My English 15: Written Composition and Drama class is studying Hamlet this week. I am beginning to accept the New Critical interpretation of Hamlet as being the first "modern" play, even if it preceded the rest of them by several hundred years. "Hamlet" the play and Hamlet the character are riddled with ambiguities upon which the course of the plot hangs. This is a convention of modern theater, not classic or renaissance theater. Depending on what choices the actress playing her makes, Gertrude might have been more involved with the murder of the King. Her interpretation of the role will have much to do with the audience's acceptance or rejection of the morality governing the final bloodbath that concludes the play. Again, attempt to sort out moral ambiguity is a modern occurrence. By far the most ambiguous character is Hamlet. Is he crazy or not? Does it matter? In Los Angeles recently, a mock trial was held to determine if Hamlet was guilty of Polonius' death or if he was too crazy to be guilty of the crime. That character is so ambiguous that an actual trial was set up to determine his level of guilt or complicity.
For what it's worth, I think Hamlet was guilty as hell. If you accidentally kill the wrong target during your declared attempt to kill another person, you are still guilty of at least second degree murder. This fits Hamlet's situation. Was he crazy at the time when he punctured Polonius? I'm not convinced that conventional criteria for insanity work here, either. Insanity is judged relative to the defendant's ability to comprehend the moral rightness or wrongness of his or her actions. In Hamlet's case, morality was the cause of his mental instability. Hamlet's personal code of right and wrong regarding life, law and justice was at such odds with the morality of the code of honor and vengeance his father thrust upon him that it drove Hamlet to distraction. The problem wasn't that he had no idea of what was right or wrong, but that he had such clear ideas about right and wrong that it bred cognitive dissonance. Ergo, he was fully aware of the difference between right and wrong when he killed Polonius.
The most convincing argument that Hamlet was too crazy to be guilty lies in the perception of him as one struggling against madness. This struggle against madness lends itself to interpretation. If one plays Hamlet as essentially sane but horribly distracted and distressed, then he is more guilty of Polonius' murder. If one plays Hamlet as stark raving mad, than he would be less guilty of Polonius' murder. Modern actors have typically chosen variations on the latter basic interpretation, and it is a given in the modern theater that it is so.
One scene that gets cited in support of Hamlet's insanity is his conversation with Polonius in II.ii. Polonius' reactions guide the audience into believing Hamlet is mad, but if you read Hamlet's lines closely, it is clear that he is playing mind-games to manipulate and unsettle Polonius. There is more method than madness in it.
In calling Polonius a "fish-monger", Hamlet is alluding to the fact that he knows Polonius is baiting him to learn more. Fishmongers earn their living through catching fish, which they use bait to get. When he alludes to the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog and thus is good reason to keep Ophelia out of the sun, Hamlet is expressing that he is aware of Polonius' ordering his daughter to keep away from the sun (or Hamlet the son). Choosing the term "breeding maggots" hints at the socially debased position of sexually active unmarried women and the bastard children they breed. Polonius is trying to save his daughter from such a fate, and Hamlet knows it. "Words, words, words" is an evasion calculated to thrown Polonius off. When Polonius inquires further of "the matter," Hamlet again twists the scene, turning Polonius's inane question into one that might begin a slander. Which Hamlet picks up again in the next paragraph. He believes it indecent to describe old men as putrescent with dull wit and weak hams, even though he believes it to be true. He is clearly making a dig at Polonius here. The crux of the crazy factor lies in Hamlet's "for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am--if like a crab you could go backwards." What Hamlet means here is the Polonius and men like him are afraid of being as foul as the "satirical rogue" says; they "shall" gladly turn back the clock to be Hamlet's age, if they could do so and are jealous of men like Hamlet for being young. Here Hamlet digs at Polonius' ineffectuality as brought on by age. Hamlet's final line again digs at Polonius, exclaiming that there is nothing Hamlet would prefer to be rid of so much as Polonius' adieu. When Hamlet says, "except my life,' it is uttered in a way to defuse the power of that statement's implications--that Hamlet is suicidal. But it is also a hint that he knows Polonius' actions reporting back to the King might have deadly implications for Hamlet, even if Polonius doesn't recognize them.
There is method in the madness: it's called a mind game. Crazy people can't keep up with those games. Cunning people, such as the Lord Hamlet, can.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The Culture Wars, or, Steve Martin's 92nd Street Y Nightmare, Courtesy of Deborah Solomon
I made a comment about this on the Huffington Post website. I have no idea if it will be posted or not. But I feel strongly enough on the issue to go off-topic in this blog to address it. Following this post is my take on the Culture Wars: from someone stationed in the trenches behind "enemy" lines. First, here is a longer version of the post I made:
I think there is a lot to be gained by looking at the context of the situation. If you check out the webpage of the 92nd St. Y, you will see that they have a tremendous amount of arts and humanities programming, including classes in gay and lesbian literature, studio classes for a variety of art media, museum tours, and of course the arts and humanities lectures and conversations series of which Steve Martin was a part. The people of the 92nd St. Y are not culturally illiterate brutes, but people who love and support art and culture, especially in the education of the young. Which makes what happened with Martin that much more perplexing. I think the A.V Club's speculation that the blame lay with Soloman is probably on-target. An Object Of Beauty came out only a few days prior to the interview, which means the majority of the audience had no experience with it and could not reasonbly be expected to follow an intricate discussion of the book without getting lost. Also, as An Object of Beauty ably demonstratrates, the New York arts world is an elite, exclusive and rarefied place with which Martin--an art collector and connoisseur, and Solomon-- a journalist who has written a significant amount of art criticism, are very familiar. Their audience that night was not. Despite an avid interest in and support of arts and culture, the members of the 92 street Y lack the funds, network, and the access to really understand the art world. Even if An Object of Beauty could help them better understand that world, it came out too close to the interview for them to read it and be able to follow the conversation. In short, the event was derailed by a significant communication breakdown caused when two art world insiders decided to have a conversation that art world outsiders could not possibly follow. When seen in this light it makes sense that the members of the 92 street Y were upset and wanted their money back. They subsidized a frankly self-indulgent conversation that they were not really privy to understanding, and they felt cheated. Even if the conversation had focused on the work but managed to stay more accessible while weaving into the proceedings some of Steve Martin's past experiences as an entertainer, author and thinker- experiences that that night's audience knew about and could appreciate- the interview would have been much more positively recieved. As the interviewer, Solomon was the audience's stand-in who was tasked with engaging Mr. Martin on their behalf. Instead, she chose to pursue her own interests, as informed by her own priviliges experience with the art world, and disregarded the audience entirely. The controversy thus far has been painted as another skirmish in the culture war between the culturally illiterate, as the members of the 92 St. Y have been portrayed, and the art heroes, who are represented by Steve Martin. In actuality, it was a communication breakdown that a little foresight, respect for audience, and genuine interest in opening up an understanding of the art world to people who cannot access it could have totally prevented. This was Solomon's responsibility. She shirked it.
The whole point of this blog is that I try to stick to literary narratives and storytelling. As any postmodernist-educated humanities professor will tell you, societies generate their own narratives about social and cultural conditions within that society. One narrative I have always found compelling is that of the GREAT CULTURE WARS!!! In short, there are a lot of conservative, provincial, backward citizens in America hellbent on destroying arts and culture here, and they will use every ounce of their political, moral, and paramilitary militia might to do so. It is believed that these people occupy every single inch of America outside of San Francisco, LA, or New York and that they lovingly embrace Blue-Collar Comedy, Monster Trucks, and McDonald's. It is further believed that they viciously reject art, literature, and culture (and science, and logic, and reason) with such intense passion that only the passion of their Lord Jesus Christ is comparable is strength and scope. It is also widely believed they fornicate with their immediate family members and hunker down in city-sized militia compounds to do so. According to what I heard somebody might have read in the New York Times, they are all white, mostly inbred, Nazi sympathizers who collect guns and bibles with the same level of alacrity and connoisseurship as displayed by Peggy Guggenheim when she collected the great works that founded the Guggenheim Museum. These are your enemies, O ye right, good and true culture warriors of the 3 civilized cities of America--and your compatriot partisans living in the mostly civilized frontier towns of Chicago, Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. You must defeat them if American culture is to survive.
What an epic story. But like all deeply-held narratives, there are extenuating realities that call the truth of this epic tale into question. The first concerns the provincialist mindset of everywhere outside of the cities mentioned above. The most defining characteristics of provincialism are the lack of sophistication, perceived superiority of one's own region, limited perspective, and narrow-minded disinterest in the concerns or perspectives of people outside of one's region. In their (dis)regard of other American people and places, the cities mentioned above exhibit every aspect of provincialism save one: lack of sophistication. To be sophisticated is to be worldly and complex. Yet, how worldly can one be if she or he disregards and dismisses the experiences of those living in the world who differ from her-or-himself economically and socially? Not very. To do so is to be provincial. Thus, New York, L.A., San Francisco--and to a lesser extent Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., etc.-- are in fact quite provincial. But because the nation's media, wealth, and political power are disproportionately large in these places, their viewpoint is disseminated as sophisticated, democratic, and generally superior in every way to those of the rest of America. Frankly, it's provincialism gone berserk and validated by power.
The second idea underpinning the narrative is the presumption that either there is no appreciation of arts and culture anywhere outside the places listed above, or that what is present in those places is so paltry and "provincial" as to be worthless. The fact is that there is a tremendous spectrum of art in "provincial" America. Many talented and committed artists, musicians, writers, actors, and dancers live and work here. Many went to one of the aforementioned cities, did not achieve any level of professional success. One way to look at this is to say they defeatedly returned home. Another is to say that rather than stay trapped in an insanely expensive city where they work two jobs to afford a matchbox-sized room in a bedbug-infested Manhattan hellhole with no money left over to buy materials, and no space or time to practice their art, they left. The returned home to a lower cost of living, reasonable rent on a decent-sized space, and one day-job that leaves them time and funds to pursue what is important to them: their art. Are they art professionals? No. But then again, there isn't really any such thing as "professional art;" art is art regardless of who makes it. Professionals are just those who are well-paid for the privilege of producing art.
What's more, those of us living in these places can attest to the fact that to be an artist, writer, musician, actor, or dancer is to also be an activist, simply through the fact of creating art. Our regions’ reputation for hostility to arts and the devaluation of culture is in many ways deserved. Still, we write, we create. With little funding and less understanding, we carefully mitigate the hostilities to art held by people in our communities and we slowly build audiences and understanding. We volunteer to teach the arts in our schools; risk opening art gallery spaces; repurpose warehouses as theaters, and bars and clubs as venues for literature and poetry readings. We develop tight-knit communities to support each other. The fact that we dare to be writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and actors in places that could never hope to sustain an art industry of any size, and with little hope for financial gain and none whatsoever for recognition in the “art world,” makes us primarily arts advocates who practice what we preach. We are the ones on the front lines of the “culture” wars, because we are working to cultivate understanding and appreciation of the arts in communities that are not very open to it. More often than not, all we’ve got for support is each other. And yet, because we are, for lack of a better term, “geographically disadvantaged,” our efforts are dismissed and our work is derided. It’s easier to be an artist of any sort in New York (or any of the other places aforementioned) because there exists a bigger potential audience that has far more money to spend on art, and there are dozens of shops from which to buy supplies, myriad locales that can be converted into effective performance spaces, and greater access to innovative and inexpensive media and advertising. It is one of the cruelest ironies imaginable that people living and working in the arts and culture industry in New York acquire the lion’s share of nonprofit and federal funding for the arts, because it is the one place in America that can sustain the profitability of an arts business (Martin’s An Object of Beauty demonstrates this fact). Worse yet, funding agencies justify the inequality in funding because they perceive New York as having the best of culture and the finest of art- a situation made possible because the City is so well-funded. Everywhere else has to fight over what’s left. So we do as much as possible with less than nothing and try to engage our communities interest in art and culture.
The third concept underpinning the Great Culture War narrative is that the “enemies” of Art and Culture actually hate art and culture. As I’ve learned from personal experience, this is not really true. I’ve worked in theater and music, but my experience as a museum docent is what really taught me what the problem is. As a docent, it was my job to overcome the hostility or ridicule that corporate seminar attendees, school children, elderly folks from the local day center might dish out when visiting the museum. This was a frequent occurrence. At first I dealt with it by adopting a defensive attitude about the art in question and coldly settling the matter by explaining the greatness of the artist in question and suggesting that while they might have a point that art is in the eye of the beholder, some people clearly have much better vision than others. This approach left the museum visitors and myself really uneasy. Such a stance left no room for dialogue or learning. The approach I eventually developed involved engaging the visitor’s perceptions and feelings- their ‘affect’. I’d tell the visitors about the artist and what ideas she or he had about art and the artistic process, and then I asked them if they though those ideas were presented in the work we were looking at. If not, what seemed to be there? How did it make them feel? Did it remind them of anything? Then I’d talk with them about the artist’s technique and medium. Had they ever seen it before? Why the thick, heavy brush strokes? Why did Jacob Lawrence work in egg tempera when it is such a persnickety and time-sensitive medium? The thoughtfulness of their responses surprised me, and I had many interesting conversations with sixth-graders, retirees, construction workers and pharmaceutical reps about what we were looking at.
I finally figured out that what they had been hostile to wasn’t Art, but how they were treated because of their inexperience in viewing and thinking about art. It is easy to recognize Renoir’s work as art, because his representational style and lush imagery are accessible and recognizable. It is a bit less easy to understand Clyde Broadway’s “Southern Trinity” as art, because the irony and irreverence of the piece prompts the question: “why is it good enough to be in a museum?” However when it comes to works such as Kendall Shaw’s “Sunship,” Vincenzia Blount’s “Tauerna,” or Ida Kholmeyer’s “Fenestrated #6” the question of what is and is not art becomes really complex. And very intimidating. People generally had no visual or experiential points of reference to help the make meaning of those pieces. Once I recognized that, and began a dialogue with visitors to create points of reference which they could use to interpret the pieces, their hostility diminished considerably. Most of the people living in the territory identified as hostile to culture don’t have the points of reference to help make meaning of the more challenging art pieces. Which is only one problem. The biggest problem is that their inexperience is interpreted by the civilized and highly cultured denizens of the coastal metropoles as stupidity and crudity. Nobody likes being made to feel stupid. They like even less being treated like they are stupid, because such treatment is disrespectful and hateful. Many of the people who seem to be anti-art and culture are actually anti- being portrayed as narrow-minded PROVINCIAL idiots because they aren’t sure what to make of certain pieces and genres of art. This is the attitude those of us who live in these areas are really fighting against. The sooner we all realize that the attitude problems surrounding the valuation of art and culture is a two-way street, the better off we will all be.
The Great Culture War won’t end with Westwater Gallery triumphing over macramé, or with Monster trucks bulldozing the Alvin Ailey dance school. Arguing over what is and is not art, what is or is not GOOD art, or even what makes art better than entertainment, won’t get anyone anywhere. The only real way to end the culture war is to acknowledge two things: First, that all art serves as a jumping off point for discussion and discovery, and that the more challenging a piece of art is, the greater the need to search for points of reference to make it meaningful; and second, what people in some areas find meaningful and important can, should and will differ significantly from region to region, and it isn’t fair to privilege the artistic expressions of one economically and socially (and geographically) advantaged group of people over those of another. All points of view are valid; inexperience doesn’t equal stupidity, and that worldliness doesn’t equal art. Perhaps if Deborah Salomon had considered all this, her interview might not have turned out so dreadfully.
I think there is a lot to be gained by looking at the context of the situation. If you check out the webpage of the 92nd St. Y, you will see that they have a tremendous amount of arts and humanities programming, including classes in gay and lesbian literature, studio classes for a variety of art media, museum tours, and of course the arts and humanities lectures and conversations series of which Steve Martin was a part. The people of the 92nd St. Y are not culturally illiterate brutes, but people who love and support art and culture, especially in the education of the young. Which makes what happened with Martin that much more perplexing. I think the A.V Club's speculation that the blame lay with Soloman is probably on-target. An Object Of Beauty came out only a few days prior to the interview, which means the majority of the audience had no experience with it and could not reasonbly be expected to follow an intricate discussion of the book without getting lost. Also, as An Object of Beauty ably demonstratrates, the New York arts world is an elite, exclusive and rarefied place with which Martin--an art collector and connoisseur, and Solomon-- a journalist who has written a significant amount of art criticism, are very familiar. Their audience that night was not. Despite an avid interest in and support of arts and culture, the members of the 92 street Y lack the funds, network, and the access to really understand the art world. Even if An Object of Beauty could help them better understand that world, it came out too close to the interview for them to read it and be able to follow the conversation. In short, the event was derailed by a significant communication breakdown caused when two art world insiders decided to have a conversation that art world outsiders could not possibly follow. When seen in this light it makes sense that the members of the 92 street Y were upset and wanted their money back. They subsidized a frankly self-indulgent conversation that they were not really privy to understanding, and they felt cheated. Even if the conversation had focused on the work but managed to stay more accessible while weaving into the proceedings some of Steve Martin's past experiences as an entertainer, author and thinker- experiences that that night's audience knew about and could appreciate- the interview would have been much more positively recieved. As the interviewer, Solomon was the audience's stand-in who was tasked with engaging Mr. Martin on their behalf. Instead, she chose to pursue her own interests, as informed by her own priviliges experience with the art world, and disregarded the audience entirely. The controversy thus far has been painted as another skirmish in the culture war between the culturally illiterate, as the members of the 92 St. Y have been portrayed, and the art heroes, who are represented by Steve Martin. In actuality, it was a communication breakdown that a little foresight, respect for audience, and genuine interest in opening up an understanding of the art world to people who cannot access it could have totally prevented. This was Solomon's responsibility. She shirked it.
The whole point of this blog is that I try to stick to literary narratives and storytelling. As any postmodernist-educated humanities professor will tell you, societies generate their own narratives about social and cultural conditions within that society. One narrative I have always found compelling is that of the GREAT CULTURE WARS!!! In short, there are a lot of conservative, provincial, backward citizens in America hellbent on destroying arts and culture here, and they will use every ounce of their political, moral, and paramilitary militia might to do so. It is believed that these people occupy every single inch of America outside of San Francisco, LA, or New York and that they lovingly embrace Blue-Collar Comedy, Monster Trucks, and McDonald's. It is further believed that they viciously reject art, literature, and culture (and science, and logic, and reason) with such intense passion that only the passion of their Lord Jesus Christ is comparable is strength and scope. It is also widely believed they fornicate with their immediate family members and hunker down in city-sized militia compounds to do so. According to what I heard somebody might have read in the New York Times, they are all white, mostly inbred, Nazi sympathizers who collect guns and bibles with the same level of alacrity and connoisseurship as displayed by Peggy Guggenheim when she collected the great works that founded the Guggenheim Museum. These are your enemies, O ye right, good and true culture warriors of the 3 civilized cities of America--and your compatriot partisans living in the mostly civilized frontier towns of Chicago, Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. You must defeat them if American culture is to survive.
What an epic story. But like all deeply-held narratives, there are extenuating realities that call the truth of this epic tale into question. The first concerns the provincialist mindset of everywhere outside of the cities mentioned above. The most defining characteristics of provincialism are the lack of sophistication, perceived superiority of one's own region, limited perspective, and narrow-minded disinterest in the concerns or perspectives of people outside of one's region. In their (dis)regard of other American people and places, the cities mentioned above exhibit every aspect of provincialism save one: lack of sophistication. To be sophisticated is to be worldly and complex. Yet, how worldly can one be if she or he disregards and dismisses the experiences of those living in the world who differ from her-or-himself economically and socially? Not very. To do so is to be provincial. Thus, New York, L.A., San Francisco--and to a lesser extent Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., etc.-- are in fact quite provincial. But because the nation's media, wealth, and political power are disproportionately large in these places, their viewpoint is disseminated as sophisticated, democratic, and generally superior in every way to those of the rest of America. Frankly, it's provincialism gone berserk and validated by power.
The second idea underpinning the narrative is the presumption that either there is no appreciation of arts and culture anywhere outside the places listed above, or that what is present in those places is so paltry and "provincial" as to be worthless. The fact is that there is a tremendous spectrum of art in "provincial" America. Many talented and committed artists, musicians, writers, actors, and dancers live and work here. Many went to one of the aforementioned cities, did not achieve any level of professional success. One way to look at this is to say they defeatedly returned home. Another is to say that rather than stay trapped in an insanely expensive city where they work two jobs to afford a matchbox-sized room in a bedbug-infested Manhattan hellhole with no money left over to buy materials, and no space or time to practice their art, they left. The returned home to a lower cost of living, reasonable rent on a decent-sized space, and one day-job that leaves them time and funds to pursue what is important to them: their art. Are they art professionals? No. But then again, there isn't really any such thing as "professional art;" art is art regardless of who makes it. Professionals are just those who are well-paid for the privilege of producing art.
What's more, those of us living in these places can attest to the fact that to be an artist, writer, musician, actor, or dancer is to also be an activist, simply through the fact of creating art. Our regions’ reputation for hostility to arts and the devaluation of culture is in many ways deserved. Still, we write, we create. With little funding and less understanding, we carefully mitigate the hostilities to art held by people in our communities and we slowly build audiences and understanding. We volunteer to teach the arts in our schools; risk opening art gallery spaces; repurpose warehouses as theaters, and bars and clubs as venues for literature and poetry readings. We develop tight-knit communities to support each other. The fact that we dare to be writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and actors in places that could never hope to sustain an art industry of any size, and with little hope for financial gain and none whatsoever for recognition in the “art world,” makes us primarily arts advocates who practice what we preach. We are the ones on the front lines of the “culture” wars, because we are working to cultivate understanding and appreciation of the arts in communities that are not very open to it. More often than not, all we’ve got for support is each other. And yet, because we are, for lack of a better term, “geographically disadvantaged,” our efforts are dismissed and our work is derided. It’s easier to be an artist of any sort in New York (or any of the other places aforementioned) because there exists a bigger potential audience that has far more money to spend on art, and there are dozens of shops from which to buy supplies, myriad locales that can be converted into effective performance spaces, and greater access to innovative and inexpensive media and advertising. It is one of the cruelest ironies imaginable that people living and working in the arts and culture industry in New York acquire the lion’s share of nonprofit and federal funding for the arts, because it is the one place in America that can sustain the profitability of an arts business (Martin’s An Object of Beauty demonstrates this fact). Worse yet, funding agencies justify the inequality in funding because they perceive New York as having the best of culture and the finest of art- a situation made possible because the City is so well-funded. Everywhere else has to fight over what’s left. So we do as much as possible with less than nothing and try to engage our communities interest in art and culture.
The third concept underpinning the Great Culture War narrative is that the “enemies” of Art and Culture actually hate art and culture. As I’ve learned from personal experience, this is not really true. I’ve worked in theater and music, but my experience as a museum docent is what really taught me what the problem is. As a docent, it was my job to overcome the hostility or ridicule that corporate seminar attendees, school children, elderly folks from the local day center might dish out when visiting the museum. This was a frequent occurrence. At first I dealt with it by adopting a defensive attitude about the art in question and coldly settling the matter by explaining the greatness of the artist in question and suggesting that while they might have a point that art is in the eye of the beholder, some people clearly have much better vision than others. This approach left the museum visitors and myself really uneasy. Such a stance left no room for dialogue or learning. The approach I eventually developed involved engaging the visitor’s perceptions and feelings- their ‘affect’. I’d tell the visitors about the artist and what ideas she or he had about art and the artistic process, and then I asked them if they though those ideas were presented in the work we were looking at. If not, what seemed to be there? How did it make them feel? Did it remind them of anything? Then I’d talk with them about the artist’s technique and medium. Had they ever seen it before? Why the thick, heavy brush strokes? Why did Jacob Lawrence work in egg tempera when it is such a persnickety and time-sensitive medium? The thoughtfulness of their responses surprised me, and I had many interesting conversations with sixth-graders, retirees, construction workers and pharmaceutical reps about what we were looking at.
I finally figured out that what they had been hostile to wasn’t Art, but how they were treated because of their inexperience in viewing and thinking about art. It is easy to recognize Renoir’s work as art, because his representational style and lush imagery are accessible and recognizable. It is a bit less easy to understand Clyde Broadway’s “Southern Trinity” as art, because the irony and irreverence of the piece prompts the question: “why is it good enough to be in a museum?” However when it comes to works such as Kendall Shaw’s “Sunship,” Vincenzia Blount’s “Tauerna,” or Ida Kholmeyer’s “Fenestrated #6” the question of what is and is not art becomes really complex. And very intimidating. People generally had no visual or experiential points of reference to help the make meaning of those pieces. Once I recognized that, and began a dialogue with visitors to create points of reference which they could use to interpret the pieces, their hostility diminished considerably. Most of the people living in the territory identified as hostile to culture don’t have the points of reference to help make meaning of the more challenging art pieces. Which is only one problem. The biggest problem is that their inexperience is interpreted by the civilized and highly cultured denizens of the coastal metropoles as stupidity and crudity. Nobody likes being made to feel stupid. They like even less being treated like they are stupid, because such treatment is disrespectful and hateful. Many of the people who seem to be anti-art and culture are actually anti- being portrayed as narrow-minded PROVINCIAL idiots because they aren’t sure what to make of certain pieces and genres of art. This is the attitude those of us who live in these areas are really fighting against. The sooner we all realize that the attitude problems surrounding the valuation of art and culture is a two-way street, the better off we will all be.
The Great Culture War won’t end with Westwater Gallery triumphing over macramé, or with Monster trucks bulldozing the Alvin Ailey dance school. Arguing over what is and is not art, what is or is not GOOD art, or even what makes art better than entertainment, won’t get anyone anywhere. The only real way to end the culture war is to acknowledge two things: First, that all art serves as a jumping off point for discussion and discovery, and that the more challenging a piece of art is, the greater the need to search for points of reference to make it meaningful; and second, what people in some areas find meaningful and important can, should and will differ significantly from region to region, and it isn’t fair to privilege the artistic expressions of one economically and socially (and geographically) advantaged group of people over those of another. All points of view are valid; inexperience doesn’t equal stupidity, and that worldliness doesn’t equal art. Perhaps if Deborah Salomon had considered all this, her interview might not have turned out so dreadfully.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Marilyn Manson's Celebrity Ghost Story is Badly Told B.S.
I seriously doubt Marilyn Manson’s Celebrity Ghost Story.
Over the Halloween weekend, I had the chance to catch Marilyn Manson’s segment on Celebrity Ghost Stories. I wasn’t very impressed. In fact, I think it’s a load of crap. Marilyn Manson’s account was problematic for me because while it was doubtlessly a great story, the narrative structure and his behavior while relating the story are not consistent with the story structure and story-telling behavior of other people I’ve studied, or even of the other celebrities who related their ghost stories on that program. Manson’s chief aim, as I will discuss, was to entertain himself by pulling the wool over the eyes of his gullible fans.
In the labyrinthine shadows of folklore studies lurks the uncertain and uncomfortable realm of memorates/revenants. These are the terms German folklorist Carl Von Sydow gave to describe experience narratives concerning a brush with the paranormal. Memorates are personal, first-hand accounts. Revenants develop when memorates that have been told to a second party are then related by that second party to a third party (folklorist Linda Degh has speculated that this is how the narratives we recognize as folk legend come into being). Please understand that one does not need to believe in the paranormal to appreciate memorates. I study the narrative as a true and honest account of someone’s subjective personal experience. This is to say that I can study the narrative structure of people’s accounts of their personal responses to disturbing events without having to believe that they really experienced a paranormal event. What matters is that the narrator believed she or he experienced such a thing and that they feel strongly enough about the experience to narrate it for others. The narrative structure predicated upon this need is fascinating and unique to this particular genre of story, which is the main reason I study it.
With rare exception, all of the stories related on Celebrity Ghost Stories are memorates. The exceptions involve stories such as Manson’s, which are absolutely fabricated.
It’s true that memorates entail a succession of strange, and often ever-worsening, incidents, which criteria is met by Manson’s tale. Memorates usually conclude with either the teller fleeing the haunted locale, or (less common) sticking around and making amends with the spirit(s), and Manson’s story meets this criteria as well. But even the best storytellers will derail strong narrative structure while relating a memorate, because it is a subjective personal experience that they have had to really process to understand. Memorates generally involve some narrative telescoping. By “telescoping,” I mean that as the teller relates parts of the story, they will intermittently pull back to reflect upon the feelings, and fears, and rationalizations they experienced during the event before continuing on with the story’s events. Personal digression is a hallmark of the memorate and it is notably absent from Manson’s account—it lacked telescoping. He told it straight through with little reflection on his own feelings at the time, and no attempts towards rationalization of the events during the telling of them. Unfortunately, because Manson never experienced the events related in his narrative, the structure of his narrative reflects his lack of honesty in relating this personal experience.
Manson’s primary interest in telling this story is to create an interesting tale that others will believe, because convincing others that his tale is true provides entertainment for Manson. Check out the plot points of Manson’s tale: Point A- beaten and then befriended by a cool guy bully; Point B- cool guy bully invites you over for the weekend; Point C- cool guy bully drags you into his Satanic lair, where he forces you to read the Necromonicon (note irony that cool guy bully is a closet Satanist) and makes you PROMISE not to tell his brother about it; Point D- the bully’s activities are thwarted by the arrival of his brother, a fact he does not take lightly and fortunately he has an alternate venue in mind—a cellar located under the remains of a house; Point E- Bully drags you to the alternate venue and makes you recite the Necronomicon by Bic light; Point F- It seems you successfully aroused some big evil, a fact that freaks both you and the cool guy bully out and both of you clear out of the basement and high-tail it back home (where the Satanic sacrifice blood barn of evil death is, btw). Point G- After staying the night with Satan’s lapdog the two set out to retrieve the Necronomicon, which was conveniently left behind in the mad rush to escape the cellar of doom; Point H- the mysterious house foundation and cellar are gone, replaced by an empty field. As we can see, Manson’s narrative is too tight. He didn’t make the digressions anyone relating a genuine memorate makes, but he does have a double-whammy twist ending for both the narrative and the story related within it, which is a characteristic that memorates generally lack.
Manson makes up for this lack of narrative reflection during the telling by over-rationalization at the end of it. The alleged event ends with the twist that the Satanic cellar has disappeared, and the tale-as-told ends with Manson ascribing his monstrous aspects to the evil he unleashed as a teenager. What links the two is the causal relationship he constructs between his powerlessness in finding and destroying the book and his resultant powerlessness at redeeming himself from the monstrousness he has embraced. Not only has he come to terms with what happened, he has blamed this experience for creating the darkness in his own heart. Significantly, this darkness is the major component of Manson’s public persona. The twist ending catapults Manson past his utter lack of reflection and into an over-rationalization of how the event impacted his life. Memorate tellers usually relate some sort of closure in their tales either with the actual events, or through the narration of them, or both. They may also remark how the experience impacted them for the rest of their lives. But they all stop short of ascribing gigantic chunks of psychosocial development to the experience. And they usually don’t highlight the experience as formative of the personality aspect they are most well-known for.
The interrelationship of plot elements, the lack of reflection, and the convenient pattern of causality are all too neatly interwoven for this to be a bona fide memorate. Yet these are not the only aspects of Manson’s narrative that call its veracity into question. Manson’s devil is found primarily in the details. There are a few carefully related and specific details that he meant to add veracity to the story but which when examined betray the falseness of the story.
The first example came when Manson mentions the blood-soaked hay, littering the Satanic death hayloft in the barn. Curiously, he never mentions any smell. Of the five senses, smell is the most closely related to memory. If Manson was telling a real story, the stench of rotting death and the flies and maggots attracted to the carcasses would have impressed upon his memory far more than the sight of bloody hay. Which raises another point regarding plot plausibility: as the barn was doubtless reeking of the stench of death, how could the bully’s brother have been so clueless about the Satanic shenanigans in the hayloft that the bully needed to warn Manson not to tell the brother anything? Why is it that, upon seeing the carcasses and the Satanic altar, Manson didn’t fear he would end up another sacrifice on the bully’s Satanic altar? Had he felt that fear, it should have come forth in a reflective moment during the narration. That this didn’t happen suggests that the events in question probably didn’t take place. Another question undermining the story’s plausibility is that if the bully was so concerned about his brother discovering the Satanic sacrifices, why not just keep the Satanic altar and sacrificed critter corpses in the cellar in the woods, thus ensuring the brother remain clueless about it all? The bloody hay detail was included to verify the existence of the sacrificial hayloft, and thus make the story more plausible. Yet because Manson’s primary sensory memory was visual instead of aromatic—when there should have been such more overwhelming scent details to remember—his verifying detail becomes a strong indicator that his tale is false.
I very much liked the detail that Manson remembers burning his thumb on the hot metal of the Bic lighter while using it to try to read the Necronomicon. Out of this entire story, this is the one detail that really rings somewhat true. The only criticism I can give is that it is virtually impossible to keep a lighter flame going while turning the pages of a book. Which brings me to the most outlandish detail of this entire tale: The book Manson was forced to read from was the Necronomicon. Really.
Traditionally, the Necronomicon is the name of an evil grimoire, or spell-book, that periodically recurs in horror author H. P. Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft’s disciples Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth also feature recurrent mentions of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. He approved of this because such mentions made it seem as if the Necronomicon was a real book, but in fact it never existed before H.P. Lovecraft invented it. Even then it was an obscure reference in many of stories but was never published by Lovecraft as a work in its own right. In 1977, German publisher Schlangekraft, Inc published a leather-bound edition of the Necronomicon. The grimoire is comprised of spells, rituals, and demonology—largely based on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology—allegedly related by the “Mad Arab” to “Simon,” the grimoire’s alleged author. This detail of conjuring evil from the Necronomicon is so suited to the story being told that it seems to be TOO perfect. This is the perfect book to mention if one is inventing a harrowing tale of compulsory participation in ritual sacrifice, which is precisely what Manson did.
Manson mentions the book but makes no attempt to explain what it is or otherwise contextualize it. He seems to assume that the audience will already know what it is. Given the cultural predilections of Manson’s fan base, it is almost certain that they would know something about the Necronomicon and believe that it is an extant demonic text. But it is unlikely that the majority of CGS audience members would have had any clue what the Necronomicon is. Manson has always been a savvy self-promoter and it is doubtful he would have made this omission if he had been concerned with having the wider audience base understand and believe his story. The Necronomicon reference suggests that although he was telling his tale to a wider audience, he was specifically addressing the narrative to his fans. Conveniently, Manson’s fans are also the least likely among CGS-watchers to question the veracity of his narrative.
Manson addressed his tale to his audience, and as a master entertainer he knows not only what his fans want to hear, but also what they don’t. They would not be interested in the psychological digressions from the narrative’s plot, because they would be too impatient to get to, and linger on, demonic details. He also knows that his fans expect a punchy ending, and he gave them one. The double-whammy twist of the vanishing cellar with the Necronomicon trapped inside, and his assertion that this event made him the twisted creature he is today, makes his tale less of a memorate and more like the plot of a comic book hero’s “origin story.” The convoluted plot events and the tragically dark ending are exactly what his fans expect from their prefered comic books, music, films, and other amusements. These generic conventions are is so ingrained that Manson’s fans wouldn’t recognize or appreciate an honest memorate if they were told one. It would fail to meet their expectations and they would be disappointed, quite possibly to the point of thinking the story false. All of which makes Manson’s story ring true for them. The details about the bloody hay and the Bic lighter are also the sort of things that his fans would find realistic and believable but which in retrospect only serve as red flags to ethnographers like me. Manson lied about experiencing any such events as those he relates, but he does offer an entertaining tale plausible enough to his fan base that they believe him. For Manson, that is pure entertainment.
Over the Halloween weekend, I had the chance to catch Marilyn Manson’s segment on Celebrity Ghost Stories. I wasn’t very impressed. In fact, I think it’s a load of crap. Marilyn Manson’s account was problematic for me because while it was doubtlessly a great story, the narrative structure and his behavior while relating the story are not consistent with the story structure and story-telling behavior of other people I’ve studied, or even of the other celebrities who related their ghost stories on that program. Manson’s chief aim, as I will discuss, was to entertain himself by pulling the wool over the eyes of his gullible fans.
In the labyrinthine shadows of folklore studies lurks the uncertain and uncomfortable realm of memorates/revenants. These are the terms German folklorist Carl Von Sydow gave to describe experience narratives concerning a brush with the paranormal. Memorates are personal, first-hand accounts. Revenants develop when memorates that have been told to a second party are then related by that second party to a third party (folklorist Linda Degh has speculated that this is how the narratives we recognize as folk legend come into being). Please understand that one does not need to believe in the paranormal to appreciate memorates. I study the narrative as a true and honest account of someone’s subjective personal experience. This is to say that I can study the narrative structure of people’s accounts of their personal responses to disturbing events without having to believe that they really experienced a paranormal event. What matters is that the narrator believed she or he experienced such a thing and that they feel strongly enough about the experience to narrate it for others. The narrative structure predicated upon this need is fascinating and unique to this particular genre of story, which is the main reason I study it.
With rare exception, all of the stories related on Celebrity Ghost Stories are memorates. The exceptions involve stories such as Manson’s, which are absolutely fabricated.
It’s true that memorates entail a succession of strange, and often ever-worsening, incidents, which criteria is met by Manson’s tale. Memorates usually conclude with either the teller fleeing the haunted locale, or (less common) sticking around and making amends with the spirit(s), and Manson’s story meets this criteria as well. But even the best storytellers will derail strong narrative structure while relating a memorate, because it is a subjective personal experience that they have had to really process to understand. Memorates generally involve some narrative telescoping. By “telescoping,” I mean that as the teller relates parts of the story, they will intermittently pull back to reflect upon the feelings, and fears, and rationalizations they experienced during the event before continuing on with the story’s events. Personal digression is a hallmark of the memorate and it is notably absent from Manson’s account—it lacked telescoping. He told it straight through with little reflection on his own feelings at the time, and no attempts towards rationalization of the events during the telling of them. Unfortunately, because Manson never experienced the events related in his narrative, the structure of his narrative reflects his lack of honesty in relating this personal experience.
Manson’s primary interest in telling this story is to create an interesting tale that others will believe, because convincing others that his tale is true provides entertainment for Manson. Check out the plot points of Manson’s tale: Point A- beaten and then befriended by a cool guy bully; Point B- cool guy bully invites you over for the weekend; Point C- cool guy bully drags you into his Satanic lair, where he forces you to read the Necromonicon (note irony that cool guy bully is a closet Satanist) and makes you PROMISE not to tell his brother about it; Point D- the bully’s activities are thwarted by the arrival of his brother, a fact he does not take lightly and fortunately he has an alternate venue in mind—a cellar located under the remains of a house; Point E- Bully drags you to the alternate venue and makes you recite the Necronomicon by Bic light; Point F- It seems you successfully aroused some big evil, a fact that freaks both you and the cool guy bully out and both of you clear out of the basement and high-tail it back home (where the Satanic sacrifice blood barn of evil death is, btw). Point G- After staying the night with Satan’s lapdog the two set out to retrieve the Necronomicon, which was conveniently left behind in the mad rush to escape the cellar of doom; Point H- the mysterious house foundation and cellar are gone, replaced by an empty field. As we can see, Manson’s narrative is too tight. He didn’t make the digressions anyone relating a genuine memorate makes, but he does have a double-whammy twist ending for both the narrative and the story related within it, which is a characteristic that memorates generally lack.
Manson makes up for this lack of narrative reflection during the telling by over-rationalization at the end of it. The alleged event ends with the twist that the Satanic cellar has disappeared, and the tale-as-told ends with Manson ascribing his monstrous aspects to the evil he unleashed as a teenager. What links the two is the causal relationship he constructs between his powerlessness in finding and destroying the book and his resultant powerlessness at redeeming himself from the monstrousness he has embraced. Not only has he come to terms with what happened, he has blamed this experience for creating the darkness in his own heart. Significantly, this darkness is the major component of Manson’s public persona. The twist ending catapults Manson past his utter lack of reflection and into an over-rationalization of how the event impacted his life. Memorate tellers usually relate some sort of closure in their tales either with the actual events, or through the narration of them, or both. They may also remark how the experience impacted them for the rest of their lives. But they all stop short of ascribing gigantic chunks of psychosocial development to the experience. And they usually don’t highlight the experience as formative of the personality aspect they are most well-known for.
The interrelationship of plot elements, the lack of reflection, and the convenient pattern of causality are all too neatly interwoven for this to be a bona fide memorate. Yet these are not the only aspects of Manson’s narrative that call its veracity into question. Manson’s devil is found primarily in the details. There are a few carefully related and specific details that he meant to add veracity to the story but which when examined betray the falseness of the story.
The first example came when Manson mentions the blood-soaked hay, littering the Satanic death hayloft in the barn. Curiously, he never mentions any smell. Of the five senses, smell is the most closely related to memory. If Manson was telling a real story, the stench of rotting death and the flies and maggots attracted to the carcasses would have impressed upon his memory far more than the sight of bloody hay. Which raises another point regarding plot plausibility: as the barn was doubtless reeking of the stench of death, how could the bully’s brother have been so clueless about the Satanic shenanigans in the hayloft that the bully needed to warn Manson not to tell the brother anything? Why is it that, upon seeing the carcasses and the Satanic altar, Manson didn’t fear he would end up another sacrifice on the bully’s Satanic altar? Had he felt that fear, it should have come forth in a reflective moment during the narration. That this didn’t happen suggests that the events in question probably didn’t take place. Another question undermining the story’s plausibility is that if the bully was so concerned about his brother discovering the Satanic sacrifices, why not just keep the Satanic altar and sacrificed critter corpses in the cellar in the woods, thus ensuring the brother remain clueless about it all? The bloody hay detail was included to verify the existence of the sacrificial hayloft, and thus make the story more plausible. Yet because Manson’s primary sensory memory was visual instead of aromatic—when there should have been such more overwhelming scent details to remember—his verifying detail becomes a strong indicator that his tale is false.
I very much liked the detail that Manson remembers burning his thumb on the hot metal of the Bic lighter while using it to try to read the Necronomicon. Out of this entire story, this is the one detail that really rings somewhat true. The only criticism I can give is that it is virtually impossible to keep a lighter flame going while turning the pages of a book. Which brings me to the most outlandish detail of this entire tale: The book Manson was forced to read from was the Necronomicon. Really.
Traditionally, the Necronomicon is the name of an evil grimoire, or spell-book, that periodically recurs in horror author H. P. Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft’s disciples Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth also feature recurrent mentions of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. He approved of this because such mentions made it seem as if the Necronomicon was a real book, but in fact it never existed before H.P. Lovecraft invented it. Even then it was an obscure reference in many of stories but was never published by Lovecraft as a work in its own right. In 1977, German publisher Schlangekraft, Inc published a leather-bound edition of the Necronomicon. The grimoire is comprised of spells, rituals, and demonology—largely based on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology—allegedly related by the “Mad Arab” to “Simon,” the grimoire’s alleged author. This detail of conjuring evil from the Necronomicon is so suited to the story being told that it seems to be TOO perfect. This is the perfect book to mention if one is inventing a harrowing tale of compulsory participation in ritual sacrifice, which is precisely what Manson did.
Manson mentions the book but makes no attempt to explain what it is or otherwise contextualize it. He seems to assume that the audience will already know what it is. Given the cultural predilections of Manson’s fan base, it is almost certain that they would know something about the Necronomicon and believe that it is an extant demonic text. But it is unlikely that the majority of CGS audience members would have had any clue what the Necronomicon is. Manson has always been a savvy self-promoter and it is doubtful he would have made this omission if he had been concerned with having the wider audience base understand and believe his story. The Necronomicon reference suggests that although he was telling his tale to a wider audience, he was specifically addressing the narrative to his fans. Conveniently, Manson’s fans are also the least likely among CGS-watchers to question the veracity of his narrative.
Manson addressed his tale to his audience, and as a master entertainer he knows not only what his fans want to hear, but also what they don’t. They would not be interested in the psychological digressions from the narrative’s plot, because they would be too impatient to get to, and linger on, demonic details. He also knows that his fans expect a punchy ending, and he gave them one. The double-whammy twist of the vanishing cellar with the Necronomicon trapped inside, and his assertion that this event made him the twisted creature he is today, makes his tale less of a memorate and more like the plot of a comic book hero’s “origin story.” The convoluted plot events and the tragically dark ending are exactly what his fans expect from their prefered comic books, music, films, and other amusements. These generic conventions are is so ingrained that Manson’s fans wouldn’t recognize or appreciate an honest memorate if they were told one. It would fail to meet their expectations and they would be disappointed, quite possibly to the point of thinking the story false. All of which makes Manson’s story ring true for them. The details about the bloody hay and the Bic lighter are also the sort of things that his fans would find realistic and believable but which in retrospect only serve as red flags to ethnographers like me. Manson lied about experiencing any such events as those he relates, but he does offer an entertaining tale plausible enough to his fan base that they believe him. For Manson, that is pure entertainment.
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