Trendlist: Althouse

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Althouse

Sunrise — 6:38, 6:41.
"When I was about 10 years old, my mother became interested in the idea of the divine feminine, specifically centering spirituality on women..."
"Starting with the Moog and adding other synthesizers and a collection of modules, some of them designed by Mr. Cecil, they created a massive semicircular piece of equipment..."
"If they are right, if that is what it takes to get grocery stores, that says a lot about those corporations think of certain communities. It’s a sad commentary on those corporations."
I was just saying that it's been decades since anyone has been outraged by "'modern art' in the form of paintings that have messy-looking drips and scrawls and blotches."
"When I was a kid, we were 'free to be you and me' regardless of sex."
At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 08:03 AM PDT

"When I was about 10 years old, my mother became interested in the idea of the divine feminine, specifically centering spirituality on women..."

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 08:05 AM PDT

"...rather than the patriarchal notion of a male god.... Judging from the attendees of the goddess fairs in hotel ballrooms I was also taken to, this was a fairly White, progressive and privileged group of women. It served as a kind of spiritual extension of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, parallel to feminism. Men soon started to realize that they, too, had a gender to consider, and the men's movement took off in the '70s and '80s. It manifested in three expressions, says Cliff Leek, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado and vice president of the American Men's Studies Association: 'You get pro-feminist [men's] groups that do work around reproductive health and sexual violence; and, on the other end of the spectrum, men's rights groups that say, "We are gendered and the system is out to get us." The middle way is the mythopoetic: tying masculinity back to the sacred and mythological.' The prevailing figure in the mythopoetic movement is the poet Robert Bly. In 1990, Bly, who was in his 60s (he's now 94), published 'Iron John: A Book About Men,' which includes lines like, 'Where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be.' Bly's idea, told through Jung-influenced archetypes and fairy tales, was that men had been robbed of true masculinity via emotionally withholding fathers who raised soft sons. With some reflection — and maybe some banging on drums with other dudes in the forest — they could reclaim their inner Zeuses and thrive."

Cherry-picked right from the center of "QAnon's Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality Masculinity, faith and the strange convergence of counterculture and hate" by Marisa Meltzer (WaPo).

"Starting with the Moog and adding other synthesizers and a collection of modules, some of them designed by Mr. Cecil, they created a massive semicircular piece of equipment..."

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 07:25 AM PDT

"... that took up a small room and weighed a ton. It could be programmed to create a vast array of original sounds and to modify and process the sounds of conventional musical instruments.... Mr. Cecil lived in an apartment above the studio so that he would be available to fix anything that might go wrong, day or night. 'I get a ring on the bell,' Mr. Cecil told Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. 'I look out; there's my friend Ronnie and a guy who turns out to be Stevie Wonder in a green pistachio jumpsuit and what looks like my album under his arm. Ronnie says, "Hey, Malcolm, got somebody here who wants to see TONTO."' What started as a demonstration of TONTO for Mr. Wonder turned out to be a weekend-long recording experiment. Seventeen songs were recorded, and a collaboration was born. Over the next three years, TONTO became a significant sonic element of Mr. Wonder's music on the albums 'Music of My Mind' and 'Talking Book,' both released in 1972, and their follow-ups, 'Innervisions' (1973) and 'Fulfillingness' First Finale' (1974)."

From "Malcolm Cecil, Synthesizer Pioneer, Is Dead at 84/His massive machine, known as TONTO, helped transform the music in Stevie Wonder's mind into classic albums like 'Innervisions'" (NYT).

"If they are right, if that is what it takes to get grocery stores, that says a lot about those corporations think of certain communities. It’s a sad commentary on those corporations."

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 07:16 AM PDT

Said Del. Dereck E. Davis (D-Prince George's), quoted in "In a bid to bring grocers to food deserts, Prince George's turns to alcohol sales" (WaPo).

The issue is whether to let grocery stores sell beer and wine. They'd be more likely to open if they can sell beer and wine, and there are places in the state (Maryland) where there aren't enough grocery stores, and that's detrimental to the health of the poorer people who live there. But there's also the idea that beer and wine are bad for people (and that food stores selling booze is bad for the business of liquor stores).

The Davis remark is interesting, because it suggests that it might be possible to pressure businesses into opening stores as a way of expressing respect for black people or — to put that negatively — to avert accusations of racism. There's also the idea — is it racist? — that black people need to be protected from making their own choices about which beverages to buy in the store.

I was just saying that it's been decades since anyone has been outraged by "'modern art' in the form of paintings that have messy-looking drips and scrawls and blotches."

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 06:43 AM PDT

Here, in this post linking to a old-time-y review of painting done by an Abstract Expressionist who emerged in the 1950s. I wrote, "There are things in art that can still shock people, but it would need to involve hurting a living creature or destroying something of value, not merely the chaotic application of paint to a canvas."

And look what we have today. A painter did one of the big messy-looking scrawls-and-blotches things that everyone has completely absorbed as ordinary art, something that wasn't even the slightest bit newsworthy but that is in a public place and capable of being presented to the news media as valued at $500,000.

And then along come some people who painted on top of it, so it's the "destroying something of value" that I was talking about. It's not the artist smashing a $1 million ancient vase, but some people other than the artist coming along and painting on top of the artist's mundane exercise in Abstract Expressionism. The artist could not get us heated up about his painting — mere painting. But when you talk about destruction... well, you know that you can count on us to get excited. So maybe one of the last remaining methods of engaging our outrage has been successfully deployed.

But, you may want to tell me, the artist didn't do it. Some stupid people came along and decided on their own to paint on a painting. But did you read the news story? "Young couple mistakenly vandalizes $440,000 painting in South Korea/The work was done in 2016 by American graffiti artist JonOne" (ABC News). Key passage:

The decision to display performance equipment in front of JonOne's work goes back to 2016. JonOne completed the artwork in question during a graffiti museum show, "The Great Graffiti,'' in Seoul Arts Center at the time. When the piece was complete, it was displayed along with the props used by the artist, in the same way the display is on now.

"The paint and brushes used by the artist comprise a complete set with the graffiti canvas work," said [Kang Wook, the CEO of Contents Creator of Culture, co-organizer of the exhibition]. He explained that the props were part of the exhibition to help highlight the history of the artist's work.

The displayed "performance equipment" was jars of paint and paint brushes scattered on the floor at the base of the painting, giving the impression of a work in progress and susceptible to the interpretation that the viewer is invited to use the equipment and participate in performance art by adding to the painting.

Now, is that what the artist intended? There was no sign telling people to paint on the painting. That would be like something in a children's museum, and I doubt if anyone would write a news article about it. It would be cutesy and communal. Everyone's an artist, and all art is a joint project. Not outrageous. No destruction. Only construction. So creative.

But if you put the paint and brushes out there as a sculptural still life, and leave it to members of the public to maybe decide on their own to do the children's museum thing and paint over the painting, then you can sell it to the press as destruction. A painting was painted over!! And now you've got your outrage. You've got your publicity. The name JonOne is well-known for 15 minutes.

"When I was a kid, we were 'free to be you and me' regardless of sex."

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 03:48 AM PDT

From the top-rated comment at "How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?" (a NYT column we discussed yesterday, here). The full comment, which is from Kate in Oregon:

It would appear to me that the current cultural obsession with gender and how one identifies with it is a distraction from true self-knowledge and understanding of each person's unique personality. The current ideas around "gender identity" pigeon-hole people into behaving certain ways to signal their "gender" but what does it even mean? When I was a kid, we were "free to be you and me" regardless of sex. Now it seems like things are going back in the other direction. Girls like pink and boys like blue and if a boy likes pink, he must have something different about his gender identity? It is regressive.

From the Wikipedia page for "Free to Be You and Me":

The original idea to create the album began with Marlo Thomas, who wanted to teach her then-young niece Dionne about life, in particular that it is acceptable to refute or reject the gender stereotypes expressed in children's books of the period. In an Emmy Legends interview Thomas explains:

I told my sister Terre "it would take Dionne 30 years to get over it (stories featuring traditional gender roles) the same as it took all of us. We need to find her some different books to read" and she said "You go and find 'em." Well there weren't any. And not only weren't there any, I was in the bookstore one day looking around and found this one (picture book - I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! by Whitney Darrow Jr.) that showed a pilot on one page and a stewardess on a facing page (with a caption) that said "Boys are pilots, girls are stewardesses." Well I nearly had a heart attack right there in the bookstore....

Here's another high-rated comment from the NYT column, from another woman in Oregon, Lunita:

The author "jokes" that gender is a social construct... it is! Feminists have been working to dismantle gender (the hierarchy of men over women and the sex roles associated with that) for decades, which makes it all the more disappointing that most liberals assert its existence as internal and innate. You should express yourself however you please, but performing "gender" to an audience is not affirming; the fact that the author needs external validation for this proves how alienating it is. Gender is a caste system that needs to be abolished, not an identity to be celebrated.

Here's the reference to joking in the original column:

My friends and I had long joked, "Gender is a social construct!" every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: "Too bad there's no more 'social'!"

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 02 Apr 2021 05:07 PM PDT