one jock at Donelson High who was plenty smart and got honestly good grades. There was also my own idiosyncratic, Clark Kent-ish existence, where I compartmentalized my athletic identity at the downtown Nashville YMCA, accepting the bookish knurd label at my high school. I also avoided the awkward high school social scene by almost exclusively dating girls from other high schools.
There have always been these little private retreats from small communities. If one wants a more general escape, one could go to the big city, whichever one that might be, although for centuries that merely meant getting stuffed into some encapsulated community within the city. But at least cross-fertilization was easier. There are a lot more Juliets for the Romeo to find in the big city. Cities are big markets, and one of the markets is in spouses.
Modern transport and communication has broken down the practical barriers to escape from even the most isolated village, at least in this country. But more than that, modern American society has vastly multiplied the number of status hierarchies there are to join and climb.
In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and later, The Pump House Gang, Tom Wolfe chronicled the emergence of strange and exotic sub-cultures in the U.S., hot rodders, surfers, and paparazzi, as well as profiling the icons of those sub-cultures, “Big Daddy” Roth, Dick Dale, Phil Spector, Murray the K. The books were revelatory, in the smacking-hand-to-forehead-and-exclaiming “Of course!” kinda way.
If I get a small enough group, I could be their leader…
Science Fiction Fandom was a very small pond until SF hit television and what would once have been cult movies began making mega-bucks. Fandom began as small clubs of geeks (almost exclusively male) who met through pulp magazine letter columns, then ironically bulked up as the magazine slowly died. There was also a time when it all melded, with comic books and D&D gamers side by side with costumers, RenFaire prithee-speakers, and Heyer Teas. Now, disaggregation is the order of the day, and comics or gaming conventions easily top the SF Worldcon in attendance. Moreover, the SF fan base is aging almost as rapidly as the Fox News viewership, and most under-30 convention attendees are legacies, the children of the earlier generation of fans.
Still, I expect the readership at least to get a nice final kick when the Boomers retire, giving many of them the time to catch up on their reading. So I still have some time to sell Dark Underbelly.
And anyway, there’s always Aikido. And I have this essay thing going on...
Friday, January 25, 2008
Rethinking Communism
"Communism didn't fall. It was pushed." – George H. W. Bush, July 2, 1992
I've noticed that, whenever anyone wants to give the devil his due, they first must stand up and announce in a loud voice that it is, in fact, the very devil we're dealing with, so bad, bad, bad, old devil, and then they can say what they set out to say. I've seen this in action where people analyze the infant mortality rates in Cuba, which are far lower than any other country in Latin America and close to those of the U.S., but Castro is a bad, bad man, so let's be sure we get that in. Similarly, if one wishes to locate where in south central Asia the USSR has occupied, now or in the past, one can find a very good map of it by just looking at literacy rates, as compared to the neighboring countries, with the former USSR countries having over 97% literacy rates. The outlier is Afghanistan, which, despite a violent and unsuccessful occupation by the USSR in the 1980s, nevertheless saw large increases in both male (increasing from 30% to over 40%) and female (6% to about 15%) literacy during that time.
But communism, especially in the Russian and Chinese models, was an authoritarian political form that demanded a single Party state, censorship, secret police, and all the trappings that gave George Orwell the heebie jeebies. Bad old Commies.
So let's pretend, somehow, that it's possible to divorce communism from those things. What do we have left? Can we somehow rewind the tape and start all over again from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune and somehow get it to work better? Ah, that seems pretty dubious, so that's probably a dead end.
Still, from my recent review of the French Revolution (granted, more the Cliff Notes version than anything deep or substantive), one of the things that stuck was the degree to which foreign intervention kept the pot on the boil. The monarchies in the rest of Europe felt that they could not afford to let the French Revolution succeed; the American Revolution was bad enough, and that was just a slaveholder rebellion as far as many Europeans were concerned. The Americans were half a world away, besides. But this new French thing…no, best to nip it in the bud.
And even Napoleon, who rose like a cork from the stormy sea, well, he named himself Emperor and put his cronies in charge of things. They may have despised the little twerp, but at least Napoleon they understood.
So what about Soviet Russia? Well, again, was there ever a time when the Western powers just let it ride? The Red and White armies marched all over hell and gone in the 1920s, and not without plenty of outside interference and support for various factions. In the twenty years before the Second World War, Europe looked like a tossup match between Communism and Fascism, and liberal democracy was hardly considered worthy of a seat at the debate. The Hitler/Stalin pact looks insane at this distance (and was a head bender at the time, as well), but I've seen it explained as the natural outcome of Stalin's actually being a real Communist. He considered England to be the real enemy, and it was trivial for Hitler to play on that. Hitler had his own delusions, of course; he viewed England as a natural ally, and thought the British royalty (who were "racial Germans," after all) would swing his way.
Then, big war, one that wiped out almost an entire generation of Russian males, followed by the Cold War. England had spent itself in the war, and divested itself of its colonial empire, in a series of moves so ham fisted that they guaranteed several generations of blood and conflict in the former colonies. But hey, that's the White Man's Burden, isn't it?
The United States took up the great cause of anti-communism, though, and wasn't that a peach? We built up an Armageddon arsenal of nuclear weapons, and then, when the Russians got themselves a bomb or ten, the U.S. went absolutely batshit berserk, seeing Communists under every bed, with neighbor denouncing neighbor, lives ruined on rumor, and drunken old Joe McCarthy scaring the pants off of everyone. In college I knew a few old lefties who'd been through that wringer, and it's not something I ever want to see up close and personal. After 9/11 people were killed for just wearing turbans. Imagine how it would have been if the mark of Cain had been belonging to some club in college 10 or 20 years ago. In other words, imagine if it could be _you_ under the hammer.
It also makes me wonder what sort of derangement would have resulted if the U.S. had actually been _invaded_ in WWII, or if the first ones with the nukes had been some other country, which is to say, if the U.S. had experienced even a fraction of what the USSR went through. But, of course, trying to imagine the world from the perspective of a "godless communist" is exactly the sort of thing that could have gotten you blacklisted in 1950.
Exactly what is it that created the Cold War? The Russians grabbed a lot of land in eastern Europe, I get that. They supposedly threatened Western Europe militarily, I get that, too. But it's not as if there wasn’t a "vice versa" there as well.
And as nearly as I can tell, nothing justifies the general plan that seems to have been in place for "containment" of communism, which, in practice, worked out to replacing democratically elected governments with authoritarian dictatorships that were "friendly" to the West, which is to say the U.S., which is to say U.S. commercial interests. The list of those is long and brutal, and we all know who they were. The other option seems to have been putting a lot of U.S. soldiers into the place, as hostages. That was pretty much how it was for Germany and South Korea.
For the life of me it looks like the United States and the European democracies simply didn't believe in their own forms of government. Democratic principles were (and still are) considered "weak," things to be replaced by authoritarian command-and-control whenever things got tough, or scary, or even hard to understand.
My own belief is that the USSR fell because of the generation gap. The War Generation (the Russians had a "greatest generation" of their own, after all), got old, and boring, and the young elites of Russia saw the cool stuff that was going on elsewhere in the world and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted sex and drugs and rock and roll, just like every other younger generation in the history of the world. So as the new technocrats took over, they just let the whole communism thing slip away. I imagine the same thing happened in China; Tiananmen Square was an urban youth rebellion, put down by soldiers drawn from the countryside—the Chinese Red States, if you will.
From time to time, I see someone writing about the "internal contradictions" of Russian Communism, and the "inefficiency" of the Soviet economic system. I think that there are truths buried in there, but I have to observe that an oligarchic command-and-control structure is the model for every corporation in America. And yes, corporations do go bankrupt, and they do get bought out, but the same can be said for the USSR. And corporations generally don't have to have their own armies, and they don't have foreign governments trying to subvert their every move.
I do believe in those things that we all wave at when we talk about "freedom" and "democratic principles." I just wish that I were more certain that the rest of my countrymen did.
I've noticed that, whenever anyone wants to give the devil his due, they first must stand up and announce in a loud voice that it is, in fact, the very devil we're dealing with, so bad, bad, bad, old devil, and then they can say what they set out to say. I've seen this in action where people analyze the infant mortality rates in Cuba, which are far lower than any other country in Latin America and close to those of the U.S., but Castro is a bad, bad man, so let's be sure we get that in. Similarly, if one wishes to locate where in south central Asia the USSR has occupied, now or in the past, one can find a very good map of it by just looking at literacy rates, as compared to the neighboring countries, with the former USSR countries having over 97% literacy rates. The outlier is Afghanistan, which, despite a violent and unsuccessful occupation by the USSR in the 1980s, nevertheless saw large increases in both male (increasing from 30% to over 40%) and female (6% to about 15%) literacy during that time.
But communism, especially in the Russian and Chinese models, was an authoritarian political form that demanded a single Party state, censorship, secret police, and all the trappings that gave George Orwell the heebie jeebies. Bad old Commies.
So let's pretend, somehow, that it's possible to divorce communism from those things. What do we have left? Can we somehow rewind the tape and start all over again from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune and somehow get it to work better? Ah, that seems pretty dubious, so that's probably a dead end.
Still, from my recent review of the French Revolution (granted, more the Cliff Notes version than anything deep or substantive), one of the things that stuck was the degree to which foreign intervention kept the pot on the boil. The monarchies in the rest of Europe felt that they could not afford to let the French Revolution succeed; the American Revolution was bad enough, and that was just a slaveholder rebellion as far as many Europeans were concerned. The Americans were half a world away, besides. But this new French thing…no, best to nip it in the bud.
And even Napoleon, who rose like a cork from the stormy sea, well, he named himself Emperor and put his cronies in charge of things. They may have despised the little twerp, but at least Napoleon they understood.
So what about Soviet Russia? Well, again, was there ever a time when the Western powers just let it ride? The Red and White armies marched all over hell and gone in the 1920s, and not without plenty of outside interference and support for various factions. In the twenty years before the Second World War, Europe looked like a tossup match between Communism and Fascism, and liberal democracy was hardly considered worthy of a seat at the debate. The Hitler/Stalin pact looks insane at this distance (and was a head bender at the time, as well), but I've seen it explained as the natural outcome of Stalin's actually being a real Communist. He considered England to be the real enemy, and it was trivial for Hitler to play on that. Hitler had his own delusions, of course; he viewed England as a natural ally, and thought the British royalty (who were "racial Germans," after all) would swing his way.
Then, big war, one that wiped out almost an entire generation of Russian males, followed by the Cold War. England had spent itself in the war, and divested itself of its colonial empire, in a series of moves so ham fisted that they guaranteed several generations of blood and conflict in the former colonies. But hey, that's the White Man's Burden, isn't it?
The United States took up the great cause of anti-communism, though, and wasn't that a peach? We built up an Armageddon arsenal of nuclear weapons, and then, when the Russians got themselves a bomb or ten, the U.S. went absolutely batshit berserk, seeing Communists under every bed, with neighbor denouncing neighbor, lives ruined on rumor, and drunken old Joe McCarthy scaring the pants off of everyone. In college I knew a few old lefties who'd been through that wringer, and it's not something I ever want to see up close and personal. After 9/11 people were killed for just wearing turbans. Imagine how it would have been if the mark of Cain had been belonging to some club in college 10 or 20 years ago. In other words, imagine if it could be _you_ under the hammer.
It also makes me wonder what sort of derangement would have resulted if the U.S. had actually been _invaded_ in WWII, or if the first ones with the nukes had been some other country, which is to say, if the U.S. had experienced even a fraction of what the USSR went through. But, of course, trying to imagine the world from the perspective of a "godless communist" is exactly the sort of thing that could have gotten you blacklisted in 1950.
Exactly what is it that created the Cold War? The Russians grabbed a lot of land in eastern Europe, I get that. They supposedly threatened Western Europe militarily, I get that, too. But it's not as if there wasn’t a "vice versa" there as well.
And as nearly as I can tell, nothing justifies the general plan that seems to have been in place for "containment" of communism, which, in practice, worked out to replacing democratically elected governments with authoritarian dictatorships that were "friendly" to the West, which is to say the U.S., which is to say U.S. commercial interests. The list of those is long and brutal, and we all know who they were. The other option seems to have been putting a lot of U.S. soldiers into the place, as hostages. That was pretty much how it was for Germany and South Korea.
For the life of me it looks like the United States and the European democracies simply didn't believe in their own forms of government. Democratic principles were (and still are) considered "weak," things to be replaced by authoritarian command-and-control whenever things got tough, or scary, or even hard to understand.
My own belief is that the USSR fell because of the generation gap. The War Generation (the Russians had a "greatest generation" of their own, after all), got old, and boring, and the young elites of Russia saw the cool stuff that was going on elsewhere in the world and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted sex and drugs and rock and roll, just like every other younger generation in the history of the world. So as the new technocrats took over, they just let the whole communism thing slip away. I imagine the same thing happened in China; Tiananmen Square was an urban youth rebellion, put down by soldiers drawn from the countryside—the Chinese Red States, if you will.
From time to time, I see someone writing about the "internal contradictions" of Russian Communism, and the "inefficiency" of the Soviet economic system. I think that there are truths buried in there, but I have to observe that an oligarchic command-and-control structure is the model for every corporation in America. And yes, corporations do go bankrupt, and they do get bought out, but the same can be said for the USSR. And corporations generally don't have to have their own armies, and they don't have foreign governments trying to subvert their every move.
I do believe in those things that we all wave at when we talk about "freedom" and "democratic principles." I just wish that I were more certain that the rest of my countrymen did.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Crimes Against the Humanities
The destruction of the Library at Alexandria is often attributed, by Christians, to Muslim Caliph Omar, who supposedly ordered that all the books in the library should be destroyed because, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." It is also said that the legend of Caliph Omar was promulgated by Saladin, who found the precedent convenient when he himself needed to destroy a library.
Earlier, however, in 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria is said to have complied with this request. There were also anti-Persian riots in the city at that time, which may have produced the real destruction.
The first personage accused of the library's destruction, is Julius Caesar, more or less by accident, when he sacked and burned Alexandria harbor.
Iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, "Image-breaking") is the name of the heresy in the eighth and ninth centuries primarily affected the Eastern (Byzantine) Church. It was among the last of the breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius. There was a lesser outbreak of idol smashing/art vandalism in the Frankish kingdom in the Western (Roman) Church.
Later, during the Reformation, iconoclasm was one of the many new/old facets that Protestantism presented to the world. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537), and Scotland (1559). And event called "Beeldenstorm" took place in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Northern France. This outbreak of iconoclasm included such acts as the destruction of the statuary of the Monastery of Saint Lawrence in Steenvoorde after a "Hagenpreek", or field sermon, by Sebastiaan Matte; and the sacking of the Monastery of Saint Anthony after a sermon by Jacob de Buysere.
Significant destruction of artworks and manuscripts also took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Some were anti-religious and anti-clerical; many were directed at more secular targets, especially tax and debt records.
Upon the death of Sir Richard Burton, his widow proceeded to burn most of his notes, diaries, and some unknown number of manuscripts, including a translation of "The Perfumed Garden." Some say it was for fear of his soul and as part of a campaign to portray him as a good Catholic. Others say it was on Burton's own instructions. Either way, we'll never read his translation of The Perfumed Garden.
There is an apocryphal tale, probably started by Mark Twain, that in the latter part of the 19th Century, steam engines in Egypt were fueled by burning mummies. Whether or not ancient (or modern, the desert is still used for mummification) mummies were every used for fuel or kindling, there was a painter's pigment of the time called "Mummy Brown," which was, in fact, made from powdered mummy. Also, mummies removed from the dry climate of Egypt tend to grow rot, and such was the fate of many that made their way to Europe during the Colonial Era.
Twain also described American tourists taking chips off of the Pyramids and other grand artifacts as "souvenirs." That one has the ring of truth to it.
In 1687, the Venetians, under Francesco Morosini attacked Athens, and the Ottomans fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine. On September 26, a Venetian mortar, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew the magazine up and the building was partly destroyed. Francesco Morosini then proceeded to attempt to loot sculptures from the now ruin. The internal structures were demolished, whatever was left of the roof collapsed, and some of the pillars, particularly on the southern side, were decapitated. The sculptures suffered heavily.
Historically, the greatest cause of damage to existing marble sculptures in Europe has been acid rain and fog during the middle to late 20th Century.
Most of the golden artifacts of the Aztecs and Inca peoples were melted down for their metal content.
Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate than the original for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His name is now associated with prudish censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programs.
Some estimates place the number of languages in Pre-Columbian America as high as a thousand. Only a handful remain.
In the early days of talking pictures, the older silent films were considered useless, and many of the highly combustible films were used as kindling for the bonfires and similar events.
In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable. State authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km (143 miles) northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters (8,202 feet). Built during the sixth century, the statues represented the classic blended style of Indo-Greek art. They were dynamited by the Taliban in Afghanistan in March 2001.
In 1969, when I was away at college, a combination of foundation work and an untimely storm flooded the family basement. My mother saved my comic book collection
Earlier, however, in 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria is said to have complied with this request. There were also anti-Persian riots in the city at that time, which may have produced the real destruction.
The first personage accused of the library's destruction, is Julius Caesar, more or less by accident, when he sacked and burned Alexandria harbor.
Iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, "Image-breaking") is the name of the heresy in the eighth and ninth centuries primarily affected the Eastern (Byzantine) Church. It was among the last of the breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius. There was a lesser outbreak of idol smashing/art vandalism in the Frankish kingdom in the Western (Roman) Church.
Later, during the Reformation, iconoclasm was one of the many new/old facets that Protestantism presented to the world. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537), and Scotland (1559). And event called "Beeldenstorm" took place in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Northern France. This outbreak of iconoclasm included such acts as the destruction of the statuary of the Monastery of Saint Lawrence in Steenvoorde after a "Hagenpreek", or field sermon, by Sebastiaan Matte; and the sacking of the Monastery of Saint Anthony after a sermon by Jacob de Buysere.
Significant destruction of artworks and manuscripts also took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Some were anti-religious and anti-clerical; many were directed at more secular targets, especially tax and debt records.
Upon the death of Sir Richard Burton, his widow proceeded to burn most of his notes, diaries, and some unknown number of manuscripts, including a translation of "The Perfumed Garden." Some say it was for fear of his soul and as part of a campaign to portray him as a good Catholic. Others say it was on Burton's own instructions. Either way, we'll never read his translation of The Perfumed Garden.
There is an apocryphal tale, probably started by Mark Twain, that in the latter part of the 19th Century, steam engines in Egypt were fueled by burning mummies. Whether or not ancient (or modern, the desert is still used for mummification) mummies were every used for fuel or kindling, there was a painter's pigment of the time called "Mummy Brown," which was, in fact, made from powdered mummy. Also, mummies removed from the dry climate of Egypt tend to grow rot, and such was the fate of many that made their way to Europe during the Colonial Era.
Twain also described American tourists taking chips off of the Pyramids and other grand artifacts as "souvenirs." That one has the ring of truth to it.
In 1687, the Venetians, under Francesco Morosini attacked Athens, and the Ottomans fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine. On September 26, a Venetian mortar, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew the magazine up and the building was partly destroyed. Francesco Morosini then proceeded to attempt to loot sculptures from the now ruin. The internal structures were demolished, whatever was left of the roof collapsed, and some of the pillars, particularly on the southern side, were decapitated. The sculptures suffered heavily.
Historically, the greatest cause of damage to existing marble sculptures in Europe has been acid rain and fog during the middle to late 20th Century.
Most of the golden artifacts of the Aztecs and Inca peoples were melted down for their metal content.
Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate than the original for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His name is now associated with prudish censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programs.
Some estimates place the number of languages in Pre-Columbian America as high as a thousand. Only a handful remain.
In the early days of talking pictures, the older silent films were considered useless, and many of the highly combustible films were used as kindling for the bonfires and similar events.
In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable. State authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km (143 miles) northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters (8,202 feet). Built during the sixth century, the statues represented the classic blended style of Indo-Greek art. They were dynamited by the Taliban in Afghanistan in March 2001.
In 1969, when I was away at college, a combination of foundation work and an untimely storm flooded the family basement. My mother saved my comic book collection
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Belting Out
Contract work is often a bit like the old Mission Impossible TV show: the Team is built around The Mission, which usually is subject to impossible constraints and the Team Members all bounce around trying to keep the makeup from slipping, and waiting for the Secretary to disavow all knowledge, etc.
And you get to meet management consultants, each and every one of them fully buzzword compliant and using all the fashionable tools to appear like they can actually deliver on whatever weird fever dream was sold to the organization that hired them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, eh?
Anyway, one of the current fashions is Black Belts. There are Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Black Belts, Process Management Black Belts, PFD Black Belts, and who knows what else. I just saw one business card that asserted the holder was a Master Black Belt, though it didn’t stipulate in what. Probably Six Sigma; I think that’s where this PR trick began, and, wouldn't you know it, it was a General Electric thing. There are, incidentally, also Green Belts in these things. I’m just glad they didn’t go for the whole rainbow, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, etc.
It’s the general opinion in at least my little stretch of the martial arts community that colored belts are mostly PR. It’s not like there is any licensing board that sets standards for the things. Anybody can hang out a shingle and award any colored belt to anyone they like, and many martial arts schools take the route of awarding lots of promotions quickly as a way of enticing students.
I can only report directly from Aikido, though I’ve had plenty of friends in other arts. For that matter, there are enough versions of Aikido that I can’t speak universally even for that one art. But generally speaking, my fellow Aikidoka don’t speak much of belt colors. For adults, it’s either white or black (In the first dojo to which I belonged, over 25 years ago, there were a few students who were informally given brown belts, but I haven’t seen that practice in over 20 years). The “black belts” are referred to as yudansha, and the first dan grade, shodan, basically means that the holder is now taken as a serious student of the art. There is also a tradition of beginning to wear a hakima (a sort of long black culotte), after promotion to shodan unless one’s sensei says to wear it sometime earlier. One of my fellow students once compared wearing a hakima to painting a big target on one’s back at seminars. It is certainly expected that someone wearing a hakima knows his/her limits in ukemi (having an aikido technique applied to you and surviving it unharmed).
And, of course, shodan (first dan grade) is only the beginning. Then there is nidan, sandan, yondan, and on up, though it gets mighty sparse above that. By the time you get to 5th and 6th dan, (godan and ryokudan) you might as well just give people’s names, since their art has become intensely personalized by then, and there are sufficiently few of them that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and the differences in numerical rank become less important than their place in the community. More to the point, at that level, teaching is the important service, with Sensei (any teacher), Shidoin (instructor), Fuku Shidoin (assistant instructor), and Shihan (master instructor, or “teacher of teachers”) being the appellations.
I don’t really have a punch line (as it were) for these musings, except to maybe be glad that the Japanese terms haven’t been swiped as management consulting buzzwords. I don’t think I’d react very well to meeting a “Six Sigma Shihan.”
In case anyone is wondering, I began Aikido practice in 1980 at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley under Steve Sasaki Sensei. I had to quit in 1985, for health reasons, and I did not return to practice until 2000, at Eastshore Aikikai, under Elizibeth Lynn Sensei. I was promoted to shodan in the fall of 2005. It's a tradition to give certain promotions at the time of the New Year, and my promotion to nidan has just been announced.
And you get to meet management consultants, each and every one of them fully buzzword compliant and using all the fashionable tools to appear like they can actually deliver on whatever weird fever dream was sold to the organization that hired them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, eh?
Anyway, one of the current fashions is Black Belts. There are Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Black Belts, Process Management Black Belts, PFD Black Belts, and who knows what else. I just saw one business card that asserted the holder was a Master Black Belt, though it didn’t stipulate in what. Probably Six Sigma; I think that’s where this PR trick began, and, wouldn't you know it, it was a General Electric thing. There are, incidentally, also Green Belts in these things. I’m just glad they didn’t go for the whole rainbow, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, etc.
It’s the general opinion in at least my little stretch of the martial arts community that colored belts are mostly PR. It’s not like there is any licensing board that sets standards for the things. Anybody can hang out a shingle and award any colored belt to anyone they like, and many martial arts schools take the route of awarding lots of promotions quickly as a way of enticing students.
I can only report directly from Aikido, though I’ve had plenty of friends in other arts. For that matter, there are enough versions of Aikido that I can’t speak universally even for that one art. But generally speaking, my fellow Aikidoka don’t speak much of belt colors. For adults, it’s either white or black (In the first dojo to which I belonged, over 25 years ago, there were a few students who were informally given brown belts, but I haven’t seen that practice in over 20 years). The “black belts” are referred to as yudansha, and the first dan grade, shodan, basically means that the holder is now taken as a serious student of the art. There is also a tradition of beginning to wear a hakima (a sort of long black culotte), after promotion to shodan unless one’s sensei says to wear it sometime earlier. One of my fellow students once compared wearing a hakima to painting a big target on one’s back at seminars. It is certainly expected that someone wearing a hakima knows his/her limits in ukemi (having an aikido technique applied to you and surviving it unharmed).
And, of course, shodan (first dan grade) is only the beginning. Then there is nidan, sandan, yondan, and on up, though it gets mighty sparse above that. By the time you get to 5th and 6th dan, (godan and ryokudan) you might as well just give people’s names, since their art has become intensely personalized by then, and there are sufficiently few of them that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and the differences in numerical rank become less important than their place in the community. More to the point, at that level, teaching is the important service, with Sensei (any teacher), Shidoin (instructor), Fuku Shidoin (assistant instructor), and Shihan (master instructor, or “teacher of teachers”) being the appellations.
I don’t really have a punch line (as it were) for these musings, except to maybe be glad that the Japanese terms haven’t been swiped as management consulting buzzwords. I don’t think I’d react very well to meeting a “Six Sigma Shihan.”
In case anyone is wondering, I began Aikido practice in 1980 at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley under Steve Sasaki Sensei. I had to quit in 1985, for health reasons, and I did not return to practice until 2000, at Eastshore Aikikai, under Elizibeth Lynn Sensei. I was promoted to shodan in the fall of 2005. It's a tradition to give certain promotions at the time of the New Year, and my promotion to nidan has just been announced.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Lyon-ess
(Left, photo from Bodybuilding Fanatic)(Right, photo © Copyright 2003 Chris Gulker)
Mystery solved.
I was baffled at first. I have Google Analytics installed on this blog, and it was telling me that no less than a third of the hits I was getting was on the essay on Robert Mapplethorpe. Okay, fair enough. If you want a lot of traffic on your blog, put up a photo of a gorgeous woman wearing only a snake.
But what really got me was that if I went to Google Images and put in "Lisa Lyons," my essay came up right at the top of the list, despite the fact that I was hot-linking the image from another web site.
Well, to my acute embarrassment, it seems that it's a good idea to spell the name right. It's "Lisa Lyon" not "Lisa Lyons." I am chagrined and apologetic to Ms. Lyon, and will try to do right by her forthwith.The histories I can find on the Lady give the story that she took up weightlifting and bodybuilding in order to assist in her practice of kendo, then won the first World Women's Bodybuilding Championship in Los Angeles in 1979. That, plus guest posing at a number of other bodybuilding competitions that year, put her on the pop culture map. She appeared on talk shows, describing herself as a performance artist and body sculptor. Was this the first use of the phrase, or was it first applied to the likes of Schwarzenegger et al.?
In any case, Lyon sponsored a bodybuilding competition in 1980, Lisa Lyon's United States Bodybuilding Championships, which was won by Rachel McLish (photo at right), who also won the first Miss Olympia competition, which was part of the more established network that organized men's bodybuilding competitions.
There's an interview with Doris Barrilleaux, another of the pioneers in women's bodybuilding that fails to mention Lyon at all, which is interesting, and probably revealing, but I can think of too many different explanations for the omission, and I'm going to leave all speculation to my readers on this one.
Lyon connected with Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s, and Lady was published in 1983. It was quite a revelation, to both the art world and the world of popular culture, including bodybuilding. Lyon was clearly exactly what she claimed to be: a performance artist, who could project a hundred different moods through the photographer's lens.The story then gets stranger still. Lyon met John C. Lilly, the counter-culture hero, talker-to-dolphins, and inventor of the sensory deprivation tank. She wound up on the board of advisors to Lilly's Association for Cultural Evolution, and more than that, she became one of his four adopted children (if that is the right phrase; all four were adopted as adults).
Ah, doesn't the imagination runs riot here? Lilly wrote extensively about altered consciousness, and regularly used both LSD and ketamine to achieve some of those altered states. (Quick aside: the movie Altered States was inspired by Lilly, as was Day of the Dolphin).
When drugs enter the narrative, the narrative becomes all about the drugs. With Lisa Lyon, sex was already front and center in the narrative (woman wearing snake, remember?), so the narrative hits a pretty turbulent air pocket, right about here, doesn't it? Nor does it help matters that one finds references to Lyon being just out of a psychiatric institution at about the time of Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.Maybe this all amounts to some sort of flameout, but I'm not buying into it. Lilly entitled his autobiography, Center of the Cyclone. I'm thinking that Lyon was more like a cyclone all by herself. When there is a zeitgeist, there is bound to be a lot of geist during the zeit.
Lisa Lyon and Patti Smith
Friday, December 7, 2007
Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe, and Smith
In among our glamorous life of science, engineering, fiction and technical writing, street performing and puppet shows, and the occasional truck driving/running a thrift store gig, Amy and I do some transcription work. One of them was during the brief existence of Wired Television, and boy, did they pay through the nose for having a short deadline over a major holiday. Another was transcribing interviews for someone's thesis on the psychology of transgendered individuals and I will say absolutely nothing more about that. Whatever the legal limits of confidentiality, some people deserve an absolute respect for their privacy.
Then there was the one from a conference at The Foresight Institute on Nanotechnology, back when nanotechnology meant little robots that would make you immortal rather than carbon nanotubes.
There are also the video projects, which often involve me stripping the audio off of a videotape, then digitizing it so we can use the cool transcription software on it. It's still typing, not voice recognition, but being able to slow the thing down to match your typing speed (just one of the whizbangs for digital transcription software) is a godsend. The first one we did was for a documentary project on a group that tries to keep military recruiters out of high schools, so we got to see Cindy Sheehan before she became famous. I can report that, whatever else has happened to her since, the loss of her son was as devastating as you can imagine, and, as far as I'm concerned, she gets a free pass on anything she's done since then.
Then there was the documentary on Sam Wagstaff.
Wagstaff was the patron and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, of whom I've written previously. In fact, and this is a little strange to me, recently the Mapplethorpe essay here is the single most viewed essay on this blog. Is there some art course that is studying Mapplethorpe now? Many and mysterious are the ways of Google.
Anyway, Amy did most of the video transcription and I did the timestamping. Having a timestamped transcript allows preliminary editing to be done without having to watch the video. It saves a lot of time, and when you're done, hey, great, you also have the transcript.
The documentary was called Black White + Gray, and it seems to have been quite a success, and good on James Crump, the director and the guy who hired us to do the transcription work. I haven't seen the film yet; I've just seen pretty much everything that went into it, which is weird, isn't it? I do recommend the trailers on the linked web site.
The New York Times review of the film notes:
Then there was the one from a conference at The Foresight Institute on Nanotechnology, back when nanotechnology meant little robots that would make you immortal rather than carbon nanotubes.
There are also the video projects, which often involve me stripping the audio off of a videotape, then digitizing it so we can use the cool transcription software on it. It's still typing, not voice recognition, but being able to slow the thing down to match your typing speed (just one of the whizbangs for digital transcription software) is a godsend. The first one we did was for a documentary project on a group that tries to keep military recruiters out of high schools, so we got to see Cindy Sheehan before she became famous. I can report that, whatever else has happened to her since, the loss of her son was as devastating as you can imagine, and, as far as I'm concerned, she gets a free pass on anything she's done since then.
Then there was the documentary on Sam Wagstaff.
Wagstaff was the patron and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, of whom I've written previously. In fact, and this is a little strange to me, recently the Mapplethorpe essay here is the single most viewed essay on this blog. Is there some art course that is studying Mapplethorpe now? Many and mysterious are the ways of Google.
Anyway, Amy did most of the video transcription and I did the timestamping. Having a timestamped transcript allows preliminary editing to be done without having to watch the video. It saves a lot of time, and when you're done, hey, great, you also have the transcript.
The documentary was called Black White + Gray, and it seems to have been quite a success, and good on James Crump, the director and the guy who hired us to do the transcription work. I haven't seen the film yet; I've just seen pretty much everything that went into it, which is weird, isn't it? I do recommend the trailers on the linked web site.
The New York Times review of the film notes:
In particular, Patti Smith, the poet and rock star, offers tender descriptions of her friendship with both men.
Ms. Smith’s friendship with Mr. Mapplethorpe began in 1967 when they were both art students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They were living together near the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s when Mr. Mapplethorpe first brought Mr. Wagstaff to meet her. “Sam came in and seemed totally at home in my mess,” she recalls. “We liked each other immediately. He had such a great sense of humor and had such a nonpretentious and nonsanctimonious spiritual air.”
Wagstaff was clearly a charmer, as the archive footage of him revealed. You can't help but like him in his interview with Dick Cavett and in the other footage of him in still earlier days. He charmed Mapplethorpe (though his wealth couldn't have hurt), and he charmed Patti Smith as well.
It's Patti Smith that was the revelation to me in viewing the raw video footage. I've been a fan of hers since the 1970s, of course, how could one not be? But seeing her in a simple setting, not performing, just reminiscing about those she loved, those who died, the expansiveness of her humanity seemed to flow from her like the wind from the sea.
I know I may being sappy here. But the only word that I could think of to describe her was "magnificent." The human race cannot be as vile as it sometimes seems, not when it can produce creatures as magnificent as Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Patti Smith.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Ancient Traditions – Bushido III
The bottom line.
Training in the martial arts has many virtues: discipline, concentration, physical conditioning, and, sometimes, an indefinable elevation of the spirit. "Cheated death again," I often say at the end of a class, and it feels like a real accomplishment.
Many of the Asian martial arts are also suffused with various philosophies, Buddhism in one or another of its variations being common, and that is the one that often appeals to Western students. The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba Osensei, was a devotee of Ōmoto-kyō, a mystical religion deriving from Shinto.
But martial virtue is martial virtue, and it would be foolish to believe that the Asian arts are somehow intrinsically superior to Western arts like fencing, boxing, wrestling, or long bow archery. The Western arts likewise have "ancient traditions" and if the links to ancient times is as tenuous as the connection of the modern Olympics to its Greek predecessor, well, that is par for the course, isn't it?
Likewise there are many philosophical and spiritual covers for the practice of warfare and the arts of war. I've mentioned Chivalry, which included the Christian doctrine of the "just war," and I'm sure that both sides often find their cause to be just, and that is course par as well.
When all of life is nasty and brutish, then the nasty brutishness of war does not seem like such a breach. But what does one do when the nastiness is lessened? What is the state of man when peace is an option?
I have, upon occasion, justified Aikido with these words: You understand the calm serenity that is the object of meditation exercise? Those practicing meditation spend long hours in darkened, quiet rooms attempting to find that center of peace. It is the goal of Aikido to reach that peace even on the battlefield.
A paradox, perhaps. But what to make of those who attempt to find war even in the midst of peace?
We train. Aikidoka train in that art. Other martial artists train in their own arts. Soldiers train. Competitive athletes train. Do we train for combat, real combat? If that combat never comes, do we feel that we have wasted our time?
What happens to the athlete who trains and trains but never gets to play the game?
What happens to the soldier who never fights in war?
Those seem like they should be different questions, because playing the game rarely kills people, so there is no obviously creepy downside to the simulated combat of competitive sports. Except perhaps that the sports themselves are considered simulations of war, and the winning player of games looks to find a more exciting game.
They sometimes call it that. That's how the British referred to the contest with Russia for control of central Asia in the 19th Century. Quite a lot of blood was spilled. The idea was to "civilize" Asia—a truly laughable notion given the respective age of the civilizations involved.
Warriors are rarely philosophers and philosophers are rarely warriors. But warriors do fascinate philosophers, who often yearn for the "reality" or the "authenticity" of war and fighting. Read Norman Mailer on boxing, or Hemmingway on bullfighting. But do not read them for real insight into boxing or bullfighting; what you will find instead is the writers' projections of their own internal conflicts onto the external reality of the fight. If you want to learn about boxing, put on the gloves and find a teacher.
When the philosophy of war is formulated, the Necronomicon is opened. People who read and fantasize about war puff themselves up with martial spirit. They imagine themselves as heroes, never as cowards. They lose their real selves in the distorting mirror of wannabe. They feed off what they imagine to be the experiences of others.
Is there a martial artist alive who has not imagined himself/herself fending off an attacker with some artful move or maneuver? God knows I have. Sometimes I also make myself pay penance, by imagining myself simply handing over my wallet to the mugger, or darting down the alleyway, running away, as fast as my aging legs can take me. But the lure of the imagined fight remains. I'm lucky; I get to put these fantasies into fiction, where I know that I'm the puppet master pulling all the strings.
Find the strings. I guess that is the nub of what I'm saying. Follow the strings back to the fingers that pull them. But don't be surprised if you wind up staring at your own hands.
Training in the martial arts has many virtues: discipline, concentration, physical conditioning, and, sometimes, an indefinable elevation of the spirit. "Cheated death again," I often say at the end of a class, and it feels like a real accomplishment.
Many of the Asian martial arts are also suffused with various philosophies, Buddhism in one or another of its variations being common, and that is the one that often appeals to Western students. The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba Osensei, was a devotee of Ōmoto-kyō, a mystical religion deriving from Shinto.
But martial virtue is martial virtue, and it would be foolish to believe that the Asian arts are somehow intrinsically superior to Western arts like fencing, boxing, wrestling, or long bow archery. The Western arts likewise have "ancient traditions" and if the links to ancient times is as tenuous as the connection of the modern Olympics to its Greek predecessor, well, that is par for the course, isn't it?
Likewise there are many philosophical and spiritual covers for the practice of warfare and the arts of war. I've mentioned Chivalry, which included the Christian doctrine of the "just war," and I'm sure that both sides often find their cause to be just, and that is course par as well.
When all of life is nasty and brutish, then the nasty brutishness of war does not seem like such a breach. But what does one do when the nastiness is lessened? What is the state of man when peace is an option?
I have, upon occasion, justified Aikido with these words: You understand the calm serenity that is the object of meditation exercise? Those practicing meditation spend long hours in darkened, quiet rooms attempting to find that center of peace. It is the goal of Aikido to reach that peace even on the battlefield.
A paradox, perhaps. But what to make of those who attempt to find war even in the midst of peace?
We train. Aikidoka train in that art. Other martial artists train in their own arts. Soldiers train. Competitive athletes train. Do we train for combat, real combat? If that combat never comes, do we feel that we have wasted our time?
What happens to the athlete who trains and trains but never gets to play the game?
What happens to the soldier who never fights in war?
Those seem like they should be different questions, because playing the game rarely kills people, so there is no obviously creepy downside to the simulated combat of competitive sports. Except perhaps that the sports themselves are considered simulations of war, and the winning player of games looks to find a more exciting game.
They sometimes call it that. That's how the British referred to the contest with Russia for control of central Asia in the 19th Century. Quite a lot of blood was spilled. The idea was to "civilize" Asia—a truly laughable notion given the respective age of the civilizations involved.
Warriors are rarely philosophers and philosophers are rarely warriors. But warriors do fascinate philosophers, who often yearn for the "reality" or the "authenticity" of war and fighting. Read Norman Mailer on boxing, or Hemmingway on bullfighting. But do not read them for real insight into boxing or bullfighting; what you will find instead is the writers' projections of their own internal conflicts onto the external reality of the fight. If you want to learn about boxing, put on the gloves and find a teacher.
When the philosophy of war is formulated, the Necronomicon is opened. People who read and fantasize about war puff themselves up with martial spirit. They imagine themselves as heroes, never as cowards. They lose their real selves in the distorting mirror of wannabe. They feed off what they imagine to be the experiences of others.
Is there a martial artist alive who has not imagined himself/herself fending off an attacker with some artful move or maneuver? God knows I have. Sometimes I also make myself pay penance, by imagining myself simply handing over my wallet to the mugger, or darting down the alleyway, running away, as fast as my aging legs can take me. But the lure of the imagined fight remains. I'm lucky; I get to put these fantasies into fiction, where I know that I'm the puppet master pulling all the strings.
Find the strings. I guess that is the nub of what I'm saying. Follow the strings back to the fingers that pull them. But don't be surprised if you wind up staring at your own hands.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Ancient Traditions – Bushido II
In my essays on Privation Morality, I tried to get a handle on how the authoritarian tradition begins, in times of privation, when the world reduces to zero sum, the game becomes not just a matter of "him or me," but rather, "us or them" and the "us" includes your family, your children, all you hold dear. Is there one among us who would not steal for their children, lie if it meant the lives of your parents, kill if the option were the deaths of all you hold dear?
So who do you pray to and who do you prey upon? Those are real world questions when the times are sufficiently rough.
The nuclear family becomes an extended family, and families merge to form tribes. And tribes war upon each other, conquer or be conquered. Is there a single human on the planet whose ancestors did not pass through this cultural experience? Is there a one of us who can claim a single lineage that did not?
I've been trying to find a passage that I believe I saw on the blog Orcinus, written by Sara Robinson, who has become one of the better analysts of the authoritarian culture. It outlines the authoritarian family bargain: The husband is the leader, the voice of the highest authority. His command is law and all must do his bidding and attend to his wishes and comfort. In return, he provides for the family and defends it with his life, if necessary.
The Paterfamilias has the power of life and death within the family. It falls to him to decide if a newborn infant is taken into the family or left to die of exposure. If any family member angers him sufficiently, he may kill them with impunity. "My home is my castle" is not just a figure of speech to a true authoritarian.
Over time, tribes merge with other tribes. Cities arise and different needs emerge. The story goes that the tradition of Paterfamilias in Rome was broken when a father ordered the death of his son—who happened to be an important Roman general. Whether the tale is true or not, the power of the head of a household is bound to ebb when the household is connected to a larger society.
One way that power is restricted is through the power of law, or the precursor of law, tradition. Familial roles become codified and legalized. The power of the father becomes the power of a caste. Since the most important role is aggression and defense, there comes to be a warrior class. The power of tradition and law often comes to rest with the priests. The True King requires the support of both.
None of this is very controversial. What comes next is where the real meta-combat begins.
The 19th Century upended everything. Distance was obliterated. Every sort of production exploded, and every commodity market in the world found itself in a game of crack-the-whip. Napoleon remade the map of Europe and the New World colonies of Spain and Portugal nominally freed themselves from their former masters, only to experience a different sort of colonialism, with economies tied to the aforementioned commodities, whose markets were not under their influence or control. Those few nations in possession of modern weaponry conquered the rest of the world with almost pitiful ease.
All the "ancient traditions" were rewritten in the new light. What became the new codes of conduct were called by the same names as the older codes, but it was a new world, and it was not the same.
The Japanese code of Bushido, the code of the warrior, was not written by warriors. It was written by a "warrior class," the Samurai, who were perhaps descended from warriors, but by the 19th Century, most of them were administrators, bureaucrats, at most policemen. Their martial experience was in the dojo, not the battlefield. Actual warriors rarely articulate philosophy, and philosophies are rarely written by warriors.
Even now, you can see the "martial spirit" in the southern United States, an echo of an echo of an echo. The Antebellum plantation elite considered themselves to be the heirs of Chivalry. They fought duels. They carried the favors of their ladies with romantic flourish (and visited the slave quarters when their carnal needs arose). They devoted themselves to fine houses and fine clothes.
And when they lost, they spent the next century mourning the "noble cause" and convincing themselves that their culture was something special, unique, lost in a torpor of nostalgia for an "ancient tradition" that never existed, could never have existed, and which, in any case, was utterly inappropriate for a time when war is simple slaughter, without glory, without honor, and largely without purpose. But the mythology lives on, first transmuted by romantic literature into the noble gunfighter of the Old West, then to the Top Gun aviator of the dogfight in the air. Denatured still further we get Spectator Sports, those little Kabuki Plays that simulate warfare as unrealistically as the playing fields of Eton simulated Waterloo (or am I the only one who always found that sentiment to be a crock?).
The Wikipedia article suggests these as the hallmarks of Bushido:
A recent essay by my sensei's sensei called out these:
Well, here is an example of the code of Chivalry:
That gave us the American Civil War. Somehow, I don't think that it is the Words' fault.
So who do you pray to and who do you prey upon? Those are real world questions when the times are sufficiently rough.
The nuclear family becomes an extended family, and families merge to form tribes. And tribes war upon each other, conquer or be conquered. Is there a single human on the planet whose ancestors did not pass through this cultural experience? Is there a one of us who can claim a single lineage that did not?
I've been trying to find a passage that I believe I saw on the blog Orcinus, written by Sara Robinson, who has become one of the better analysts of the authoritarian culture. It outlines the authoritarian family bargain: The husband is the leader, the voice of the highest authority. His command is law and all must do his bidding and attend to his wishes and comfort. In return, he provides for the family and defends it with his life, if necessary.
The Paterfamilias has the power of life and death within the family. It falls to him to decide if a newborn infant is taken into the family or left to die of exposure. If any family member angers him sufficiently, he may kill them with impunity. "My home is my castle" is not just a figure of speech to a true authoritarian.
Over time, tribes merge with other tribes. Cities arise and different needs emerge. The story goes that the tradition of Paterfamilias in Rome was broken when a father ordered the death of his son—who happened to be an important Roman general. Whether the tale is true or not, the power of the head of a household is bound to ebb when the household is connected to a larger society.
One way that power is restricted is through the power of law, or the precursor of law, tradition. Familial roles become codified and legalized. The power of the father becomes the power of a caste. Since the most important role is aggression and defense, there comes to be a warrior class. The power of tradition and law often comes to rest with the priests. The True King requires the support of both.
None of this is very controversial. What comes next is where the real meta-combat begins.
The 19th Century upended everything. Distance was obliterated. Every sort of production exploded, and every commodity market in the world found itself in a game of crack-the-whip. Napoleon remade the map of Europe and the New World colonies of Spain and Portugal nominally freed themselves from their former masters, only to experience a different sort of colonialism, with economies tied to the aforementioned commodities, whose markets were not under their influence or control. Those few nations in possession of modern weaponry conquered the rest of the world with almost pitiful ease.
All the "ancient traditions" were rewritten in the new light. What became the new codes of conduct were called by the same names as the older codes, but it was a new world, and it was not the same.
The Japanese code of Bushido, the code of the warrior, was not written by warriors. It was written by a "warrior class," the Samurai, who were perhaps descended from warriors, but by the 19th Century, most of them were administrators, bureaucrats, at most policemen. Their martial experience was in the dojo, not the battlefield. Actual warriors rarely articulate philosophy, and philosophies are rarely written by warriors.
Even now, you can see the "martial spirit" in the southern United States, an echo of an echo of an echo. The Antebellum plantation elite considered themselves to be the heirs of Chivalry. They fought duels. They carried the favors of their ladies with romantic flourish (and visited the slave quarters when their carnal needs arose). They devoted themselves to fine houses and fine clothes.
And when they lost, they spent the next century mourning the "noble cause" and convincing themselves that their culture was something special, unique, lost in a torpor of nostalgia for an "ancient tradition" that never existed, could never have existed, and which, in any case, was utterly inappropriate for a time when war is simple slaughter, without glory, without honor, and largely without purpose. But the mythology lives on, first transmuted by romantic literature into the noble gunfighter of the Old West, then to the Top Gun aviator of the dogfight in the air. Denatured still further we get Spectator Sports, those little Kabuki Plays that simulate warfare as unrealistically as the playing fields of Eton simulated Waterloo (or am I the only one who always found that sentiment to be a crock?).
The Wikipedia article suggests these as the hallmarks of Bushido:
- Rectitude
- Courage
- Benevolence
- Respect
- Honesty
- Honour, Glory
- Loyalty
- Filial piety
- Wisdom
- Care for the aged
A recent essay by my sensei's sensei called out these:
- Courage
- Endurance
- Nobility
- onesty and Faithfulness
- Unsullied Integrity
- Simplicity and Directness
- Compassion (toward the weak)
- Honor
- Self-sacrifice
- Non-attachment to worldly importance (including life and death)
One might think that these are all noble sentiments, as indeed they can be. So how is it that the spirit of Bushido found its way into Japanese militarism in the early 20th Century, one of the greatest national disasters in history?
Well, here is an example of the code of Chivalry:
- Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions.
- Thou shalt defend the Church.
- Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
- Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
- Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
- Thou shalt make war against the Infidel without cessation, and without mercy.
- Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
- Thou shalt never lie, and shall remain faithful to thy pledged word.
- Thou shalt be generous, and give largess to everyone.
- Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.
That gave us the American Civil War. Somehow, I don't think that it is the Words' fault.
Ancient Traditions – Bushido I
CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time. – John Quiggan
There are basically no publications in English on ninja worth reading–it’s all junk. The only serious academic scholarship available outside Japanese language publications would be the material on Roy Ron’s website at ninpo.org. Roy is a (fairly) recent PhD graduate from U Hawaii, and has spent a number of years doing research on ninja and related topics.
The most reliable reconstructions of "ninja" history suggest that "ninja" denotes a function, not a special kind of warrior--ninja WERE samurai (a term, which didn't designate a class until the Tokugawa period--AFTER the warfare of the late medieval period had ended--before that it designated only an occupation) performing "ninja" work.
Movie-style ninja, BTW, have a much longer history than the movies (although the term "ninja" does not appear to have been popularized until the 20th century). Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American "haunted houses" at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The "ninja" performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it's clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre.
--Karl Friday
Instructional Coordinator & Associate Head
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
Another problem stems from the nature of Japanese society and Japan's social history. From the early seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century (Meiji Restoration) Japanese society was locked in a rigid class structure that allowed very little or no mobility at all. That meant that members of a social group within a certain social class had no choice but to accept their place in society. In addition, there was a clear distinction between the ruling class--the samurai--and the other classes--peasants, craftsmen, and merchants. Within each class as well, there was a certain hierarchy according to which members of the class had to act their social role with little opportunity to change their status. This reality have produced strong identifying characteristics for each social class to which the individual had to conform. Outside these social classes, as they were designated by the ruling samurai elite, were the classless people and outcasts who were placed bellow everybody else. Ninjutsu, for the most part, was the fighting skills and methods practiced by a small number of families who belonged to the lower samurai class, peasants, and even outcasts, and only rarely by warriors belonging to the samurai elite. Consequently, ninjutsu since the Edo period has been identified as different than the noble traditions of the samurai, and those practicing it were usually regarded by the rest of society as lowly people. In other words, ninjutsu was anything but conformity to the pre defined social rules. As such, it could have never received a seal of approval as a recognized martial tradition, not even when those samurai were actually employing warriors proficient in ninjutsu.
The social conditions and the strong tendency for conformity I have just discussed produced another problem. Fighting methods or weapons that were not practiced by the samurai elite were considered mysterious at best, sometimes demonic, often super natural, and certainly unworthy of respect. Here again is the problem that rises from social conformity. For the samurai elite who were bound by rules of behavior and a code of honor and ethics, fighting methods were confined to a small number of weapons, namely bow, sword, staff, jutte, and spear. This resulted in little creativity in fighting. However, for warriors other than the samurai, those who were not constrained by their position in society, creativity was a necessity for winning. They have maintained unusual and innovative fighting methods and weapons that were developed in earlier periods, while systematizing, recording, and adding to it during the Edo period. Consequently, ninjutsu came to be perceived very negatively, and when Japan moved into the modern period ninjutsu gradually disappeared while its dark and mysterious image, which already became folklore, was now viewed as an historical fact.
--Roy Ron
And yet, in the 1921 Ryūkyū Kenpō: Karate, the first fully published karate text, little of this [historical development of karate traditions] appears: karate is not a dō, lacks mythology, and is frank about recent Chinese influences. Reaching further back, to the unpublished writings of Itosu Anko, karate lacks even a name, makes no claims on the spirit, and mentions history not at all. Beyond that, the writing is in Chinese. Strangest of all, and most easily overlooked, is that through the 1920s there was only really one name: karate, the Chinese hand…
But the historical imperative was not a simple descriptive one, for it included certain strategic silences. They needed to know the details of their mystical origins, but they also needed to be at a loss to make a full accounting of the middle of karate history. Make no mistake: karate history soon had a middle, but it was indistinct—an outline with many precise gaps, a carefully composed picture of fog—because along with the questions that required answers were ones that could not be asked at all… --Craig Colbeck: Karate and Modernity, A Call for Comments
Bushidō, meaning "Way of the Warrior", is a Japanese code of conduct and a way of life, loosely analogous to the European concept of chivalry. It originates from the samurai moral code and stresses frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery and honor unto death. Bushidō developed between the 9th to 12th centuries as set forth by numerous translated documents dating from the 12th to 16th centuries (as mentioned below). However, some dependable sources also state the document might have been formulated in the 17th century.
According to the Japanese dictionary Shogakukan Kokugo Daijiten, "Bushidō is defined as a unique philosophy (ronri) that spread through the warrior class from the Muromachi (chusei) period." Nitobe Inazō, in his book Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, described it in this way. "...Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe... More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten... It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career."
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Edo Period (1603-1867), Bushidō became formalized into Japanese Feudal Law. –Adapted from the Wikipedia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
