Wikipampers for your Wikileaks

So some of you may have heard about the Wikileaks controversy - well, one wikileaks controversy anyway - this latest being a compilation of thousands and thousands of documents that create what the site has called the "Afghan War Diary."  Now, since I myself have no inclination to read so much Army jargon (a mix of oblique verbosity in passive voice and an alphabet soup of acronyms), I have to sort of take people's words on what's in the documents.  I represent investigative blogging at its finest!

 This desert's gonna swallow you whole, son 

A few entities (Reuters most notably) have gone ahead and parsed through the docs, though nothing conclusive can be drawn yet.  A few words and phrases keep recurring, including civilian casualties, quagmire, and thank god people are paying attention to Iraq instead of this clusterfuck.  Naturally, the government is pissed.  Surprisingly, not quite so many people seem to be paying attention as one might think - it's possible that they're preoccupied with the BP oil spill or the upcoming off-year elections or, more likely, following the wild exploits of pop sensation Ke$ha to keep track of whatever is happening in a poor third-world country half a world away.  Or maybe they're just waiting for the movie.

In any case, to those that have actually studied history and warfare, none of this is particularly surprising.  Consider as an analog the source of PTSD or Shell Shock or whatever we're calling it today:  you grow up thinking that war is something like you'd see in Combat! or G.I. Joe where bullets either (in case A) kill you quickly and painlessly and get you shipped home to your appreciative mother, or (in case B) don't do anything except allow you to bail out of your Rattler and listen to Cobra Commander call you an imbecile as you parachute safely down to earth.  Then you actually go to war and find that bullets tend to either blow your face clean off your head or suck your guts out the exit wound in your back so that your friends can spend the next 4 hours in a fox hole listening to you die.

 Tell...tell my momma I...I...OH GOD THE PAIN...tell her I...Gurglespluuurttt...(*die*)

Then of course there's the chance that you win your engagement, and rather than just hump it back to base for chow and hooch and whatever teenage hookers the village sent up this week, but no - you've got to go around finding dead enemy bodies, cutting their dicks off, and stuffing them in their own mouths as a warning to any other "insurgents." Naturally, when they find out about this back home, you will be tried and convicted as a war criminal for doing this while the officer who ordered you to do so will have long since been promoted away from any such trouble.

 But...but... was only following orders!

But this is how empire is made, and if anyone finds the details of the Afghan War Diary shocking or surprising, I can only  ask where the hell they've been for the last, well, forever.  Contrary to the hawkish point of view, war is not the provident exercise of a burly, Anglo-Saxon English-speaking Jesus who leads his troops bloodlessly into battle for apple pie and baseball, and contrary to the dovish point of view, there's no way at present to have a beautiful paradise of milk and honey and multi-ethnic prosperity without occasionally going out and murdering a bunch of people in order to take what they have and make it your own (caveat:  you can have someone else do the majority of your killing a la the Marshall Plan after WWII).

So long as we consume, we must conquer, and this has been true for thousands of years.  I quote Tacitus here, as he writes regarding the Barbarian tribes:

The Germans have no taste for peace; renown is easier won among perils, and you cannot maintain a large body of companions except by violence and war. The companions are prodigal in their demands on the generosity of their chiefs. [...]. Such open-handedness must have war and plunder to feed it. You will find it harder to persuade a German to plough the land and to await its annual produce with patience than to challenge a foe and earn the prize of wounds. He thinks it spiritless and slack to gain by sweat what he can buy with blood. 

g

Give me that bloody and victorious spear

The Romans were no different, though of course to Tacitus that was a matter over-and-done-with.  The Roman empire was built by murdering, displacing, and absorbing other Iberian tribes, but, you know, that was then, and this is now.  It's totally different.  Really.  In turn, we do much the same: we want, we take, and in taking we redistribute internally.  As we set up South America, so we gained year-round produce.  As we conquer the middle east, so hopefully should we get oil.  What's next?  Who knows.  Maybe we'll conquer the Canadians for ice. 

As the narrative of the Afghan War Diary unfolds, just remember - You, Joe Taxpayer, are at the top of the chain of command.  You are in fact facilitating everything in these documents.  We forget that sometimes in this country, and we keep looking up at our elected officials when really we should be looking down at our public servants.  We allow our apathy to swell up into a wave of complicity that carries all these shitty events along with it.  Evidently, we approve of everything going on - we haven't broken 60% voter turnout at 4-year elections since 1968, and we haven't broken 40% voter turnout at 2-year elections since 1970.

It's the world's smallest violin playing a sad song for liberal pussies

Now this all sounds like I'm some big bleeding heart liberal pussy who wants to sit around making daisy chains and singing Kum-Bay-Ah, when I'm not.  Well okay, I personally would rather do that than fight, but I don't think that's generally speaking a good national policy.  Nor, however, do I agree with imperialism.  I think it leads to monoculturalism which is not only stagnant, but also boring. 

The question for the 21st century is, I hope: How will we go about the business of war-making?  Can we adopt a neutral position, like the Swiss?  Will we try to conquer by sword, as the Germans?  Or will we commit to perpetual police actions, like the British before us?  In all cases, history has a lot to teach us, and by "us" I mean you and me both, so read up, write your officials, and get to voting.  If you like what you're hearing out of the Afghan War Diary, vote to keep it going.  I'll be canceling you out, but that's how democracy works.

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***

South by Southwest

No update today (7-28-2010) because I'm down in Southwest MI settling up some property dispute BS.  Normal updates resume Friday!

State of the Something Address

I'm happy to announce that I do have some work - I'm back at the pizzeria (which, because of recent changes to their terms of employment, I am not allowed to mention by name in online communiques).  I'll also find out sometime in the next 48 hours if I have a part-time work-from-home job on top of that.  My theory is that together, two repetitive part-time jobs will add up to a slightly more interesting and chimeric full-time job.  It's all about variety, you see.

Because of this new found bounty of employment, I want to make the disclaimer that I like as not will not be able to update on Wednesday. This is in part because I'm working a lot of hours this week, and also because I'm going back down to St. Joseph county to help finalize this little property dispute that my grandmother found herself in.  It's actually a more interesting story than it seems, but it's kind of a long story, and there may be pending legal action, so I'm not going to run my big yapper yet.

 We all remember where we were when we heard the news

So speaking of work, I'm inclined to go back and read from when I first started this blog in the autumn of last year so as to see how much still applies.  The answer is, unsurprisingly, all of it.  Writing remains my highest priority, and my undemanding work is going to leave me comparatively unfettered, and thus free to pick up the pen whenever the mood strikes.  This is a very good thing. My work starts when I punch in, and ends when I go home, and I've got a lot of time in between to sketch ideas and thumbnail drawings into small pocket notebooks, and then to develop those sketches into proper drafts when I get home and have a cold beer or twelve.

I guess if I had to figure out why I'm doing this, why I'm not falling all over myself to renew or contemporize my MCP certification or, like, go to ITT tech and learn heating and cooling repair or court reporting or how to be a medical assistant technician, it's because I'm doing it for me.  Not just any me: 13 year old me.

See, in the comic they were all hardcore and shit and...nevermind, you're not listening...

If you went back and time and told 13-year-old me that twenty years later he'd be working in a pizzeria AND that he woulds would still have all 4 original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mint in blister packs, he'd be like "Holy crap, no way dude - it's hammer time!"  so really what I'm doing has little to do with capriciousness or any so-called failure to get my life together:  I just figured out what I want at an unreasonably early age and didn't really have to go chasing after a bunch of superfluous bullshit.

And so that's where you'll find me, gentle readers:  until the academy calls, or I'm whisked away on a whirlwind book tour, you can come order up a pizza or ask me to do a little freelance writing. Don't worry about me - I'm exactly where I need to be. Michigan can breathe a little easier, though it's still on notice if I get wind of some really awesome opportunity elsewhere.  Until that happens, I'll be eating coneys and bettermades, drinking Faygo and Bell's, and trying to make up some sort of hard-to-prove condition or disease that merits a prescription for good, legal, medical dope.

Nope - you're just unemployed

*When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***

 

The Cult of Morris, Part 3: WWZD?

This post is (obviously) the third in a series. If you haven't read Cult of Morris, Part 1, you may want to do so now.  Then, unless you are the world's laziest ass, read the second part too. 

Saved by the Bell: the New Class is beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst show on television except for any episode of JAG in which Catherine Bell does not appear.  It is in fact worse than Everybody Loves Raymond.  It is worse than the last season of Roseanne, after they won the lotto.  It is in fact even worse than Manimal. Also, while I'm at it: how the fuck is Hawthorne still on the air?

Not ruled out:  Possibility that everyone except me is retarded.

Even the falcon couldn't find work after this

Saved by the Bell: The New Class a terrible show, and it pains me to admit that I have watched more episodes and partial episodes on YouTube in the week I spent researching this post than I have in the 33 years preceding.  It pains me to admit this almost as much as it pained me to watch the damn things in the first place.   The worst part is that complete episodes are difficult to find - hulu, youtube, vimeo - only a few complete episodes are readily available online, and those are usually broken up into 2 or 3 segments.

In other words, this isn't like looking for Jessi Spano's "I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so...scared" bit - finding an episode of SBTB: TNC online is a fucking quest. You need your Omni for this shit.  That's from Voyagers! - I got kind of carried away with this 80's TV thing. That's why I converted to Airwolfitarianism.

But as bad as it is, it's a useful show because it illustrates a few points about Western Religion that are worthy of consideration.

One angle we can take is to evaluate SBTB: TNC as a reflection of cultural repetition - are the terrible characters in this show conforming to the same archetypes as those presented in the original show?  That's one perfectly viable, and even useful, interpretation - Thor is Apollo is Slater is Tommy D.  However, we already know how analogs work, and there's no reason to beat a dead horse unless the reason the horse is dead in the first place is that it really pissed you off, in which case I say: keep kicking.

No relevant image - usual picture of Allison Stokke has been replaced with Kelli Kapowski's boobs.

SBTB: TNC offers us an exploration of a common tertiary phase of Western Religion: the apostolic phase. 

A disclaimer first:  I'm not writing all this out to actually get into any sort of cosmogonical debate.  I am looking at religion as a cultural phenomena here, and I'm not making any claims to anything beyond an anthropological perspective.  My own beliefs are pretty well documented and don't have a lot to do with anything here.  So I say: Atheists - suck it up, religion is a part of culture and you're not going to get rid of it anytime soon no matter how many times you suck off Richard Dawkins.  Religious people - your faith is just one of many and they all pretty much just have different words for the same crap.

Now, with that being said, we're going to get all hella meta for a second, and I'm going to explain what makes SBTB: TNC interestingly different from the previous SBTB series.

The offensiveness of this image pretty much disproves any belief in a kind and loving god

SBTB: TNC lives in the deep shadow of the preceding series, and this goes beyond the cultural relevance of the show (e.g. - we all watched Saved by the Bell and we, on this side of the screen, are comparing this show to that).  The titular new class, in the contextual universe of the show, lives in the shadow of the preceding class.  Their every action is taken within the context of those taken by Zack, Kelli, Jessi, and all the others.  The first class was free from such impediment.  Sure, in the Good Morning Miss Bliss years, Zack joined a "cool kid club" composed of upper classmen, and occasionally a senior would be mentioned in passing, usually just as "a senior," but there was no doubt who really ruled Olympus. 

But the New Class has inherited a legacy by way of two prophets:  Screech and Mr. Belding.  They are perpetual reminders that every situation the New Class will have encountered, the original class encountered it first  Every day of their lives is an imitation of what came before, and they are the first class to whom this has happened.  Sure, the original class had to deal with some historical weight (like the fact that Jessi's ancestors were slave traders which, coincidentally, is about all the mention Lisa's blackness ever gets), but mostly the old class had free reign over their own actions.  The world was theirs to explore, to rule, and to codify.

Not pictured:  Donkey, Damascus

The interesting thing about SBTB: TNC then is that we're not watching the gods themselves - we are not ourselves members of the Bayside cult.  Rather, we are watching the conversion and inculcation of other mortals.  As we have been preached to, so too must these new young Tigers. 

The gods no longer walk among the mortals, though of course in this context Screech makes for a compelling Christ figure from almost any interpretation (triune, unitarian, etc) - he can be god-made-man, the son of the gods, or he can be shoehorned into just about any interpretation you like, but let's leave that alone since I'm not interested in discussing the finer points of Christianity. Again, looking at cultural implications and affects of that religion here.  To clarify: he makes a fine Mohammed, or Job, or Jesus, or Saul - the point of Screech's existence at Bayside is to spread The Word. 

Something tells me the cheerleader's outfits are going to be less sexy

So that in a nutshell (a three-post nutshell) is how Western religion evolved: just like Saved by the Bell.  People start by worshipping the earth and sky, then as their lives get more complex and the old models don't fit they begin worshipping aspect deities - forge gods, messenger gods, war gods - along with sky gods and sea gods.  Eventually, and personally I think this is an indication of increasing complexity extending beyond the capability of the human mind to easily grasp, someone just says "Fuck it, know what?  There's only one god, and he does everything."   Divine intervention (or miracles) is (are) in large part removed from every day life, and is (are) experienced in sublime ways: Zeus no longer hurls angry lightning form Olympus, and Zack no longer calls "time out" in order to sneakily fix whatever problem ails him.  Rather - the parables of the past are handed down as examples to the present through the machinations of a prophetic clergy, differing from an oracular clergy in that they make no claim to ongoing divine contact, but rather are recounting the tales of divine deeds past.

The leap from Polytheism to Monotheism in a cultural context is only possible with these prophets and apostles - messengers who can unify large populaces in coordinated worship under a single banner, uttering a single name.  This also requires a certain disillusionment with complex polytheistic systems - first, the gods have to provably fail, second, the established clergy has to be corrupt, ineffectual, or unsatisfying, and third, the complexity of the potential follower's lives must allow for a certain degree of inexplicable mystery.  While SBTB: TNC lives in a polytheistic society, there can be no doubt that by the end of the entire franchise' run, most of the old pantheon has been whittled away, and that there is only one who is most high: Screech be his prophet, Morris be thy name. 

More like SAVED by the Bell, amirite?

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***

The Cult of Morris, Part 2: The Bayside Pantheon

To make things easy, you can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 by clicking on their respective links.

 What happens when you get tired of worshiping rocks and dirt?  Why, you worship the moon, of course - but not knowing what a moon is, you have to make up a little story for it, and that story pretty much always involves a god, because burning offerings to a giant hunk of glowing rock in the sky is just silly.  Thus begins polytheism.

In the narratives of western religions, Polytheism tends to be a transition phase - you find new gods, but you don't just want to dump on the old chthonic gods, so you start coming up with all sorts of new gods because, as the old maxim goes, you can either have one god with infinite power, or infinite gods with finite powers.  It's as if the ancients had to splinter and fracture their mighty earth gods into less powerful, but more numerous and usually anthropomorphised, pantheons.

But what does this have to do with Saved by the Bell?  

Polytheistic pantheons exhibit archetypal characteristics.  For those unfamiliar - when unrelated characters in literature, religion, culture (etc) are very much like each other in form and / or function, they are said to conform to or mimic an archetype.  You could say that they are cast from the same mold, and only the accents and affectations of culture, language, and geography change their superficial appearance. Many classical gods conform to archetypes, and, get ready to have your fucking mind blown, the key characters of Saved by the Bell appeal to these same archetypes.

(Please note - I've focused primarily on the Greeks here, but thrown in appropriate Norse, Celtic, and Aztec analogs when possible)

Archetype 1:  The Trickster

Zack Morris, like Hermes, Ananzi, the Coyote, and Odin, is able to walk between worlds.  Not so much a leader as an instigator, Zack Morris carries communication from the older "gods" down to the core pantheon (Zack, plus AC Slater, Jessi, Kelli, Lisa, and Screech).  He is smarter (or at least more savvy) than his peers, and more energetic than his seniors, giving him rare license to tread where no other can, and do things that no other would dare.  As Hermes had his winged sandals and travelers brim, so to is Zack Morris never without his cell phone and never-expiring hall pass.

Archetype 2: The Innocent

 
Kelly Kapowski is arguably the most lovely, and most pitiable, of the Bayside Pantheon.  While a more obvious comparison might be to call her a love goddess, she is more akin to a bravely suffering Persephone (other suffering gods and goddesses include Xipe Totec and the celtic Aife).  She endures in order to bring cheer to others, whether that means she goes without a prom dress because her father god laid off, or that she presents her bright red face (an unfortunate side-effect of Zack's untested acne treatment) as an intentional demonstration of school spirit.

Archetype 3:  The Good Son

Not just any son, but the first-born and eager-to-please son.  AC Slater is a model Apollo-figure: First born, physically fit, good-natured, and eager to please his father, and yet constantly outwitted by the trickster (for AC, that's Zack - for Apollo, it was Hermes), and inept in matters of courtship (AC loses Kelli to Zack, Daphne would rather turn into a tree than be with Apollo).  In Norse mythology, the powerful (but sometimes dumb) Thor is the son, suffering from an unlucky combination of big muscles and small brains.

Archetype 4:  The Warrior Goddess

The Warrior Goddess exhibits wrath and wisdom in equal measure.  In Greek mythology, Athena was the goddess of wisdom, strength, and civilization, as well as being a powerful warrior figure.  In Saved by the Bell, Jessi Spano is the conscientious voice of compassion, but is also fiercely defensive, especially of her patron causes and ideals.  The Celts also had a warrior goddess named Brigid, and Jessi Spano is the closest direct analog to the Nordic Freyja in all of Bayside.

Archetype 5:  The Lover

Lisa Turtle, played by the lovely Lark Voorhies, is not only beautiful, but is obsessed with fashion and style, very much befitting a goddess of passion and beauty.   In analog, she exemplifies the beauty aspects of Freyja (Norse) and dozens of other beauty goddesses throughout the world, but the most interesting element of this comparison is in how perfectly she mimics the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who is married off to...

Archetype 6: The Maker

Hephaestus is often described by his epithet "the lame god," and if you're up on your 80's slang, you know that lame is also a derogatory descriptor an uncool person (see also: spazz, dweeb, re-re, or any movie with the two Cory's).  Who is lamer than Screech?  And yet, who brings more innovation to the group?  Screech is the computer programmer (as evidenced by his robot Kevin), the hacker, the subdued genius who makes many of Zack's schemes possible, and yet receives little love or recognition in return. Like Hephaestus, he is bound (by the conventions of screenwriting, to a woman who will never return his affections, but also like Hephaestus, he keeps on doing the best he can, and taking some small measure of pleasure in self-satisfaction.  Then he bangs Tori Spelling, so...okay, nevermind, sucks to be Screech. 

Archetype 7: The Father

There are others, of course, but Mr. Belding as all-father is the most compelling first because it is the most accurate (Hesiod describes Zeus as a king who oversees the Universe - in this case, Bayside).  Natural comparisons to Odin, Ogmios, Huehueteotl and so on are barely worth mentioning - Belding is the creator-protector.  He rules over the lesser gods, and is capable of bearing down with terrible wrath, but his primary intention is to preserve order and strengthen his domain.  By the main series of Saved by the Bell, Belding has completely surpassed and suppressed Miss Bliss, the now-forgotten earth-mother of earliest creation. 

The Cult of Morris goes beyond making analogs between gods - it also extends to understanding hierarchy, gender roles, and group psychology.  The world of Bayside is male-dominated, and only occasionally does the show pass the Bechdel test (" 1. It has to have at least two women in it, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something besides a man").  The roles of the women are frequently interchangeable - their interests change episode by episode, apparently as interests, hobbies, and passions are assigned by drawing names from a hat.  Likewise, the popularity and authority of Zack's little clique is never challenged or questioned - it just is.  

 March right back to the kitchen, ladies

And finally, the core series reads very much like Classic mythology - stories of the great gods of Bayside descending from the Max (on high) to solve the problems of the little folk.  The show focuses on their petty squabbles and incestuous couplings in much the same fashion as Hesiod's Cosmogony and accompanying folktales.  Unfortunately, the gods have a funny way of not sticking around.  Usually excuses go something like "olden times were the ages of miracles, not today" or "god works in mysterious ways," but as the series wound down and the spin-offs revved up (well, sort of) the miracles of the core Saved by the Bell series would survive only as testament - divinely inspired revelations passed down to a new age of man.

To Be Continued...

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***

 

The Cult of Morris, Part 1: Chthonic Beginnings

To make things easy, you can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 by clicking on their respective links. 

An English degree doesn't seem too useful at a glance.  Sure, you can write well, you're less likely to mix up to, two, and too (though it happens) and you appreciate literature on levels undreamed of by the lay person, but unfortunately a lot of the people with the power to give you a job are themselves lay people, and they're not particularly impressed with your knowledge of esoteric middle-English poetry.

While it's some consolation to know that, thanks to a glut of business colleges and lemming-like career-minded students, the MBA and other business-type degrees are about as valuable as toilet paper nowadays (less valuable, in fact, than the super-nice quilted and perfumed kind), there are still enough practical and profitable degrees to make an English BA, and by proxy a creative writing MFA, look silly and self-indulgent.  

 The world is your oyster, Hemingway

Regardless, there are a few degrees with even less practical application than an English BA, and right around the top of the list is anything having to do with religious studies.  Luckily for you, I am going to spend some time this week sharing my own knowledge of comparative religion by way of an easy and accessible metaphor.  Look at it this way - I'm sparing the most frivolous and self-indulgent among you 50,000 dollars and 4-8 years of your life.  You can thank me later.  Now is fine too, though.

Rather than make you guess what I'm driving at, I'll put my thesis here:  across three of its four incarnations, Saved by the Bell is a model of religious evolution.   Taken as one contiguous line of cultural history, Saved by the Bell represents early chthonic cosmogony, classical polytheism, and prophetic cults akin to that seen in Western Ibrahimic religions.  Taken as a whole, Good Morning, Miss Bliss, Saved by the Bell, and Saved by the Bell: the New Class depict religious archetypes found across multiple cultures, and illustrate the evolution of religious modalities in a way that is accessible to the layperson.

Bow before your new god

So first things first: the winding path of the Saved by the Bell Franchise.   

Saved by the Bell didn't start out as Saved by the Bell.  It started out as a show called Good Morning, Miss Bliss (a great and telling title with which to begin anything) and it only ran for one season.  Good Morning, Miss Bliss focused primarily on the titular teacher played by Haley "Parent Trap" Mills, and introduced many of the running characters who would persist through several incarnations of the franchise:  Zack Morris, Screech, Mr. Belding, and Lisa Turtle.

Unfortunately, nobody gave a crap about Miss Bliss and nobody gave even that much of a crap about middle school kids in Indiana, so some of the cast was picked up  for a continuation series and others were dumped, doomed either to B-list hell or total obscurity.  The setting moved about 2000 miles west to Bayside, California, and as the cast had aged, so too did their characters.  Saved by the Bell, the only series of which most casual viewers of SBTB are aware, covered four years of high school in five seasons, and became a vital element of modern American pop culture.

I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so...scared

After high school, much of the cast naturally went on to college - Kelly, Zack, Screech, and Slater all went away to fictional Cal U, and it turns out that even though they were by far the most recognizable of the show's characters,  that alone couldn't carry the weight of the franchise.  Ultimately, Zack and Kelly announced plans to marry, and that was that for them. 

Then a curious thing happened - Screech returned to Bayside as a teaching assistant on the laughably bad Saved by the Bell: The New Class.  Trying to get any semblance of coherency from SBTB:TNC is like trying to build a cow out of hamburger.  There are chunks and fragments, and maybe a human finger, but even the few contiguous threads of character and setting meander into nonsensical nothing (idiosyncratically, it also had the longest run of any SBTB series).  While it serves to illustrate a point I'll make later, it's just a terrible show, and under no circumstances should you actually watch it. If you should accidentally get some Saved by the Bell: The New Class in your eyes, rinse with cold water for 30 seconds and then drink yourself to death. 

Or just watch Showgirls

This is all well and good, but what does all this have to do with Religion? 

We can compare SBTB most readily to Western mythic cycles in part because those are the most ingrained into Western culture (naturally) and also because those are the ones I myself studied (I'll leave comparisons between Mr. Belding and Bodhisattva to a more accomplished Far East Studies scholar), so let's look at how Western religions developed by discussing Chthonics.  

No, Chthonics is not a cardio class for those who lay dead-but-dreaming in the cyclopean city of R'lyeh.  Chthonic deities are earth-gods - they represent primal elemental forces (strictly speaking, they are only earth gods, but I'm using the term to mean elemental or nature-gods here), and are typically the first form of divinity worshiped by cultures around the world - think sun god, sky god, water god, etc.

In Greek myth, the Chthonics were Gaia and Uranus, but we can also include the titans in the Chthonic classification since any worship of those second-generation gods is lost to pre-history:  they may be just so much cosmogonical back-story, or they may at one time have had cults of their own - there's no way of knowing for sure. It is worth noting that sometimes the "old gods" are the gods worshipped by an indigenous population that are in turn denigrated and "killed" when new populations displace the old.  This explains why the snake-haired goddess of the Minoans becomes the dread Medusa, and why the fertility bulls of the Minoan Labrys cults become the hated Minotaur.

Similarly, we can see chthonic entities in Norse myth:  these are the giants, the trolls, and the dwarfs - alien beings that live in the wilds and besiege the more anthropomorphic Aesir gods, though here I digress:  chthonic deities are noteworthy for two reasons:  First, they are gods-of-old, those who are no longer directly worshipped or who are worshipped only on special occasions when need or delight call for archaic ritual. Second, their powers are broad and flexible, and they are almost always subsumed or usurped by younger gods with more narrowly prescribed powers and domains.

"Starring" is such a strong word...

But if you've never heard of Mist-Calf or Rhea or Borr, there are two readily accessible figures who closely mimic the chthonic gods in function:  Miss Bliss and Principal Richard Belding.

Miss Bliss is a gaia figure - she is Freudian femininity, teaching by way of example and inference, letting her students come to their own conclusions.  She is at times permissive to a fault, but never to the point of ruin: she has a deep wisdom and a nurturing sense of discipline: all the things one would expect of an earth goddess.

Her counterpart is Principal Belding, who is assertive, authoritarian, and masculine.  By comparison, he is a rigid and angry figure (such as anyone ever really gets angry on a Disney show) and it is he who acts as law-maker and law-bringer, and woe betide any who test his wrath.  Because, you know, they'll get detention or something. 

And so the series starts in the same way that Western spiritual culture starts:  with elemental forces and emerging masculine and feminine identities.  Interestingly enough, it is the earth-mother Miss Bliss who is the leading character, and this is reminiscent of the powerful fertility figures of Minoan and Celtic myth.  Miss Bliss holds tremendous power in her shaping of the young, and I think it is heavily symbolic that she is completely forgotten when the students go to High School, a realm which will become the province of male authority and enforced gender dichotomy.

Destroyer of Worlds

And so this is the origin of the Saved by the Bell franchise - feminine and chthonic with a nurturing goddess at its core.   This goddess is set in direct opposition to the ordered masculine forces of the universe, and though they are in conflict, they cooperate (sometimes unwittingly) to forge a new generation in their image.

But in so doing they sow the seeds of their own destruction for just as Cronus castrated Uranus, Zeus threw Cronus into Tartarus, and the Aesir cast out the Vanir, so too will Zack, Screech, Lisa, and their friends form a new Pantheon at Bayside. 

To be continued...

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***
 

Yeah, Well, You Know, That's Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man: On Art and Criticism

Before I get started with anything heavy or pretentious, let me just say that your argument is perfectly valid and I’m not going to fight it.  I concede:  anything that you want to call art is art, okay?  There, now you can’t call me a stuffy intellectual pinhead since I totally just said that you’re right.  Look how smart you are!  You didn’t have to go to no school or nothing, and just looky how you knows art good! 

But the larger question of just what makes art is a topic of no small concern.  What is good art?  What is bad art?  What isn’t art at all? 

A new and shocking paradigm of expression

I’ll tell you now that one of the reasons the big important art critics get to comment loudly and publicly on the nature of art is that they have studied this question for years and years and years, while you were sitting around with your friends after a hard shift at T.G.I.Fridays getting stoned and asking all sorts of deep philosophical questions and shit, like, what is art?  and what if god were one of us?  and also what if dog were spelled C-A-T?

The difference between you and a dedicated art critic is that tomorrow you will go back to waiting tables and whining impatiently for your next smoke break, and the critic will continue to ask that question until the day he dies. Even if he comes up with a good snazzy answer and writes a big long paper about it, he still has to consider other equally articulated answers to the same question, argue for his own answer, and possibly even abandon it if it doesn’t pass muster.

To be clear, when I say “art” I don’t just mean paintings and sculpture or some anorexic kid in a Soho loft dressing up like the statue of liberty and throwing cottage cheese on his audience – I also mean literature, film, photography, dance, music, etc. So what kinds of things do art critics think when they talk about art?

Aaaieeeee!!! What the fuck?  I mean, What the FUCK?

For one thing, they consider the form or genre:  you probably can name two modes of form in painting – abstract and realist, and between these two distinctions you may know of sub-forms or movements like pointillism, surrealism, luminsim, and so on.  An adherence to form is not in itself artistic – a wonderfully rendered watercolor portrait may or may not be artistic:  it can be just a picture.  Similarly, a random rendering of paint on a canvas, lovely or no, is not necessarily an abstract masterpiece – it could just be paint randomly rendered on a canvas.

The thing that allows us to judge any piece of work within or without its form or genre is context, and context is lent to us largely by geography and history.  Where was the piece made?  When did it come out?  What came before it?  What informed it, or what is it reacting against?  Jackson Pollock’s big drizzly works aren’t considered art because they’re so visually stunning or because they’re such fine representations of whatever he claimed he was painting – they’re art because everyone told him he couldn’t paint that way, then he went out and did it, so fuck you, art world.

But regardless of ALL of this, art needs a certain mimetic catchiness, and here I am totally in bed with the formalists – art speaks to you.  It is communication.  You look at it and recognize that something is being said – you may not be able to fully articulate what, but for just a moment, whatever that work of art says is the only thing that needs saying in the whole of history and the world.

Yep - people gotta know about this

So there is in part some subjectivity involved.  Something that speaks to you might not speak to anyone else, and this may or may not diminish its capacity to be considered art by the world at large.  If a piece doesn’t speak to a significant portion of recipients, it’s really hard to argue for that piece’s value as a work of art.  It can be beautifully rendered, but mostly meaningless: the equivalent of a very pretty boy or girl who becomes less so when speaking.

Does this mean that mob rule affects art status?  In a word, yes, but the chances are very good that you’re not in the mob.  While academics tend to humbly eschew this distinction, it still should be said that the academy and the learned critics of the world at large (those in the employ of museums and the press) hold a great deal of sway over which artifacts are deemed art and thus are privileged to contribute to the cultural collective.

Consider:  you may really like The Health Inspector starring Larry the Cable Guy.  You tell everyone you know (probably about 100 people or so) and your take on the matter is thusly dispersed – 100 people now know that you think The Health Inspector is this generation’s Citizen Kane. You may have all kinds of strong supporting evidence and diagrams and shit, but you’re only able to tell about 100 people, give or take the clerks at your local video store and random strangers at the bus stop.

Oh look, Thomas Kinkade made his painting again

However, with the weight of the academic publishing industry behind me, I can posit that it is not The Health Inspector, but Baby Geniuses that is the defining film of this generation.  Even if your opinion is as equally well researched and argued as mine, I have a much better chance of having my opinion published, and so not only will I reach the 100 people or so that I know, but also another 20 or so who actually bother to read academic journals.

Luckily, I’ll also be read by every desperate first-year art major feverishly digging through JStor in an attempt to shit out a last-second paper for Art History 105 – my opinion is now disseminated to hundreds, if not thousands, of young scholars who will in turn cite me as an authority, making my opinion that Mariah Carey’s Dream Lover album is the quintessential pop compilation of the 20th century not only less controversial, but rendering it fucking fact.

I make light of the matter, but do know that you don’t just walk up to a journal and say “publish me” and get that kind of authority – I wouldn’t write a paper on the brilliance of Baby Geniuses if I didn’t have strong research and a lot of historic inertia behind me, which is why you may notice that I have never written, nor will I ever write, a paper arguing for the excellence of Baby Geniuses. As elitist as it sounds to say that those with an education in matters critical get their voices canonized, it's worth remembering that these people devote their lives to critical exchange.  This isn't rambling rumination - this is peer-reviewed research.

There are a lot of layers here

A painting, a movie, a song, a book, and so on can all be very enjoyable and very well rendered and not be art.  Conversely, all of these can be middling in their formal execution, but if they resonate and communicate, then they can be considered art.  There are all manner of arguments for which makes one good or bad, and I hope I’ve shed some light on this, but there’s one more qualifier that I hem and haw on, but that I will mention now for the sake of argument.

Picasso (who was only 5'3" but girls could not resist his stare) said that all art is subversive.  This doesn’t mean that Dogs Playing Poker is shaking the establishment to it’s core – by this standard, Dogs Playing Poker is not art – it’s a painting.  Art, real art, is critical itself – it rebels against paradigm, bends and even breaks the limitations and definitions of its own form, and hopefully helps to bring down authority (thus, the act of hanging Dogs Playing Poker on the wall at the Louvre becomes a subversive, and possibly artistic, act).  This means again that your favorite painting may be very enjoyable and pretty, but it may not be art in a meaningful sense of the word.

And that’s really the distinction to be made, and the big puzzle to be put together: what is it? Is it even a term worthy of consideration?  If anything and everything can be art, then there’s no point in even talking about it because we already have too many words for “everything.”  This is similar to the frequently offered spiritual-but-not-religious statement that god is everywhere and everything, in which case we have to ask – why call it god at all?  If I’m god and you’re god and we’re all god, why come up with more words to confuse the point?  If I and the Mona Lisa and a pile of dog crap all have the same cultural value, why make any distinction?

Now I'm all kinds of confused

The distinction deserves to be made, if for no other reason, because I don’t want dog crap hanging on my wall.  While the dog crap would certainly communicate something, it would only say “I have terrible taste and evidently no sense of smell,” which is not a captivating expression.  It will never be the most important thing needing to be said. Well, unless you're trying to eat dinner in that room.

So we'll all keep hammering away at the question, and we'll keep coming up with tide-me-over answers.  Want in on the conversation?  Read books, go to libraries, and study!  Rather than lament that you don't understand why photography is an art form, try taking some pictures yourself.   Don't just rely on "liking what you like," but try to justify its existence.  You may find it harder, and more rewarding, than you think.

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***

 

An Open Letter

Michigan, baby, sweetheart - we've got to talk.

Let me just say first of all that I think you are just - you're just great.  You're beautiful and fun and, well, we grew up together, you know?  I know you better than I know myself sometimes.  I know your forests and your lakes, your freeways and farms.  I even go to those inner city places that most boys won't, and that's because I love you baby.  I do it for us.

Of course, sometimes I can get forest and city at the same time

Sometimes, though, I get the feeling that you're not as into us as I am.  I mean, and I'm not trying to talk out of turn here, okay?  I don't want to disrespect your feelings, but I'm gonna say what I gotta say, and I just don't think you appreciate that I came back here for you. 

No, of course, I didn't like Vegas - that was just a fling, baby, but let me tell you something:  Vegas offered to take care of me for a while.  Vegas, as I was packing my bags, offered me another year of teaching - no questions asked.  But I turned my nose up at it to be back here with you. 

And now you're going to tell me you don't have any jobs?  Okay, let's clear the air a bit:  I thought you didn't have any real jobs, you know?  I thought you didn't have any white-collar career jobs, and you know what?  That's fine.  I'd given up on holding down a square-type job so as to stay focused on my writing while making the bare minimum I needed to live, so it was not a thing for me that you said you didn't have any jobs

We had an arrangement for the last few years that I lived here (before Vegas) that I wouldn't make any money, and you would keep your cost-of-living down. When I was living downtown, my output quadrupled, my writing improved, and you were the subject and setting of so many of the stories I wrote.

Those were good times, weren't they? 

Skyrockets in flight - afternoon delight

But now it's starting to look like you've got nothing for me, baby, and it tears me up to say it, but I need to know where you're at.  I've barked up every university and community college, every fly-by-night editorial company on Craigslist, and I've spent time walking, really walking through the streets of Ferndale, Berkley, and Royal Oak filling out applications.  

Applications - who fills out applications after the age of 30? 

And yeah, I had that editorial job for a while, but you saw what that was doing to me.  I had to quit that thing baby - that's just what a man do. Baby, I'm still holding out a lot of hope here.  I've got a few irons in the fire, and I'm trying to make something work, but I've got to know you're in this with me.

Don't try to be all coy now

Now I'm not the type of guy to go around giving ultimatums, but I'm going to tell it like it is:  If I can't make something stick by December, I'm leaving for the coast.  Don't matter which one, just know that I'll go.  And when I say "by December," you should know that I'm going to start looking at jobs outside of Michigan in September, and start packing in November. I've talked to a lot of my friends on this, and there's been a lot of head shaking and so-sadding, but ain't nobody said "no don't go."

So baby, get your head together - is you is or is you ain't my home state?  Do I change that header up at the top of this page to read "Blog of Detroit Writer Vytautas Malesh?" 

 I really hope you come around, baby, but know this:

The countdown starts today.

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money*** 

  

I Know What Boys Like

Of all my older posts most frequently brought to my attention in conversation, the old one about "girls like assholes" pops up most frequently.  Apparently I made some cogent points, and this makes me very happy.  However, that post is a bit lopsided.

Sure, I was able to tell some guys what girls want them to know.  How do I know this? because those same people bringing that post to my attention are by and large female.  Or gay.  Idiosyncratically, not gay and female at the same time.  I digress: Gentlemen, I told you in so many words what women want you to know.  I consider it my service to sexuality. 

But now, ladies, to even out my Ann Landers advice karma I'm going to take the boy's side (the wonderful androgeny of being a writer - I can take either side when I wish, and chalk any ambiguity up to "artistic license!).  There are a few things on every man's mind that women need to hear, and I think I'm the guy to say them even as I work to erode the delineation and distinction between genders.  Does that make me a hypocrite?  Ask someone who cares.

America's sexiest holocaust denier

1) We have our own inverse corollary to "Girls Like Assholes."


Everyone is guilty of over-generalization.  See what I just did there?  That was F'ing meta.  The inverse of "GLA" is "BLS" or "Boys like Sluts."  This is on one hand totally true, but you know what?  It's also not.

Sure, when some girl wearing short-shorts and a top that she is just obviously ready to burst out of, every guy in the room is going to look, but are we going to pick her up?  Do we want to take her home to mom?  Do we even want to fuck her?  The answer is mostly no, except for the last one, which is probably yes.  But:  wanting to fuck someone and doing something about it are two different things.  See, some of us can actually think two steps ahead and imagine the god awful conversation that will follow the next morning, something along the lines of "I'm only stripping to put myself through college" or, even better, waking up and crying the next morning, then laughing, then crying again, then asking us at length why we called 911 when we she already told me that she has a prior arrest and what the fuck, I thought you loved me!!!

So no, ladies, it is no more true that we like sluts than it is that you like assholes.  What we don't like is having sex used as a weapon against us (aka "pussy control") and we sure don't like being tested to see how far we'll go for it (aka "let's keep it real ma, you're savin' it for cabbage").  Do remember that while we love you, and we enjoy your company, and we hope you get along well with our mothers, so help us if you won't give it up in a reasonably timely fashion we know plenty who will, and we've got the painful urination and occasional recurring rash to prove it.

Better do this at her place

2) We do not give a fuck about David Bowie. 

David Bowie just confuses us. Labyrinth came out in 1986, and while I personally had pushed past sexual latency by that point, and could recognize Jennifer Connelly would grow up to be a banging hottie, all that movie did for me was to confuse the issue of hteronormity.  I mean, I was 12 and I could tell that David Bowie was hot.  We all get it - David Bowie is hot.

However, most of us are not bisexual (myself, shockingly, included), and we think the only decent songs he ever did were"Changes" and "Modern Love."  Most men cannot name more than 2 other David Bowie songs.  Stop asking.  Stop insinuating that we're missing out.  We don't care.  Like, at all. Think of a guy thing that is alien and unsettlingly weird to you, like monster trucks or fist fight - that's how we feel about David Bowie and, while I'm on the subject, Sex in the City.

Lightning mullet chick

3) We do not understand your nuanced inference. 

Not to give away trade secrets, but I'm pretty empathic.  I'm one of those guys who has a pretty good handle on how people feel and think within 5 minutes of contact.  The thing is, ladies, I am believe it or not an especially sensitive guy - I know that YOU can get that same understanding within 2 minutes.  Understand that a normal guy needs at least 15 to Infinity minutes to figure this stuff out.

Believe me, I'm on your side!  Do you know how onerous it is for me to have to tell people how I feel?  Oh my god, gross, right?  It's like, when I am unusually silent and slamming my coffee cup down in a certain fashion, you should just get that something is wrong, and by that same body language, you should get whether or not I want to talk about it or whether or not I just want to have my mom bring me a Pepsi so I can work it out myself.

Ladies, again, I'm totally with you, but my fellows from the XY set have even less of a clue than I do.  Do the boys a favor - say what you are feeling in short one or two syllable words.  We get that.  We'll probably try to offer you a beer or say, like, "well hug it out, bitch," so we're not going to be a big help, but understand that this is what consolation looks like to us, and if you can find it in your hearts, please give us a little credit for trying.

More like MAN hug it out, amirite?

4) We really, really don't give a fuck about David Bowie.

Okay, he was great as the walk-off judge in Zoolander, but that's about as much truck as he pulls with us.  He is as culturally and socially relevant to us as Gary Gygax is to you, and the fact that you looked that up proves everything.  

 I've got your dragon RIGHT HERE

So there you have it - you can cancel your Cosmo subscription.  I've condensed all of human sexuality into two blog posts.  I just hope the Alfred Kinsey estate won't think that I've wantonly overwritten all his hard work.  I only see so far because I stand upon the shoulders of giants, who I am smarter than, and also better looking.

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***