Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
Night-night,
It's time for blogwatch,
It's been a great day, thanks a heap!

Krampus tweets! Via Sean Collins. This is a gift from me to you, because you have been bad.

"The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009." You probably missed fewer of these if you read the foreign press, but if you don't, Foreign Policy catches you up.


"Seven Insane True Stories Behind the World's Most WTF Houses."
posted by Eve at 2:02 AM

 
"KEEPING THE KRAMPUS IN CHRISTMAS": Longtime readers know that I am no fan of Santa-Claus treacle. But if we must have superstition in our Christmas, let's at least have justice to go with our mercy!

(Jesse Walker has more links: "A few years ago an Austrian psychiatrist reportedly called for banning Krampus, on the grounds that ;in a world that is anyway full of aggression, we shouldn't add figures standing for violence...and hell.'" And some readers may appreciate a Christmas version of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth": "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen.")

Labels: I saw Mommy kissing the Bishop of Myra

posted by Eve at 12:37 AM

 

Jacob Wilson, a student at Iowa State, described his experience at Love In Action. When he was 19, his pastor found out he was dating another boy from church, and threatened him that he would no longer be welcome in his church or his hometown unless he went to LIA. The program promised him freedom from the pain of his "deviant choice", but later they told him that the best he could hope for was a life of celibacy and self-control. (As we heard often throughout the weekend, this kind of bait-and-switch is common in ex-gay ministries.) Jacob wasn't allowed to talk to his family and friends till he made a list of every sin he'd ever committed and shared it with them. At the "Friends and Family" weekend, LIA counselors blamed their clients' parents for making them gay. Then, all the clients had to march in silence into the auditorium and one by one share the thing they were most ashamed of, to an audience of 100+ people. Jacob quit Bible college after one semester and has started surrounding himself with more affirming friends who support him in being both gay and Christian.

--Jendi Reiter

Labels: gayer than a picnic basket, so far from God so close to the United States

posted by Eve at 10:18 PM

 
GOING TAME: Jesse Walker vs. Sarah Palin (and in partial defense of her fanclub)...

and John Reynolds here and here. "Ronald Reagan showed more substance in his delightful book written mostly about his time as an actor than Palin shows in her four hundred pages."

Labels: so far from God so close to the United States

posted by Eve at 2:49 AM

 
"UNSAFE AT ANY CREED": My current AmCon column looks at Brookland/CUA. Subscribers can read it here (PDF).

This issue isn't as good as their stellar books issue--I think the cover article rests on a naive view of an American Golden Age when we had a "humble foreign policy" (TM GW Bush, summer 2000) and the press afflicted the comfortable--but AmCon consistently finds interesting and entertaining writers, and then gets out of their way.

Labels: district of chaos, mackerel-snapping, other people paid me to write this

posted by Eve at 2:39 AM

 
I WONDER IF HE'LL ROT UNDERWATER?: I bought a 2010 calendar with a horror-movie poster for every month; and, in a burst of cheapjack awesome, the calendar comes with four dvds so you can see all twelve movies! I think April's selection is Dementia 13, which also happens to be the directorial debut of one Francis Coppola.

People, this is the good trash. The plot is a Frankenstein skeleton, the writing is obvious, and the acting is workaday, but you know what? The direction is genuinely lovely. The opening sequence is shot in tight, high-contrast black and white, exploiting the lead femme's white-blonde hair; it's got terrific control of the soundtrack as well. The credits are eerie, subaqueous and beautiful. There are many terrific scenes later, such as the pool death--just perfect and horrible, and wringing the most out of the b&w. Scenes are framed well and creepily. There are also some nice character moments, though this isn't a movie you'll remember for complex characterization. It's deeply over-psychologized in that midcentury style: You know the bit at the end of Psycho where they try to explain things? That attitude is threaded through this movie.

Nonetheless, Dementia 13 is really worth checking out, especially if you can strongly privilege looks over substance. Corman + Coppola: How can you not be at least intrigued?

Labels: horror

posted by Eve at 1:25 AM

 
ALL INSTITUTIONS ARE "STRUCTURES OF SIN"; BUT WITHOUT THESE INSTITUTIONS THERE IS NO VIRTUE.

Labels: complicity, gnomic utterances of the squid

posted by Eve at 12:55 AM

 
"I LOVE THE '30S": This is amazing. So far the Monopoly episode is my favorite, but the Hindenberg one is also epic, and really, all of them have been hilarious. (If you just let this link run it will play all the videos. They're all about three minutes long.)

Labels: lol, the dark continent: europe in the twentieth century, the retro-future is ours comrade

posted by Eve at 12:50 AM

 
SO MANY STEPS TO DEATH: As he does every November, Daniel Mitsui is posting Catholic and Orthodox artwork/liturgical whatnot relating to the Last Things. Yes, there are a lot of Dances of Death; you also get Alaskan spirit houses, Requiem chasubles, ossuaries, death's-head rosaries (!), and the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory.

Labels: all of life is a choice of genre, Daniel Mitsui, mackerel-snapping, reading and repentance, sublimity now

posted by Eve at 6:27 PM

 
BACK... AND ON THE ATTACK!

Labels: awesome, La Rittelmeyer

posted by Eve at 6:25 PM

 
Too many people say step out on de word. But all dem words don't say preach. Sometimes God writes and just as soon as God git to de letter P--they run off and go preach. God wuz gointer say "plow," but they don't wait tuh see.
--as told to Zora Neale Hurston by Eugene Oliver; Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States

Labels: vocation, Zora Neale Hurston

posted by Eve at 6:24 PM

 
FACTORIES THAT MAKE FACTORIES: I really loved (Untitled), even though I went in to the theater with a lot of skepticism. Basically, I expected the movie--no wait, I mean "film"--to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic "my kindergartner could make that" perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite philosophical stance--I'm a personalist, not a humanist--but still) fable in which both commercial success and boundary-pushing were simultaneously celebrated and interrogated.

So here are three points/questions about the movie.

1) It's so funny! I mean, I'd already seen the line, "Harmony is just a capitalist plot to sell pianos!" in ads for the flick (and using that line in ads is kind of adorably recursive); but there were so many other great lines and moments. I think the sex scene, in which the classic "How does a bra come off?" puzzle was made vastly more complex by the lady's baroque clothing, might have been my favorite.

And I note that many of the satirized characters are also humanized. Not all--the Damien Hirst caricature, for example, doesn't get more than a comeuppance, and ditto the easily-snowed male collector. But this movie is more a debate or dialogue than a treatise: Lots of perspectives get their say, and get to be human.

2) I love how the movie draws out the bluntly literal bent of so much avant-garde art. This isn't art you experience, or even art you endure; it's art you solve. Possibly the most blatant expression of this fact comes early in the movie, when the hot haute collectrix says that the rattling of a bucket on the end of a chain signifies "the unchaining of desire," or some such. I will always stand up for abstraction and stylization as a way of representing a truth behind "realist," Naturalistic human experience; but this movie showcased the ways that abstraction can become childish, an alphabetic relation of image to concept in which the image adds nothing to the concept.

I think that's one reason that the movie manages to show so much terrific avant-garde art, and contrast it with the art being mocked. I mean, I personally didn't care for the shimmery-glasses music of the Avant God at the end--I thought it was pretty and twee. But I did nonetheless get that it was attempting to be music, something nonliteral, something unspeakable, something more lovely and complex than a chain falling into a bucket to represent the unchaining of desire.

3) Freddie's old post about Damien Hirst made me think about one question. I mean, I think Freddie is wrong on at least five different levels!, lol (what is actually wrong with fifty beautiful pictures of water lilies?), but the thing I most want to question right now is the idea that art has been emptied of meaning.

I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.

Look. In the modern era, wherever you'd care to place that, there was a crisis of representation. (I should say that this next bit isn't mine alone but rather is boilerplate undergrad art history. It's still true.) Everywhere, traditional structures of certainty and meaning were being subverted. Religion, science, government, civic society were all facing new and frightening challenges. Into this maelstrom came the popularization and eventual universality of the camera and the photograph, a direct and insurmountable challenge to the preeminence of the artistic image as the primary mode of representation. In the face of this challenge, the response of many artists has been to abandon the notion of representation at all. Just as literature in the modern era was the literature of exhaustion, art in the modern era was the art of a tradition that had, in a small but significant way, admitted defeat. Art itself fails, in the modern era.

--Freddie

Because I agree with Freddie that "beauty" isn't the only aim of art. And (Untitled), I think, does as well: It gives the stellar line, "When did beauty become so [redacted] ugly?!" to a pretentious painter of pretty corporate sunbursts. (One of the movie's many triumphs is that my self-confessed Philistine friend said, afterward, "You know--I really liked his paintings!" They're likable! They're pretty and pleasant, and I actually don't mean that with any degree of contempt; I would think well of a hotel or office which had these lovely, balanced abstractions on its walls. Anyway, point is, I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity.

But even that isn't the fight I want to pick right now. The thing I'm curious about is... why some media and not others? Why are painting and "orchestral" or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning... while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-'90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously... if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Maybe "fine artists" are living in the world of The Last Unicorn--where most unicorns have been captured, it's true; but every time they see a real unicorn, they think it's merely a strange white mare.

Labels: art, expressionism is realism, sublimity now

posted by Eve at 3:38 PM

 
YOUR ORCHID-RELATED PUN HERE:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

lots more--really interesting. Via Jendi Reiter.

Labels: I am the least resilient person I know, unskilled at childhood, vocation

posted by Eve at 3:34 PM

 
FLOW MORPHIA SLOW...: This is pretty amazing. Click on the YouTube link.

Labels: all of life is a choice of genre, comics, Gustave Dore

posted by Eve at 3:25 PM

 
"HEAVEN CAN WAIT": Me, at Inside Catholic, in which I discuss Hell, American character, slapping your mama, and the centurion who speared the side of Christ:

There's a terrific moment in the TV show House, in which the irascible and brilliant Dr. Greg House is explaining to a lapsed Catholic subordinate why he doesn't believe in the afterlife. House, with all the self-lacerating irony that actor Hugh Laurie can impart to the character, says, "I would hate to think that all of this was just a test."

House is right -- and he's offered a crucial diagnosis of one form of Catholic piety. There's a way of thinking about the afterlife that makes this life, here, irrelevant and even inexplicable. Catholics will sometimes argue against universalism -- the comforting belief that all people must be saved, because God would never be so cruel as to damn somebody's grandma -- by asking, "If everyone is saved, why even bother to do the right thing here on earth?"

more

Labels: inside catholic, other people paid me to write this, Plato, unskilled at childhood

posted by Eve at 6:11 PM